Spontaneous (4 page)

U
sually in these situations, we'd end up at Tess's house. Her mom was a single mom and the thing about single moms is they tend to tolerate teenage shenanigans. I can't remember how many times I've been drunk and draped over Tess's shoulder as she led me upstairs while Paula peered over the top of whatever novel she was reading and remarked, “Hope it was worth it, Mara.”

That said, the other thing about single moms is they tend to date, and when that happens, they prefer not to have their seventeen-year-old daughter and her friend who's swatting at imaginary dragonflies show up just as they're pulling the cork from some chardonnay. On this particular night, Paula was on a date with a guy named Paul. It couldn't possibly work out, for obvious reasons, but she'd asked if Tess could sleep at my house anyway.

This meant that Tess had to smuggle me past
my
parents. Not mission impossible, but not exactly easy. It was a good thing
that Tess was charming and Mom and Dad liked her. They called her Tessy—which I guess she didn't mind because she never objected—and they were always asking her about field hockey.

“Heard it was a close one, Tessy.”

“How do your playoff chances look, Tessy?”

“Flex your goddamn muscles, Tessy! Flex!”

Okay. Maybe not the last one, but they loved that she was an athlete, even though she wasn't a star. Only started a few games that year. Didn't score a single goal. Still, Mom and Dad were jocks in the days of yore and I never was, so Tess might as well have worked for ESPN. She was the one they always talked jock to.

Most of the time, it was annoying, but now it was essential. Tess had to distract them as I tiptoed up to my room. The shrooms were wearing off, but I couldn't risk saying something embarrassing. And I couldn't lie. I already told you about my problem with lying.

I know what you're going to say. “Not telling equals lying!” Well, that's just bad math.

Example: Say you pleasure yourself. Not that I'm saying you do . . . Actually, yes. I am saying you do because everyone does. But even if you're the world's most honest person, do you run downstairs after every sweaty session and holler, “Mom! Dad! Guess what?”

Of course not. Same thing with shrooms, though in this case it was pleasuring the mind. Okay, that's going a bit too far, but I think you get the point.

As we pulled into the driveway, Tess gave me a pep talk. “All you have to do is make it to the stairs. You can do it, sweetie. I know you can. It's seven o'clock, so they'll be watching the news. I'll pop
my head into the family room, tell them that we grabbed some Dunkin on the road and now you've got a stomach thing—”

“Yeah, good. Dunkin. Stomach thing. That's actually not a lie.”

“Right. And then they can ask me about when practice is going to start up again and you can slip into some jammies and into bed and if they want to come check on you, you can pretend to be asleep.”

“But I want to cuddle you.” This was partly the shrooms talking, but it was also the way we were. Neither of us had sisters, so we spent a lot of time doing what we thought sisters did. Braiding each other's hair, cuddling, fighting. We hadn't fought in a few weeks, but I knew a fight was coming. Maybe mid-cuddle, probably in the morning.

“Get your shit together, kiddo,” Tess was bound to tell me in her exasperated big-sister voice. And I would nod and she would scowl and we would both know that it doesn't matter because I always end up doing the same shit all over again.

For now, in the driveway, we weren't fighting. We were moving. “First things first,” Tess said as she grabbed my shoulders and pointed me to the door. “Upstairs. Eyes on the prize.”

“Aye-aye, cap'n,” I said, and strode up the brick walkway. Though I was still noticing so much—the rustle of leaves that sounded like rain, the glint of evening sunlight on the silver knocker that reminded me of a sword—I must not have noticed some obvious stuff, such as the skateboard resting against the oak tree in the front yard. I pushed open the door without knowing what I was really walking into.

Now, here's something you've got to understand. No one
ever
hangs out in our living room. It's strictly a
Christmas-Eve-and-the-grandparents-are-visiting corner of the house. So when I stepped inside and saw three people sitting on the living room couch together, I was tempted to turn tail and not look back. Figured I'd stumbled into the neighbor's place.

Dad's voice cast an anchor, though. “Speak of the devil!” he hollered.

My head pivoted, and then my gaze landed on the person sitting between my parents. A boy. In a suit. On our living room couch. He stood, and I spoke. “And the devil doesn't have a clue what the hell is going on.”

Mom rose to her feet next and she presented the boy like he was a car for sale. “It's Dylan . . .”

“Hovemeyer, ma'am,” Dylan said as he pulled down on his jacket to straighten out the wrinkles. There were a lot of wrinkles.

Now it was Dad who stood and remarked, “Hovemeyer? I've seen that name in the old cemetery by St. Francis.”

“Our family goes back a ways,” Dylan said with a nod. “And people tend to die.”

I knew Dylan. Well, I didn't know him personally, but everyone at school
knew
him. He was the one you suspected. Of what? Well, name it.

“Hey, it's . . .” Tess had joined me in the doorway, her hand on my back.

“Dylan Hovemeyer,” he said, stepping toward us with a hand outstretched. I wasn't sure which one of us the hand was intended for, but Tess was quicker on the draw. As she shook Dylan's right hand, I presented my left one and soon I was shaking his left one. A pulse of energy zipped between the three of us, back and forth,
like people doing the wave at a stadium. “We all have econ together,” he went on.

“Riiiight,” Tess and I said at the same time, as if this were something we'd never thought about before, which was total BS. We'd discussed Dylan. We had theories about him.

Mom's face crinkled up as she said, “I assumed you were already friends.”

“We're
becoming
friends,” Dylan said, staring at me. “Fast friends.”

The handshake à trois was still going strong and Tess gave me that what-now? look and I gave her that um-I'm-still-pretty-high look and so she took control, like always. She pulled her hand away and placed it on top of mine. It was the fuzzy hand again, the cuddly cartoon bear paw.

“You look great, Dylan,” Tess said. “And we'd love to catch up, talk econ and all that, but Mara is feeling crazy sick.”

I nodded, but I didn't pull my hand away. I liked it, sandwiched up and tangled in their fingers. It was melting like grilled cheese.

“Vomit-all-over-the-place sick,” Tess added.

“Oh, honey,” Dad said.

“Pumpkin latte,” Tess informed him.

Mom's eyes narrowed because she knew I downed those things like they were water during months that ended in
BER.
So I added a key detail. “Probably something fungal too.”

This made Mom cringe, but Dylan didn't budge. The words
vomit
and
fungal
can usually scare away even the most dedicated panty-sniffer, but it required Tess's field-hockey-honed arms to pry our fingers apart.

“Straight to bed for this one,” she said, pulling me toward the stairs. “Sorry, Dylan. Again, you look . . . dashing.”

Dylan seemed to take it in stride, shrugging as if he were called dashing all the time, which I knew for a fact he was not.

“Mara—” Mom started to say, but soon Tess and I were at the stairs and her tone shifted from surprise to embarrassment. “I'm so sorry, Dylan. She's . . . well, she's got a sensitive stomach.”

“That's cool,” Dylan said. “I did what I came here to do.”

“And that is?” Dad's voice was suddenly suspicious. He wasn't an idiot. He could see through a wrinkled suit.

“I wanted to meet you two. And I wanted to shake Mara's hand. Thank you for being nice to me. Your home is a nice home.”

By the time I reached my room, I had already heard the front door close. I looked out my window to the front lawn. Dylan was jogging across the grass, skateboard in hand. As soon as he reached the road, he tossed the board to the asphalt, hopped on, and escaped, suit and all, into the evening.

I opened the window so I could hear the squeaking wheels retreating into the distance as I collapsed on my bed. They sounded like sails being raised, a ship setting out to sea.

B
efore we dive back into things, I should probably tell you three stories about Dylan. Rumors, really, but rumors are as important as anything. Even if they're not true, they end up turning people into who they are.

Story Number One
: His dad died under a pile of shit.

I should elaborate, I suppose. Dylan started attending our school halfway through sixth grade. Middle school is a tough time for any kid, but being a new kid smack dab in the middle of middle school is about as tough as it gets. If you show up on the first day of classes, it's not so bad. New teachers, new lockers. People are distracted. A few kids might say, “Hey, I don't remember that guy,” but pretty soon you're integrated into the pubescent stew. Yet another dude dishing out or dodging wedgies.

Show up after Christmas break and things are way different. Then kids are, like, “Hey, what's this interloper's deal. His mom move him to Jersey after his parents got a divorce? He get kicked
out of his last school for sexting the nurse? This douche-nozzle ain't one of us, that's for sure.” Names are Googled, local news stories pop up, links are followed, until a tale emerges. The one for Dylan was that his dad died under a pile of shit.

I never looked it up to confirm, but I think Tracy Levy told me that Dylan was from some Podunk town in Pennsylvania and he lived on a farm with his parents and one morning his dad bought a bunch of manure (which is technically shit) and when the old man was unloading it—he hit the wrong button on the dump truck or whatever—it all came tumbling down on him and he suffocated beneath the pile. Dylan supposedly found him over an hour later and tried to dig him out with his bare hands, but it was too late.

Now, kids are cruel. We all know this. It's no surprise that the story spread quick and thick. Thanks in no small part to people like me, who love some good gossip. But as cruel as kids are, they aren't monsters. It wasn't like they teased Dylan about it. It merely branded him with a reputation.

Dylan came from a farm, which meant he was poor. His father died doing something stupid, which, if you're taking genetics into account, meant Dylan was stupid. On top of that, the stupid thing involved a pile of manure that Dylan pawed his way through, and now you've also got a kid who's dirty. And stinky.

So almost immediately, Dylan was known as a dumb and smelly hick who was probably scarred for life by what he came upon one afternoon out there in Pennsyltucky. Everyone felt bad for him, but no one wanted to be his friend. Myself included.

Story Number Two
: He burned down the QuickChek.

Again, this requires a bit of elaboration. At the intersection of
Willoby and Monroe, there used to be a QuickChek convenience store. In the summer after seventh grade, Tess and I would ride there on our bikes and buy Mountain Dew, Twizzlers, and the latest issue of
Vogue
. We'd take it all down to a nearby creek, sit on the rocks, and use the Twizzlers as straws to drink the Mountain Dew while we'd tear pictures of models out of magazines and then fold them up into little paper boats that we'd race in the currents.

“Go Adriana! Go Svetlana! Go, go, go you glorious anorexic Romanians!”

Okay, fine. I'm fairly certainly we didn't use the words
glorious
or
anorexic
or
Romanian
, but we got pretty damn excited about it. What else was there to do? We couldn't drive. We didn't drink, yet. Boys were an interest, of course, but they were all inside killing zombies or watching people kill zombies and Tess and I really weren't that into zombies and . . .

Sorry. Zombies aren't the point. QuickChek is. So it turns out that thirteen-year-old girls buying the occasional fashion mag, caffeinated soda, and bag of strawberry licorice isn't enough to keep a convenience store in the black, and by the winter of that year it closed down. It was kind of a craphole to begin with, but once people stopped using the building, raccoons and teenagers took it over, sneaking in at night to do the things that raccoons and teenagers do, which is primarily making a big fucking mess.

Big fucking messes tend to be pretty flammable and so it was no surprise when some boys set the place on fire. Well, one boy set it on fire, if you were to believe the stories. No arrests were made, no parents found out, but the incoming freshman class entered Covington High convinced that on the last night of eighth grade,
Dylan Hovemeyer had accompanied Joe Dalton and Keith Lutz to the abandoned QuickChek with the intention of smashing shit. You know, as a celebration of their manhood. Only Dylan brought an unexpected guest to the party: a Molotov cocktail made from an Arizona Iced Tea bottle filled with lighter fluid and wicked with the T-shirt we got for graduating from the middle school that said
GO GET
'
EM
,
YOUNG SCHOLARS
.

Apparently, Young Scholar Hovemeyer got 'em and got 'em good. That is, if 'em was a stack of old newspapers that he pelted with the burning Molotov cocktail before Joe and Keith had any idea what was what. The three bolted out of there with flames licking their haunches and promised never to speak of the incident, a truce that lasted a full fifteen hours.

In the end, everything worked out for the best. The building's owner probably got insurance money. The police never implicated the guys. And now there's a Chick-fil-A on the lot and everybody loves Chick-fil-A. Except for the fact that they're closed on Sundays. You can thank Jesus for that raw deal.

Story Number Three
: Dylan is the father of three kids.

This was the least corroborated of the stories, but the other two stories certainly helped make it believable. Remember, by the time he was in high school, Dylan was known as a redneck pyromaniac with a dead father. In other words, he had nothing to lose, and so whenever something suspicious happened, he was a suspect.

A fire alarm pulled on the first day of finals? Gotta be that Dylan kid.

Laptops stolen from the computer lab? Paging Mr. Hovemeyer.

Spontaneously combusting students? You bet his name was whispered more than once.

But even before the spontaneous combustions, there was the curious case of Jane Rolling. Jane had always been a bit chubby. Not obese. Just consistently soft. Well, during junior year, she got softer and softer and softer still. Then one day, she stopped showing up to school.

“Triplets!” Tess told me a few weeks later.

“She was . . . with child? That whole time?” I said.

“With
children
. Yes. Three. All boys.”

“That's boom-boom bonkers,” I said, because junior year was the year I said nonsense like “boom-boom bonkers.” Trying to land my own catchphrase, I will freely admit.

“What's even more
boom-boom bonkers
,” Tess said in a mocking tone, “is the identity of the father.”

I shrugged because there was better gossip than Jane Rolling's love life.

“How about Dylan?” Tess went on. “Manure-dad Dylan. Fire-starter Dylan.”

“Damn,” I said. “That's right. They dated. Used to cuddle on the front steps before first bell. It was . . . nausealicious.” Yep,
nausealicious
. Another junior year gem.

“So there you have it,” Tess said. “The delinquent has reproduced in triplicate.”

“Guy's got powerful sperm.”

“I thought you passed bio. It's more about Jane's eggs. Girl's got a chicken coop down there.”

“Well, I don't envy either one of them,” I said, which wasn't the
whole truth. Having a trio of babies is not without its advantages. Once they learn to walk and talk, you can teach them song-and-dance routines and who doesn't love a little soft shoe and three-part harmony?

Jane didn't come back to school, of course, and Dylan became more of a lurking, mysterious presence than ever. I guess he talked to other kids. I guess he had friends. But to people like me and Tess, he was simply a bundle of rumors and suspicion, dressed up in jeans and ringer tees.

Literary Analysis
: Dylan was sad. And dangerous. And fascinating.