The Fallback Plan (2 page)

My mom was standing at the top of the stairs, flossing her teeth.

“Yes?”

“Are you going out?”

“I dropped something,” I said. “I think I dropped something.”

“Okay. Be safe,” she said.

“Do you have your keys? Be sure to lock behind you,” my dad said, opening and closing his eyes like garage doors. He turned off the TV and resealed the bag of cookies on the coffee table.

I stood and let myself out.

Across the street, dusk was falling to the west behind the gas plant. Down came the first stars.

The world seemed so safe and secure, but I knew that at any moment an asteroid could fall on us, or a bomb, summoned by our fear of it, and it wouldn’t matter if we had locked our doors or not. Thousands of miles away, a bus could explode and destroy a mosque and a tourist from San Diego. A polar bear could drown and a teenage girl could lose her feet in a roller-coaster accident on the same exact day. You always heard people say, “I never thought it would happen to
me
,” so my strategy was to think of it all—terrorist attack, amusement park dismemberment,
death by climate change—and use my grim imagination as a preventative measure in the face of the random universe.

I kicked a cicada shell to the side of the driveway with my sandal and got in the car. The radio was playing that song about the guy who would walk a thousand miles across the country for the girl. Everyone loved that song. I would put it on
The Littlest Panda
soundtrack. When I backed out of the driveway, I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I was looking at the moths near our porch light—for a second I thought they were snowflakes in June—and then I ran over the curb a little bit.

I could see my dad at the window near the front door. I waved. He shook his head.

I turned off the radio and drove west into the silent, encroaching darkness.

• • •

Jack lived in an apartment complex near the community college and whenever I drove by I remembered a field trip my third grade class had taken there, to watch the prairie grass burn. The college’s maintenance staff had to light the dry overgrown stalks on fire every spring to kill weeds and encourage the growth of native plants. Clear the dead to make room for the living. We’d stood a safe distance away from the flames and watched as they consumed acres. The heat bent the air like a dreamscape.

That same spring, we’d planted our own patch of prairie grass at school behind the baseball field. The local newspaper came to take pictures of our work, and they printed one of me holding my dirty hands up victoriously. Missing one of my front teeth, I look like the Witch from
Snow White
.

I had to walk past the man-made lake in the center of Jack’s apartment complex to get to his door. Swans slept near the tall reeds like sailboats. Instead of answering the buzzer, Pickle came out on the balcony and threw down the keys so I could let myself in. Jack’s balcony was the one with the aluminum lawn chairs, and a screen door, punctured by BB holes, that had come off its track.

Inside, the stairwell and hallway smelled like fish sticks.

Jack and Pickle were sitting on the couch playing Super Mario Kart. They were both wearing white t-shirts and jeans, but only Jack looked like a Hanes model.

“Hi,” I said, and sat in a beanbag chair, the only other place to sit besides the floor.

“Do you want to play winner?” Pickle said, without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Not really.”

“You mean does she want to play me,” Jack said, and elbowed him in the side, causing Pickle to drive Bowser into the ocean.

“Oh, fuck.” Pickle tried to elbow him back, but just got air when Jack shifted toward the arm of the couch.

“Going for a swim?”

“Yeah,” Pickle said, “in your mom’s vagina.”

Before college, when I’d imagined my social future, my life at twenty-two, I’d pictured a small group of brunette women who were all my best friends, and our bearded boyfriends who all hailed from Portland, in a room together, drinking red wine and discussing Brecht’s influence on Godard, or the merits of Joyce.

What page are you on in
Ulysses?

Oh, 500 and something
.

Keep with it. I can’t wait to hear what you think of the Latin parodies in Episode 14!

Anyone up for another game of
Bananagrams
?

But after four years of college, I was exhausted by ideas, and secretly relieved to live at home because there were so few expectations. I liked being with Jack and Pickle because everything we did together, everything we ever talked about, was unambiguous and fell into one of four categories:

Sex, money, drugs, violence.

Jack was going on his third year of community college, taking Acting for the Camera and Introduction to Ornamental Horticulture classes. His parents paid the rent on his apartment—not because he was lucky, but because they didn’t want him living in their house with his younger siblings any longer. He had a history of violence.

Jack had spent most of his teenage years locked up
in treatment centers for kids with personality disorders, which is why we didn’t know each other in high school. He told me that his parents once sent him to a wilderness program in Kentucky that was supposed to help him manage his aggressiveness, but instead of going outside he stayed in his room, and beat “We Will Rock You” against the wall with his head, for hours. His parents didn’t seem to care if he ever graduated; they’d pay the bills as long as he kept his part-time job at Best Buy, which is where he met Pickle. When they had to stay late to stock they went out behind the strip mall and lit things on fire.

I was in love with Jack. Not just because he looked like a Grecian statue, or an athletic convict on the verge of a prison break, but also because there’s something devastatingly attractive about wild cards and loose cannons. He was the antithesis of the drama fags, the pale overachievers, and the anemic trumpet players I’d gone to college with. He was James Dean and I was Natalie Wood, and I just wished he’d put on a red jacket and we could go find a cliff to play Chicken on.

Mario crossed the finish line and Jack threw his controller to the ground like he’d just scored a touchdown.

“Call your guy,” Jack said, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern.

“That was the deal.” He opened a bag of peanuts and cleared a space on the coffee table on which to discard the shells.

“It’s a girl,” Pickle said. “I know this girl who used to
go out with my brother and she has to know someone. She works at Whole Foods.”

“Whole Foods smells the way baby kittens would smell if they were beaten to death with patchouli by a motorcycle gang,” Jack said.

“I like the way it smells,” I said, looking at my feet. “It smells like handmade soap, like if Amish people made it.”

Jack stared at me without blinking. “How much money do you have,” he finally said.

“None. I don’t have a job.”

“Get one, Jew,” he said. “Pickle, see if you can get a twenty sack.”

“
L’chaim
,” I mumbled, celebrating nothing. To Jack, I wasn’t Natalie Wood. I was Yentl. I was the ethnic diversity in the room.

It had taken me that long to realize that Jack’s girlfriend Jocelyn wasn’t here; she wasn’t squeezed between them on the couch, chain-smoking cigarettes that didn’t belong to her and telling inane stories, presuming that if they happened to her, we cared. Once, she told us, a customer at Old Navy thought she was a mannequin!
Isn’t that a scream?
she said. I hoped we wouldn’t have to pick her up later. She didn’t know how to drive. That’s what I had to remind myself, whenever I heard she got cast in another play or commercial because she had perfect bone structure, and not because she’d gone to Northwestern. I couldn’t hate her for living with her parents because I lived
with my parents, but I could hate her for never learning how to drive because she assumed there would always be someone there to chauffeur her. I once sent her a text message from a number she wouldn’t recognize that said,
Congratulations on your face
.

“Where’s Jocelyn?” I said.

“Fuck if I know,” Jack said, without taking his eyes off the peanut shells, and I fantasized briefly that she had been hired to play Belle in Disney on Ice and had to leave immediately for training without time to say goodbye. I imagined Jocelyn inviting Jack to the show when it came to Chicago, and his face when she twisted her ankle and fell and had to be carried off the ice with the painful knowledge that she would never fully recover, that from then on she would have to settle for less and less, just like the rest of us.

“It’s ringing,” Pickle told us. “It’s telling me to enjoy the music while the subscriber’s being reached.” You could always count on Pickle for a play-by-play. “Beth? Pickle. Hey, listen. Who do you know that we could get a sack from tonight?”

Jack wiped his hands on his jeans and asked me to hand him his iPod. It was on a bookshelf near my beanbag chair, next to an ashtray and a DVD called
Panty Party IV
.

“Watch,” he whispered, and turned on a ZZ Top song. “Now put it back in the stereo thing and turn that shit all the way up.”

I could still feel the Vicodin. I had taken a second one in the car on the way because I hadn’t felt the first one yet but then I felt both. I looked at the hand that was holding the iPod and saw that it was attached to a wrist and an arm, but I didn’t know what was inside it and I didn’t know how to find out and then I thought
maybe I shouldn’t be thinking this right now because probably nobody else is
, and then I wondered if Jack could read minds. If anyone could, it would be Jack. I wondered if he knew what I had just wished upon Jocelyn.

Pickle got off the couch, and I took his spot next to Jack. Then the music came on and I forgot why I was staring at my arm. Jack laughed, and hit the coffee table with his fist. Pickle looked at us, incredulous that we’d set the volume at such a maximum level.
What the fuck
, he mouthed, and threw an empty Sprite can at Jack’s head.

Jack caught it and threw it back, harder.

Pickle ducked. It hit the wall below the dartboard. “Hold on a sec,” he told Beth, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. “Dude, I’m on the phone
for you
.” Jack laughed. Privately, he had once asked me if I thought Pickle could tell the difference between when we were laughing
at
him or
with
him. I had never thought of it before, but I understood what he meant. Pickle didn’t have a clue.

Jack tried to balance a Gatorade bottle on the top of his head and Pickle went into the bedroom and closed the door.

I had met Pickle in kindergarten. I was one of the few kids in our class who already knew how to tie their shoes, and so the teacher had me help everyone else get ready for recess or gym class, especially Pickle, then known as James. I have never let him forget the fact that he would have tripped over his shoelaces and fallen down, repeatedly, had it not been for me, Florence Nightingale.

Since he lived within walking distance, I spent summer afternoons at his house, and we would take the juice leftover in pickle jars, pour it into ice cube trays, add toothpicks, and make Popsicles.

“Let’s do something,” I said. “We never actually do anything.” I took my sandals off and put my feet on the edge of the table. Jack scooted toward the edge of the couch, away from me, and then back to where he’d started, teasing me with restlessness.

I felt bored. With boredom came the relief that I didn’t have to feel anything else. When Jocelyn was bored she looked sexy. She was bored all the time. If I looked like Jocelyn I would try to get on a reality TV show as soon as possible.

“Hey,” Jack said. “Hey, Esther.”

“Hey what,” I said. ZZ Top wasn’t playing anymore. “Folsom Prison Blues” was on.

“What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“Nothing. You’ve already told her twice.”

He smiled and held his hand up for a high five.

“I don’t think I can give you a high five for that one,” I said.

“I’ll put it in the lost and found. You can reclaim it later.”

“Very funny.” I put my neck back and closed my eyes. “Your couch feels so nice,” I said. “Try it. Sit like this.”

“Today I had to meet with my English professor and she asked me what grade I thought I deserved and I said a B and she said she’d give me a B,” Jack said.

I didn’t want to talk about grades, not even someone else’s. “I’m a writer,” I said. “I’m writing a screenplay.”

“Can I be in it?”

“It’s just for pandas.”

Pickle came out of the bedroom. His Cubs hat was turned backward. Had it been backward before? I couldn’t remember. “She said she’s at a party and we can drop by and get some off someone there,” he said.

“Pickle,” I said, “fix your hat.”

“Where’s the party?”

“In Darien.”

“Esther can drive us,” Jack said.

“I’m not driving.”

“Well, my car’s on E and I don’t know where Darien is.”

“Google, asshole,” Pickle said, and held up the back of his hand, where he had written the address with a Sharpie. (My mom had once told me that when Pickle’s mom was pregnant she was well overdue, but the doctor didn’t want to induce labor. When Pickle was finally born they found
that he had detached from the placenta and had been starving to death. “It’s a miracle he survived and his brain wasn’t damaged more,” she’d said.)

“You drive,” Jack told Pickle. “You find it, you drive us, you get it. This was all implied in our deal when I killed you at Mario Kart
Hotel Rwanda
style.”

Pickle hadn’t moved from the doorway. “What’s wrong with my hat? I always wear my hat like this.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes I do. I always do.”

“You look like a tool.”

“Your purse is vibrating,” Jack said, and handed it to me.

It was my mom. Her ringtone was “Ride of the Valkyries.” “Hello?” I said. “Mom?”

“Sorry to be calling so late.”

“Did something happen?” Had someone died? Would she say sorry to be calling so late if someone was dead?