The Laws of Average (2 page)

“Up top,” she said. “Come on.”

He swiveled to see where she'd pointed into the bleachers, just underneath the rickety pressbox where a man powered a microphone one short phrase at a time, his device wired into a tinny PA system. The uncle was already at the farthest end of the bleachers, front row, right behind the green team—“BEARS”—but separated by more chainlink fencing. He'd wedged himself between a pair of clover-colored stadium chairs, the kind with folding metal bars and foam backs. Clover-clad occupants. The green cheer team was already ramping up its rendition of “Be Aggressive” while the red cheer team politely watched and waited its turn to do the same. The nephew felt inclined to wave at his relative in the distance, but the uncle was already in full fever, yelling and spelling every letter ahead of the green cheerleaders, absolutely and irrevocably gleeful, fully and unmistakably himself in his old smelly jean jacket with the musky wool collar.

And, besides, she already had control of the evening's agenda, sweetly but firmly guiding him through the waves of feet and elbows as they climbed their way to the spot she'd marked inside her own mind when she'd motioned towards it with a little shake of her head and slight wrinkle of her nose. She'd learned The Move when she was still a toddler, and it had a 99% success rate with every human male within her periphery. Her first deployment of The Move came when she knocked a three-gallon bladder of Kool-Aid out of the refrigerator and yet still managed to finagle a snickerdoodle cookie out of the disaster while her mother and grandmother and aunt tried their damnedest to keep the linoleum floor from staining into the permanent splotch of scarlet that was still in front of her mother's fridge until The Great Remodel erased every trace of the incident. She used The Move not because the nephew needed convincing but because she wanted it absolutely clear where his attention needed to be at all times, framing herself constantly in his vision, hoping he was taking mental snapshots of her to last a lifetime: the angle of her sweatshirt around her; the thin trace of her brassiere across her back; the whisps of chocolate hair loosening under the ribbon across her scalp; the bend of her knee as she climbed the bleachers; the way she balanced her ascent by jutting her unoccupied hand out at her waist, spreading her fingers to catch enough air between the digits so as to correct her center of gravity; her quick glances over the shoulder at him; up and up and up and up.

When they reached the highest row, she turned 180 degrees, right there in the stairway, before he'd had a chance to come to a full stop with his feet. His shoes washboarded over her toes and he took two hard steps down on them. Her face flushed. She broke her hold on his hand and gasped a small mouthful of air. The nephew's reflexes kicked in to pull his feet back and she fell away from him. He grabbed the loose arms of her sweatshirt and her balance immediately reversed, her face pitching full into his face, forehead to forehead, smacking there, his own arms now braced behind her back and the thick cotton ones taught against her front.

“Gotchoo,” he smiled.

Her eyes sunk back in their sockets and she quickly closed her lips, heart throbbing hard against her lungs.

“You okay?” He punctuated his concern by pumping the small of her back with his knotted hands when he sounded out the last syllable. She blinked a big blink and drew in a full breath, the lungs pushing back and slowing the bud-ump bud-ump bud-ump radiating out of her rib-cage. He pumped his fists again.

“Say something.” The smile fell off his face and he narrowed his eyes enough to make out the edge of her contact lenses against the outermost membrane of her eyes. As she exhaled she slid her own arms around his waist, their limbs crossing over another in perfect symmetry before forming right angles to one another when she flattened her hands against his shoulder blades.

“Are you looking for a reward,
hero?”
The smile he'd lost reappeared on her face. “Oh, you're so
strong
and have such
quick
reflexes,” she said, nose twitching. “Are you
Superman?
You know, I didn't come here with Clark Kent.”

He raised his eyebrows to exaggerate the smirk on his lips but remained silent.

“Do you think my boyfriend's going to be jealous?” She scraped her toe playfully across his shoe.

“Stop it,” he said.

“Make me.”

He looked at her and she looked right back, their eyes forming a horizon.

“Or am I your kryptonite, Mister Kent?” He blinked. “I
know your seee-cret,”
she sang, in full-on The Move mode now, her mind mapping the chessboard of their conversation. The smirk relaxed against his cheeks and they traded thin caresses on each other's backs. She squashed her smile into a pout and he remained silent.

“Oh, don't be that way, you big baby.” He blinked. “You know I'll make it up to you.” She slid out of his arms and rejoined his hand with hers before they scooched to a clear spot on the long pine bleacher board and sat down.

The nephew could see the back of his uncle's head, now on the opposite end from where he'd just seen him. The red team careened into its own take of the green team's cheer; the girls sporting the capital letter Bs stood with their hands crossed in front of them, trying really really hard not to be impressed. The uncle tried to hide nothing, and for the duration of the first half he made a nuisance of himself, uprooting and uprooting again until his temporary neighbors on both ends of the long front row finally just got up and left their prime viewing seats, passive aggressively snapping their foam-backed seats together and climbing the stairs up to where they wouldn't be interrupted every 5 minutes by worn wool and halitosis.

By the time each pair of the uncle's spurned neighbors made their respective ways to the top of the stadium, she had long coaxed the nephew down from the heights, claiming to be scared even though she knew he knew she was competitive in gymnastics, and he knew she knew he was the one truly terrified.

The red drill team had its halftime performance—a glowstick routine set to Bon Jovi's “Livin' On A Prayer”—cruelly postponed when the pressbox cassette player ate the tape right at the moment Richie Sambora climbs into his wicked guitar solo. The pair of them long gone from the stadium and its huge suns of floodlighting. They slid into the stadium's big shadow where it was ten degrees cooler, where the last of the sunset was still smearing the horizon, where the sweatshirt clung to her shoulders, chest and forearms, where he had his hands shoved in his pants pockets, where the harvest moon made no pretense about its creep into the purpling sky, where the clouds had already turned in for the night and the stars were taking their spot.

The sounds around them softened to a murmur. He extracted his hands and rubbed them together; the seams of his pockets formed a pale band over the backs of both hands, the denim stretched too tight and cutting off the circulation. She instantly reached for them and wriggled the cuffs of her sweatshirt over his cold hands, holding the tips of his fingers above her thumbs. He clamped down and after a few seconds she freed her own fingers just enough that she could work them up to his wrists, then to his forearms, and eventually all the way up to his elbows. His hands released, slacking within the cocoon of cotton. The air between them and the night around them thickened. She slid her hands up and down his arms a couple of times before looping one of her index fingers and a tag-along middle finger over the thin bones and veins in his wrist. His pulse leapt to the surface of his skin to meet her fingers there. He looked into her face and she looked into his face.

“You don't intimidate me, Mister Kent,” she said.

They'd played this game before and the rules were simple. Be the first to blink and know it and own it.

She sterned her brow and pretended to be serious, her chin locking into her jawline. He said nothing, did nothing.

“Go,” she said, already fixated on his eyelids before uttering the sound. This was her cheat, her hack, why she always won: the illusion she was looking all the way into his retinal wall and he simply couldn't tell the difference.

He held her gaze for a full 10 seconds before pulling his eyes away, first to the right and then up above and into the air, where the night had scoured out the last pesky bits of daylight.

“Gotchoo.”

She smiled. He said nothing, but she felt the muscles in his arms tighten and she instinctively pulled her hands away. The cuffs of the sweatshirt deflated as he withdrew. His gaze remained overhead, his hair angled in near parallel with the ripening moon.

“Oh, don't pout because you lost again,” she said, her eyes still aimed into his sockets. She gave The Move a good try but he remained silent and motionless, neck arched up and away from her. She flattened her toes into the ground and went up on the balls of her feet, bouncing on them, trying to snap back into his frame of reference. It wasn't working.

“Hey space cadet,” she said, her voice a lower gear of serious. She waved an arm of the sweatshirt up in the air, raking his chin with a soft blow that was more petulant than playful.

“Stop.” He gripped her arm. Her face fell into a real frown. She lowered herself back to the grass and stood flat-footed again as he continued to hold her arm. She watched him raise his other arm and drag his index finger through the night, past the tip of her peripheral vision, pointing almost directly behind her.

“Look.” He released her arm.

She turned and raised her eyes, scraping his shoe as she went about, and stumbled a bit. She reached behind her to touch him quickly to make sure he was still there. She said nothing as she panned across the sky, its big field anchored by the plump orange moon and well-meaning twinkles of stars.

“You see it?” Arm and finger rigid like a clock hand, motoring across the curve of the night, a dull yellow streak. She raised her own arm and pointed her own finger, pushing his out of the space around her.

“Oooooh.”

She traced its path with her eyes and moved her shoulder to keep pace; she could feel the slow burn in the sky replicating itself in her deltoid. The nephew dropped his arm and watched her do this: the creep of her arm and slight twist of her torso, shuffle-steps with her red Keds in the green grass, hips rotated, her hair and face and ribbon defuzzing back into focus. The extended arm landed softly on his shoulder and the other flew up to rest neatly on the opposite side. She locked her fingers together and stretched a big stretch. He saw she wasn't looking up anymore.

“You
saw
it, right?” he asked. The sweatshirt enveloped him, chest to shoulder blades.

“Saw what?”

On their rides home they said nothing, did nothing but scour the night for the trace of that moment, streetlamps splashing against their windows as they strained to see that they were merely passengers.

Here is the beach and here is the car and here is the face that brought the other face here. Here is the wine and here is the glass and here is the glass and here is the clink of them together here. Here is the chair and here is the chair and here is the shrinking space between them here. Here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle and here is the candle here. Here is a red rose and here is a red rose here.

And there is the haystack of rock swelling into the sky. And there is the sky muscled over in cloud. And there is the cloud blurring the horizon. And there is the horizon all around us. And there is us.

Even though it was July, she chose black—head to toe, under and over—for the occasion. She spun a big bracelet over her right wrist, one segmented into white and black triangles shot through with an elastic cord to keep it all together, thin steel flourishes trailing off it like signal flares between the thick vinyl chips. The shirt she'd chosen flowed freely down the shoulders to her elbows and framed the top curves of her with a wide net lace.

She wanted to be sure she wouldn't give off the wrong impression, but she wasn't necessarily opposed to the idea. Because if that were the case, she wouldn't even be up yet, and she certainly wouldn't be dressing in the med closet.

She slid her contact lenses into place and blinked vigorously. The supply room washed into focus, its sunlight-bright overhead lamps burned the space completely free of shadows. This is why she preferred doing her makeup and hair and finer touches here rather than in the dim recess of her master bathroom, that and the fact she owned—not leased—the building in which she stood, her floral-print sandals firm against the thin industrial-grade carpet. Ten years ago she'd temped here as a receptionist. Five years later she returned with an SBA loan and MSPAA license and literally took shit over, the real way, the way it matters. Ownership society. All that.

Authorizing the office's satellite radio subscription was her first official act of legit responsibility, and all country all the time every since, the more pop stuff, the less jangly-twangy stuff, the stuff marketed with music videos and Stetson hats and designer jeans and lighting rigs, shot with RED cameras in the absolute highest high-def, shoulder-shrugging models lip-synching in front of empty amusement park rides or in vast stretches of meadows without even a whisper of human population. Outside: her parking lot, her asphalt, her rectangle marked in bold yellow lines, her gunmental gray GMC Yukon Denali towering above it all. Climate-controlled seats. Speed-sensitive volume control on the Bose stereo. Power everything. Tailgate camera wired in closed-circuit to the thick LCD screen always hovering just in front of her. Her past all about the future, and the future right here, right now.

Yet. If only.