Thousand Words (22 page)

“What about you?” I called. “You ever get hurt here?”

As if on cue, he misstepped and tumbled down a ramp, doing a clumsy backward somersault and landing on the concrete.

“Not yet,” he said, rubbing the back of his head as he sat up. “But keep talking and maybe I will.”

I sat and slid down on my butt like a little kid, ending a foot or so away from him. “Sorry. You okay?”

He squinted at me and smiled. “I’ve wiped out worse than that lots of times. I’m just not used to having anyone out here with me to see it. Not since my dad”—he hesitated, turning away—“stopped bringing me here. It’s been a while.”

There was definitely something weird about the way Mack looked when he talked about his dad, but something told me to let it go. I knew enough about Mack to know that if I started asking a bunch of questions, he would clam up. So instead I lay back against the ramp with my arms crossed under my head and watched the clouds, which were slowly moving by. I heard Mack run up the ramp again, and heard him slide down. And then again. And then the
last time I heard him run up, there was a pause. I glanced over to see him tying his shoes.

“Leaving already?” I asked. I knew I was hardly being the most exciting conversationalist in the world, but that usually didn’t matter with Mack. I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I liked it here.

“I owe you.”

I sat up. He tossed my backpack and then shoes down to me, first one, then the other. It felt good to put them on. My toes were so cold. “What do you owe me?”

He jumped off the edge of the ramp, landing on his feet but stumbling forward a few steps before getting control. “The creek.”

I grabbed my backpack and we plunged into the woods and turned a sharp right, walking away from the skate park. Our shoes crunched on the dead sticks and leaves that littered the ground for the winter. Despite all the trees losing their leaves, it was surprisingly secluded in there, and even though I could hear cars on a street somewhere ahead of us and could see mottled sides of houses through the dead branches and scant leaves, I couldn’t help feeling cut off from civilization.

We tromped over a patch of dirt that might have at one point been a trail, and then we came upon a small creek, running dry save for a few puddles here and there.

“This is it?”

“Yep.”

“There’s no water,” I said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I guess I always assumed that creeks had water.”

Mack simply kept walking, shimmying sideways until he was standing in the creek bed, which he followed, and then ducked into a concrete tube. “Come on.” His voice echoed off the walls.

After a moment’s hesitation, I followed him down into the creek and peered into the dark tunnel. I could walk in there bending only slightly at the waist, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Places like this were teeming with bugs and rodents. “Mack!” I called, and he popped back out to the entrance.

“Come on, chickenshit,” he said. “It’s just a drainage pipe. It’s not a sewer or anything. And it’s dry.” I stood there a second longer, unmoving. “Fine, suit yourself,” he said, turning and going back inside. “You’re the one who wanted to see it, anyway.”

I took a deep breath, watching the back of his jean jacket until I couldn’t see him anymore. If my parents knew I was spending my time after Teens Talking following a boy like Mack—a boy I’d met in community service and barely knew, besides—into a drainage ditch, where I could possibly be raped and murdered, they would come unglued. And who could blame them?

But I followed him in anyway.

It wasn’t as bad inside the drainage pipe as I’d feared. It was dank, and there were sodden leaves underfoot, and a distant sound of dripping that echoed off the concrete walls
around me, but there were no rats or spiders’ nests pregnant with pulsating eggs or anything like that, and I could see the exit hole ahead in the distance.

Mack was waiting for me inside. He bent down and picked up something, then held it out to me: a flashlight.

Even though it was more shadowy than all-out dark, I flipped on the flashlight, if for no other reason than that I was still uncertain what we were doing in there.

Mack raised his arm and pointed straight ahead. “So all this does is go under Cypress Street,” he said. “It comes out in the same creek on the other side. Like a little tunnel. The storm drains up on the street drain down into here, but it hasn’t rained in like a month, so right now everything’s pretty dry. Come on.”

I followed him forward, shining the light on the ground where I was going to be walking, still not convinced that I wasn’t going to step in anything gross or dangerous. We tromped through the leaves, the sound of our footfalls and our breathing bouncing off the walls around us. Every now and then there’d be a low whoosh of a car driving on the street we were walking under.

Finally, I saw a rectangle of light shining through the storm drains above us. The tunnel widened out, the rounded ceiling flattening. Mack stopped between the drains.

“When it rains, you get two waterfalls down here,” he said. “I like to stand in between and just listen sometimes. But you have to scoot up the wall a little or you’ll be standing in water the whole time.”

I pointed the flashlight up and tried to imagine what it must be like under the street in a storm, the rain beating on the world above, pouring down on either side of you, but you standing safe against the wall, listening.

Mack backed up and leaned against the curved wall.

“You come down here a lot?” I asked.

“Not as much as I used to. It’s a good place to think. A good place to get away. It’s hidden. I like solitude.”

I flicked off the flashlight and backed up next to him.

“You let me hang around,” I said.

“I didn’t know I had a choice,” he answered, and then he chuckled.

I thought about all the times I’d sat next to him. The times I’d barged into his spot by the vending machines. Sat by him on the bench outside Central Office. Jogged up next to him on the sidewalk. Demanded to listen to his music. Demanded to go with him.

“No, I guess you didn’t,” I said.

We were silent for a minute, and I began pulling leaves off the floor and crumbling them between my fingers.

“I’ll show you something. Turn your light on,” he said, and I did. “Shine it on that wall over there.”

I aimed the beam at the wall directly across from us and gasped. How had I not noticed before? It was covered from top to bottom with graffiti, some scratched into the stone, some written in bold, black letters, most spray-painted in vivid colors. Words, art, messages, names. I stood and
walked to the wall, then reached out my hand and brushed my fingers across it. “Did you do this?”

“Some. A lot of people add to it. Here, give me the flashlight.”

I handed it over and he shined the light on a spot above my head. The words
ROGER S
6-22-70 were scratched into the concrete, white faded to gray.

“I think that’s where it started,” he said. “I can’t find anything older.” He moved the beam. “This one’s my favorite.” I shuffled to the side to take a look. In bright-green cartoonish letters was the word
RHINO
, the “O” embellished with a horn. Next to it, in pink spray paint, was
CLEVER WUZZ HERE
, and beneath that were the words
PEACE DRIVER
.

“So cool,” I said, studying every word and illustration as Mack took a step back to let the flashlight illuminate a bigger section of the wall. “Where’s yours?”

He stepped forward again and bent to shine the light closer to the ground. “Here’s one,” he said. I squatted next to him and looked. In black lettering, the word
SOLO
was written. Above it were a shaded moon and a shaft of moonlight shining down on the word.

“Is that your nickname?” I asked. “Solo?”

“No, my nickname is Mack.”

“Short for…?”

He sighed. “My real name is Henry. My dad started calling me Mack when I was a little kid because I’ve always been big like a truck. It stuck.”

“So what does Solo mean?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

Instead, he stood up and pointed the light at another spot. “My dad put this one here when I was a kid.”

It was very simple, very plain, almost as plain as Roger’s initial inscription.
DRAGON AND MACK MAY
1998.

I ran my fingers across the word
DRAGON
. There were so many questions I wanted to ask. So many things I wanted to find out. But Mack never offered information. He liked his solitude. And it was one thing to make him let me come with him to the skate park or the creek; to demand he take me along to his past felt like stealing.

“You want to tag it?” he asked.

“Me?”

“Yeah, why not? I’ve got a marker.”

“What would I write?”

“I don’t know. Your name. Whatever you want. You have any nicknames?”

I stared at the wall. Yes, I had a nickname. My whole life was about nicknames right now.

“Sure, give me your marker,” I said, my throat suddenly burning. “I’ll just write Slut Up for Grabs. Everybody’ll know who left that one. But I could shorten it to Slut or Whore if we’re wanting to conserve space.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant, like—”

“No, I know what you meant,” I said. “But if I wrote Ash or Buttercup or some other stupid nickname, what would it really mean? That’s not who I am anymore. All
I am is the Slut Up for Grabs. That’s all anyone cares about.”

“You’re not those things.” Mack’s voice was soft, and he’d clicked off his flashlight.

“How do you know who I am? Even I’m not sure anymore. I did it, you know? I took the picture. So if taking that picture makes me a slut, then how can I deny that I’m a slut?”

And I realized how much I’d come to believe that. Taking the picture was a mistake, but somehow that mistake had started to become me. How could I keep fighting it, keep denying the truth? It was hard to stand up for yourself—to claim that you weren’t the slut they were all saying you were—when your picture was on a porn site. How could I blame them, really, for making assumptions about me? How could I blame the people on the website and at school for harassing me? How could I blame Mom and Dad for assuming I was having sex with Kaleb?

“That’s ridiculous, Ashleigh. Those people don’t get to say who you are. You can’t let them have that kind of power. You made a mistake. You’re human.”

“But don’t you see?” I said, my voice going croaky and loud in the enclosed space. “They do have that power. Because when I think about who I am, all I can think about is that picture.”

“Then you need to think harder,” he said.

I shook my head. “Forget I said anything. I… don’t want to write my name up there right now is all.”

“Okay,” he said. “No big deal.”

I tried to lean against the concrete again, hoping for the same thrill of adventure and the excitement of seclusion I’d felt before he’d shown me the graffiti.

But the walls had begun to close in on me, and the darkness had begun to press into my eyes, making me feel terrified and small. I had to get out of there.

“Thanks for bringing me, but I need to get home. See you tomorrow,” I croaked, and even though I was pretty sure I felt his hand brush against my elbow, I turned and raced out the way we had come. I plunged through the woods, past the skate park, and ran all the way home, without so much as looking back once.

At restroom break the next day, I didn’t follow Mack out to the vending machines. I was embarrassed to talk to him. I felt like I needed to apologize, but I wasn’t sure for what. For making him show me his most secret space and then rushing out on him? For losing it when he asked about my nickname? For forcing my friendship on him in the first place?

When he returned after the break, he dropped a roll of Life Savers on my desk. We didn’t make eye contact or say a word. After a while, I picked it up and peeled it open. Earlier in the day, Phillip Moses had called me a slut, and two sophomores had giggled and whispered the entire time I was in the bathroom with them. A guy in my third-period class had acted like he was grabbing my boobs for half an hour.

But Angela Firestone had actually talked to me in PE, and at lunch some girls sat a few seats down from me like it was no big deal. Even Cheyenne kind of shyly grinned at me in the hallway as we walked past each other, when normally she would have pretended I didn’t exist at all. And the fact that I had noticed those little details made me wonder if I wasn’t doing what Mack had suggested in the tunnel the night before.
Then you need to think harder
, he’d said. Maybe things were just getting better on their own. Or maybe I was thinking harder.

Dad had another late night ahead of him, so Mom drove me home from community service. I took my backpack and headed straight to my room. I was only there a few minutes before I heard a light knock on my door and Vonnie came in.

“Hey,” she said, kind of awkwardly waving.

I sat on my bed and stared at her because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d all but given up on Vonnie, which wasn’t easy. When I’d gotten back from suspension, she seemed to have moved on. There was no space for me in her life anymore, and most of the time she walked right past me as if she didn’t even know who I was.

What was more, I’d found that Rachel had been eating at my old lunch table. And since we were court ordered to have nothing to do with each other, I had to stay away, which meant, essentially, that Vonnie had chosen Rachel over me.

How did you go ahead and accept that your best friend who you’d loved forever had ditched you when something that happened to you made her look bad?

“Hey,” I said, suspiciously. “What’s up?”

She fiddled with the end of the knitted pink scarf that was dangling loosely around her neck. She was also wearing a new pair of boots. They were white suede with rhinestones covering the toes and heels and were totally beautiful. I’d noticed them at school a few days ago and had almost run up to her to tell her how great they looked, but then I’d remembered that there was this huge hole between us now and I couldn’t approach her—not even to tell her that I loved her boots—or I’d fall in.