Someone set Walmart on fire. Kind of a sophisticated operation, evidently. Walked through, dribbled gasoline from concealed containers up and down every aisle, trailed it out the door, dropped a lit cigarette onto it. Fwoosh. Attention, Walmart associates, code orange in aisles one through fifty.
We live close enough that the smell of burning drifted in through the open windows. Lots of smoke, but not so much damage once it was all under control. No one injured.
Still, it was serious, now. The police were all over it.
Walmart, they cared about. Jewel Gomez, not so much.
Another one of Sheffield’s Induction Ceremonies; it had to be. The whole football team knew about this. Knew who did it. Was protecting them. And things were escalating. Getting scarier.
The day after Walmart, I phoned Connor from his driveway. I was still angry at him, but I hoped maybe I could talk some sense into him. Get him to help stop all this before someone got seriously hurt.
“Hey,” he said, just like that, with no exclamation mark. Normally, he’s superhappy to answer a call from me.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m outside. We need to talk.”
He didn’t answer right away. “Door’s open,” he finally said. “I’m in the basement.”
I went inside and walked down the hall, and I had a moment, opening the basement door, when the mildew-and-cinnamon smell of it transported me briefly back in time, to childhood, to Solomon and me standing at the top of the stairs and daring each other to descend to the darkness.
But I was a grown-up now, and I was alone. And the broken bulb at the bottom of the stairs had been replaced. So I didn’t think about Solomon, didn’t spend even a second getting sad over where he might be, because I was on a mission, I had to stay focused, and I didn’t let myself feel the slightest bit of fear following the sound of clanking metal to where I knew I’d find Connor.
His basement had a better weight room than most actual gyms. Connor didn’t like lifting, but he wanted to please his dad, spot for him, be bros.
And there he was, shirtless and sweaty, on the rowing machine. Resistance set so high I probably couldn’t have pulled it a single inch.
“Hey,” he grunted, when he got to the end of his set.
“I know you don’t want to talk about this,” I said. “But someone just tried to burn down Walmart. Was that you guys?”
He frowned, looked at his hands. They were patterned with the checkerboard imprint of the machine’s metal handles.
“Jesus Christ, Connor. People could have been hurt. You could have—”
“Look. I want to talk. But it has nothing to do with any of that.”
I sat down on the floor. There was real pain on his face.
Crazy fears filled my head. But then Connor opened his mouth, and it was so much worse than anything I’d been imagining.
“I don’t want to be your pick-me-up anymore. The person you hook up with when you’re feeling down,” he said, avoiding looking at me. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be insensitive. I know it helps you. But it’s been messing with me, and I can’t handle it anymore.”
I put my hand on his leg. He pulled it away. “Are you okay?” I asked.
The words looked superhard for him to say. “I care about you, Ash. A lot. And I can’t just do this and pretend it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Oh, honey,” I said, and reached for him, and then stopped. Because I didn’t want to touch him if touching him made him upset. Like even that would be leading him on. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
He looked at me, for what felt like the first time. His eyes were round, hazel, electric. “Didn’t you?”
And I had. On some level, I must have. I didn’t want to see it, because seeing it would mean I was an awful person, playing with his emotions, hurting him, ignoring his pain for my own momentary sense of well-being.
Humans are so strange like that. When we don’t want to see something, we just don’t see it. Or we tell ourselves it’s something else. That’s pretty much an essential part of how we survive in this world.
The smell of his sweat was strong in the air. Normally the scent was sexy to me, exciting. Now I could see it more clearly. All this “manliness” . . . it didn’t match up with the soul behind his eyes. He was something softer, kinder, more sensitive than the world wanted him to be.
An image flashed in my head: irrational, absurd. Connor as a six-year-old, being carried piggyback by a fully grown Solomon . . . in a weird little hut. Laughing like the happiest kid on the planet.
“If you want to go out on a date sometime, call me,” he said. “Roller-skating. Bowling, over in Catskill. But without that? I’m sorry. I thought I was mature enough to handle it, but I’m not.”
I didn’t answer, not right away. The easy thing to do was say, “Yes, let’s go roller-skating.”
But the thing was, I couldn’t. And he deserved better than that. So all I said was okay.
For a second he looked surprised, and then he nodded. “See you around, Ash.”
I wanted to say more. It felt wrong, after everything we’d done together, to have so little in the way of goodbye. But I didn’t want to make things worse. So I just went out the door.
Me, and all my unanswered questions.