Dad’s client in California had a “conveyor emergency,” a statement so ridiculous I never would have let it slide under normal circumstances, but I was too upset to respond with anything but goodbye as he headed to the airport while I got ready for school. It’s been a slog this week without Jeff and without Mindy and now Dad is gone all weekend. I’m trying not to think.
I walked home from school today, backpack loaded down, hoping studying might take my mind off things. Jeff. I could have taken the bus but the route goes round past half the town before they get to my development even though we live across New School Road. I missed a whole week of cross-country practice—the doctor recommended I rest after the concussion, or possible concussion—and the wind on the walk spikes against my stitches. I don’t mind. I want to feel something.
“Is your dad home?”
Jeff climbs off the curb by our garage door, shrouded in the cover of the overgrown bushes lining our driveway.
“Jesus, Jeff. You scared me.” I didn’t even see him.
“Is your dad home?”
“No, he’s in California,” I say. “Conveyor—stuff.”
“I need to use your phone.” He’s wearing a heavy flannel shirt hanging loosely off his back.
“Okay,” I say, pushing the backpack off my shoulders and dropping it onto the concrete.
“Roland’s sending me to that school.”
“Are you serious?” I say.
“They already transferred my records from Dallastown.”
He shields his eyes from the sun with the sleeve of his flannel.
“Fuck.”
“Mom told me it will just be until Christmas and I’ll come back more mature and have a relationship with God or some bullshit like that, as if she could possibly convince me.”
A car drives past and Jeff looks over my shoulder to watch, ducking for cover in the shade of the garage. His hair is a mess—tangled and spread across his forehead, stray strands straight up, tufting in the wind. His blue eyes look dark, red veins webbing through the white.
“She said I might be able to come home on weekends but I don’t know if that’s true.” He finds my face. “I need to use your phone.”
“Wait—what do you mean, home for weekends?”
“It’s a boarding school. Like, you board there and live there and they don’t let you leave.”
I blink to make it make sense, but he isn’t making any sense. He can’t leave me.
“And they don’t even let you have phones or Internet. No access to the outside world at all.” He hasn’t had his phone all week—I know because I’ve called and texted every single day and the messages don’t even deliver. I haven’t spoken to him since the night of the accident.
“That’s insane,” I say, stepping closer, but he ducks under the garage again and the wind against my back blows several leaves from the gutter above his head.
“It’s basically a prison—they’re sending me to fucking prison, Cy. A goddamn Jesus prison because I went to one fucking concert in Philly.”
His lips are charred or a little chapped in the light behind me, breaking through. We kissed. I know we kissed because Mindy saw it and told me. It seems distant.
“Can’t you talk to your mother?” I say. “Can’t she do something?”
“It’s too late.” He scratches through his flannel at the side of his chest. “Roland found my stash.”
“The weed?”
“Yeah. He convinced my mom I was on drugs so she let him search my room. It didn’t take long. He already had the Altoids tin.”
“Shit.”
“My mom was resisting about the school until then but now it’s over. She’s on board. It might even be her idea at this point.”
“I’m so sorry, Jeff.”
I should have been the one stashing the weed. He taps his foot against the door and his hair sweeps down his face. He doesn’t brush it away.
“How’s your cheek?” he says.
“It’s okay,” I say, touching on instinct. “Six stitches.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.” Not as much.
“Have you heard from Mindy?”
“Yeah. She’s doing better. She got out of the hospital yesterday.”
I wait for him to ask why she was in there, or ask about our kiss. His bloodshot eyes are spinning around my face.
“She broke some ribs in the accident,” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “That stinks.”
I keep waiting.
“I need to use your phone,” he says. “Please.”
I bend down to dig it out from the front pocket of my backpack, sitting on the concrete. He takes it from me.
“I need to call my father, try again to get him to let me live with him.”
Jeff walks to the front of the house, underneath the pair of oaks at the side of our driveway, the leaves turning brown in the early autumn breeze. The front lawn was bare when my parents bought the house and Mom planted the trees for Angela and me, when each of us was born. Mom would sit on her bench in between them every spring, reading her books or grading papers for school, watching the leaves return from a winter of waiting.
“What happened?” I ask when he returns. He looks past me into the street, scratching at his side through his shirt again.
“He said no. I knew he would, I just—” He’s shaking his head back and forth so hard I think he might break. “You got to do me a favor, Cy.”
My cheek starts to itch from the wind picking up, this sharp pressing ache.
“They’re driving me up there Sunday. After church.”
“This Sunday?”
“Yeah.” He nods and keeps his eyes down. This is happening way too fast. “But they do their Bible study after church so I need you to do me a favor.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I thought I could catch a train to Florida but that’s out now—” He grinds his hands against the flannel, the hair in his eyes spinning around his face. “So I need cash—whatever you can spare—for bus fare or a train ticket, because I don’t have a car and I don’t have my phone and I can’t get far with what I have in my savings. I spent a lot this summer on the guitar and the amps and everything.”
The rush of words spread through my brain. I don’t know what to do with them.
“Can you help me, Cy? I’m leaving.”
“Wait—where would you go?” I can’t let him leave. “What if I came over, explained what happened again. Better this time. That it was all my fault—the concert, the accident, the weed. I’ll say you were stashing it for me.”
“It’s too late, Cy, let it go.”
“It can’t be too late,” I say.
He steps forward out of the shadows, into the faded sunlight behind me.
“When Roland found my stash, he closed the door to my bedroom and told me he wasn’t going to let me hurt my mother like my father did. That I needed to accept what was happening and get the proper treatment.” He pauses, gnawing on his chapped lips. “I told him to go fuck himself and then he hit me.”
“Oh my god.”
“And I fought back, Cy, I told you I would. But he’s so fucking huge—he’s a big fucking ape—and I hit him as hard as I could but he was punching too.”
He lifts up his flannel and the T-shirt underneath. Sharp black bruises cover the skin around his ribs.
“Jeff.” I reach out to touch. He pulls back.
“It looks worse than it hurts.”
“Jesus, Jeff. This is ridiculous.”
He yanks on the flannel, stepping back against the door again. A few fallen leaves have gathered between the driveway and the garage, the start of a pile that Dad’s going to force me to rake in the coming weeks. They spin in a circle next to Jeff.
“It doesn’t matter now, I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?” I say. Desperate.
“I don’t know. Maybe Brooklyn, like we talked about. That’s why I need money—for like a motel room and the train ticket or bus—I don’t know, do they even have trains to New York from here?” I start to nod but he doesn’t wait for my response. “I’ll pay you back. I’ll definitely pay you back.”
“But Jeff, wait—” This is insane. “You’re running away?”
“Yeah,” he says. “They’ve been doing Bible study after church at the house so they’ll have all these people around and won’t notice when I leave. Will you help me?”
I don’t think I’d survive if he got sent away to religious school but if he ran away, I might never see him again because he couldn’t come back to Dallastown and I don’t have a car or a license so I couldn’t go visit him. I can’t function without seeing him, the way I haven’t functioned all week. He hasn’t even mentioned the kiss.
“Cy?” He leans forward, into the light. “Please.”
I nod. I don’t know what else to do.
“Thank you.”
He cracks a sideways smile and for a second I think it’s a joke, the end of a wild dream that started with the kiss. I wait for him to laugh, tell me his punishment is over and he’s staying in Dallastown for good and giving all his money to the ASPCA. But he’s not laughing.
“I need to go, Cy,” he says, handing me back my phone and stepping from the shelter of the garage. “Please be home Sunday, I’ll be over right after church. I need you, man.”
He taps me on the shoulder and rushes down the driveway, picking up into a sprint as he dashes into the street. I squint as he speeds away.