Mrs. Wolfe doesn’t like the story. She calls me up to the front of class and asks me if I’m planning on running away and don’t I know that’s dangerous and should she talk to my mother about it? Her eyes are cross. She stares at me with that concerned look the adults get every time you let them know what you’re really thinking. “It’s just a dumb story.”
“So you’re not really planning on going?”
“No.” Maybe I am and maybe I’m not. The point is to plan. For Billy and me to have a plan because rivers take you places and we want to be anywhere but this dumb town.
“Okay. As long as it isn’t real. You scared me. I won’t tell your mom if you promise not to run away.”
“I promise.”
One time when I talk to Billy on the phone, when we speak for hours like I do with Bonnie sometimes or Dad, at the end of the phone call he says, “Okay dude talk to you later.”
And I say, “All right. I love you.”
“What?”
I feel a hotness on my cheek as I realize I made a mistake. “Aw shit. I thought I was talking to my mom for a second.”
“You love me?”
“No. I was just confused. Like how you say goodbye to your mom.”
“Ha-ha. You love me. Fag.”
“Shut up. I got to go.”
“Later.”
He lets it go and doesn’t tease me about it because he’s a good friend like that. We just want to get high together or run off somewhere where we don’t have to deal with gutter drunks or teachers or dumb parents who never listen or mean what they say. “Friends ’til cigarette butts wear pants,” we say, even though we drift apart when he starts smoking the real weed he buys from another kid at Alateen.
When Mom later tells me Billy shot himself, I never get any details about why, nothing about a funeral, no Big Talk. It’s just something she mentions once in passing.
“Your friend Billy killed himself” is all she ever says about it.
“Isn’t there something we should do? How could he do that?” I don’t know how to feel, just that my friend is gone and I start to cry. I can’t help but wonder if things would have been different for Billy, for me, if we had just left. I picture his smiling face with his fuzzy yellow teeth, the easy way he slapped me five like a brother, like a skin-on-skin pact to keep our secrets from the adults who prowled around our lives. He knew I loved him and he was cool with it. Friends ’til cigarette butts wear pants.
She puts a hand over her mouth, searching for something. “Why are you crying? He was a disturbed kid. Just be glad that you guys didn’t know each other that well.”
She doesn’t know about our plan to run away or how nice he was to me, how I told him I loved him and he never even teased me about it. She doesn’t know that Billy and I just wanted to be somewhere we didn’t have to pretend anymore and how he’s gone and he never got to go and I’m still here.
“Let go and let God,” she says, as she gathers her things to leave for a meeting.
* * *
THE HOUSE IS a mausoleum. It’s either too big or too small for only Mom and me and we are both aware of the people who were once with us and are now gone: Tony, Doug and especially Paul. We don’t talk about it but I know she’s lonely because she’s always at meetings or reading books with titles like Women Who Love Too Much and You Can Heal Your Life. I don’t like cleaning the house because when the house is clean it feels emptier, a place for ghosts to walk undisturbed by the clutter of people going about their lives. I’m allowed to use hot water now when I do the dishes because Mom got a raise and she’s “able to support this family” on just her income. We don’t use food stamps or eat the big blocks of government cheese anymore. She even buys me some new clothes. She sells the Vega and buys a red Honda Accord hatchback. We celebrate with salad bar at Chalet and I try not to bring up the breakfasts with Doug Brennan.
One day when I get home from school, he’s in the living room, sitting on the couch with Mom on his lap blushing like a teenager. There are cardboard boxes all over the floor.
“Hey, pal. Your mom and I made up.” As if they’d been in a fight. Maybe he thinks I don’t know that he just split one day without a word. Maybe he thinks children are too dumb for the truth.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, sweetie, Doug’s gonna be back with us and we’re gonna be a family again.”
“Oh.”
He says he wants me to meet his kids now that everything is out in the open. They can come over and stay with us sometimes.
“You hear that, Mick? You’re gonna have a new brother and sister.”
“Oh.”
Instant family. Just add water.
I wonder what wasn’t in the open before. I wonder what these kids are like. I wonder why I feel so strange, why Mom is so quiet, so clueless, why Doug thinks he can walk back into this house with this bullshit explanation.
She tosses that word around so casually. I wonder what she means by it. We have our roles. Am I the son? Is he the father now? Are we going to bury him someday and cry over his grave or are we going to pretend he didn’t exist once the tears are dry and the waffle maker is out on the curb again?
He kisses her on the lips and they stay locked for a moment. Paul would kiss Mom too but it was always funny because he’d dip her or peck her on the cheek or twirl her around and make us all laugh. Doug says, “Hey, pal, I guess we’re gonna be roommates again.”
“I’m gonna go ride my bike.”
* * *
DOUG DOESN’T LIKE that I swear at Mom. He doesn’t like that I’m always gone on my bike after school. He doesn’t understand where I get off speaking to an adult like that. He makes fun of the bandanna on my knee. “You get wounded in battle?” He makes fun of my Robert Smith poster. “What’s with the lipstick? Is he supposed to be some kind of cross-dresser?” He tells me not to eat his food. I eat it anyway, swiping a muffin or a Fig Newton or a bite of raspberry yogurt when I think he won’t notice.
When I make the Jaycee relay team, the track team for Englewood Elementary that competes in the citywide track meet every year at the stadium at Bush’s Pasture Park, Mom says, “Just make sure it doesn’t interfere with your chores.” I tell her about the tryouts on the dirt trail behind the school, how twenty kids showed up for the mile relay team and I got second behind only Mark Johnson, who was faster than everybody.
I like to pant and sweat, like I did on the long days when Paul used to take me to Minto-Brown Park. He said, “You know, in a long enough race, a man can outrun a horse.” Which doesn’t sound true but it is. I understand running in a way I never understood football or baseball, the sense that you could just go on and on forever, just you and your two feet, this normal body of yours suddenly capable of something amazing.
“Don’t they have a football team?” Doug says.
“Track is better than football. More natural. You use it in every sport. And anyway someone should be an athlete in this house.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re the athlete here?”
“Yes.”
“You know I played football in high school.”