Sleight of Hand
“You need to get your eyes back over here, dumbass.” Rob tosses an old, rusted screw at my leg and snorts when the pointed end scratches my skin and draws blood. “Luke! Head in the game. This is your community service, so why the fuck am I the one doing the work?”
“It’s a whole group of ‘em.” I don’t turn away from the spectacle playing out ahead of us. I don’t need to look at Rob – we’re identical! I already know what he looks like. Rather, I study the gathering of girls tanning on the edge of the grass jut eight or so feet from the lake’s edge. Frilly bikinis, booty bikinis, polka-dot bikinis. “I’m so sad summer is ending,” I lament. “Now we have to wait till next year to see a little skin and side boob.”
“Sure is a hard life.” I know he’s rolling his eyes between grunts of exertion as he pulls screws from the rotting pier.
Under court orders, and with engineering approval, we’ve taped off the entire pier, added warning signs so no one sues us when they come here and fall through a rotting plank of wood, and for the last few hours, we’ve been removing screws and trying our damnedest not to drop the rusted steel into the lake. One is fine. Two or three are acceptable. But any more than that is laziness, and another mess the courts are going to demand I clean up.
So we’re being careful. We have our bucket to toss the decaying bits in to keep them all together. Which means, including the one Rob just tossed, we only have, roughly, eleven hundred others to fish from the bottom of the lake before the judge finds out and tosses me in jail.
“Luke! I’m not coming out here anymore if you’re gonna be a lazy prick. I have better things to do with my life than do the work you were ordered to do.”
“Ugh.” I shake my head and turn away from the girls who are slathering sunblock onto each other’s backs and are seconds away from turning into college-girl porn. “What’s got your panties in a twist, huh?” I kneel down and go back to work getting the screws out. “You’re grumpy today.”
“I’m not grumpy,” he rolls his eyes. “I’m just tired of your big mouth getting us both in trouble all the time.”
“No one is making you be here, ya know? I could be doing this on my own, and you could be at the house with Mom and Dad in the air conditioning.”
“I don’t wanna be at the house in the cold. I wanna be here, with my stupid fucking brother, bonding over the pier we’re gonna build. We can show it off for the next fifty years.” He stops working, rises to his knees and stares off into the distance the way I had to in eighth grade drama club when I was playing the killer in Sweeney Todd.
Totally inappropriate subject matter for kids our age, by the way.
“Look, son.” Rob’s voice is dreamy and faraway. “Uncle Luke and I built that pier back when we were twenty-one and young.”
“We were fighting champions,” I pick up the baton and keep going, “tanned as fuck, and hot as hell.” I lift my shirt and peek over at the crowd of girls. “We had eight-packs, and biceps that could break skulls. Oh, to be young again.”
“You’re so fucking annoying,” Rob huffs and goes back to work. “You’re the reason we’re known as the Devil Twins, you know that, right? There are two of us, and there are only a handful of people on this planet who can tell us apart, so whatever the fuck you’re doing on any given day, the town blames both of us. And because I’m loyal to you, motherfucker, I take your punishments on the chin and go on with my life.”
“And I love ya for it.” I stop work for a moment, and flash a toothy grin. “I appreciate the shit outta you.”
“You’re gonna die someday.”
“Most of us do.”
“Right, except you’ll be twenty-one, and cause of death will be the axe I threw at your skull.”
“Aggressive,” I murmur and go back to work. “A little bit dramatic, considering you could have gone with a knife, or the claw hammer over there by the bucket.”
He looks to the bucket, to the hammer, then back to me. “I have options.”
“You have anger issues,” I grumble and work on a crumbling screw. I’m here to get them out and toss them into the trash, but each time I touch this one, it turns to powder and dissolves. “You never used to be this pissy, man. Especially not toward me.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t—”
“Oh! I met this chick this week.”
Rob stops wrestling with his own problem screw, scowls, and shakes his head. “You meet chicks every day of the week. I can’t say I’m all that interested in this newest one.”
“She’s got red hair.”
His eyes whip up to mine and narrow. “What?”
I nod and continue working. “Uh huh. It’s not, like, bright red. And it’s not the strawberry blonde kind like Abby at the flower shop. It’s a little darker than that. It’s like, the poisoned apple type of red, and I bet, when she’s swimming and it’s all wet, it’ll be close to black.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”
I snort and toss my broken screw into the bucket. “I saw her at the bakery a couple mornings ago. She’s not local, and she does this thing with her lips.” I press the tip of my finger to my chin, and wrinkle my lips like I taste lemon on my tongue. “She’s snooty. Fancy heels, fancy clothes, fancy handbag with the fancy brand on the side. She ordered a fancy drink, and when I stood with her for a bit, she looked at me with her fancy eyes.”
“Fancy eyes?” He rolls his. “You can’t have fancy eyes, idiot. They’re genetics, not a marker of economic value.”
“They’re green like gemstones in a princess tiara,” I counter. “Trust me, they’re fancy as fuck. She told me she was starting a new job.”
“What job?” I’ve got his interest now.
“Dunno. She wouldn’t give me a straight answer, but she was looking all fancy about it. I doubt her new job is stacking shelves at Jonah’s store. Maybe she’s working at the eye doctor’s a couple streets over.”
“Optometrist’s.”
“Yeah, or maybe she works with the pediatrician. An assistant, or hell, even a doctor. She looks kinda fancy enough to have an Ivy League education with a fast track to graduation.”
“She’s our age?”
I nod and toss another screw into the bucket. “She looked it.”
“I don’t think doctoring is fast-tracked, no matter how rich or fancy a chick is. You gotta put in the years at school, and then the years on the job. Twenty-one ain’t enough time.”
“Doogie Howser.”
Rob stops, scowls, and tries to filter through my words. “Huh?”
“He was a teenaged doctor. Smart as a whip, graduated high school at, like, ten, right? Princeton at fourteen. Fully qualified doctor at eighteen.”
“You realize that was a TV show, right? Fiction. It was not inspired by real events.”
“I bet I’m onto something. Mmm.” I start on the next screw. The next plank of wood. “She’s a genius.”