Текст книги "How to Repair a Mechanical Heart "

Автор книги: J. Lillis

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Her dad left when we were twelve. I knew he was going to leave, just like she probably knew Abel was going to leave sooner or later, but we both know the unspoken rule about comforting someone. You pretend you had no clue what was coming, no privileged outsider’s view. I sat on her yellow bedspread that day with a stiff arm around her and my head bowed like people do at funerals, letting her know I was sharing her sadness. “You don’t have to stay,” she sniffled, but she knew I would. That’s what we do.

“Do you want to go home?”

“I don’t know.”

She’s running with me. We’re running to nowhere, down the wooded path that winds away from our campground.

“Do you want to go after him?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? We could find the bus station.”

The fic writes itself: I track him down at the crowded station, shout his name over the very last call for his bus. He makes me work for forgiveness when I catch up to him, but only for a minute. We fall into each other’s arms and the make-up kiss goes on and on, and all the travelers set down their suitcases to clap for the triumph of love.

I stagger to a stop by a giant cottonwood and close my eyes.

“No,” I tell her. “What’s the point?”

She watches me carefully.

“Okay, well. I’m up for anything,” she says. “Just tell me what you want to do.”

She waits in the near-dark. She’s wearing sneakers with her pajama pants and the sleeves of her black t-shirt are rolled up to her shoulders, like she’s ready for a fight. I think of Sim. Standing outside Lagarde’s hut with a knife pointed to his right temple, where the evolution chip was installed. Take it out, he’d begged Lagarde. How do people live like this?

When she refused, he’d picked up a thick long branch, like this one, and beat it against a tree until it shattered into splinters.

Like this.

Bec watches. She doesn’t try to stop me. She just lets me pummel the poor old tree like a Boy Scout gone savage, smashing one branch after another until I’m out of branches and out of breath and I give up the fight, collapsing limp against the ancient bark.

I hear a distant trill. My phone.

“That’s him,” Bec says.

She sounds so firm and hopeful that I believe it too. I yank the phone out of my pocket and answer fast, in the dark. If I’d checked the screen first, I would’ve seen the warning.

HOME CALLING.

“Brandon?”

Damn.

“Uh. Hey!” I force a smile into my voice. “Everything’s great. Can I call you back?”

“No, actually,” Dad says.

“Brandon,” says Mom, in the same tone she used when I was twelve and she found the Tiger Beat stash in my closet. “Is there something you’d like to tell us?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“I would like to know,” my father says, “why your mother had to find out in an email from Mary Beth Heffler that you were driving across the country with a boy we clearly do not trust.”

“What?”

“Facebook doesn’t lie, Brandon. Mary Beth’s daughter posted on Bec’s wall. Something about‌—‌you have it, Kathy.”

“’Lucky you‌…‌cross country with two hot guys! Too bad they’re both gay, lol.’”

Oh God.

I make an I’m dead sign to Bec, finger slashing throat. She cringes and makes a Should I stay? motion; my hands tell her My demise needs no witnesses. She slips away but I see her stay close, just behind a Ponderosa pine a little way back down the path.

“You lied to us,” Dad says. “True or false?”

“True,” I whisper. I rest my forehead on the cottonwood I’d just attacked.

“Tell us it’s Abel, at least. Not someone worse.”

“It’s him. Or, it was. He‌—‌” My eyes fill up. “He left.”

Dad makes a disbelieving ugh sound. “You’re coming home, in case you’re wondering,” he says. “Right now.”

“What‌—‌why?”

“Why?”

“There’s one more convention.”

“You should have thought about that before you spent five weeks lying to your parents.”

“I’m not in high school anymore,” I say. “It’s my life.”

“Well, it’s my RV, kiddo,” Dad says calmly. “And I want you to return it immediately. Where are you right now?”

I dig my fingernails into the bark. “Far away. Nebraska.”

“All right. Fine. I want you back here tomorrow night. On Friday you can help with setup for the Funfair at St. Matt’s and then you and your mother and I will have a long talk.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“Honey. Come on,” soothes Mom.

“I’m not coming home yet!”

“Ah, okay. I see.” Dad’s voice goes low and taut, like it always did when he’d lecture Nat. “So this is what the Life of Brandon’s all about now. No, I get it. Real cool. You walk away from church, you lie to your parents‌—‌”

“Yeah, well, why do you think I lied? What if I told you Abel was coming? There’s no way you’d have said yes.”

“You’re damn right!”

“We’re just concerned, sweetie,” says Mom.

“You’re just backwards, is what you are,” I shoot back.

We all plunge into silence. The woods around me feel dark and cold and endless. I think of the old Family Game Nights in the St. Matt’s parish hall, when Dad would school everyone in Jeopardy and Mom was reigning Pictionary Queen with a 7-layer taco dip everyone wanted the recipe for. Nat would roll her eyes when they put their goofy plastic trophies on the mantel but I thought it was great, having parents who were champions and knew just about everything.

“Do you think I want to be this way, Brandon?” Dad sighs. “I mean, look: I wish to God I could say ‘Suuure, go ahead. Whatever you want, kiddo! Dessert for dinner! Blow off that homework! Loosey-goosey, whatever feels good‌…‌’”

Mom giggles lamely. “Loosey-goosey?”

“The point is,” he huffs, “I’m on your side. Very much so. I want you to be happy. I want to see you fall in love, get married‌—‌”

“I can still do that.”

“But the fact is, you’re never, ever going to be at peace. Not like this.”

I just blink.

“Greg‌…‌” my mother whispers.

“It’s true. You won’t, because your mom and I raised you to know what’s right, and you’re always going to know deep down that this isn’t what God wants for you. That even if he quote-unquote ‘made’ you a certain way, you separated yourself from him with your choices. And if I didn’t keep pointing that out to you, if I didn’t give my only son every chance to fix his relationship with God‌—‌” His voice wavers. He pauses, pulls in an even breath. “‌—‌then what kind of dad would I be?”

The kind of dad I need. If hey_mamacita was real and I was in her fic, I’d say it clear and brave. I’d tell him I respected his opinion, but it wasn’t mine, not anymore. I’d tell him that my beautiful boyfriend was probably still at the bus station, and if I drove fast enough I could probably still catch him.

Instead I just mumble I gotta go. And I hang up.

Three seconds later it rings again.

hey_mamacita says, Answer it, baby. Stand up to him. You can do it.

It keeps ringing.

Tell him who you are! Be Fanfic Brandon! Unleash some mayhem!

Which is easy to say, when you don’t exist.

I wait for the phone to stop ringing. When it’s finally quiet, I send a single pathetic text to my dad’s cell. He always keeps it on his belt, even when he’s home watching baseball or working in the garden. “I don’t want to be fertilizing the roses when someone calls with terrible news,” he likes to say.

GOING 2 BALTIMORE CON

HOME SUNDAY LATEST

I hit send and shut my phone off before it can protest. The world doesn’t end. The cottonwood in front of me is tall and strong and unchanged. I peel a small patch of ragged bark from its side and slip it in my pocket.

Baltimore.

Bec shuffles back down the dirt trail, drawing a line behind her with the tip of a thick walking stick.

“We’re going on?” she says.

“Going on. Yeah.”

My legs are going boneless. I start to shake a little.

“Here.” She hands me the stick, and we start on the uphill path back to the Sunseeker.

CastieCon #6

Baltimore, Maryland

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Bec and I do our usual on the long drive east on I-80.

We put on the playlist we made together a couple years back and hum along with Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine, Rufus Wainwright, Dylan. We argue over whether Scott Pilgrim is actually any good. We polish off the dregs of the snack bin: raisins, stale trail mix, packs of code-orange crackers with crumbly peanut butter filling. She props her polka-dot flip-flops on the dash and reads me ridiculous Cosmo quizzes on the right animal print for your body type and what your favorite martini says about you.

But sometimes I’ll catch her eye over a diner menu or glance at her while we’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper, and I know she knows that everything I say is just filling silence. That inside I’m secretly doing what Past-Tense Brandon does best: flailing wildly.

She’s right. Like right this minute, on the morning of July 4th, what we’re technically doing is listening to the Broken West and estimating how many crunches a day she’d have to do to get as ripped as Della Wolfe-Williams. But the whole time I’m rifling through a flipbook of options. I’ll go home, straight home, and apologize to my parents. I’ll call Abel, beg him for another chance. I’ll find a church and talk to a priest. I’ll pick up some random guy at the Baltimore con and drag him into a bathroom stall. I’ll swear off sex forever and join a monastery and spend the rest of my days meditating and making thimbleberry jam.

“You miss him,” Bec says, for the millionth time. We’re on 76 now, snipping the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. I’m wearing Abel’s white shirt from the Castaway Ball, the sleeves rolled up to fit me and the collar still tinged with blue.

“Yeah.”

“So call him.”

“I can’t.”

“That’s it.” She pulls out her phone. “I’m dialing.”

“No! Don’t.”

“Why?”

“It’ll just make things worse.”

“Like waiting too long won’t?”

“I need a sign.”

“Okay: STOP.”

“No no, listen. I have a feeling.”

She sighs. “Here we go.”

I can’t explain it. I try anyway. I tell her I feel like something’s going to happen at the Baltimore con, at the Q&A. Like I’ll absorb some of Lenny Bray’s storytelling genius on this subatomic level and I’ll have an epiphany, and all the confusion will dry up and I’ll know exactly what to do and where to go next.

Bec nods gravely. “That’s really kind of dumb.”

I grip the wheel tighter and kick it up to seventy. Let her think that; I don’t care. We merge onto 70 East, toward Baltimore. I direct the next part straight to God, if he’s up there. Please help me. Please find some way to speak through Leonard Bray today. Give me, once and for all, the sign I’ve been waiting for.

***

***WE’RE SORRY***

TODAY’S Q&A WITH LEONARD BRAY

IS CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS

MR. BRAY SINCERELY REGRETS ANY INCONVENIENCE

***NO REFUNDS***

For a long time I just stare at the sign‌—‌attached to the closed door of Meeting Room 1-C with cheery mismatched thumbtacks, as if it were announcing a shortage of strawberry ice cream instead of a cruel practical joke of the universe.

“Crap,” I whisper.

Bec squeezes my arm.

Outside the Q&A room in the Baltimore Dorchester, the CastieCon staff‌—‌a burly guy with a black goatee and a skinny lady with straggly brown hair‌—‌are getting absolutely jackhammered. The crowd around them gets bigger and angrier by the minute, the fans shooting out questions and threats and conspiracy theories.

“I drove my son all the way from New York! We’re missing fireworks for this.”

“I knew he’d pull this. He planned it, didn’t he?”

“He’s got stage fright, you guys. He said‌—‌”

“Bullshit! He hates us. Always has.”

“Refunds or revolt, people!”

“Refunds or revolt! Refunds or revolt!”

Bec pulls me away from the chanting crowd.

“Sorry,” she says. “This sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you want to do?”

I scan the convention hall, hoping the answer will pop out. But it’s all the same CastieCon stuff‌—‌the vendors and the overpriced snack stand and the trivia games and costume contests‌—‌and none of it is fun without Abel. I can’t go, though. Not yet. I can’t just go home to my pissed-off parents and the St. Matt’s Funfair and my stupid room with the stupid solar system sheets, like the past six weeks never even happened.

“I need some time,” I tell Bec. “I think maybe a long walk or something‌…‌”

“Want company?”

“Not this time. That okay?”

She nods. “I’ll hang out here. I want to call Dave anyway.”

“Are you sure?”

“There’s a fanfic panel at 12. It might be fun and educational.”

“Really.”

“Plus there’s a pool. Take your time.”

She’s snapping a little blue plastic dragonfly barrette in her hair, the kind she used to wear when we were kids and spent whole afternoons in the woods around St. Matt’s with her dad’s metal detector. She used to save the bottle caps for me, even that awesome vintage Orange Crush cap she probably wanted to keep.

I crush her in a hug.

“Okay, freakshow,” she laughs. “Go find your epiphany.”

“Thanks.”

“Try the gift shop first. I think they’re on sale.”

I give her a raspberry and a wave.

“Bring me back a snow globe!”

***

I stick my earbuds in and call up a Sim playlist, scrolling right to the song Abel contributed (”Coin-Operated Boy” by the Dresden Dolls). I stalk the hotel lobby while the song tootles in my ears like a demented music box. I walk with purpose, even though I have none. I scan everything like there’s a clue inside: the concierge, the fountains, the sleek leather armchairs, the glass chandeliers shaped like upside-down birthday cakes.

Just past the elevator banks, I spot the nun.

She’s an old-school kind I’ve only seen in photos, with a long black veil and just a small window of face peeking through. Like a relic from Gram’s day, when it was okay to throw a five-pound Latin hymnal at someone for mispronouncing venite adoremus. She’s walking arm in arm with a young blonde woman who’s dressed way older than she probably is in a dark severe pantsuit and pearls, her hair swept up and sprayed stiff. She looks familiar, the way all churchy girls do. They’re probably off to some kind of youth convention, where Pantsuit Woman will pump them up with an abstinence-is-cool speech and the nun will make sure no one’s secretly making out in the coat closet.

Follow them.

The weird idea presses into me. Lightly at first, then hard as a fist; they vanish around a corner and my legs jerk to action, run to catch up. Cold sweat breaks out on my neck. When you’re trolling for a sign and your gut tells you follow that nun, you probably won’t like what you get.

They turn down a narrow hallway, a dim passage with a red EXIT sign flickering at the end. I hurry past the opening, all innocent-passer-by, and then back up and duck behind the vending machine at the hall’s entryway.

“He says wait here,” says the nun, in a deep raspy whisper I didn’t expect. “He’s pulling the car around‌—‌What’s that face for?”

“You look ridiculous.”

“Effective, though. No one looks a nun in the eye. We’ll return the costume on the way to lunch.”

“Oh, geez, Lenny.”

Every hair on my arms lifts straight up. Now I know where I’ve seen Pantsuit Woman‌—‌decorating his arm at the Emmys, shuffling shyly in a mermaid-tail gown, the forums snarking Bray likes ‘em young.

I crouch down and sneak a quick peek.

“This is really pathetic,” his wife is saying.

“Well, I’m sorry, Elizabeth. Some days I can. Some days I cannot. This happens to be a cannot day.”

“At least be honest with them.”

“I was! Illness. It’s a useful word. Crippling anxiety slots neatly therein.”

She sighs. “Crippling? C’mon, that’s a little‌—‌”

“I am deep in disguise, skulking past angry throngs of fans. Would I do this unless I had to?‌—‌Yes, hello?‌…‌Uh-huh, fantastic. And it’s a curtained alcove? Marvelous. We’re on our way.” His phone snaps shut. “Reservations at Cereza. That should cheer you up. Private room, little plates, no one to bother us.”

“You break people’s hearts.”

“Darling, please. They just want to ogle me like a zoo animal. The only one who truly wants to see my ugly mug is you.”

“Not true. You’re the Genius Creator.”

“Oh, tell me more.”

Do it now. Talk to him. I risk another peek; Bray’s yanking off the nun costume, hopping on one foot with a hand on his wife for balance, and he looks so human and approachable with his bald spot showing and his underwear peeking from the waistband of his cords that‌…‌

A sneeze sizzles up my nose and roars out of me.

“Who’s there?” Bray’s voice: sharp and mean, a trace of fear. I clap a hand to my mouth.

“Hello?” says Elizabeth.

“Show yourself!” I get a fanboy chill. He’s doing Xaarg. I remember how he joked in that interview once, how writing the voice of God was “frighteningly easy” for him. “It’s impolite to hover!”

I could run. There’s a staircase three doors down; I could lose the voice of God in a heartbeat if I tried.

I close my eyes. Breathe in, breathe out.

I step into the dim hallway light.

Bray squints.

“My glasses,” he whispers. Elizabeth digs in her little black purse, passes them over. He slides on a thick pair of tortoiseshell frames and sizes me up.

“What hath the heavens discharged?” He blinks theatrically. “One rumpled fool in an ill-fitting shirt.”

I clear my throat. “Mr. Bray, I‌—‌”

“Oh. God. Why? Why why why do you have to know who I am?”

“Foolproof costume,” Elizabeth eyerolls.

“No‌—‌” I take a step closer. He’s short in person; we stand eye to eye. “No, see, I’m a fan‌—‌”

“Of course you are. Of course. You took pictures with one of those miniscule stalker-cameras, no? By day’s end your Internet boards will be aflame with scandal! Leonard Bray Ditches Q&A! Secret Nun Fetish Photos Inside!”

“No, I won’t say anything. I promise.”

“Uh-huh. What a Boy Scout. I suppose you followed me to buy me pork rinds?” He gestures toward the snack machine.

“No‌…‌” I try a smile. “Do you want some?”

“Stupendous. He’s a comedian, too.” Lenny Bray goes off on a muttering rant, addressing the Ho-Hos in the C4 slot. I try to absorb it: the supreme creator of Sim and Cadmus, the guiding force behind everything Castaway Planet, the entire reason I went to bed smiling last year, is standing right in front of me and knocking his head against a vending machine.

“You’ll have to excuse him,” says Elizabeth. “He has‌…‌some problems.”

I watch in awe. “It’s okay. I do too.”

“Why don’t you join us for lunch?”

“What?” Bray stops the head-knocking and glares fire at her.

“Sure. We treat you to a once-in-a-lifetime afternoon with the creator of Castaway Planet, and you won’t spread any rumors about today. Right?”

What else would I say? “Absolutely.”

“Lenny?”

“Fine.” He slumps against the machine and knots his arms. “He’s not sitting next to me on the drive over.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Leonard Bartholomew Bray,” Elizabeth scolds. “Will you lean in a little? He won’t bite you!”

In the white curtained alcove of some fancy small-plate restaurant, Lenny Bray is protesting a photo op. Elizabeth frowns behind my phone, waving us closer together. Her pink nails are perfectly rounded and she’s got a giant honker of a diamond ring on her left hand.

“He’s going to post this,” Bray whines. “I know it.”

“Well, he said he wouldn’t, and I believe him. He deserves a souvenir.”

“And I deserved a day of rest. Genesis says so.”

Lunch is not going exactly as planned.

I want to ask Bray a thousand questions about Sim and Cadmus and the rumors about next season and of course the cave scene, but so far opening my mouth in his presence hasn’t yielded very positive results. It’s like a nasty version of comedy-club improv; I toss out a random comment, he builds a complaint around it. By the time the shark fritters and goat cheese ravioli arrive, I kind of have to face it: in addition to being smart and witty and talented and even kind of cute in a pop-eyed, older-guy, sweater-vesty way, Leonard Bray is pretty much a giant jerkoff.

Once Elizabeth snaps the photo, he starts yammering again: “Oh, and another thing about the Loyola English department!” I made the mistake of telling him I’d be a freshman at his alma mater this year. “If Antonia Humphrey is still moldering in her corner office, don’t ever take her class on The Epic. That miserable twat. I spent three days on an essay comparing Odysseus and Travis Bickle and she called it forced and indulgent and gave me a C minus. Meanwhile the rest of the class is stuck in preschool, decoding symbolism like good little sheep‌—‌”

“Lenny,” says Elizabeth.

“What?”

“Maybe he’d like to ask you some questions about the show.”

“Well, he can’t. I can’t say anything.”

“Not spoilers. Just tidbits he might be interested in.”

“Oh. Fine, fine.” He sighs. “All right, Brendan. Can I interest you in any tidbits?”

“Sure.” I fiddle with my chicken kabob. “Actually, I did have a question.”

“I shall do my best.”

“It’s about Cadmus and Sim.”

“Oh goody.”

“So, I‌…‌” I gulp some water. “There’s a lot of ah, fanfiction about that one scene in the crystal spider cave‌—‌”

“Terrible episode. I regret it. Derailed the whole season’s momentum.”

“I sort of agree, but‌…‌” I’m blushing already; there’s no chance he’ll take this well. “After they say that line about how the cave could swallow up your secrets and it kind of faded out? Did they, um‌…‌do anything?”

“What do you mean?”

He blinks at me. I want to vanish.

“Anything romantic,” Elizabeth smiles.

“Did they fuck?” says Lenny Bray. “Is that the question?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Jesus. How would I know?”

My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.

“Seriously, why even ask me that?”

“Well‌…‌ah, it’s your show, and‌—‌”

“I will never, ever, for as long as I live, understand you people. Every goddamned Q&A it happens! Mr. Bray, what does this line mean? Mr. Bray, is Castaway Planet the afterlife? Can Sim fall in love? Is Xaarg good or evil?” He stuffs two ravioli in his mouth. “Apparently an alarming percentage of you traipse through life without a single independent thought. I thought my fans were supposed to be smart!”

“But you created the characters, so‌—‌

“Oh, so I’m God? Is that it?”

“No, but‌—‌”

“Listen, you runt. I saw that self-righteous eyeroll when you said fanfiction. Let me tell you something: I fucking love fanfiction. Why do you think I made up these characters? So I could play with dolls in public and tell everyone else ‘hands off’? So I could spoon-feed you stories from on high about the mysteries of love and free will and giant alien spiders?” He shows me his palms, then the backs of his hands. “I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it’s because I don’t want to keep them for myself. You don’t like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I’m wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending. Castaway Planet is supposed to be a living piece of art!” He wags a tiny fork in my direction. “I don’t know you from Adam, but if you’re sitting there drooling in front of the TV like I suspect you are, letting me have the Final Word every goddamned Thursday night, you frankly don’t even deserve to be a fan, Brendan.”

Elizabeth sighs. She’s heard it before. “Lenny.”

“Elizabeth.”

“Come on.”

He purses his lips. “What?”

“This poor kid looks up to you. Can’t you give him an answer?”

Lenny Bray looks me right in the eye. He stabs another shark fritter with the little fork.

“I thought I just did,” he says.

I should be crushed by all this, but I’m not. I get this calm settled feeling, like when you see where the last three pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle are supposed to go.

“I have to leave now,” I tell them.

“I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth touches my hand. “He’s having a bad day.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to be me.” Leonard Bray pouts and shoves a fritter in his mouth. “No one has any idea.”

“That’s true, sir. It was good to meet you.”

“I doubt that.”

Elizabeth blots her pink lips with a napkin and folds it carefully on her empty plate. She’s given up saving the day; you can tell.

“At least let our driver take you back,” she says to the napkin.

Outside, cabs are rattling by; the day’s first firecrackers are going off in the distance.

“That’s okay.” I nod to Bray, standing Sim-straight. “I’ll find my own way.”

***

In two months, this’ll be my city.

I’ve been here in Baltimore a few times since I was a kid‌—‌an aquarium trip, a college tour‌—‌but never without my parents. I let myself meander. Past the tourist crowds and the glassed-in malls and the old battleships moored in the harbor, across a swarming intersection and into a homey network of narrow streets. Junk shops and bars and bookstores introduce themselves to me, murmur about new starts in new places where no one knows my name. Next year I could streak my hair with Manic Panic and go dancing at this club with the fiery wings painted on the door. I could join some Young Agnostics support group downtown or find one of those alternative churches with a rainbow-cross logo. I could watch Castaway Planet in a dorm bed with my boyfriend or read Thomas Merton in a tulip patch; I could sing for people in a nursing home or strum Jeff Buckley and Dylan covers on open mike nights in this café wallpapered with board games and doll heads.

Or I could do it all.

On the walk back to the Dorchester, I pass a wide patch of grass with three big abstract sculptures. Light gray concrete, shaped like smiles without a face. There’s a kid on one of them, dressed for the Fourth in navy shorts and a red-and-white striped shirt, trying to see how far he can walk up the side of the smile before gravity kicks him back down. On the second one, a neo-hippie girl with blond dreads and a sunflower dress is working out some tender instrumental on a blue guitar plastered with stickers from different cities. The third smile is up for grabs.

I sit down on it gingerly, like I have no right to. The action feels familiar, and then I realize that that’s how I sit down in church. Used to, at least. I swing my legs inside the smile and prop my feet up on the concrete, smoothing Abel’s white shirt across my chest. The sky is thick with puffy motivational-poster clouds; I take deep breaths and watch them morph across the blue for a whole minute. Two minutes. Three. I’ve never looked up for this long. Ever since I was old enough to know what a sin was, I’ve just naturally averted my eyes from the sky. As a kid it was terrifying: a place where divine judging eyes screened everything you did, where lightning bolts were hurled in anger from a golden throne, where your dead relatives clutched their harps and scanned your dirty thoughts like a waiting-room magazine.

I wonder if other people think weird thoughts like that. It seems unavoidable. You’re a kid, and how can they explain something huge and unknowable like God to a kid, so they draw a simple picture: he’s like a father in the sky, watching over us. Then you see statues and paintings of God in books and museums, so old they seem like historical records and not flights of fancy from ancient dead guys. And you file those away and fill in the rest of the portrait with your own references, until your picture of God is something like mine was: Ben Kingsley in a long Michelangelo beard, enthroned in an icy castle like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and scribbling (with the angry point of his thunderbolt) a fancier version of Santa’s Naughty or Nice list. You get older, but the kid’s picture stays with you. And then all of a sudden you’re eighteen and you’ve learned how to question and doubt and you think you’re smart enough to draw your own grown-up picture of what God might be, but part of you is still cringing with one eye to the sky, waiting for the thunderbolt.

A cloudbank swallows the sun and the harbor cools and darkens. I keep my eyes on the shifting sky, like Sim in the operating room getting prepped for Lagarde’s silver chip. I think of him three weeks post-chip, shouting on the mountaintop with Cadmus: No one told me what doubt was like. To know how much I still don’t know. I used to feel every syllable of that line. Almost nothing hurt worse than doubt. Now it’s feeling almost comfortable, like this too-big shirt of Abel’s that I’ll probably wear until it frays and the stitches start to unravel.

The harbor breeze rustles my shirt. I pull it tighter. I tell everything bad inside me, everything I’ve outgrown, to go play somewhere else for a while. I picture them all wriggling out of my head, groaning and grumbling. The clean blond boy from Put on the Brakes! The chalupa guy from the laundry room. Tom Shandley and Miss Maxima and my angry bearded Ben Kingsley God. Father Mike is the last to go, toting his battered guitar and an armload of little black words.

They all crowd around me. What now?

I close my eyes on them.

You can go anytime.

I think it softly, without anger. After a minute, I feel them shuffle off into shadows, like when Dad and I used to catch and release sunfish up the street at Tanner’s Pond. They’d hover in the shallows for a second, stunned to be free, and then they’d struggle away and vanish in the murk.

Not forever, I warn myself. They’ll be back, and soon. But I’ll be ready.

I send a tentative prayer to my vague new idea of the maybe-God: featureless and formless, a light warm and yellow as my kitchen at home. The anti-Xaarg, like Abel said. Help me be ready, I say to him. Or her. If you exist, please help.

If you don’t, I’ll do it on my own.

Bright heat washes over my face. I open my eyes. The sun’s shaken off the clouds again. Two kids with rocket pops are spinning themselves dizzy in the grass and Dreadlocks Girl is still hunched on her concrete smile with her blue guitar, tuning up for another song. The harbor hums with happy busy holiday noise. Alone in the midst of cute families and throngs of friends, I feel empty in the best way, cleaned out and ready to fill up on new thoughts and words.

I rest my cheek on the warm upturn of the smile, and listen.

***

Brandon set the sunflowers on the table. He took another step closer to Abel, who fixed him with a wary gaze that Brandon totally and completely deserved.

I come back to the Dorchester with my brain buzzing and my fingers itching. I call Bec and tell her I need a little more time. I don’t tell her anything else. Not yet. I find a quiet corner in the coffee shop, slide my laptop out of my bag, and type for my life.

“Look, I’m probably going to be pretty screwed up for a while,” Brandon admitted, his voice deep and confident. “There’s a lot I haven’t figured out yet. But we’ve got six weeks left of summer, and I think we owe it to ourselves to be screwed up together.”