C A I T L Y N
We had been told all we had to do was watch the kids during recess. I could do that, but apparently, not this guy. This guy, whoever the fuck he was, had been playing with the kids for hours. He had played catch, then hide and seek, then green light, red light, then everything and anything the kids wanted him to. Right now, he was letting the girls braid his hair, sitting in a swing that was obviously too small for him, and trying to catch his breath. There were grass stains on the knees of his jeans, some more on his old white shoes, and blood on his elbow, where some old scabs had come off.
I had been sitting on the same bench for hours, watching all this through my sunglasses even though the sun was almost gone for the day, while resisting the very real urge to smoke a cigarette, maybe more. I had one more hour left before I could get the fuck out of here. That was exactly one hour too long. I couldn't resist it anymore. I got up and walked up to the guy getting the ugliest looking braids I had ever seen in my life.
"You look beautiful."
He looked up at me, cheeks red from all the running and jumping he had been doing, and smiled like an idiot, "Thank you."
"Sure." I shrugged. "I'm gonna go to the toilet."
"Okay," he said, right before, "I mean, yeah, of course, go ahead, it's fine. I think I can handle them on my own for a few minutes."
He had been doing that for hours, but I didn't tell him. I had, after all, watched a kid fall on his face just minutes ago and done absolutely nothing about it. He had looked up at me, ready to start crying, and I had crossed my arms over my chest and looked away. When I looked back, he was up on his feet again, ready to go back up the slide he had just fallen off of. So no, I wasn't really handling anything.
I left him to it. There was no one in the toilets. I took the last stall, the one with a small window on it, and closed the door behind me before climbing on top of the toilet seat. I took a cigarette from the pack I had forced into the pocket of my jacket this morning and lit it up. It took me only a few minutes to finish it. The window was too small to fit my whole head in it, but big enough that I could lean in and blow all the smoke out.
I threw the butt of the cigarette in the toilet and flushed it. When I opened the door, a girl with cornrows was looking at me. I hadn't heard her come in. I had no idea what she had seen.
"Snitches get stitches," I warned her, just in case.
She nodded, and said, "I know." Then she disappeared inside a stall.
I went back outside, back to my bench, back to waiting for all this to be over. The girl came out of the toilets a few minutes later and walked over to the slide, where she waited for her turn to go. When a kid cut in front of her, she let him. When another one did it too, she did the same thing. She didn't seem upset about it either, or if she was, she didn't let it show. When it was finally her turn, she sat very upright on top of the slide and pushed herself forward, smiling when gravity pulled her down, and stopping as soon as it was over.
I watched her do this a few more times. She kept letting kids cut her in line and she only smiled when she was going down the slide, but even then, she did it like it was something she shouldn't be doing, or that she didn't know if she was doing right. The other kids didn't talk to her, except to yell hurry when she was going up the stairs or get out when she took too long to get up from the slide after she reached the bottom.
I didn't think she was going to tell anyone she had seen me smoking. In fact, she didn't seem like she was going to tell anyone anything ever. I wanted her to. I wanted her to tell each and every one of those kids to fuck off. I kept watching, wanting for her to lose it and at least push one of them off the slide, but she didn't, and in any case, eventually, they all left. She was one of the last ones to get picked up.
Miss Johnson came out to tell us we could leave if we wanted, since there was only a handful of kids left in recess, four fifths of which were playing kickball with the guy in the ugly braids, but I decided I would stay. I wanted to see who would come to pick her up.
I was smoking outside, waiting, when a car with the bumper falling off stopped in front of the school. The man behind the wheel honked once, rolled the window down, and started smoking. A few minutes later, the girl in the cornrows ran through the school gates, jacket barely on, a backpack bouncing up and down on her shoulders. She got in the backseat, said something to the man on the wheel, who said nothing back, and reached for her seatbelt. She wasn't even done putting it on when the man started the car and drove away.
I wanted to call the social services. I could. I knew the number by heart. Except, of course, I didn't think I had enough to really get anything done. I wasn't even sure anything needed to be done. I put my cigarette out on the lid of a trash can and threw the rest of it inside. On the other side of the road, the bus that was supposed to take me home drove by without stopping.
"Fuck."
"Was that your bus?"
I turned around. He hadn't taken the braids off. I didn't feel like talking to him or to anyone, really, but I opened my mouth all the same.
"Probably."
He scratched the back of his head and asked when the next one was coming. He had put on a sweatshirt at some point and his elbow had gone on bleeding into that. I shrugged. He asked if I lived far. I told him far enough.
"My bike has space in the back," he said then. "I can give you a ride, if you want."
"You have a bike?" There was no bike in the parking lot, only a few cars.
He pointed at a bicycle locked to a streetlight.
"Oh, fuck, you're the guy that almost got run over the other day." His bicycle was hard to forget. The paint had come off everywhere and all the metal in it was rusting.
He frowned, "Yeah, that's me."
"Yeah," I said. It was definitely him. "I think I'll walk."
"I know it looks old, but it's a good bike â"
"Oh, it's not because of the bike, it's because of you."
"Me?" he asked, not knowing if he should smile or not.
"Well, you obviously don't know how to ride a bike."
He went for the smile, and said, "I was late for class."
"And you would rather be run over by a car?"
He smiled some more, "I didn't see the car â"
"Right," I stopped him. "You can stop talking. I'll take the ride, fuck it. I'm kinda done with being alive anyway."
"You're not gonna die," he said, mostly to himself, his back already turned to me as he made his way to his bike. I followed him. He unlocked it and climbed onto it. I reached for his shoulders and climbed onto the back wheel. I knew I probably wasn't going to die tonight. I didn't think I even wanted to die. I just had no real interest in being alive either. I had no interest in anything really.
"You'll have to tell me where to go," he said, and I did.
The streetlights were on already, so was rush hour. The wind had picked up, and so my hair was blowing, and my cheeks were going cold, probably red too. I couldn't feel my hands. Tristan and I had crashed a bike like this once. We had been drunk. Maybe on drugs. Definitely on drugs. Nothing bad had happened except for the front wheel of the bike coming off. We had never found it, but then again, we hadn't really looked for it.
He stopped in front of a drugstore with tired green incandescent lights coming from the inside when I told him to. I lived in the apartment over it. He was looking at it. The kitchen light was on.
"Is that you?" he asked. I climbed off. I wasn't going to answer him. It was a stupid question. Of course that was me.
"Thanks for the ride," I said instead. I doubted he had done it out of the kindness of his heart. Guys our age, or any age really, rarely ever did. He probably wanted something in return. Probably something disgusting. Maybe not. Maybe this was just some good old virtue signaling, which was somehow more disgusting to me.
"Right," I said. "I'm out."
He said he was too, but then he waited for me to get inside, at which point, he shouted, "See you tomorrow!"
I went up the stairs. My mom opened the door before I could, apron on, hair up in a bun, cheeks red, probably from standing over the stove. Her glasses were fogged up. She had definitely been standing over the stove.
"Who was that?" she asked.
I stepped inside and kicked off my shoes. Then I shrugged, "I don't know."
"You don't know?" She frowned, following me into the kitchen. There were onions fizzling in a pan. I asked her what she was making, and she ignored me. "He gave you ride a home, and you don't know who he is?"
"Not really, no." I shrugged again, looking at the dented can of tomatoes on the counter. She was probably making spaghetti with tomato sauce. I looked at her again, "He's just some guy."
She was not happy with this, even though it was true. She wasn't going to tell me she wasn't happy with it though. My mom was perhaps the least confrontational person I knew.
"I don't actually know his name," I told her all the same. "He's from school though."
I hadn't told her I had been forced to do community service, so it wouldn't make sense to add that I had met him during said community service, or that that was where he had given me a ride from. The reason I hadn't told her about having to do community service was because I shouldn't have to be doing it in the first place. I hadn't done anything wrong. Mr. Colton had accused me on the account of his big fat gut. Was I not innocent until proven guilty? Yes. Didn't I have the right to call him out on his bullshit? Also yes.
In front of me, mom smiled, "Well, it was nice of him to give you a ride."
Mom thought most things men did were nice because she had married one who had never done anything nice ever. I rolled my eyes and got the spaghetti from the pantry. She watched me put it on the counter next to the canned tomatoes.
"I'll go grocery shopping tomorrow," she said. Mom had been working at a canning factory for years. It didn't pay well, but she got to bring defective cans home, which meant saving money in groceries, and eating canned food for weeks on end. I didn't mind.
My mom didn't always work at the canning factory, even if she liked to pretend she did. She had gone to art school on a full scholarship. After, she had begun selling impressionist figure paintings for hundreds of dollars. One day, a man had walked into one of her exhibits and offered a thousand for her self-portrait. He was a stockbroker and he had just made a big sale. He wanted both the painting and the girl in it. He got both.
They got married after a while. He went on to make bigger sales, then not so big ones, then no sales at all. Finally, he went to jail for insider trading. I was one year old. Mom's paintings stopped selling, probably because she had become the wife of the man who had lost all those people's money. She had to sell the house they had bought in the suburbs and moved into an apartment in town. That was when she got the job at the canning factory. By the time he got out, I was five years old, and mom had inhaled so many fumes working extra hours to get us out of debt, her eyes had gone bad. She never painted again.
A few years ago, he fell down the stairs and died. We never talked about him again, or any of it really. In fact, most it I had found out by myself over the years. Most days I wished I hadn't.
After dinner that night, mom sat by the kitchen table cutting coupons out of the Sunday newspaper, occasionally looking up from her glasses to watch whatever late night show was on the satellite tv over the fridge. I kissed her goodnight and went to my bedroom.
The paint was coming off the walls, mostly because I kept peeling it off, and the ceiling over the window had darkened with moisture, maybe even mold. I pushed the curtains away and climbed out into the fire escape where a potted plant looked like it was dying. I had knocked it over a bunch of times over the years, so the roots had started growing through the cracks in search for water.
I rolled myself a joint. The wind blew inside the room and the paintings I had put over the spots in the walls with no paint left in them threatened to fall off. I had found mom's oil paints collecting dust in a box at the back of her closet years ago. I had started using them that same day. She knew about this, but she pretended she didn't.
I put the joint out on the potted plant's dirt, climbed back inside my bedroom, closed the window behind me, and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.