“You know this isn’t going to make a difference, right?”
“You seem pretty sure of that.”
“Not ‘pretty sure.’ Absolutely positive.”
“Look at you, talking a big game. And with big words. Now I’m curious. Elaborate on your certainty.”
“Waste of time.”
“And that there — that right fucking there — is why you’re the only kid in the entire grade that has to take this class in summer school. Because you think certain things, things that don’t meet whatever asinine criteria you assign them, are somehow beneath you. But take a look around this room. I don’t know, I’m getting a bit older so my vision isn’t quite what it used to be, but you seem to be THE ONLY FUCKING PERSON IN THIS ROOM.”
Hearing her teacher not only raise his voice for the first time, but pepper it liberally with language that would have otherwise met with his walking papers gave Derta pause.
“You can’t talk to a stu—“
“I can’t talk to a REGULAR student like I just talked to you. But you’re not a regular student, Derta. You’re a failure. And the best part is that you failed a pass / fail class because you didn’t think it was…what was it, ‘worth your time’?”
“Fuck you, old man.”
“Finally. She shows some fighting spirit. I thought this was just going to be another episode of Mr. Roger’s Secret Life: Child Beatings. Don’t you ever wonder why he had so many sweaters? Not only do you have to find a terrific dry cleaner to get blood stains out, but after the first dozen or so, they start to get curious. Then you have to find another dry cleaner.”
“What is the matter with you, dude?”
“Just thinking out loud.”
“Yeah, and furthering my case that this is not a place for me.”
“Four assignments. You had four assignments. Over twelve weeks. I even let you decide when to turn them in. Several of your peers had all four written the second day of the term and never had to give another thought to this class. And yet here you are, Derta Blanton, because you quite literally did fuck all. On purpose.”
“I had a reason.”
He leaned his chair back, let out a whistle, put his feet up on his desk, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and looked her right in the eyes. “I’m really excited to hear this. Please.”
For the first time, a barely perceptible part of Derta’s facade chipped off. Her sudden inability to meet his eyes let him know that his all-in gamble had worked at least enough for him to become more than a will-o-wisp face in a sepia background. He had become someone tangible that she couldn’t file away in the files of her brain that get put through the shredder at the end of the day.
“Why do you even care what the reason is? Just give me my assignments so I can do them and get the hell out of here.”
He made a farting sound with his mouth that sounded more like a dying moose than actual flatulence, but the point was made nonetheless.
“I care because you have proven in the past ten minutes that not only were you intellectually capable of completing the assignments, but also that I would have looked forward to reading your efforts. And, here we are again, at the point where you deliberately decided to scree yourself out of…what? Spite? Some sense of intellectual superi—“
“I didn’t write them because they made me hurt. All four of them. Every single one made me cry just reading the question.”
Even as she vomited all of this out, he could just barely make out the words over her heaving sobs. She kept trying to explain but nothing, not even a sound, came from her now quaking visage.
Despite all this, he didn’t change his facial expression. Or his body language. He didn’t even speak. But he never took his eyes off her.
Usually a substitute taught summer school classes so that the teachers could have some semblance of what it was like to be a normal human being for, oh, ten to twenty days.
But when he walked into the headmaster’s office and told her— he didn’t ask — that he would be teaching the remedial session of his class this summer, the look in his eyes immediately quelled any possible objection. She simply nodded. Then he nodded. Then he walked right back out.
“Still waiting for that reason, Derta.”
She snapped her head up, snot flinging from her nose, eyes bloodshot with tears that had clearly been held back for God knows how long.
“Didn’t you hear what I just said, you asshole?”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t a reason. You told me how they made you cry. Okay. Why did they make you cry? They were all very different questions.”
“And yet they all had one thing in common.”
Here we go, he thought. He quickly leaned forward onto his desk, showing her that she had his full, undivided attention.
“And that would be…?”
“They all asked about something in our future.”
“And?”
“And…and I wake up every day not even knowing if I want to have a future. Sometimes it’s so bad that I cry because I actually woke up that day. And that meant another day of having to pretend everything was normal.”
Suddenly it all made sense. Long sleeves even in the oppressive spring humidity. Long sleeves AND jackets.
He said nothing as he lithely came around his desk and stood over her. And with a hauntingly quick motion, he grabbed her by the elbow and jerked her shirt sleeve down.
“What are you doing!? Stop touching me! Help!”
Derta’s screams were histrionic. And she kept on screaming.
And that’s when he rolled up his own sleeves.
He had far, far more to show than she did. One of his even went from middle finger to elbow. But they were all words unspoken and written in a script that the forlorn and broken can read and write and understand.
“You…” she began, “you, too?”
“I almost went full bore one night. Thankfully I had forgotten to lock the door that time and my brother caught me before I could…finish my work.”
“Why?”
“You first, Derta. This is your only assignment. Once again, it’s pass or fail. You’ve thought no one would be listening at all, but less closely enough to hear your silence.
“But hear me when I tell you this: your silence would be the loudest, most mournful. You are alive. You will be alive tomorrow. And the next day. Because now, finally, I think you understand that this is not something you have to go through alone.”
By the time the lunch bell rang, he stood up and opened the classroom door.
“You have passed the class. Your summer school is complete.”
As she walked past him, she said quietly without turning around, “Same time tomorrow?”
“I’ll be here.”
A phone number in a fortune cookie? I might be too drunk. Are these even numbers? I take a deep breath, raise my head level with my shoulders, and try that stupid fucking breathing technique for about nine seconds before deciding again that it’s useless.
But my vision does clear enough for me to read the fortune from the cookie, and it is definitely a phone number. What is this? Do I have to call the number for my fortune? What happened to six words that barely made sense in the broadest of situations?
You know what I’ve always wanted. Specificity from the fortune cookies. “You will get hit by a bike messenger on the second crosswalk as you walk back home. Your pants leg gets caught in his gears and he’s so goddamn jacked that he doesn’t even notice he’s got extra baggage to deliver.”
Alright, that’s obviously too long, but you get what I’m saying. But when had a fortune ever been anything but numbers? Much less a phone number. A local one, too.
In a panic that must have looked hilarious to the other diners, I whipped entire body around in my chair, for some reason coming to the conclusion that I had wandered into one of those “special” massage parlors.
And with that panic, those motions, and that thought, I had made three demonstrably racist assumptions because of a fucking fortune cookie. The wrapper on the table had an unmistakable declaration on it: “MADE IN THE USA” as a little extra dollop of “you’re an asshole.”
That’s why she left. Almost those words exactly.
“You’ve turned into an asshole.”
Turned into. Meaning assholelessness had once been a quality one could ascribe to me. Then I got a promotion at work — alright, since we’re just getting it all out there, it was more of a lateral repositioning than anything else — an suddenly I was the center of attention whether that center had to be manually redirected immediately and with great fanfare.
So she was absolutely right. But I told her that she could not be more wrong if she tried, which only reinforced the point she was going to make, but I beat her to the punch. The punch to my face. Whatever. That’s the jist. She deserves better and there’s no doubt she’ll find better.
Still fiddling with the fortune, rolling it around in my fingers, my curiosity finally gets the better of me. My vision is still a little swimmy so the last “868” part takes me more brain power than I’d really like to admit.
I hesitate for maybe half a second and start the call. It rings maybe ten times, and someone finally picks up.
“Took you long enough, Twerp,” says the voice I know on the other end.
I feel all the blood rush out of whatever body part it’s in and into someplace it shouldn’t be because whatever this feeling is cannot be good.
“Br—Bryce?” I ask.
“Who else calls you ‘twerp’, Twerp?”
No one else calls me Twerp. Not anymore.
Not since Bryce died eight years ago.
She played hopscotch along the driveway toward the house, making sure that she didn’t hop outside the boxes despite there being no one to compete with. Even so, she made the extra effort.
As she hit the final box, she hopped out, spun around in the air, and slammed both of her feet down onto the concrete. Dust flew up in a thick cloud, so dense it made her eyes water and tickle her throat to the point she thought she might cough.
Her eyes wandered down to the end of the driveway where her bicycle was leading on its kickstand. The left handlebar didn’t have a rubber grip on it, and with the scorching heat that permeated almost every hour of the day, sometimes she just steered with one hand. That’d have to do until the blisters on her left hand calloused over, then it wouldn’t be such a big deal.
But now it was time. Time to go. Time to say good bye.
She turned around to the home that had been turned to rubble by an errant SCUD missile a few blocks over. They called it collateral damage, but she called it a dead mom, a dead dad, and a dead sister. She called it motivation.
Whoever did this would pay, and they would feel the entire weight of her pain trapped beneath that cobblestone.
Any attempt to make out the scene in front of them would be a Herculean feat on the best of days, but this was an exercise in futility. Sisyphean, you could say.
Every minute that passed meant more bystanders crowding around. It meant less room to maneuver. It meant less space to do their jobs. It meant lives that were already tenuous had their scales tipped against them.
“How did this even happen?” he asked, barely looking askance at the woman on his right. He couldn’t manage to completely divert his attention — not with something like this.
She fumbled around for a beginning before giving up and delivered her assessment; she was, after all, the first responder to the scene.
“At first I thought it was just an old timer who finally lost the fight with his ticker and just runs off the road into a lamp post, stop sign, storefront, whatever.” She paused, choosing her next words very carefully. “But I’ve seen more than a couple of those, believe it or not.
“What I HAVEN’T seen before is a man whose path was diverted with a bullet through the driver’s side dashboard. And what I REALLY haven’t ever seen is that plus what could only be military grade high explosive attached to a timer block underneath the car.”
That last bit managed to pull his attention completely away. “What do you mean?”
“Like you see in the movies. With the block of putty that you—“
Unapologetically cutting her off, he clarified: “I mean how do you know it was on a timer block. That would have blown up with the explosive it was attached to.”
“That’s what I thought, too, and I’m not even sure that part is correct. But I know as soon as I saw the billboard that I had to get every fucking person down here as quickly as I could. This could get even worse.”
Following her eyes as she slowly raised them to the skyline, he saw the billboard that she had fixed on.
Suddenly he understood.
The billboard showed an analog clock.
And it was counting DOWN.
Down Low tugged twice on his door to make sure it had latched. Then he pulled on it a third time. Nothing wrong with being extra cautious, especially in this neighborhood.
He stood at the top of the staircase down to the street. Fifteen steps. He could do it. He’d gone down every step every day for the past two months, three weeks, and six days. But it never got any easier on his leg.
Lowell — Down Low to his neighbors since he never appeared to have two nickels to rub together after his rent had been paid every month — felt at the brace on his leg. Still there, just like every time he checked. Maybe one day he’d reach down and there wouldn’t be one, and so he wouldn’t have to deal with the cold sweats and trembling hands that came with standing at the top of the stairs.
Today, though, he had found two quarters laying side by side in a ditch on his way home from work. To Lowell, that was a sign. A sign that things would turn out okay. Eventually. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, or even the next day. But eventually. People destined for eternal bad luck don’t find two shiny quarters laying next to each other. No sir, no sir.
Two quarters meant that it was HIS turn to pick the song at the jukebox. It was HIS turn to be the man with the plan. It was HIS turn to be in control for the one-hundred and sixty-one seconds that it took Tom Fogarty to croon out “Up Around the Bend.”
One Step. Two steps. Three st—
Down Low’s knee buckled, the rest of his two-hundred and fifty pound frame collapsing with nothing to support it. And suddenly it wasn’t just one step at a time — it was all of them all at once.
His head struck the pavement at the bottom of the staircase at such an angle that he didn’t feel any pain as his neck snapped and his spinal cord ripped apart like hot spaghetti under the faucet.
His hand in his pocket was wrapped around those two quarters. When Lowell went up the steps earlier that evening, he was Down Low.
But here at the bottom of the stairs, dead as a door nail and with a great big grin on his face, he was someone else entirely.
He was Up High.
