Excerpt Book 3:
The summer dusk gave way
to interstitial twilight. There was no sense in riding an hour back home in the
dark just to turn around and come back the next morning. Instead, my friends
and I bummed our way back to Camp Jellystone, where we got to camp in tents on
the gravel and weeds off of the RV lot for five dollars a night. We sat around
a fire and drank pop while the older actors – our mentors – went through
six-packs of beer and homilized on their atheist Bibles. They quoted SNL
routines, Monty Python, GURPS, Cthulhu, and the Digital Underground until we
were all too tired to see straight. We all said goodnight and made our way back
to our tents. But my tent had flooded during the week, and inside I found dead
earwigs floating in slow circles.
I didn’t mind.
I was glad that this had happened.
I gathered up my sleeping bag, which
Eddie had dropped off in the morning before heading back to Akawe, and stumbled
back through the purple dark to Omara’s tent.
“Knock knock,” I said.
I heard her sigh. “You got your own
tent, John.”
“Not tonight,” I said. “It’s flooded.
Will you let me stay here?”
“Fine,” she said. “If this ever gets
back to my dad, he’ll murder you.”
“I don’t think he will. I don’t think
he’d murder a fly.”
She didn’t argue. She knew that I was
right. She unzipped the tent and beckoned me inside.
In more than a year of going out,
Omara and I hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t even been naked together. The driving
thirst and curiosity that I had felt in seventh grade had been quenched by my
confusing tumbles with Crystal. By my guilty nescience with Lucy. Still, here I
was, sleeping bag in hand, stooped under the slope of the tent roof, wearing
soccer shorts and a too-small t-shirt, and Omara stood before me, more stooped
because she was taller than I was, her white panties and tank top bright
against her dark skin. We unzipped our sleeping bags, made a bed between them,
and lay down. Omara turned away from me, and I pressed into her back. I put my
arm around her waist with my palm against her bare stomach. I could feel her
shapes against mine, though there was still cloth between us.
“It was a long day today,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“We’d better get some sleep. It’s
gonna be a long weekend. We got two more days to go. Then school. You know I
got that job at the Olan Farm? It’s gonna be almost like this. I mean, I guess
I’ll dress up like a milkmaid, like The Little House on the Prairie or
something. But it’ll be acting, you know?”
I sighed.
“I’m not tired,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said. And then, in
a burst: “I can’t stop thinking about that woman on your block. Who murdered
her baby.”
I pushed myself against her. I held
my breath. I said, “I can’t think about that. I mean. There’s nothing I can do
about that. It makes me sick, but what does that even accomplish?”
“But doesn’t it just stick with you? The
idea of it? How awful it –”
“I don’t want it to, okay? Anyway,
it’s far away. We’re here now. Let’s stay here.”
“We can’t stay here.” I felt the
tenseness in Omara’s back.
“Yeah. But someday,
we’ll leave Akawe for good. And anyway. We aren’t there now.”
“Aren’t you afraid your dad’s gonna
lose his job?”
“My father? Yeah. He’s already
driving two hours each day ever since they transferred him to Canton. Ever
since that strike ended last year, it seems like X is closing everything fast
as they can. You know? I mean, they closed the Benedict Main. Most of the Old
Benedict. Probably RAN, too. ‘Course, my aunt says they were going to close
them all anyway.”
Omara laughed. A slight untensing.
“Sounds like you have thought about it.”
“I think about lots of things a lot.
Some things I don’t want to think about and some things I do. I mean, I think
about you a lot.”
I was trying to move toward her. In,
you know, ways. But she wasn’t taking the bait.
“Aren’t you afraid they won’t be able
to pay for college?”
She’d finally succeeded. Omara’s
fears had become my fears.
“No,” I said. “I mean, my mother is
working at that new job at XAI. And even if my father gets laid off, he’s got
options. Right? Transfer to other plants. Stuff like that. What about you? Why
are you worried? Didn’t your grandparents get you a savings bond or something?”
“Yeah. But I keep thinking someone’s
gonna open a trapdoor beneath me or something. I guess ... I guess I keep
thinking I’ll believe in college when I get there. And not before. It just
seems a bad idea to get my hopes up, you know?”
“You don’t have to worry about it for
a while. It’s still years off. I mean, we just have to keep working, don’t we?
It’ll happen. We just need to be patient or some shit, you know?”
The wind buffeted the tent over our
heads. I could hear low talking outside. Low chuckles. Through the tent wall, I
could see the embers of the fire flickering faintly. Some of the older actors
would be slouching in their folding chairs until the sky started to gray with
dawn. That was still several hours away. I listened to it for a long, slow
minute.
“I do worry,” I confided. “I worry
that something will happen that I don’t expect, and I’ll get stuck. That I’ll
fail a class, fail a test I need to pass ... and I won’t get into college in
Chicago, or I won’t get into college anywhere. I worry that my parents are
lying about everything, and they can’t pay for shit. I worry that I’m just
being set up to fail. I even worry ...” I caught my breath. Saying this all out
loud was hard. Trusting a human being was hard. But at least I wasn’t looking
into her eyes. At least the darkness of a September tent wrapped us and kept our
secrets from everyone else.
“I worry,” I whispered, “that you’ll
go away to college in Chicago, and I’ll be stuck in Akawe, and I’ll never get
out.”
I heard a deep breath from Omara. I
felt her belly raise beneath my cupped palm. She had fallen asleep, and I was
grateful.
