Arizona, Arizona, Arizona

 

 

“THAT T-SHIRT! I lived in that. God, I was a dorky kid. And there is nothing more dorky than a dorky kid with a comic-book obsession.” Micky flops down on the hotel bed next to me, puts his arms around me, and rests his bony chin on my shoulder so he can look at what I’m looking at.

Micky was a gorgeous kid with an adorable comic-book obsession. I can’t hide my smile as I flick through the photo album Benjamin brought over from their parents’ house earlier. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to show Micky photographs of my childhood, if there are any out there somewhere.

“Your mum looks different in this one.”

“Yeah, I like to think she was happy once.” Micky turns his head away and rests it against my back. “Not seeing them is the right thing to do, isn’t it?” he asks softly.

Micky’s parents don’t know he’s here in Arizona. After a week of Micky coming close to self-destructing, we realised the stress of seeing them wasn’t worth it. Stress of any sort is bad for his heart. He has regular checkups, but his heart will always be a little bit broken. He’ll probably have to take medication for the rest of his life.

Tomorrow we’re heading out of Phoenix.

I reach down and find his hand so I can lock our fingers together.

“What shall I order? Thai, Mexican, McDonald’s?” Benjamin asks, peering around the doorway joining his room to ours.

“Benjamin, if you don’t start knocking on doors before you come in, one day you’re going to get a shock. We could be doing anything,” Micky says lightly, pushing himself up, but I can feel the way he has tensed.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if you were having sex. You make too much noise anyway.”

“Thanks!” Micky pulls a face and flops dramatically back on the bed.

Acting as though anything to do with food is not a big thing is what Micky needs from us, but we’ll all go hungry before he answers Benjamin’s question. I know he has a weakness for junk food, but it makes him feel sick afterwards.

“Mexican,” I answer. “Not spicy.”

Benjamin leaves and I go back to looking at the photographs. Sometimes Micky points someone out—an aunt, a cousin, Thor in a poster on his bedroom wall—but mostly he leans against me, his fingers tracing circles on my back under my T-shirt.

“Want to go for a walk?” he asks quietly when I reach the end of the album.

“Before Benjamin gets back with the food?”

“Yeah… look.” Micky points out the large window at the sky. “You’ve never seen the sun set in the desert,” he whispers. “Benjamin will understand. I’m not avoiding food, I promise. We won’t be long.”

We head outside. The hotel is on the very edge of the desert. Or that’s what it looks like anyway—all the green sprinkler-fed hotel grass ends abruptly with the narrow stone path we’re standing on. After that there is nothing but rocks and dust and prickles. A hotel at the edge of the world.

Micky takes my hand. For a moment I don’t want to move. I like the idea of being on the brink of something. I glance behind us at the hotel.

It’s a posh hotel. There’s a lot of marble in the foyer and the staff wear expensive-looking suits. Benjamin is paying for everything. As he’s away on tour with the orchestra quite a bit, their parents gave him a credit card. He makes sure he spends a lot of money on Micky. He thinks it’s their parents’ duty to do this even if they don’t know about it.

Micky and I have no money. In two years, when Micky is twenty-one, he’ll have access to his trust fund, but there is no way for him to get to it before then. Even if I knew how much money that was, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Not really. No matter how hard I try to get my head around it, things like that remain stubbornly out of reach.

I never imagined I’d be somewhere like this. It’s a million miles from everything I’ve ever known. For a second I think of Dashiel. I try to imagine what he’d say about it. I do this everywhere I go. My memory of him is a precious bright light I shine on everything. Sometimes I think he took a little piece of me with him when he died, and this is what I have to do to fill the space.

“The clouds are on fire,” I say softly, looking up.

“They’ll set the sky alight in a minute,” Micky says. “Watch.”

And they do. I see it. A fire above the world. A sky so big I can’t catch hold.

Arizona is beautiful. The sky is beautiful. But it isn’t what sets me alight. Micky is my fire, my sun, my sky, my world.

With a smile, he pulls me over the brink and into the desert.

The End