Twelve
Garin
Twelve Years Ago
I waited for Kyle in the alley. She didn’t know I was here, but I knew she’d pass me because this was the route she took to get home from school. I used to walk it with her every day. But since Paulie’s death, she walked home without me. She’d run right out of that fucking schoolyard before I even got a chance to get to her locker.
But not today. Today, she was going to walk with me. I’d skipped my last few periods, so I’d be here when she strolled by. So, I could join her, and things could go back to the way they used to be because things were all fucked-up now. I’d bang on her front door; she wouldn’t answer. I’d call her place; she wouldn’t pick up. I’d wait outside her class; she’d walk the other way.
Something was wrong, and I was going to find out what it was.
I heard her humming as she came down the street. She hummed when she drew, and she hummed in the shower. I’d hear her from outside the bathroom when I’d wait for her in her room. I’d poke my head out of the doorway just so I could hear her. And I’d hope she’d open the door just a crack to let out some of the steam, and by chance, I’d catch a glimpse of her in her towel. It had happened a few times but not enough.
At least now I knew what her body felt like since we’d hooked up in my room the other night. Shit, that needed to happen again real soon. Maybe even tonight, and I wouldn’t make her go home. I didn’t know if I could have her spend the whole night without getting her naked, but I’d try.
Her humming got louder the closer she got, and when I finally saw her foot step across the entrance of the alley, I grabbed her waist and pulled her inside, pushing her back against the building.
“Ow!” she screamed, flailing her arms, her legs trying to kick me in the shins.
“Kyle, it’s me.” I grabbed her hands, and she stilled.
“Garin? What the hell? What are you doing? I thought—oh God, I thought you were going to hurt me.”
“Sorry.” I should have planned this better, and I probably shouldn’t have scared her. I was just afraid she’d run the other way if she saw me. “But you wouldn’t talk to me, so you gave me no other choice.”
“Let me go.”
“No, Kyle. Not until you talk to me.”
Her chest pumped real hard, as though she were trying to catch her breath, but she was breathing just fine. Her eyes were just a little watery. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know why you’ve been avoiding me and why you haven’t been answering your door and why you’ve been acting so different since Paulie was killed.”
Her eyes started to really fill up, and her chin was quivering. “I can’t do this. Let me go.”
She tried wiggling out of my grip, and it only made me hold her tighter.
“What is wrong with you?”
“I need time.”
She was crying now, tears running down her cheeks. I just wanted to wipe them away, brush all the hair out of her face, straighten her jacket, and tuck it up under her chin, so she’d stop shaking. But if I let her go, I feared she’d take off running.
“I need time,” she repeated. “You need to give me that.”
“Time? Are you upset about Paulie? What is this about?”
When Paulie was killed, Kyle and I had both lost a friend. We’d known Paulie as long as we’d known each other. We’d grown up with him. At times, we hung out with him as much as we hung out with Billy. I knew Paulie meant a lot to Kyle. Shit, he meant a lot to all of us.
But she needed time? For what?
Nah, I didn’t believe that. Something else was going on here. She just wasn’t telling me what it was.
“It’s too much,” she said. “All of this is too much.”
She stopped looking at me, and her head now pointed toward the ground. I saw the tears dripping down the front of her jacket. She was pushing her back against the wall, holding herself as far away from me as she could.
“Kyle?” I softened my voice, hoping it would make a difference. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
She finally looked up, but her expression had changed. She looked pissed off and irritated—a look I didn’t see from her all that often. And, even though her cheeks were wet, she had stopped crying. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Us. This. All of it. You need to give me a break, Garin.” The tone of her voice was the same one she used when she spoke about her ma, and she and her ma didn’t get along at all.
“Kyle, what the fuck are you saying? You’re done with me?”
“I’m asking you to get your hands off me and respect the space I need.”
I kept my hands on her wrists, waiting for her to change her mind, for the look on her face to lighten, for the tears to return.
None of that happened.
She wanted nothing to do with me?
She’d change her mind. The second I let her go, she’d take it all back, and we’d walk home together. She’d ask me to kiss her like I had the other night, and all would be good again.
I lifted my hands and waited.
With her eyes still pointed toward the ground, she pushed herself off the brick wall and said, “Good-bye, Garin,” as she passed me.
My mouth opened, and not one fucking thing came out of it. I watched her walk out of the alley, turn at the sidewalk, and head toward her place in The Heart.
I didn’t move because she was going to come back. She was going to rush into my arms and kiss me, and this whole thing would be behind us.
She was going to come any second.
So, I waited.
I waited until it turned dark. I waited until the streetlamps flickered on.
I waited until I knew she wasn’t coming back.
And then I ran to Billy’s apartment. I didn’t talk about Kyle to anyone. She wasn’t just some girl I fucked in the bathroom behind the gym or some chick who gave me a blow job in between English and Trig. Kyle was my best friend. She was the girl I’d cared about my whole life. The one I wanted to take things slow with when I’d never taken things slow with anyone before.
“Quit the racket, will ya?” Billy’s ma shouted when I banged on their front door. “He’s upstairs, for fuck’s sake.”
I took the stairs two at a time and burst through Billy’s bedroom door without knocking. He was on his bed, his shirt off, lying in just a pair of ripped boxers. His belt was tied around his bicep, and there was a tarred-up spoon and needle right next to him. His head was leaning back against the wall, a line of drool coming out of the corner of his mouth.
“Billy,” I said, standing beside the bed. I shouted his name again when he didn’t answer, shaking the arm that wasn’t being squeezed by the belt.
“What?” he groaned. As he woke up, he scratched his chest and his stomach and his thighs. I’d heard the last batch of dope that had come in made everyone real itchy. He looked all around his room until he saw me. “What did you wake me up for? I was just catching a good nap.”
“You were fucking nodding out, not napping.”
“Whatever.”
I knew he was shooting a lot, but I hadn’t realized things had gotten this bad. He usually came to my place, so I hadn’t seen his room in a while and all the shit that was lying around in here. There were wax paper packets all over his dresser and covering most of the floor along with orange needle caps all over the rug in his closet.
It was a junkie’s fucking paradise.
And my best friend was the junkie.
“I need to talk to you. Shit is all messed up with Kyle, and I need some advice and—Billy?”
His eyes were closed again, his head starting to lean forward.
“Billy, wake the fuck up.”
“Mmm,” he groaned, scratching his forearms.
He was too gone to talk. Too high to even give a shit.
Fuck.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Billy.” I shut his door, ran down the steps, and let myself out.
Some of the old-timers were hanging out in front of my place. That probably meant my ma was home, banging one of them for a hit while the others waited their turn.
I couldn’t see it.
I sure as hell couldn’t hear it.
So, I walked right past my place, past Kyle’s apartment where I saw her bedroom light on, past the Stop sign at the end of the street, and I turned down the next block. I was still in The Heart, but I didn’t know many of the guys who lived on this street.
If it was even possible, this block looked worse than ours. There were needle caps all over the sidewalk and empty balloons of junk. Broken crack pipes crunched under my sneakers as I stepped on them.
If hell had dirty siding, chipped paint, leaky roofs, boarded up windows, and paraphernalia lining the street, then I was fucking in it.
Every row of two-story buildings that made up this neighborhood was the same. I heard it and saw it as I walked past—screaming on the inside of the apartments, most of them dark from not paying the electric bill, kids outside trying to hustle in the streets because their parents were getting high.
Kyle made it worth staying. I would have left and gone to live in one of Mario’s apartments a long time ago. Maybe I would do that until this little break of hers was over.
But I didn’t like the way she had looked at me in the alley.
Or the way she hadn’t looked at me at all.
Something about this didn’t feel right.
“Watch it,” some guy said to me as I passed him.
Our shoulders smacked against each other.
I turned around. “You fucking watch it. Who do you think you’re talking to?”
It was the wrong hour to piss me off.
“You got something you want to say to me?” he barked.
I told myself to turn back around. I told myself he wasn’t worth it. I told myself not to pay attention to anything this dude said.
But Kyle didn’t give a shit about me anymore. Heroin was more important to Billy than I was.
So, I stopped caring, too.
I wasn’t going to give a fuck about anything—not that guy’s face or what my knuckles were going to do to it. I clenched my fingers together to make a tight fist, and I aimed right for his goddamn nose.