If You Knew Then What I Know Now (13 page)

I answer the phone one night after school and it's Justin. When he asks for me, I recognize his strange voice even after two years and the inside of my throat suddenly feels fat. I know how he would sound to my parents. His voice sounds so small, almost childlike. But it doesn't bother me the way it would bother my family and I bask in my surprisingly mature outlook, very special for a boy my age. I'm afraid they'll overreact again like the time my mother wouldn't let me join my theater friends for ice skating in St. Louis because she thought the area was too dangerous. “There are a lot of gangs over there,” she said. “At the ice rink?” I asked. “Ice skating gangs! Oh, Mother,” I said, shaking my head and performing a loud patronizing laugh that was supposed to change her mind, but didn't.

As Justin and I talk, it's clear that he is nervous, but I don't understand why. My words steer our conversations, which we share for four days in a row. After we trade a few sentences about Lisa, her music and glitter-doodled shoes, all I can think to talk about are those days in the newspaper room. Does he remember this person, that day, or this time? He answers my questions, then waits for more. When seconds of quiet stretch between us, I blurt out dumb stories about school, or the current newspaper room where I'm an editor. He begins asking questions and I answer them, and he asks more. He's not hiding, he's just not
revealing as much as I am, and I'm too young to understand why. And though his calls are never planned, when the ring is heard throughout our house, I'm always first to answer. My thirteen-year-old brother Garrett generally monitors most of my calls with the phone in his room. This is the phase when he thinks he's my father. Each time Justin and I talk this week, I listen for the fumbling or breathing that always gives Garrett away, but I don't hear it.

Finally, on the fourth evening, Justin asks if I'd like to do something with him, the next day if possible, which is Friday. I'm free, I say, because, of course Angie's heart and weekend belong to Kevin. “What do you feel like doing?” I ask.

“You know what I haven't done in years?” he asks, his voice somehow now sounding more like a young boy's than ever. “And it happens to be in town, I heard a commercial on the radio. . . .”

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to guess, so I stay quiet.

“Let's go to the circus,” he says.

 

About an hour before he's supposed to pick me up the following evening, I've told my mother only that I'm doing something with a guy from newspaper who graduated the previous year. She asks millions of questions. She's so unused to the idea that I would want to spend time with anyone but Angie, she's immediately curious. But even more surprising, it's with another boy—an activity she's been suggesting for years. To my mother's
mind, I spend too much time with girls, and “hanging out with the guys” is just what I need to nudge my dormant interests in dating, sports, and yard work to sudden bright life. But I know Justin isn't the guy she has in mind, so I tell her about the Lisa connection, restating though that this is a guy I knew in newspaper and we were friends then and he's coming to pick me up soon, and I'm not really sure what we're doing tonight, but yes, I'll be home by midnight, the curfew. I wait in the driveway, set for a quick getaway.

Of course I haven't seen Justin for two years, so I have no idea what he'll look like, though I know how he sounds, and that's not good. When his car turns in, I see his same strained face and open mouth, the hardened eyes and the white arms gripping the steering wheel. I yell into the house, “He's here! Bye!” and scurry across the pavement, running up to Justin's car before he's pressed down his brake. I stand at the passenger side door and peer in. He smiles. His hair is cut short and practically “normal” in terms of my mother's standards, except he's dyed it a shiny auburn the color of an Irish setter. He shifts into park and unlocks my door. My mother steps out of the house into the garage.

“Wait a minute,” she says, her flattened hand rising to her brow to make an awning for her face. “I want to meet your friend.”

I stand helplessly next to the car as Justin looks at her, looks at me and then looks at her again when she marches across the
driveway. He unlatches his seatbelt, pushes open the door, and stands in front of my mother. He's taller and knobbier than I remembered, wearing a skintight Polo shirt and creased brown pants. He offers his hand to her, and she moves her eyes from his Irish setter head to his shabby loafers and back again.

“Mom, Justin. Justin, Mom,” I say, staring at my shoes, watching one of them take a small step toward the car.

 

The brown Missouri river separates St. Charles from St. Louis. There's a long bridge to cross, a hulking contraption of grey girders and dark rivets that looks like a giant skeleton. As far back as I can remember, when riding across the bridge, I've held my breath. It's a bargain I've struck with God—our family car can make it to the other side without the bridge collapsing into the ugly water if I can hold my breath the whole time. Maybe if I paid more attention on Sunday mornings in church, I'd know this isn't the way God really works, or that's what my mother would say if she noticed me turning red in the back of the minivan. To hold my breath now at this age feels silly, but after so many years and so many safe trips it's become my superstition.

Across the river, St. Louis is a marvelous city, but it's full of dangers and I'm not allowed to go there without my parents. So I lie and go anyway when my friends are willing to drive. In St. Louis, there's a neighborhood I've visited only a few times that I'm drawn to, a place that feels risky but also cool.
I
don't feel cool necessarily, but I feel that coolness is nearby and
available. In this neighborhood is Café Chaos. You sit on dirty furniture and sip tea while coughing in an incense cloud, music howling from ripped speakers. Above you, each ceiling tile is hand-painted in vivid swirling colors depicting Technicolor teddy bears, Chinese symbols, and Che Guevara. It's too loud to hear your companions, so you just sit and stare. I particularly like what being there says about me. Even the name contradicts everything I know; the supposed serenity of “Café” colliding with volatile “Chaos.” At the moment, it is my favorite place anywhere and I've only been once.

Like the bright white ice rink, my mother thinks this area of the city is deadly though I don't believe she's ever seen it. I've mentioned it cautiously with her, just to confirm that she thinks I shouldn't hang out there.

“You want to go where?” she said, turning off her Game Boy and setting it down to give my interest in this neighborhood her full attention.

“Oh, I don't want to
go
there. I'm just wondering if you've ever been. It's supposed to be pretty cool.” I shrugged, like I was only making conversation, as though her answer didn't matter.

 

“I'm sorry my mom gets hyper about everything,” I say. Justin and I are driving on the highway toward St. Louis to eat somewhere before the circus. Justin hasn't said much since we started. So I'm making inane comments about radio songs or pointing out that everything in St. Charles is beige just to
have something to say. My hands don't know where to go, in my lap or beside my thighs on the seat, or one propped up by the window and one on the armrest. I test the possibilities but nothing feels right. Justin knows a diner near the arena where we'll see the circus. “That sounds good,” I say. “I love diners.” Once I hear my sentence, I know how ridiculous it sounds. I'm trying to seem interesting by being a lover of diners—when I don't even know if it's true. Steak 'n Shake might be the only diner I've been to.

In fact, Justin's diner looks nothing like Steak'n Shake. His place has greasy front windows, wood paneling and a black and white linoleum floor. There are two spots at the counter so we sit side by side while an enormous black man takes our order. His head is pinched in a white paper cap, dark stains smeared across his apron. Justin warns me the food here isn't much; he comes here for atmosphere. We order and Justin lights a cigarette.

My stool is bolted to the floor so it's difficult to turn like I want to. Behind me in the corner, old men grumble with yellowed moustaches. Near the door, some teenagers slouch at a table blowing soda bubbles with their straws. There's a kid running around with untied shoes. Sizzling noises fry out the background and I'm stuck facing the dirty open kitchen as Justin's smoke mingles with the smell of bacon.

“This is a cool place,” I say. I've got the hands problem again, where to put them, what they should do. Something has shoved me off balance, forcing me to be aware of my body. I
start wondering why I'm so uncomfortable—if it's the diner, the way my mother unnerved me with her suspicious eyes, or just the unfamiliarity of sitting somewhere on this side of the river.

“It's nice,” he says, knocking ash off his cigarette. “I come here a lot.”

Which isn't hard to imagine. With the way he looks and talks, Justin has to be used to not fitting in. But who really fits in here? This diner is the place for all the people that don't fit in at all the other places. He smashes his cigarette into the ashtray and reaches for his pack, but puts it down. He folds his arms over his chest, unfolds them and smoothes out his pants. He's having the hands problem too.

“Have you talked to Lisa this week?” I ask.

“Who?” he says, swiveling to face me. “Oh, I keep forgetting she's Lisa to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that she's Charlie too. To some people she's Lisa and to some people she's Charlie. Usually she's Charlie to me.”

I want to ask him what the difference is and how he knows which one he's talking to. I'm also trying to understand how she's able to hold two names and intriguing personalities inside herself simultaneously when I can barely manage to be interesting as one person. This must have something to do with the juxtaposition of her strange face and ordinary clothes—Lisa must wear the jeans and shirts, Charlie has the Cleopatra eyes. I envy her ability to decide. Actually my association with people
like her and Justin is my own attempt at being somebody else. There seem to be ways that the people in glamorous leather jackets and ripped jeans conceal themselves and stand out from the crowd at the same time. My appearance is so ordinary in my oversized T-shirts—my mom buys all my clothes—jeans, and Converse sneakers, and I still look like the kind of boy I don't want to be.

 

When we arrive at the circus, I'm instantly aware we shouldn't be here. All around are families, families, families. At this arena, I've previously seen soccer games, Sesame Street Live, and a monster truck rally, but each time legitimately, with my mom, dad, and brother. I can't tell if Justin knows how clearly we don't fit in. At the diner, the place where no one seemed to belong, it was fine to sit next to him. But at the circus, the sight of the two of us is as lurid and outlandish as the sequined lady will be dangling from her trapeze. Two of us at the circus is one too many. Despite the giant size of the arena, as we settle into our seats surrounded on all sides by parents and kids spilling popcorn and waving fiber optic wands, the place is somehow claustrophobic; I feel the grip of how much I don't want to be here.

The lights drop, the room swells in applause and screams, a spotlight cuts through the dark and explodes on the floor. The ringmaster steps into the beam, his voice booms over us, the circus begins. Sparkle, smoke, elephants, tigers, stilt-walkers
and stuntmen—it's actually reassuring that the show is so predictable.

Justin claps easily at the acrobatic leaps, the man shot out of the cannon, the car crammed with clowns. If he's uncomfortable, he doesn't show it. The families pressing in against us don't bother him. But I can barely watch what he's doing or focus on the circus because I'm listening for that word—the word we've both been called, always singularly, but now I'll hear it in plural with an incriminating and dangerous
s
. My neck is tense, I hold my spine absolutely still, thinking if I don't move, no one will notice the spectacle of us. And as impossible as it would be to hear, I search the crowd noise for the word anyway: the quick rasp of the first syllable, then the snag of the middle, how my ear gets caught on the doubled
g
, and finally, the sudden twisting down of the last part like a barb on a hook, how all by itself the ending sounds like the place in my body where the whole word hits me when it's called out like my name.

 

After the circus, we make our way through the family crowd to Justin's car and sit in the parking lot to decide what to do next. I wish he'd just take me home, but I play along with his suggestions. Besides, going home now is too early—my mom is certainly still playing Game Boy, listening to the news. I'd rather tiptoe in after she's gone to bed. He suggests going to his place, and there's little to do but agree.

Justin lives in what's called a boxcar apartment: a cramped rectangle where you walk through the living room to get to the bedroom and then through the bedroom to get to the kitchen. He pushes open his front door fortified with iron bars. In the living room are a sofa, several wooden chairs, a coffee table and Madeline Luff. When I see her smoking and talking to another girl in Justin's boxcar, my puzzled eyes round out and I gawk at her like she's a movie star. In fact, five years earlier when I was in junior high, Madeline Luff was the closest thing I knew to a movie star. She was the girl who dressed completely in black, every day only in rich, complicated black skirts, dresses, and coats. Her hair wasn't naturally black, but dyed, the same opaque black of ink—so dark that light couldn't reflect off it, like her head was a black hole. Then, she painted and powdered her face white. Our school newspaper featured her in our ongoing series about unique students. Whenever I passed her inky figure in the hallway clamor, I wanted to stop and stare. Now what's stranger to me than her wearing only black every day of junior high school is that she doesn't look that way anymore; she's changed—her face is bare and her clothes are in color.