One Man Guy (3 page)

“No prob, man.”

Alek hadn’t seen Seth since then. He thought about reaching out to him, but never actually did because he didn’t know what to say. All Alek knew was that he missed Seth differently from everything else in the world he left behind.

3

Alek turned on Etra and saw Becky leaning against a stop sign.

“What took you so long? I could’ve taken the SATs waiting for you.”

Even on her skates, Becky barely broke five feet. Nothing about her appearance, from her frizzy brown hair to her daily outfit of overalls and a sweater, betrayed her real personality. Becky had gone to the other middle school in South Windsor, so Alek hadn’t met her until they sat next to each other in Earth Science on the first day of freshman year. Becky began whispering asides to Alek about their teacher’s ear hair less than five minutes later, and by the time the bell rang Mr. Cenci had reprimanded Alek twice for disrupting the class with his laughter. Each time, Becky stared straight ahead, serious and solemn, feigning innocence at Alek’s disruptive behavior.

“So when are you leaving for Maine?” Alek asked.

“Change of plans.”

“What happened?”

“I decided to dis my grandma when I found this.” She unzipped her book bag and handed Alek a brochure.

“You want to go to skating camp? Really?” Alek flipped through the glossy images of teens performing stunts and tricks.

“It’s the last two weeks before school starts. You get to train with pros. I can’t wait!” Becky said, spinning with joy. “My folks told me I’d have to pay for it if I wanted to go, so I got a job at Dairy Queen.”

“God, I’m so happy that you’re going to be here,” Alek admitted.

“Everybody’s been saying that to me. A few minutes ago, a group of cheerleaders stopped and thanked me for deciding to stay. They said the summer just wouldn’t be the same without me.”

“It wouldn’t! You wanna hit the movies this weekend?”

“Okay, but there’s an Audrey Hepburn film that I want to see, too. Why don’t we catch whatever mindless-superhero-blockbuster ridiculousness you want on Friday night, and then we can spend a civilized afternoon watching
My Fair Lady
on Saturday? I’ll see if Mandy and Suzie can come.”

“Do you have to?” Alek asked.

“It might be my last chance to see them before band camp,” Becky protested.

“You know I don’t like hanging out with girls,” Alek said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“You know what I mean, Becky. You’re not like them. You’re different.”

“Well, don’t even think of standing me up,” Becky warned him. “Because if you do, I’ll cut you. I’ve got a reputation around these parts for being a badass. Why do you think no one picks on us? They know you’re running with me and my posse.”

It was hard to imagine someone less intimidating than Becky. Luckily, South Windsor wasn’t the kind of high school where anyone got beaten up. The kids here were interested in getting good grades, getting better SAT scores, and getting into the best colleges. Honor Society students at South Windsor High were treated the way jocks would be at a different school.

“If I’m lucky, this book about the making of
My Fair Lady
will have arrived by then. That’s the reason I want to see it again! In fact, I’ll probably want to watch it again
after
I read the book, too, so I can really appreciate the nuances.”

Alek and Becky continued until they reached Orchard Street.

“I can go down the rest of the way by myself.” Becky smiled, initiating their ritual.

“Why don’t I walk you to your door?” Alek recited on cue.

The first time Alek and Becky had walked home from school together, he had insisted on taking her all the way to the front door, because “that’s what my mother told me a gentleman would do.” Becky was so flabbergasted by Alek’s bizarre chivalric formality that she let him accompany her. Ever since then, when they arrived at this intersection, they reenacted the exchange.

Alek dropped Becky off, retraced his steps back to Mercer, and continued walking home. A few minutes later, he reached the train station, the halfway point between his house and Becky’s.

He heard a train approaching, so he ran to the station to watch it pull in. Alex had fallen in love with a hand-carved wooden miniature locomotive he had received for his second birthday and loved trains ever since. Their strength and speed exhilarated him, especially the express trains that skipped South Windsor, shooting through the station at maximum velocity as if it wouldn’t even occur to them to stop at the insignificant suburb. The train pulling in now was a southbound local, originating in New York and traveling into New Jersey. The other side of the station, which Alek had never visited, was for the northbound trains en route to the city.

Over the last few years, Alek had gone into New York with his parents a handful of times. Usually, his family would drive in on a Saturday morning, catch a Broadway matinee or a museum exhibit, and then drive back. Alek begged to stay longer, but Manhattan restaurants made his parents feel claustrophobic, and they flat out rejected Alek’s suggestion that they “just walk around for a while.” Alek could sense other parts of the city calling to him, neighborhoods hiding behind skyscrapers like exotic animals in a jungle. But these family outings were the only way he could get into the city, and he took what he could get.

The train pulled in and the doors slid open. A few people trickled out, unlike the throngs that got off at the end of the workday. Alek envied them for getting to go to New York, but also pitied them for having to come back to suburbia. It made him think of Tantalus, the character in Ancient Greek mythology he learned about in sixth grade, doomed to thirst and starve in the underworld, with water and food always just out of his reach. Alek didn’t know which was worse, being so close to the thing you wanted and not being able to grasp it, like Tantalus, or being exiled from it entirely.

The doors closed and the train started to pull away. Alek watched it shoot into the distance, an arrow happily speeding toward its target.

Alek had lived his entire life in the neighborhood on this side of the station. The proud houses stood behind their manicured lawns in perfect lines, and since the housing association insisted they all be painted in the same palette of heinous pastels, the blocks looked like rows of oversize dinner mints in a giant’s candy box.

The other side of the station, the New York–bound side, bordered a less welcoming part of town. Because it was South Windsor, it wasn’t really dangerous, at least not compared with the parts of New York Alek’s parents had described living in before they got married. But the northbound side didn’t have the cookie-cutter, squeaky-clean feeling of Alek’s.

The two sides of the station had only been connected by a small underground tunnel until an overpass had been built a few years ago. Passing the station every day on his walks to and from school this past year, Alek had fantasized about going to the other side, jumping on a train, and shooting into the city. But Alek’s parents had made it abundantly clear that under no circumstances was he allowed to go in without them.

“I know you love New York,” Alek’s mom told him last month in the car on the way back from their Armenian church. “But the city is very dangerous, especially for someone young. Maybe when you’re a senior in high school, and we’ve had time to explore it together, we’ll let you go in. During the day. To a few neighborhoods we would agree on beforehand. With some friends. And a chaperone. And maybe a police escort.”

Alek hoped to get some support from his father. “Didn’t you move to New York for college when you were just a few years older than I am now?” he asked. But his father wouldn’t budge.

“Listen to your mother. The city’s not safe.”

Alek stood in the opening to the tunnel, peering down. Even in the middle of the day, the tunnel was dim, lit only by sporadically flickering orange fluorescents that made it feel like the setting for a horror movie. Since the overpass had been built, the tunnel had gone mostly unused, forgotten like an old pair of jeans. Although he knew his dad expected him to come home right after school, Alek lingered. The corrugated steel forming the tunnel’s opening invited and threatened him at the same time. He took a step in. And then another.

Alek held up his hand and marveled at how the orange light made his flesh look alien. He walked forward, matching his footsteps to the
drip-drip-drip
of a leaky pipe. He focused on the small landscape of sunlight at the end, beckoning him. The air was cooler in the tunnel. Alek inhaled and continued walking.

He emerged in an abandoned parking lot on the northbound side of the station. A bunch of older kids whom he recognized from school were skateboarding on an obstacle course of ramps and traffic pins they had erected. These kids were Nik’s age, but Alek knew they weren’t part of Nik’s Honor Society clique. They were called the Dropouts, or D.O.s for short, because of their impressively challenged graduation rate. Each clique at South Windsor High had its part to play, and you could always count on the Dropouts to sneak cigarettes, cut class, or start fights. Alek didn’t know most of them by name, but he recognized the one named Ethan as the initiator of the infamous food fight in March.

Principal Saunder had implemented a dress code that prohibited baggy pants and had just rejected the student petition to have them reinstated. So, the rumors went, Ethan took it upon himself to initiate a cafeteria-wide food fight in protest. Alek didn’t share the same lunch period with Ethan, so he hadn’t witnessed the fight itself, but he remembered what all the students looked like when they were being marched out of the cafeteria—their clothes drenched in ketchup and milk, bread and potato chip crumbs and God knows what else, and happier than he’d ever seen a group of kids at South Windsor High. Although Alek was glad he hadn’t been caught up in that mess, he also wished that it had happened during his lunch period so he could’ve witnessed the pandemonium.

But even before that food fight, Alek thought Ethan epitomized cool. Today he was wearing army-green cargo pants with buckles and chains looped through them and a black T-shirt that read
DARE TO RESIST DRUGS AND VIOLENCE
in blocky red letters. Alek looked down at his own boring khaki shorts and dark blue short-sleeved button-down shirt. Even if his parents had let him shop for his own clothes, he wouldn’t know where to find anything other than the same boring Gap fare they had always chosen for him.

Alek watched Ethan navigate his skateboard through the obstacle course with ease, laughing and talking to his friends at the same time. Ethan was a few inches taller than Alek, with wavy sandy hair that fell in his face in a way that made Alek think of surfers. Alek’s own hair was dark, thick, and unmanageable, like weeds in a garden. He had tried to grow it out last year, but it only got bigger instead of looking cool. All the kids at church referred to it as an Armenian ’Fro, and his parents told him that one day he’d be lucky to have such thick hair, but Alek envied the way Ethan’s hair flopped up and down as he jumped over pins, kicked off stairs, and slid down banisters.

A big D.O., his meaty forearms crossed in front of his chest, spotted Alek and called out, “Hey, kid, you got a problem?”

Alek felt his face grow red. He didn’t want to look scared, but all he could do was stutter back. “No, um, I, just was, um…”

The guy lumbered up to Alek, wiping his runny nose on his arm. He was wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt that stretched tight across his ample bulk, and his brown hair was clipped on the sides, so short that Alek could see the flesh of his skull. The top of his hair spiked up in a fauxhawk, making him appear even bigger. Alek couldn’t remember his name, but knew that he was supposed to have graduated last year. He approached Alek with the confident swagger of home turf. “Spit it out, dude. I said, you got a problem?”

Before Alek could reply, the guy drew his meaty arms back and gave Alek a sharp shove. The force caught him off guard, and Alek fell to the ground. He cried out, more in surprise than pain. The commotion caught the other guys’ attention. They skated over, hoping for some afternoon entertainment. Alek stared up from the ground, faces appearing in his field of vision like enemy spaceships.

Jack. Alek suddenly remembered his attacker’s name. Jack.

Jack’s face hovered menacingly over Alek. “What’s your problem? Why don’t you stand up and take it like a man?” Alek tried to move away, but the much bigger kid squatted down, using his knees to pin Alek to the ground. Jack barked the questions again, like an army sergeant.

The smell of onions and mustard slammed into Alek’s nostrils.
This is what about-to-get-beat-up feels like,
Alek realized. He just hoped that whatever happened, he would emerge without any visible marks so that his parents wouldn’t have a reason to ask any questions. Getting beat up was humiliating. Having to explain it to your parents was worse.

When Alek still didn’t reply, Jack lowered his face so it was right up against Alek’s. “I said, stand up, son,” he screamed.

“Leave him alone, Jack.” Alek turned his head to see who had come to his rescue. Ethan rolled over calmly and kicked his skateboard up, revealing a collage of colorful stickers on the bottom. The bright green wheels continued spinning as he held his board in one hand and put the other on Jack’s shoulder.

Jack locked eyes with Ethan. “I’m just having some fun, man.”

“That’s what you call fun? Picking on some kid half your size?” Ethan joked. But when Jack didn’t get up, Ethan continued, “But I guess the way you’ve been eating, finding someone your own size to pick on is pretty much impossible.”

“You don’t have to take that, Jack!” someone called out from behind Alek.

“Yeah, show him who’s who!”

Jack’s face slowly turned red as the rest of the guys continued taunting them. “Let’s see if you’re still talking big when you have my fist in your face, Ethan.”

“Your fist and my face are pretty much the same size now, big boy,” Ethan cracked. With a grunt, Jack jumped off Alek and rushed Ethan, knocking him to the ground. Alek remained on the ground, forgotten, as the faces staring down at him fled to witness the much more exciting spectacle. Alek heard chants of “Get him, Ethan!” and “Show him who’s who, Jack,” as well as the occasional smack of fists hitting flesh.