Are You Mine

Chapter 8


Fox


“We’re going to get caught,” she says as I grab the milk crate full of supplies out of the trunk of her car. She has nearly chickened out twice, but I’ve charmed her back into it.

Balancing the crate on the bumper and holding it with my knee, I pick out the four colors I need and hand them to her one by one. As I replace the crate and shut the trunk, she says, “Fox, I don’t think I need to be involved in all this. I mean, I get nervous just thinking about the police, and if we get caught I’ll—”

“We’re not going to get caught. I’m a ninja.”

She’s not impressed by this. “But I’m not.”

“You could be,” I say as I take the spray cans from her and start to walk toward the bridge. It’s dark but not pitch black. The moon is high and shines down on us, giving her a striking glow that’s hard to ignore. To be honest, this bridge is a little more traveled than some of the bridges I tag and the top has fencing to keep graffitist like me from defacing it, but I’ve scouted it out and know there’s a hole in the fence about three-quarters of the way down, so that’s where I’ll start.

When we get there, she bounces from foot to foot and turns her head left and right constantly as I paint. I feel better about tagging this one while I have a lookout.

“Stop freaking out. Just don’t think about being caught. Let’s just leave something lasting on this bridge, make our mark, and we’ll get out of here.”

“I can’t believe you think this is fun.”

“It is fun,” I say as I lift one foot off the bridge in order to reach a spot toward the bottom of my design. It’s different tonight. The fox is the same, but I’ve added little something else to mark it as the joint effort of Saige and me.

“Shit, there’s a car!”

I chuckle as I hear the near panic in her voice, but when I hear the car pass, I reach my hand back. “Green, please.”

She takes one can out of my hand and replaces it with the requested color. “Hurry up. I’m totally going to punch you in the gut if I get into trouble for this.”

In less than a minute, I’m finished and facing her. “There’s nothing wrong with a little trouble, Saigaweena. Lets you know you’re alive.”

“Saigaweena?”

“It made you smile, so yeah, Saigaweena.”

I look both ways and cross the street. I want to take her hand and pull her along with me, but I leave her to make her own decision. She follows, which excites me not only because she’s carrying half my paint, but because every time I’m near her, I get a little thrill. It’s like riding a roller coaster for the first time and the cart has just reached the summit of the first hill, and you look down and think what did I get myself into?

There’s no hole in the fencing on this side, so I take out my cutting pliers and use as much force as I can to snap the metal.

“Holy shit, Fox. Tagging’s one thing, now you’re destroying the—”

I stop what I’m doing and put my hands on her shoulders. “Ninja’s don’t talk so much. It’s quiet time. Let me work, and you can nag me about it later, okay?”

She narrows her eyes. “I’m not nagging. I’m protesting.”

“Protest silently.”

“This is destruction of property!”

“What you call destruction of property, I call beautifying the urban American landscape.”

“It’s graffiti,” she says, her voice nothing more than a hiss.

“I prefer urban art, thank you very much.” Once the hole is big enough, I lean though it and make the same design as before. It takes less time because I’ve got the feel of it now.

As I lift myself back to an upright position, Saige is almost jumping up and down. “Oh my, God, there’s a f*cking cop!”

I turn to look behind me. She’s right, there’s a slow creeping cop car, lights off and nearing our spot. She’s frozen, so I knock the cans of paint out of her arms, grab one of her hands and start running toward the end of the bridge. We parked quite a bit away, but I know we can make it.

I can hear heavy footsteps behind us. The cop is out of his car and shouting, but I don’t slow down to listen to what he says. I might be jogging fast and keeping my attention on getting away, but there’s no stopping me from noticing how beautiful Saige is right now. Her body is in full motion, hair and dress floating behind her as she runs with me.

Once we’re off the bridge, I pull her into a wooded area at the corner of the highway. I can’t hear the cop behind us, and we are only a few yards from the car. When we’re halfway through, surrounded by trees, I stop and use the momentum we have to pull her close to me again. It’s just like when we danced in my room, except this time, I lean down and press my lips to hers.

At first, she doesn’t respond. She’s out of breath from running. I can feel her chest rising and falling against mine. I pull back just enough to let her suck in a deep breath of air, but then kiss her again. This time, her lips open, and she lets the kiss grow. I bring my hands up to her neck, curl my fingers around the back and use my thumbs to stroke her cheeks.

A distant siren and a flash of blue and red lights jar me out of the moment. With a smile, I grab her hand again, and together we run to her car.

Neither of us talk as she drives away, but as we go under the bridge, there’s no mistaking the smile she wears when she sees my art. Tonight, the fox I drew is surrounded by a green leaf, meant to represent Saige. The entire ride back to Pechimu, I watch her. Her expression never changes.

***

The ticks of the grandfather clock are almost deafening as I wait for Saige to come back into the room. It’s after nine at night, and we haven’t spoken since I drove away last night after tagging the bridge. After the kiss, neither of us said much beyond goodbye. I’d wanted to kiss her again, but it just didn’t feel right. Now, after working two shifts and waiting to see her, I don’t care if it feels right. I just want to kiss her again.

When she comes back from the kitchen, she places a glass of Pepsi on the table next to me, then sits down on the couch. She pulls her bare feet up and tucks them underneath of her. Everything seems uncomfortable now. It seemed so natural to kiss her last night.

We drink our soda in silence until I can’t take it anymore. “I know it’s not exactly who you are to overshare your thoughts, but you’re going to have to give me something here because I’m not one to freak out, but I’m on the verge of it. What are you thinking?”

Saige stays quiet as she chews on her bottom lip and turns her eyes to the bookshelf on the other side of the room.

“Saige?”

Finally, she speaks. “I just keep asking myself what you want.”

It takes me a minute to figure out what she’s talking about, but when I do, it’s like a weak punch in the gut. I know it’s her issue, not mine, but it never feels good when someone questions your intentions, especially when you’ve gone out of your way to be respectful and clear about what it is you want. I mean, I haven’t come right out and said I want her to be my girlfriend or anything, but I think I’ve been pretty obvious about it.

“Why are you so suspicious?”

Saige shrugs and still won’t look at me.

“Who hurt you?”

Her defensive eyes are on me now, fire within them. “No one hurt me.”

“You’ve never given anyone the chance, have you?”

It was just a guess, but the answer is clear when she looks away. “Why won’t you ever say what you want to say?”

“I don’t want to say anything. I’m just. . .I don’t know. You make me nervous. We barely know each other. I mean before that party, I barely even knew who you—”

She’s either flighty or in denial, and I don’t consider her a flighty person. “We used to sit across the library from each other after school.” It was almost the only thing to do some days.

“I never saw you.”

“I saw you.”

“That’s creepy,” she says with a hint of a smile.

“You never noticed me?”

Saige hesitates, then answers. “Maybe. But you were never reading books, just listening to music or generally being loud like the other cool kids.”

“You’re so funny.”

“Why?”

I get up and wander around the living room as I talk. “Because you’re so hesitant to speak up sometimes, but other times you have no problem sliding in your opinions.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“Hey, what’s this?” I run my hands over the triangular wooden box. I’m not stupid enough not to know what it is, especially since the glass window shows a few white stars in a sea of deep blue. I don’t think Saige likes going too deep, so I reconsider asking about the folded flag. “Let’s listen to music,” I say as I dock my player and thumb through my playlist, then turn on Band of Horses at a low volume. I choose “The Funeral” because I already know what she’s going to say if she answers the question. The flag is from a military funeral. The only question I have is whose.

“You move so fast from topic to topic, Fox. Are you sure you’re not ADHD as well as dyslexic?”

Maybe another person would have taken offense to that statement, but I know Saige doesn’t mean it like that. I twist around and smile at her. “Shiny objects distract me, remember?” I point back at the box on the shelf. She follows the line of my arm, hand, and finger with her eyes.

“It was my dad’s. The one that was on his coffin.”

There’s no joke I can tell that would make her smile in this moment, so I can’t fall back on that to defuse the emotional tension that has sprang up. Instead, I sit down next to her on the couch. Every other time I’ve sat on the chair across from her, but it seems like after kissing her last night, there’s nothing wrong with sitting this close to her today.

It doesn’t lessen the heaviness created by the revelation that her dad had a military funeral. “How’d he die?”

“In bits and pieces.” Saige twirls the ice and soda around in her glass before leaning forward and setting it on the tiled coaster on her coffee table. “He was a marine in Afghanistan.”

I don’t want to pry for details of how it happened, so I ask, “When?”

“2007.”

“What were you? Eleven?”

“Yeah.”

I now knew a huge piece of her past that unlocked the mystery of Saige. “That must’ve sucked.”

The words sound horrible once they’re out of my mouth, but they must not to her because one side of her mouth rises in a little sad smile. “It did.”

“Still does?”

She nods, and I can’t stand that she’s not looking at me, so I take just the tips of my fingers and touch them to her chin. Just a tiny bit of pressure gets her to turn to me. I let my lips draw up, and I say, “Hi.”

Although she is uncomfortable, she doesn’t look away. I stay quiet because something’s happening that would never happen between the two of us if words were involved. There is nothing in this world I’d rather be looking at right now. I’ve noticed before that her eyes change color depending on the day. Sometimes they’re blue, others green, another time they’ll be a smoky gray; but today they’re deep blue, like the Atlantic ocean when a storm is about to hit. Little flakes of silver circle the iris, and if I wasn’t so close to her, I’d have missed them.

“I told him I hated him when he reenlisted. Again.” Saige takes a deep breath, but doesn’t look away. This may be the longest she’s kept eye contact with me. “I mean, he was a marine before I came along. I realize that it was his life, but—”

“You’re upset because it seems like he chose his career over you?”

“Yeah,” she says in a whisper. “I mean, I get it, especially after what happened.” She pauses, and if it’s possible, an even heavier look of pain crosses her face. “He was killed a month later. I can never take back those words.”

“You were a kid.”

“It doesn’t matter. The words of a kid made him cry, and with that in his heart, we went out and died.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was in a vehicle and—”

“One of those IED things?”

“No. That’s almost passive, you know? Wrong place, wrong time. My dad was apparently accompanying someone important and was targeted in a rocket propelled grenade attack.”

I usually know what to say in almost any situation, but I’m struggling here. She lost her dad at eleven, and I’m not sure putting your mom in a hospital at age six is a good enough equivalent. But maybe losing a parent is losing a parent, no matter what takes them. Death. Disease. Mental Instability.

“He left something lasting though, you know?”

At this, she turns her eyes to the shelf with the folded flag. “What’s that?”

“A lot of stuff, actually. Like the fact that he was trying to do good by fighting in a war that—”

“I disagree,” she says with fire. “He shouldn’t have been over there. There’s nothing lasting about being blown to pieces.”

I’m not prepared to deal with a fiery Saige simply because she’s not usually fiery like this. At least not with me. “Okay. What about that picture he painted? You’ll always have that. And don’t forget about his best living legacy. You.”

She shakes her head, puts her feet on the floor, and makes a movement to get up. I curl my fingers with hers and keep her with me. “I’m serious. You’re his legacy, right? You’re the way his memory will last. Maybe it’s not what you do, but who you impact that’s important in life.”

Saige makes no more moves to leave the couch, but I keep my hand connected to hers. “It’s like all those people in New York when we were just kids, you know? It doesn’t matter if they were bankers or receptionists. If they were a CEO of a major company or if they were just a stockbroker. In ninety years when no one living was alive when those planes came in, the whole event won’t pass out of living memory simply because those people had made an impact on others. All those people who died left a lasting mark on the people in their lives, and they’ll never be forgotten because of it.”

Silence hangs over us, and I’m not sure what to do with it. She may like the quiet, but if it lasts too long, I don’t think I could handle it. It’s not me who breaks it though. Saige turns back and locks eyes with me again. I try to give her a smile like I did before, but there’s no hint on her face that she even sees it.

“My mom died on 9/11. I was five, and I barely remember her. How is that a legacy?”

I’m slow to speak. I don’t want to stick my foot in my mouth, but more than that, I don’t want to upset her. “First, I’m sorry.” I squeeze her hand. “That’s horrible. Losing your mom, then your dad. I can’t even imagine it.”

“Don’t imagine it. Nothing good will come of thinking about being so alone.”

I pull her hand into my lap. With both of mine, I massage the palm, then move up to her fingers. “You’re not alone. You have Myka and Valentine.” I take hold of her other hand and start rubbing it with my thumbs. “And me.”

When she stays silent, I open my mouth to speak, but before I can, she pulls her hands away, twists her body so she’s completely facing me. One of her legs is up on the couch, her knee pressing against my thigh. “There’s no substitute for your parents, Fox. My grandma tried, but I couldn’t stand how she tried. No words of comfort mean a damn thing when your dad’s being shot at and your mom’s body hasn’t even been found. I was five when she was killed. It took me until I was eight to stop praying every night that she’d come home.”

She pauses, then asks, “Don’t you feel abandoned by your mother? I mean, she’s still living, I understand that, but still, it’s not like she’s your mom anymore in anything but name.”

My heart starts to hurt a little. “I don’t like thinking about it.”

“Because when you do, it hurts like hell, right? Is that her legacy to you?”

I try to think of a joke that will work in this situation, but I come up empty again. I can already feel my mood slipping into a place I never want it to be, so I struggle to find something to hold onto because I don’t want to think about the legacy of fear and confusion my mother has put on me. I don’t want to think about how my chances of being schizophrenic are much higher than someone else’s simply because my mother has it. I don’t want to think about those dark images she put in my mind when I was too little not to listen, and I don’t want to linger on the fact that from my earliest memory on, my mother was absent in my life.

Before I know it, I’m chewing on my fingernails, and I’m lost in a world where I’m a helpless kid.

“Knock, knock.”

I blink, swallow hard, then refocus on Saige. She’s sitting there with hope in those blue eyes. I look down and see that she’s taken a hold of my hands this time. “Who’s there?”

“Banana.”

“Banana who?”

“Knock, knock,” she says again.

“Who’s there?”

“Banana.”

“Banana who?” I ask.

“Knock, knock.”

I wonder if she even knows the format of a knock knock joke, but I ask again, “Who’s there?”

“Orange?”

“Orange who?”

“Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?”

The smile that spreads on my face is genuine and hers mirrors it. With a little twist of my wrists, I take a better hold of her hands. Our palms are pressed together now. “That was funny.”

Saige shrugs. “I just remembered it. I think my dad told it to me.” Saige averts her eyes for just a moment, and when she brings them back to me, she asks, “Do you want to work on the book?”

For once, I’m at a loss for words, so I nod and appreciate how respectful she is that even people like me, with a naturally positive outlook on life, sometimes just feel like crap. Apart from the joke, she doesn’t try to pull me up out of the muck of my mind; she just lets me work through it all in the manner best suited for me.

As she flips open her laptop and starts telling me all the stuff she’s written for our graphic novel, I can’t take my eyes off her. It’s almost ridiculous how much I adore this girl.