Uh-oh.
“He’s concerned about you, and so are your mom and I.”
“Listen, I’m not going back to him. I’ll find a different therapist. He wants to put me on pills. Yeah, okay, I shouldn’t have told him to eat a bag of dicks—”
“You did what?” Mom said, her face darkening.
Clearly Dr. Nelson hadn’t told them that part. “That’s not important,” I said. “Just, I’m not crazy and I don’t need to be put on medication.”
“Ozzie,” Mom said. “Dr. Nelson is concerned that, with all of the changes in your life, leaving your support system might not be best for your mental health.”
“What support system? You’re leaving, Warren’s gone, Lua and Dustin can’t wait to escape Cloud Lake, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see Tommy again.” I didn’t give them the chance to respond. “I don’t have a support system.”
Dad sighed. “Be that as it may, we—your mother and I—think it would be best if you lived with me and attended community college for a semester or two. You can defer enrollment at one of your other schools for a year, but until you’re sorted out, we think this is the right thing for you.”
I stood up so quickly I knocked my chair over. “That’s not your decision to make!” Mom reached out to me, but I pulled away.
“Ozzie . . .”
“It’s not my fault you guys are getting divorced. Don’t punish me for your mistakes.”
Dad didn’t do “serious” often, but he was serious now. “Weren’t you the one considering going to community college anyway?” he asked. “Maybe you were right. We think—”
“There’s no ‘we’ anymore!” I yelled. “You’re not a we. Whether I stay here or go to college, or join Greenpeace so I can lob fake-blood-filled balloons at whalers, is my choice, not yours.”
Dad’s usually soft face hardened. “I hate to inform you, son, but unless you can pay for school on your own, it is our decision.”
I turned to Mom. “You can’t let him do this!”
“It’s only for a semester,” she said. “Two at most.”
My mom and dad hadn’t presented a united front on anything in well over a year. It didn’t matter whether I wanted to leave or not, they had come together to rob me of the ability to choose for myself. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t speak. They’d robbed me of that, too.
I stormed upstairs and slammed my door behind me.
TOMMY
I FIND TOMMY ON THE swings. He doesn’t hear me approach from behind, or if he does, he doesn’t acknowledge me. I stand at the edge of the mulch perimeter and watch. Tommy kicks higher and higher; his back arches and his arms straighten as he strains to gain momentum.
I don’t understand the appeal of swings. It doesn’t matter how hard you kick or how much effort you expend; you never actually go anywhere. All that work is futile, but Tommy tries anyway. I imagine him swinging so high his feet touch the moon. He lets go at the top of his arc and sails into the starry sky.
But that’s not what happens. Eventually Tommy drags his feet through the rust-colored wood chips and stops.
“Hey,” I say, kicking at the ground to make sure I don’t startle him.
Tommy turns around. Even in the fading daylight the bruises around his right eye and on his neck are visible. Blood cakes his upper lip under his nose. He doesn’t smile when he sees me.
“I tried the trailer, but your mom said you’d gone for a walk.”
“Sorry,” he says. “I had to get out of there.”
“I get it.” I sit in the swing next to his. The chains groan. I doubt they’re meant to hold the weight of teenage boys. “Your dad do that?”
Tommy nods. “I forgot to put the lid on the trash, and raccoons got into it.”
“Oh.”
“It looks worse than it is.”
I twist in the swing, catching glimpses of Tommy from the corner of my eye. “You’ve got to get out of there,” I say. “When we go to college—”
“I’m never getting out of Cloud Lake,” Tommy says. “I’m going to wind up stuck here like Pops and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“You can do anything you want. Maybe we can talk to my parents about you living with us until we graduate next year.”
“Right,” Tommy says with a bitter laugh.
“And with your grades, I bet you can get a scholarship—”
“I’m not going to college, Ozzie!” Tommy stands, leaving the swing shaking. He walks to the slide and sits at the bottom. “You don’t get it. You’ll never get it.”
“Then tell me.”
Tommy scrubs his face with his hands. “You think everything is easy. You think anything is possible because you’re white and your parents have money and all your life people have told you there’s nothing out of your reach.”
“I know it’s harder for you—”
“You don’t know shit,” he says.
“We can figure this out, Tommy.”
Tommy falls silent. I wish I could read his mind. Cloud Lake isn’t exactly diverse, and Tommy’s always been one of the few black kids in town, but I didn’t think it bothered him.
“People see me,” Tommy says. “And all they see is my skin. Most of them don’t even take the time to get to know me before passing judgment. I’m black first, everything else a distant second.”
“Not to me.”
“Fuck you,” he says. “I don’t need you to save me, Ozzie.” Tommy looks at me, his eyes so intense. “You know why my mama sticks around?” he says. “Why she puts up with him beating on her and on me?”
I shake my head.
“Because no matter what he does to her, he’s not as scary as the unknown. She has no idea who she is without my pops, and she’s terrified to find out.” Tommy hugs his knees to his chest. “I don’t want to end up like that, but I don’t know how not to.”
“Please just let me help.”
“No,” Tommy says. “Whatever I do, I need to know I did it on my own, even if I don’t know who I am yet.”
“You want me to take you home?” I ask after a while.
“Can we just drive around?” he asks.
“Sure.”
Tommy doesn’t talk while we drive, so I turn on some music and roll down the windows. I drive all the way to Calypso before Tommy tells me he should get back so he can check on his mom.
When I drop him off in front of the trailer, he leans back in through the window and says, “Do you ever wonder who you’d be if we’d never met?”
I shake my head. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
Tommy shrugs. “Don’t you think maybe you should?”
381,705 KM
MS. NOVAK WAVED ME DOWN AND held up a plastic tumbler of iced tea. I tried to shout I’d be done in a couple of minutes, but she couldn’t hear me over the lawnmower’s choppy growl. The grass was thick, and sand spurs clung to my shoelaces, though they were probably about the most benign things hiding in the weedy overgrowth. By the time I finished the front yard, my shirt was soaked through with sweat, so I tugged it off and threw it on the trunk of my car to dry.