I’ve met that police officer before—with the moustache.
Howie used to live in Willow Square. In winter, he’d set up his sleeping bag in the drained, empty fountain and shake his cup of change at you. The city complained, and one day, when Howie and I were playing checkers on the steps of the fountain, the cops came to move him. There were two of them—one was the lieutenant, gruff and mean. Pile of dirt, he spat at Howie as he shooed me away. I retreated to a storefront as the other cop squatted down into Howie’s line of sight. “Fletcher,” his badge said. He helped Howie up by the arms, gathered Howie’s things into his shopping cart while the lieutenant filled out a report on a clipboard, grumbling with annoyance under his breath.
As he arrests Mr. O, Officer Fletcher’s gaze is somewhere else. When I follow his line of sight, I see her: Querida. Querida, in her black veil, gripping the arm of a man who could be her brother, tears streaming down her face as she shakes her head like No, no, no.
Querida notices me, but only for a second. She looks away quickly, panicked. But in that second, her dark eyes hold mine. So brief. Ashamed. I see myself very suddenly, too. It’s like looking into a mirror as shower fog evaporates: I am the line connecting the dots.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it—how it’s possible to be a secondary character in your own story.
The sun is blinding. Cars idle in the parking lot, silent witnesses.
“You had him last year, didn’t you, Jay?” Ma says. “For art class, what was it, pottery?”
“Ceramics.”
“Did he ever do anything to you?”
“What?”
“Did he ever touch you?”
“God, no, Ma. That’s disgusting.”
“He always creeped me out,” Amy chimes in. “He stays for hours after school every day, just looking at paintings and stuff.”
“I don’t know, Amy . . . he is an art teacher.”
“Watch it, Jade,” Ma snaps, digging through her purse for the car keys.
People stand in small groups around the parking lot, gossiping. Everywhere I go, Mr. O’s name.
“Jade!” someone says from behind.
Mrs. Arnaud holds up her long black skirt, hurrying over from the other side of the parking lot. Ma has already started the car, and Amy fixes her hair in the passenger’s-side mirror.
“Jade.” Mrs. Arnaud stops near the bumper of Ma’s Subaru. She wears her hair in black mourner’s lace like a 1940s widow, and it falls in pretty tendrils around her face. The Arnauds are technically two years younger than my parents, but it’s like they’re impervious to time, the way naturally good-looking people tend to be. They do things like running and hiking and biking. Mrs. Arnaud always looks like she’s just returned from a tropical vacation.
Now, Mrs. Arnaud squints at me, using a tanned hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“It’s Edouard,” she says. When I first met the Arnauds, they both had thick French accents, but in the years since they’ve become barely detectable. “He’s a mess. He won’t speak to anyone. We don’t know what to do.”
I wonder if she’s somehow missed the memo—if the last year has shrunk into a short blip in her mind, a speed bump in my and Zap’s friendship. If she even noticed at all.
“I know you haven’t been over in a while,” she says. “But maybe you could stop by this afternoon? I think he’d like to see you.”
She’s wrong, but I don’t tell her that. I nod and fight the urge to pull her close, to rest my tired head on Mrs. Arnaud’s shoulder, which I know will smell like Burberry perfume and brand-name laundry detergent.
WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK
A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns
EXT. FUNERAL HOME PARKING LOT—DAY
Celly and BOY’S MOTHER (43, glowing tan), stand side by side against the whiplash wind. Celly looks beautiful in a white summer dress.
CELLY
You know him. Boy. Your son.
BOY’S MOTHER
Yes, of course I do.
CELLY
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
BOY’S MOTHER
I just told you, he’s home.
Celly shifts her weight from one foot to the other.
CELLY
That’s not what I meant.
We weren’t friends at first. Zap had the three thirty slot for piano lessons, and I had the four o’clock. Our teacher was named Erin and she had three cats—they would sit on top of the piano during lessons, letting the sound reverberate across their furry stomachs.
Erin always ran late, so Ma would sit in the living room and make small talk with Mrs. Arnaud. They were new to town. Ma invited them over for dinner one day after piano lessons.
That summer, we rode bikes. Around the cul-de-sac, through the swamp on the outskirts of the neighborhood where the irrigation system had flooded a concave field. The town didn’t have the funds to clean it out. We collected sticks and pretended they were fishing rods, dunking them in slimy water. We caught toads in buckets and hid them in Amy’s room. One died in her closet. I was grounded for three weeks. We read easy novels in Zap’s backyard hammock, picking aphids off the white rope.
I spent most of my days in Zap’s clean, well-decorated house. The Arnauds had this grandfather clock they’d brought over from France, a family heirloom—I remember thinking how cool that was. How genuine. My family would never do such a thing. Garbage, Ma would say, with a pull of her cigarette.
Zap became obsessed with astronomy after the fifth-grade trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They had this giant planetarium, and the guide bombarded us with facts that Zap wrote down in the miniature notebook he kept in his back pocket. There are fourteen known black holes in existence, and The Big Dipper is an asterism, not a constellation, and You can’t hear a scream in outer space. He typed all these facts up on his parents’ computer, 16-point Verdana, and hung them on his bedroom wall, adding to the list every time he found something new or noteworthy. Soon, his room was covered in charts and diagrams, in pictures of astronauts in marshmallow suits bouncing across the surface of the moon. He was going to be an astronaut, he said, and even though it sucked because he’d be gone for years at a time, he promised he’d bring me back rocks from as many planets as he could, to add to my collection.
Our parents had dinner—usually at the Arnauds’ house—while Zap and I disappeared upstairs. We played Pokémon cards. We watched the neighbors with binoculars. They’ll get married one day, our parents used to joke.
Ninth grade, a week before Christmas, Louis Travelli nudged Zap as we walked down the hill toward my neighborhood. Into fat girls, eh? Louis said, kicking the bottom of Zap’s backpack. Zap looked at me with this twisted face: anxiety to such an extreme, it could have been disgust. I should go home, Zap said, once Louis had gone. I have a lot of work to do tonight.