“I never knew my dad,” I said, breathing in that first sweet bitter mouthful of death and ash.
He looked away sharply. I wondered if Maya had told him about our dad. About the lobster boat. I wondered what they had talked about, when they were together, while he was biding his time, before he hurt her or brought her to Ott and Bastien to be hurt.
“Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world,” he said.
“No?”
“No,” he said. “At least there’s nobody trying to make you into someone you’re not.”
Nobody but me, I thought.
“Does he ever hit you?” I asked. Tariq frowned. Opened his mouth. Shut it.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “That’s a terrible question to ask. It’s none of my business.”
Tariq laughed. “You know what, though? That much, I don’t mind. And anyway, he mostly stopped, around about the time I got to be taller than him. When I started spending so much time in the weight room that I look like whatever stupid soldier man he was, back in Syria, when he was my age. But that’s the worst part—it’s like he’s already won. He’s already made me into what he wants me to be. He’s in my head. I don’t even know how much of me is me and how much of me is him.”
“I wonder what fucks you up more,” I said. “Having no dad or having an asshole dad?”
He laughed. “If only there was some test you could take to see how fucked up you are. Then we could both take it and decide who’s more fucked up. Then that’d answer your question.”
I cut my laughter short. Back to business. The business of breaking him. “It’s my sister who really got the raw deal here. They say when girls grow up without a father figure, it messes up their whole love life from there. They never learn how to tell the difference between a guy you can trust and a guy you can’t. That’s what all the talk show assholes say, anyway.”
“Maybe that’s true for some people,” Tariq said, “but not for everyone.”
“But I think in her case, it is,” I said.
Tariq’s eyes widened just the slightest bit.
“She . . . told you?”
I shrugged. Looked at the ground, at my feet. Shuffled through the deck in my head, wondering if there was another card I could play. “Sort of.”
He nodded. “Follow me.”
We walked into the trees, which grew taller around us as we went, like something in a fairy tale. We walked for a while, talking, smoking, breathing, being alive. Soon the orderly rows of planted trees broke down, and we were in real forest, primeval growth that stretched probably all the way up to Canada, and through Canada, to the line no trees grow north of. I ached to take off my shoes, dig my toes into the dirt, feel the roots and bedrock and staggering raw scope of the earth we walked on.
I picked up a couple pine needles. I shut my eyes and breathed. Felt life energy swirling densely around me, knotted and looping around the pine trees—here was life, here was power, here was the essential energy that the entire universe was built from, and it was mine to see, control, ignite—
I flicked my fingers, like snapping them, pinching them with precisely enough pressure and speed to create just enough friction—
The pine needles sparked and crackled and burst into flame as they fell away, and burned themselves out before they hit the ground.
“What was that?” Tariq asked.
I stamped out the embers with my feet.
“Just snapping my fingers,” I said.
“I hung out with your sister a couple of times,” he said, sitting down on a stump.
This was it. The confession. He couldn’t have heard how my heart and breath both stopped, so he kept going. “She and I had never been friends, but she came up to me after school and asked if I’d sell her a cigarette.”
That was the line she always used to start conversations with people she was interested in. She used to teach me all her tricks. Someday you’ll be in a place where you can actually be who you really are, and you need to know how courtship rituals work, she told me.
“I gave her one for free, of course. And you know, we just started talking now and then after that. She was the one who got me into punk rock.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “The nostril piercing.”
He laughed. “Her idea. In a weird, Jedi-mind-trick sort of way.”
“My sister can be very manipulative,” I said. “In a good way.”
So can I, I didn’t add. In a bad way.
I took a long time thinking about what to say, weighing options, trying to be cool, finding I couldn’t. “What did you guys talk about?”
“About you, actually. She’d do anything for you.”
“I know,” I whispered, hideously embarrassed at how swiftly tears sprang to my eyes and overflowed. “At least, I thought I knew.”
Tariq reached out, a spontaneous, unplanned action. We are primates, after all, hardwired to respond to the emotions of others, and the sight of my crying triggered some buried mammalian empathy instinct in Tariq. “Matt . . . ”
And there it was, clawing its way up from his gut, squirming out his throat, the Secret, the thing he could never share with anyone, the shame and guilt that made his whole life a living hell, the need to confess, just like so many criminals in cop shows and mystery novels. . . .
I could see it emerging.
“Hey!” someone called. A big, dumb someone, stomping through the trees like an elephant, but with an arrogance no elephant could ever match.
“Hey, Ott,” I said, when he blundered into the clearing where we stood. Last time I saw him, he had been sitting on the ground with his face six shades of red from a dodgeball strike to the testicles. I turned my head and wiped the tears from my eyes as sneakily as I could.
“Matt,” he said, looking at me as little as possible. Surprised and unhappy to find me there. I stared at him, the broad rough cheekbones and flabby wide neck, and dared him to make eye contact. I couldn’t read him, couldn’t get a handle on what he was feeling. Anger, yes, but confusion, too—fear and the uncertainty that comes when you find out you were wrong about someone. “Missed you at school today, Tariq.”
“Yeah, well.” Tariq shrugged, said nothing more. I smelled worry. Maybe shame. And my newly magnificent mind, amped up by the Art of Starving, made the connections.
He is worried about what Ott will think, seeing him hang out with Known Degenerate Matt.
He is worried about what Ott will say to other people. He is worried what other conclusions people will draw.
“The guys always come here,” Tariq said to me. “The soccer team. It’s a good spot to get drunk, smoke up.”
Ott asked, “You smoke, Matt?”
From a hoodie pocket he pulled a plastic baggie, and squatted down on the ground beside me.
“No,” I said, my face deadly serious. “I get high on life.”
Then I laughed. They laughed. They didn’t notice my expression of disgust.
Three tokes in, smiling already, Ott said: “Nice moves in dodgeball the other day. Since when are you a ninja?”
I shrugged.
“A week ago you were throwing like a girl.”
“Shut up, Ott,” Tariq said.