“Just don’t tell Stephen. He’ll light our bus up with a Molotov cocktail.”
For another whole day Jeremy stared at his phone, until it occurred to him that neither response — approved, denied — would answer the question he had been hanging on.
Forty-five minutes later he was on the eastern perimeter, parking at a nearly abandoned strip mall where he found Brick, Butter, and Younce nestled between a gospel church and a military recruiting center.
“Hello?” he called, standing before an unmanned desk in a low room lined with faux-wood paneling. The place looked like a den of shysters.
“Jeremy?” asked Stephen when he emerged, sounding unsure of his name.
“I’m wondering what happens if I violate a restraining order.”
“Depends on who took the order out.”
“Father of the fifteen-year-old I slept with,” Jeremy said. He knew how Stephen felt about the men at camp, and he wasn’t going to downplay his crime.
“If you write her a letter, I could deliver it.”
Stephen was staring hungrily at Jeremy, who’d seen that look before — from across the circle, from across the fire. He could smell alcohol. For only one reason did anyone help anyone, and it had as little to do with Jeremy himself as the AA groups’ hatred did.
“Just tell me how long I’d go to jail.”
“You’re on parole, right?”
He nodded, suddenly ashamed of bringing such an obvious question in. “I only asked because I was passing by on the way to a meeting.”
“You pass five feet from my tent every day,” said Stephen. He probably thought Jeremy was lying, which for once Jeremy was doing.
“That reminds me, the cops came to confirm what I told everybody Monday.”
“Yeah, and you attacked a kid in Savannah wearing Mickey Mouse ears.”
“Okay, well,” Jeremy said.
“Who will you be this afternoon?”
“Not you; you’re different,” he said, another lie. He had read about Stephen at work. It was a good story. He could act it out.
Stephen was nodding. “There are tiers,” he said. “There’s us, and there’s everyone else.”
“I feel the same,” Jeremy said, standing to go.
“I’ll find out by tomorrow about your restraining order.”
Jeremy thanked him and left. He navigated the access road with care, breathing as deliberately as he could. Not until he’d merged onto the highway did he floor it, stereo on fifty, screaming along to a Björk song’s dissonant chords. She could distort his world into icy echoes that sealed him inside a blue crevasse, but not today. He aimed his hood ornament at the skyline and soon he was in Little Five Points, parking at the Fishers’, where Melissa answered in a leather jacket, holding a Siamese cat.
Her auburn hair was so stylishly coiffed that Jeremy gasped. “You’re ringing my bell,” she said, as the cat scrambled to escape.
“I’ve loved you all this time. You’re all I’ve got. Don’t shout.” How often had he rehearsed the lines that fell out of him like lead pellets? Speaking them, he got the sensation that he knew the wrong meaning of love, that that was the wrong thing he’d learned back in the blizzard.
“Your camp’s in the news,” Melissa replied.
She might as well have slapped his face. He wanted to slap her back. His mind wasn’t in his head; it was in his arm, slapping her. Just in time, he grabbed that arm with his other hand, and nodded toward a diploma on the mantel.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“Yeah, I’d have graduated no matter what.”
No matter how many times you hurt me, Jeremy thought, but he said, “I’ve come to apologize,” telling his third lie of the day, the one most likely to draw Melissa out of her father’s house.
He gestured up the block, where too many people were gardening for her to claim any threat. “Two minutes,” she said, slipping on her shoes.
The first half-minute he squandered on silence while waiting to escape any possible earshot or sight line. When they got to the main shopping street, he said, “I’m moving.”
“Me too, for a master’s in social work.”
To help abuse victims like yourself, he thought, hating Melissa again for being so smug. For not asking where he was moving. For pretending she’d never loved him. Spending the summer in Seville, after the trouble she’d caused by applying there. Finding a Spanish boyfriend, learning a language from him and God knew what else. He swallowed the anger, took her by the shoulders and said, “I’ll never stop loving you.”
They had stopped beside a newsstand. “Here’s what I was talking about,” Melissa said, so flippantly that she could have punctuated herself by blowing a bubble.
A headline read, “Homeless Sex Offenders Pitch Camp in Wild,” above a picture of Allen’s tent.
“Dad’s still kind of obsessed. He followed you there, then he went to the cops and they’re closing it.”
“I see,” Jeremy said. He walked on. After seven years, he was still a puppet on her dad’s string, and so was she and that was that.
The only way to force her into an emotion was to have a panic attack.
It wasn’t a decision so much as it was simply destined to happen. Kneeling on the sidewalk amid dog-walking couples, he held steady against the air. “Breathe,” Melissa said, jostling him. He shivered at that touch, the first in seven years, but took in no air. She shook harder. “Inhale!” she cried, full of concern.
His plan was working. All he had to do now was stop loving her.
It ought to be easy, with this new face to match to his old memories. He’d always fancied underdogs. His mom and dad; the Braves until they bought their way to first; Melissa, stammering through her testimony that day at Alateen when they had met. Crying about her dad the goner and all he’d squandered. She wasn’t an underdog anymore. He took the face begging him to breathe and put it to the time at Burger King when he’d had only three dollars, the evening after they’d buried his own father. What if we share a Whopper and a Coke, he’d asked, but she’d wanted her own Whopper and her own Coke. “You’re the dumbass who forgot the money,” she had said.
As he imagined her chewing that hamburger, the light ebbed. Selfishness was innate, it didn’t come from being young.
He awoke beside a juniper bush with Melissa squeezing his hand, crying. He stood up. “Go home,” he said. “You’re too old for me now.”
“Not falling for that,” she said, in pursuit not toward her house but Patrick’s car, which he’d already pointed toward I-75, which stretched north to Canada, where he could bear west across the boreal forest for five thousand miles.
If he reached that forest, he thought, walking faster, his luck had turned.
“I know how you try to make people hate you.”
“It’s been two minutes.”
“Where will you go when they close it?”
“Told you. Alaska.”
“You only said moving. Ask where I’m moving.”
“I’m not attracted to women your age.”
“Do you even have a job lined up?”
“No, ask your dad to lend me some money,” he said — a funny joke, given that Mr. Fisher really had spent tens of thousands of dollars to try and send Jeremy away forever. The best things were free, he thought, smiling in farewell. Her lip was quivering when he turned away, so he never knew if she acknowledged the irony before turning toward home.
6.
The name on Allen’s birth certificate was Al Jack Downey, Jr., after his dad, who’d been named for two minor-league all-stars. At school Allen liked bragging on Jack’s 100-mph shine ball and Al’s 600-foot home runs. He said he’d met Michael Jackson and his mom was Robert E. Lee’s great-grandniece. It got to where other kids called bullshit even on the truth. “If those dudes and your grandpa was so good, why didn’t they reach the majors?” By then Allen’s grandpa was dead along with his other grandparents. His mom was in New Mexico; his dad was locked up. No one around could confirm or deny anything, and Allen resolved to go look for Jack and Al himself someday.