Part 28: James

With his mom and Becca gone for the day, and his dad occupied with some project in the garage - something practical, something homeownery - James was basically alone, basically free. He saw the day spread out before him like a desert that extended infinitely in all directions. Or like the ocean to a shipwrecked sailor. Either image worked. They felt the same, despite being opposites. Too much water is the same as not enough, he reflected.

Like Adam expelled from Eden, he could do whatever he wanted. But he had lost his Eve. And the whole problem with the Snake was that she did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to do it, and he didn’t want to be like Her.

He sat on the couch, deliberately ignoring the computer and the TV because they were poisonous, and fragments of old conversations drifted back to him.

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: i hate when people say be yourself

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: like who the f else am i being

xx themachine: i think it means like be true to yourself

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: how can you not be though?

xx themachine: well you can lie to yourself

xx themachine: try to be something your not

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: some people can

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: but not people like us

That was the Snake at work - trying to make him think they were the same. But they were different, so different.

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: did you ever do the thing in school where like

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: they have you taste different things

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: one sweet one salty etc

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: and you’re supposed to taste them on different parts of your tongu

xx themachine: yeah! we did that in like fifth grade

xx themachine: and then we had to color in this picture of a tongue lmao

xx themachine: that’s so weird that you did that in ct too

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: did people in your class say they actually tasted them?

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: what do you mean?

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: like did they pretend they tasted sour on the back or w/e

xx themachine: pretend??????

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: yeah the whole thing’s bullshit

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: your tongue doesn’t have different parts for different tastes

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: it’s just one big tongue

xx themachine: really?

xx themachine: i didn’t know that

xx themachine: so they were lying to us?

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: yeah, most of school is lies

xx themachine: true

xx themachine: like the christopher columbus thing

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: yeah he was a piece of shit

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: but i remember all the kids in my class like

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: acting like they actually tasted them that way

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: and that’s when i realized

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: they were all full of shit

xx themachine: i tasted them like that though

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: you did???

xx themachine: or at least i thought i did idk

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: no fuckin way

xx themachine: maybe not

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: but anyway i told the teacher

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: to stop lying to kids

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: and got sent to the principal lmao

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: but the principal like barely even cared

That’s why they were different, that right there. She saw things a certain way and she just said it. No doubt, no hesitation. But he tried. He tried to see things from the other person’s point of view; to walk around in their shoes or their skin or whatever. She was only ever Hannah. That used to be what he admired about her, but now he hated it. Wasn’t it the same thing that made Hitler so bad? Being so sure he was right?

James stood up and walked into the kitchen, opened up the refrigerator, and looked around. He wasn’t hungry, just bored. After the refrigerator, he tried the cabinets. Tons of food, nothing appetizing. Suburbs in a nutshell. He opened the refrigerator again, grabbed a bottle of water, and went upstairs to his room.

His dirty laundry was strewn around his room, his bed was unmade.

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: what’s the point of making your bed

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: if you’re just going to mess it up again?

He had agreed at the time. Or thought he had. But now he saw making his bed and picking up his laundry as the thin line that separated him from Her. You have to try, he insisted, tossing a balled-up t-shirt into a laundry basket. You have to do things that you don’t want to do sometimes, he declared, tucking in the corner of his sheet. It’s not all about you, he added, patting a pillow forcefully.

There. That would make his mom happy, at least. She was always hounding him about keeping his room clean, and he was always saying it didn’t matter, no one saw his room anyway, he liked it like that. But those were Hannah’s arguments, really. He’d thought he was being independent, but really he was just following someone else.

Well, no more. From now on he would be totally independent.

Taking the water bottle with him, James left the door to his room open a crack, so that his mom might see it when she came home, but not open enough that she would think he wanted her to see it - he didn’t do it for her, not really, he did it for himself, as a declaration of independence - and went back downstairs. Bedroom, living room, kitchen, porch. He had already been in all of them today. And he’d already fought against ignorance by reading his book, against selfishness by making his bed - what other demons were left to slay?

Clangs and knocks rose up from the garage. He could go help his dad with whatever he was doing down there. Something with the car, or the boiler, maybe. He could stand there and hold a wrench or a screwdriver, listen to the muttering and swearing directed at no one. (Did he do it when no one was there? Trees falling in forests . . .)

No, the idea was intolerable; impossible. It’d be one thing if he was asked. But to make it happen now, he’d have to go to his dad and say, “Hey, do you need any help?” and be such a Good Son that it made him feel vaguely sick - and his dad would say “Sure,” but only because he felt obligated to be a Good Dad, and James would be trapped there for a couple hours, or maybe even the rest of the day, not actually helping, if anything just getting in the way - both of them would figuring they were doing the other one a favor. And his dad would be left wondering: doesn’t my son have anything better to do than this, is my kid really such a loser that this is how he is spending his only Saturday, shouldn’t he be out causing trouble, raising hell, getting kicked out of stores, when I was his age . . .

James found himself lingering at the bottom of the stairs. He wanted to talk to someone, actually face-to-face talk. It didn’t matter who. Just not his dad, and not Hannah. Who else was there? Sean? Fine, Sean was just as good as anyone else. He thrust open the front door and set off in the direction of Sean’s house.

Normally, he wouldn’t go somewhere without making plans, without messaging the person first and making sure they were home and didn’t have anyone else over. But this was how people in real places did things, wasn’t it? This was the more authentic, more independent way of living. Sun on your face, wind in your hair (there wasn’t much wind, but that was fine), birds chirping, striding boldly into an unknown future . . . Hannah would never do it, that was for sure. She was addicted to the computer.

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: i couldnt live if i was born back then

XXxSuicidesxGracexXX: id probably kill myself out of boredom

xx themachine: i feel like i could

xx themachine: and plus like

xx themachine: if you were born back then

xx themachine: it would seem normal to you

xx themachine: wouldn’t it?

When was “back then?” Pioneer days or caveman days or slavery or racism or the Holocaust - it all kind of blended together in his mind. It was all anti-suburban. It was all more real than this (James looked around at the houses and lawns of his neighborhood, and chose one to single out as the worst offender, one with stone walls crisscrossing the lawn, a tall wooden fence in the back.) That was when life was actually challenging, when it was actually interesting.

Sean’s house was about a ten minute walk away from James’s. But how long had it been since he’d actually walked here, or ridden his bike or skateboard? Years, probably. He always got a ride - how pathetic. What a waste. No wonder the planet was polluted and suffocating. But it wasn’t totally his fault. As soon as he said, “Hey mom can I go to Sean’s?” she automatically assumed she was driving him; she gave him a response like, “Sure, just give me five minutes and I’ll bring you.” Susan might have grown up in the city, but she was the most suburban of them all. Well, that made sense: she had chosen it.

In the future, though, he wouldn’t ask. That was his problem. He would just say, “I’m going to Sean’s” and then go. And she would be left there to gape at his boldness, his independence.

James strode up Sean’s front steps, feeling confident and purposeful, and knocked on the door three times. There was a doorbell, but he didn’t want to use it. Under his feet, there was a mat that probably said something like “Bless Our Home” but now was so worn away that all you could see was the shape of their words. Enough to get the gist. Inside, James could hear the competing sounds of two or three different TVs, but none of the noises that suggest that someone is approaching the door.

Impatient, he knocked again.

He thought of trick-or-treating as a kid, how most of it is really just waiting on porches.

And again.

After a while, you get sick of actually saying “trick-or-treat” and wish they would just give you the candy so you can move on.

Finally, he caved and used the doorbell.

That did it. A shift from static noise to bustling motion. The sound of the bell had interrupted their lives, caused them to lose focus on whatever they were doing or thinking about. For a moment, James felt vaguely guilty. What if someone had been right on the edge of an important breakthrough, and he had ruined it? What if they had been engrossed in the best part of a movie? What would they miss because they were dealing with the matter of the doorbell, because they were arguing over who would take care of it?

Talk about something Hannah would never consider. She expected everyone to drop everything for her, like she had a right to your time.

“Oh, hey, James,” Sean’s mom said, sounding surprised, when she opened the door. Her hair was half-straightened, half-frizzy; James had always assumed it was naturally straight. “Sean’s not home right now, actually. Did he know you were coming?”

“No, no, I just came by.” James felt embarrassed, like he had done something deeply wrong.

“Oh, alright then. Well, yeah, sorry, he’s not here.” Suddenly Sean’s mom seemed awfully young. Not a parent, just a person. “Maybe you could check the school? He had his skateboard.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that, thanks,” James said, turning to leave. He couldn’t bring himself to call her Mrs. Oullette, not with half-straightened hair and a stupid reality show playing in the background. The idea that he could have been interrupting anything important seemed laughable now. But it still made him a good person to have thought of it.

He headed in the direction of “the school” - not his current school, but where he and Sean (and Victoria and Courtney Collins, but not Hannah) had gone to elementary school, an eternity ago. Becca’s school now.

When they graduated fifth grade, he and Sean had sworn, with all the circumstance of childhood, that they would never go back to that "prison.” But a few weeks into the summer, they and a couple other neighborhood kids had decided to break in - maybe knock some stuff over or do some graffiti if they felt like it. The plans weren’t set in stone. Finding the doors locked, though, they had settled for playing on the swings and running around on the blacktop for a while. It was fun.

And it was different because they didn’t go there anymore. They were there because they wanted to be. 

Since that day, the elementary school playground had become one of their default places to go, a place they just ended up without ever really trying to. There was something that felt rebellious about it, though the original idea of breaking-in was never brought up again. It was almost like they were sticking it to authority by proving They didn’t decide when they could go to school and when they couldn’t.

Sure enough, when James rounded the corner that separated the school grounds from the rest of the world, he saw Sean sitting on the curb, idly moving his skateboard back and forth with his feet. He was on the phone with somebody and looked dejected. A girl, probably. Who did Sean like again? Or was he already going out with someone? James couldn’t remember. Some best friend he was.

Sean had that sort of long hair that keeps falling into your face every five seconds and makes you do a sort of flip-shake movement with your head every five seconds or so, which looks an awful lot like a nervous tic.

When he noticed James approaching him, he did a different head movement, the upward nod of acknowledgment, accompanied by an eyeroll to signify that the person on the phone was boring him and he’d much rather talk to James and he’d get rid of whoever it was as soon as possible.

James put his hands in his pocket and waited patiently. He looked around at the parking lot, the sky, the building, tried to remember how it had looked to him when he went to school here, or when he first moved here in second grade, or on that day they tried to break in. But nothing came. It was too familiar. He had been here too many times.

“Mmmhmm, yep. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay,” Sean was saying, exhausting his repertoire of meaningless expressions. “Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Alright love you too bye. Sup?” he said to James, flipping his phone shut but keeping it in his hands.

James decided not to ask who it was, because a good friend would have been able to guess. “You remember the time we tried to break into the school?”

“Break in?” Sean looked at him. “When was that?”

“Summer after fifth grade. It was me and you and I think Billy and Brandon maybe, and we said we were gonna break into the school, but the doors were locked. So we just played on the playground.”

“Are you sure I was there? I don’t remember that at all.”

“Yeah, you were definitely there,” James said, getting annoyed. How could Sean not remember? It had been the day they had broken their pact never to return to this hellhole. A turning point. Not to mention a particularly fun, innocent, carefree sort of day; maybe the last of them. “I think it was your idea, even.”

“Summer after fifth?” Sean squinted his eyes, evidently trying to remember. It occurred to James why he had stopped hanging out with Sean so much: he wasn’t very smart. Hannah would have remembered instantly. But Hannah was also the devil, so maybe it was better to be stupid. “Is that when I went out with fuckin’, uh, Victoria?”

“Fuck Victoria,” James responded.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“She was super annoying,” Sean agreed.

“She’s even worse now.” But was it even Victoria he was mad at? Or was that just what he thought last night when he was too cowardly to think anything bad about Hannah? Victoria was just another one of her victims. Another Eve she was convincing to eat the apple. Maybe they were allies, actually.

“Her and Hannah are, like, best friends, right?”

“Yeah.” Obviously.

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.” Sean wasn’t much of a talker; he was more a man of action. Their friendship had always been based around doing things: skateboarding, climbing trees, playing pool or darts or video games. You didn’t have to talk when you were doing something like that. But what could they do here, with only one skateboard and a playground? “Wanna go on the swings?” James ventured.

“The swings?” Sean repeated. “What are we, eight years old?”

“I don’t know, it was just an idea. Why, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t believe you don’t remember that time.” James crossed his arms, shook his head, forced a laugh: every movement felt unnatural. Maybe nostalgia could get them somewhere.

“What time?”

“The time we tried to break in to the school.”

“I don’t think that was me, dude.”

“It definitely was.” This wasn’t working. Sean was obviously mad about something else, probably whoever was on the phone, and James couldn’t be bothered to try anymore. It was too late to ask who it was. “Well, if you’re going to just sit here and be miserable, I’m going on the swings. Who cares if it’s childish or whatever.”

“Knock yourself out.”

James headed towards the swings, directly across the parking lot from where Sean was sitting, separate from the rest of the playground equipment. He half-expected to hear Sean get up and follow him, his resistance a pose, like when you get a present and you have to pretend you don’t want it for a round or two. If Sean came to the swings, the afternoon could be saved; the friendship could be saved. But all he heard was the occasional back-and-forth of the skateboard under Sean’s feet.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky. Still no wind. James could see his long shadow in front of him as he walked.

Was Sean really just going to sit there and watch him swing? And was he really going to pretend Sean wasn’t there? James suddenly felt like a little kid again, but not in the fun, pure, innocent way he now realized he had been hoping for. This was one of the forgotten parts of childhood, this feeling that other people were watching you play and you had to act like you were having fun even when you weren’t.

He sat down on a swing, facing Sean, and instantly felt overgrown, awkward. Too tall. There was a time when his feet didn’t touch the ground and he could pump them freely, on this same exact swing, but now they kept hitting the dirt and he couldn’t get a rhythm going. The rhythm was what made it fun. You could lose yourself in it. Or at least, he used to be able to. Was it too late? Was his childhood gone?

Finally, he saw Sean stand up, tuck his skateboard under his arm, and walk slowly, coolly over to the swings. Thank God. (He and Hannah once decided they’d stop saying that because they didn’t believe in God, but he hadn’t found a good alternative yet, and besides, Hannah still said it, and also, fuck Hannah.) Sean had seen reason and stopped being so stubborn. Swinging together would be more fun. More true to what childhood was really like. He’d never been alone on these swings before, he’d always been surrounded by other kids. That was the missing piece; that was why it felt wrong.

He looked down, up, everywhere but at Sean as his best friend (they were friends again, now that Sean had stood up) took his time approaching the swing set. Fine, he could go however slow he wanted. As long as he came. 

“Having fun?” he asked once he got close enough to talk, still keeping up the appearance of mocking James.

“Yeah, actually. Come on. Don’t be too cool for swings.”

Sean swept his hair out of his face, a way to stall.

“You know who I was talking to before?”

“Who? A girl?”

“No. Well, I guess kind of. It was my mom.”

“Oh.” Why was Sean telling him this? Who cared about his mom? And why hadn’t he gotten on a swing yet, hadn’t even put down his skateboard?

“She called to tell me you were coming here. To warn me.”

“Warn you?” James repeated.

“Yeah. Warn me. You’ve changed, dude. You used to be cool to hang out with, but now . . .” Sean shook his head, and this time it wasn’t just for his hair, it meant something.

“Now what?”

“I don’t know, man, you’re just different. I think it’s cause of Hannah.”

James stopped swinging. Now he was stuck - did he defend her? Could he defend himself without defending her? No, when it came down to it, if he had to choose between Sean and Hannah, it had to be Hannah. It always would be. “Hannah? She’s got nothing to do with this. And I’m not the one who changed, you are. You used to like swinging and having fun and shit.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I used to be ten years old. We’re basically in high school now.”

“So?”

“So you gotta start thinking about what you’re gonna do there. Are you just gonna follow Hannah around like a little puppy dog for four years? Or are you gonna actually do something? There are other girls, you know. And not all of them will make you dump the rest of your friends for them.”

This was the most he’d ever heard Sean speak at one time, aside from school presentations. Apparently he had been mad at James for a while, and James hadn’t even realized it. They’d drifted apart, sure . . . but dumped? That wasn’t what had happened at all. James barely even thought about Sean anymore.

“I didn’t dump you, don’t be so dramatic. You sound like a girl.”

Was that sexist? Probably, but he didn't care.

“Fine, call it whatever you want. But the only reason you’re here right now is cause Hannah’s busy.”

James resisted the urge to ask, busy with what? Clearly he had missed a lot by staying off the computer all morning. While he’d been playing stupid, selfish games, the real world had been going on the whole time, and he felt a desperate sense that he needed to get caught up.

Sean laughed. “You know what I just realized? You know who you’re just like?”

“Who?”

“Guess.”

“No, tell me. Who?”

“Victoria.”

“Fuck off, no I’m not.”

“Yeah, you two are exactly the fucking same. That’s why you both hate each other so much. You both want to be Mommy Hannah’s favorite child.” Satisfied with his conclusion, Sean put his skateboard down and kicked off, riding out of the parking lot. James watched him go, watched his long shadow, trying to think of something to yell after him. Some last words that wouldn’t prove Sean right, something Victoria would never say, but he couldn’t think of anything.

Instead, he settled for pushing off the ground extra hard, pumping his legs furiously, and trying to swing himself back in time. Ten minutes, twenty-four hours, five years - the amount didn’t matter. Just before. 

If he could remember what it used to feel like, even just for a second, then none of this - with Sean, with Hannah, with his family - would matter anymore. But as hard as he tried, as many times as he told himself he was finally starting to remember, the old feeling never came. All he felt was exhaustion and frustration. Against his will, his face grew red and he started to cry. He stopped swinging and collapsed, sobbing, against the plastic chain of the swing.

He’d lost two best friends in one day. That had to be a record.

Look at what you’ve done to me, he screamed through his tears at Hannah, far away, busily enjoying herself, as always.