Here's most of a story I'm working on. I haven't written the ending yet, but I'll have that by the end of the week. For now, I thought I'd post it and harvest thoughts from you guys.
Found Wanting
Everything happened in April. The month was only half over, and already Ottley was ticking off days like a prisoner ticks off years. Another hour before he said he would meet Tim at the park. She would probably be early, but Ottley decided to stay beneath the highway overpass as long as possible.
He enjoyed the rumbling roar of cars as they sped over him. The road in front of him was less used than the freeway overhead, but occasionally a vehicle would pass through. Those inside rarely saw Ottley. If they did turn their heads, it was to look at the graffiti on the opposite wall. He thought of ignoring Tim, and staying beneath the overpass all night. Or he could just invite her to hang out beneath it. They were just going to smoke and talk about philosophy anyways, they might as well do it in the cavern of concrete. But if he stayed there alone, he could fall asleep. He could sleep through school the next day, not worry about anyone asking him questions or prying into his life. Ottley knew that he wouldn't do it. He never missed school – and he really wanted to see Tim.
His iPod had run out of batteries earlier. Ottley had found that freeway overpasses were just about the only place in the city where he couldn't find a power outlet. He'd once heard that at any given time, you were within ten feet of a cockroach. He realized the same was true of power outlets – except for where he was standing.
Just as well, he'd rather hear the noise of cars anyways. He fantasized about standing beneath a large freeway interchange, with hundreds and hundreds of cars crisscrossing all around him in an elaborate shamrock. Unfortunately, standing anywhere along the freeway was illegal, let alone at the multi-million dollar exchanges.
If Ottley could just wait beneath the overpass long enough, then April would be over. He knew, logically, that the police investigation would still continue, that he would still have to go to classes, and that his mother would still be asleep by the time he got home, but if he could just get past the end of the month, things would clear up.
If he was lucky, the Strangers would stop approaching him.
Then he noticed the woman standing beyond the nearby concrete column. All Ottley could determine was that he recognized her – but didn't. He had the impression that he had seen her long, dark hair and the willowed body that looked tall even though she wasn't. He had seen her pale skin that still looked healthy. She felt familiar, though he had never seen her before.
He knew that she knew he was there. She had her back turned to him, but she was clearly staring right at him. He also knew why she was there, just not what she was. All of the Strangers were attracted to him because of the events of this heinous April, but so far they had all been in the guise of homeless men or creepy cab drivers.
She turned to him. Her face was old – very old – but then he blinked and noticed she didn't have a single wrinkle. Her skin was smooth, her dark eyes deep. Her flat cheeks tapered down to a pointed chin. Her mouth moved. Despite the cars overhead, he heard her clearly.
“Hello, Ottley.”
She smiled, and it was a beautiful smile.
Ottley didn't tell Tim about the woman under the freeway, who's name was Lily. He wasn't sure why. He got a since of comfort from not telling her, attributing it to the idea that Tim might feel jealous or threatened. He pictured Tim developing an irrational dislike for Lily – because that would mean there was something to be jealous about. It was just a fantasy, a trail of bread crumbs he followed inside his head. He knew Tim wouldn't be jealous. Worse – she would be intrigued. That was a validation Ottley didn't want.
He tried to picture what Tim would look like jealous. Ottley whipped together fantasies of the thin, dangly-armed girl taking a last drag on her cigarette – as though she could suck in more drama – before throwing it to the ground and storming off, leaving him alone in the park as night fell. She wouldn't have, which was part of the reason he didn't tell her.
He'd devoted enough thinking that day to the strange wisp of a woman, and he knew most of his school day tomorrow would be spent the same way. His not being able to concetrate during school wasn't so unusual, just his being distracted by the same thought every few minutes.
“I can't believe Mr. Polk assigned all of The Scarlet Letter. Is he insane?” He and Tim were walking along the road that made up the park's perimeter. Ostensibly they were going to her house, but they would eventually detour. She had been fuming about their English teacher for the entire strip of sidewalk. “Does he expect us to finish? There isn't even a quiz!”
Ottley laughed. “Yeah, what an ***. I'll bet nobody does the reading.”
Tim elbowed him. “I'll skip it if you do.”
Ottley wanted to say that she wouldn't, that he wasn't planning on reading it anyways and she was probably half way through. If he was feeling particularly insightful, he would point out that even if they did blow the reading, it would be for different reasons. Tim because she protested the poor teaching of good books, Ottley because he never got the urge. He saw the seperate reasons hung up like “his” and “hers” towels, personalized and embossed and for the same entirely mundane purpose.
“Sure,” he said.
The sun sank lower, changing the park from greens to grays. The only lights stood over the baseball diamond, but the dirt was grown over with grass, leaving only the bleachers and chainlink fence for color.
The two teenagers chose one of the bleachers to pause. They both knew that loitering in the park at night was not a bright idea, especially with their cigarettes acting like beacons. Still, the park was rarely travelled, and was located conveniently between their two neighborhoods. The road acted as a line of demarcation between the manicured lawns of Ottley's neighborhood and the converted garage homes of Tim's.
They sat. Tim had finished her cigarette and dropped it to the ground. They were facing away from the baseball field, so without the cigarette's small pucker of light her face became a silhouette.
“Don't tell anyone,” she said softly, as though they weren't alone, “but when I'm older, I want to play tennis.”
“Like, professionally?”
“No, no. In my own court, in the yard. I just want to play tennis all day.”
Ottley squinted at her, which reduced her narrow face even further. “Do you even know how to play tennis?”
“That's not the point,” she said. “I just want to play tennis, like Mrs. Newhaus.”
“You want to be a trophy wife?”
Even in the dark, he could see Tim's blue eyes widen – part in surprise, part in horror. “No! It's just – I don't think I've ever seen her in anything but a tennis outfit. Whenever Kelli invites me over, her mom is in some white skirt-tanktop outfit.
Tim paused. “Come to think of it, I've never actually seen her play tennis.”
“No need to stay in school,” Ottley joked. “You can just drop out now and find a rich doctor.”
Tim pushed hard on his shoulder, nearly causing him to spit out his cigarette. “Shut up,” she said, laughing. “I'm getting my degree first. I'll have a career and be awesome at it and everyone will beg me to stay, but I'll say 'no, I'm in love with a rich doctor and our kids are more important,' and hand off the company to my protege.”
She pulled out another cigarette and put it in her mouth. She cupped her hands around her lighter as the end flared up. “Besides,” she said, “I can't be a trophy wife. I haven't got the boobs for it.”
A quiet followed. The baseball field light bordered her face, which only filled in when she breathed into her cigarette. Ottley knew she was thinking about Kelli. He hated it.
“They still don't know who did it,” Tim said.
Ottley waited before responding. He tried to determine what length of pause would add to his innocence, but in trying to figure it out he paralyzed himself for long enough that it felt natural. He hoped it came off as a pause of introspection. “Anything new?” He asked.
“No. It's just so weird. How could anyone...”
She trailed off, and Ottley was afraid to finish her sentence – something he usually took pride in doing. How could anyone... burst into flames? Set someone else on fire? Murder another human being?
What scared Ottley the most was what ahd happened to Ron Sloane after his death. Nobody said “he deserved it,” or “if anyone had it coming, it was...” Instead, everyone was surprised. Horrified. Crying. Maybe it was because of the way he had died. The sheer drama of it. Burned alive, with himself as the source of the flames. Flailing around before eventually jumping into the pool. No trace of kerosene or any flammable substance was found, unless you count his astronomicaly high blood alcohol level.
“And to think,” she continued – and Ottley knew what she would say, for she had dwelled on the point many times before. “We were there. We saw him before it happened. I just can't forget that.”
The police couldn't get it either. They kept asking Ottley questions. The first time a detective approached him, Ottley thought he was another one of the Strangers. Like the hobos, or the bus driver. What seemed different about the detective – what made him seem human – was that he occasionally broke eye contact. Strangers didn't seem required to look around because they were already aware of their surroundings, like an insect moving its antennae but not its head. The detective, his eyes moved. He looked at Ottley's outfit. He sized the boy up, took in the painted park railing and the woman walking her dog. He had a perfect poker face (his eyes didn't widen at all when Ottley, unprompted, admitted to dropping acid) yet there still existed some small, some human shifting of focus.
He'd asked about the bruise, and Ottley told him about Ron knocking him aside. Ottley told everything, and so far as he could tell, the cops discounted him as a suspect for that very reason. His story was suspicious, but they were looking for someone vicious, someone with more than a bruise after what must have been a giant struggle.
Tim didn't say anything else. If it had happened any month but April, they would be speaking disparagingly of that party. Tim and Ottley went to only a few Lacrosse parties a year. Usually they were hosted by a particular Indian family who felt it was better to have all the teenagers drinking in one place, where they could keep an eye on them. Hell, even let them all sleep over so they don't drive drunk. Tim and Ottley joked about such an obscurely upper-middle-class act, which combined the negatives of underage drinking with the negatives of poor parenting – and failed to make a positive. The guys with girlfriends certainly appreciated sleeping over. Tim and Ottley never stayed. They would invariably end up in Sobuck Park, talking about how much more responsible they were about drinking because they didn't do it for the sake of getting drunk. They could have talked about how Ron was all over his girlfriend Kelli Newhaus, or how awful the beer was. They got drunk anyway, but that was hardly the point. They were teaching themselves good habits, Ottley would say.
It always amazed Ottley that the parents at his school could simultaneously be present and absent from their children's lives.
The silence began to make Ottley feel uncomfortable. He wasn't sure what to say to fill it, and as an act of desperation was about to mention Lily. Anything to vanquish the quiet.
“Oh,” Tim said, “did I tell you? An owl roosted in our yard.” Her voice was as awkward as casual. She was trying to change the subject, but for some reason Ottley felt like she hadn't. “It's the weirdest thing.”
Ottley used the same excuse he usually did when the conversation turned awkward, or when it was actually getting too late. “I should get home, or my mom will get worried.” Both he and Tim knew that it wasn't precisely true. Ottley did indeed have to return home, but he knew that his mother was already asleep.
He wasn't expecting her to be asleep on the living room floor, but he wasn't surprised. He assumed she had been doing yoga, due to the jazz music playing on their surround-sound system. A glass of wine sat next to her.
“Mom?”
He closed the door loudly on purpose. He hadn't walked Tim to her house, instead choosing to part from her straight from the park. The lights on the way back reminded him of his father, from when they would walk their Labrador when Ottley was young.
“Mom,” he said again, louder.
She snapped awake, jerking her head forward and knees up as though she were doing a crunch halfway. She gasped, said hello, and apologized. She rested her head back against the ground, her palm on her forehead to block out the ceiling lights. “What's that smell?” She asked.
“I was smoking.”
“Oh...”
Ottley waited for more, but she rolled over and slowly got to her knees without speaking. Her back was too him. She rose and walked to the kitchen. Ottley followed, picking up the empty glass as he passed.
He placed the glass on the kitchen's white countertop. His mother, still squinting from her sleep, pulled the cork out of a bottle she had just retrieved from the refridgerator. The sauvignon blanc was half empty. She took the glass, supporting the bowl with the end of her palm and the stem tucked between her middle fingers.
“You shouldn't be smoking,” she said. White wine swirled from bottle to bowl.
Ottley considered that the perfect moment for someone to shout, but neither did. Instead, his mother walked past him, patting him on the shoulder as she went by. He heard her feet scrape across the stone-tiled floor until they reached the muffled carpet of her bedroom.
She'd left the wine out. Normally, Ottley would have corked it and put the bottle away, but instead he turned, abandoning it to remain rising out of the counter like a minaret.
He stepped into his mother's room after spending the short walk mustering as much indignation as he could. He pictured himself drawing energy from the abstract and primitivist art on the walls, of tapping into the color fields and fetishes. He stopped just inside her door.
She was stretching again. It was a part of her bedtime ritual – a glass of wine and a stretch of yoga. But sometimes the former got the better of the latter. She must have forgotten that she had already stretched before falling asleep on the living room floor.
Ottley was about to speak, but stopped as he watched his mom. She grabbed her knees and pulled her legs to her chest. Her ankle-length sweat pants rode up to her knees, exposing her shins and calves.
Seeing his mother's legs made Ottley uncomfortable. Not that they were unnatractive. Her tanned ankles, while perfectly complexioned, revealed their age with hair follicles and the rare vein. Ottley remembered finding an old Playboy of his father's, which was filled with women the 1960's considered glamorous. Photography was different in those days, and even through his hormonal excitement Ottley noticed the difference in texture and tone. The pictures were grainier, and the colors more neutral. Someone had autographed one of the pages, one filled with pictures of the same woman in different nude arrangements. She was outdoors in a field, and what struck Ottley most was her tanline: a diving curve of white through each breast, stark against her otherwise brown skin. Ottley felt a pinch of pride upon reading the inscription (to Justin, who always saw me with the naked eye – Eileen Walsh,) which was followed by embarrassment. He wondered who this woman was that his father had known before marrying. Ottley never returned the magazine, but he never again opened it either.
His mother, her lower legs bare, elicited the same discomfort, evoked by the same image – a woman that fit within the mold of attractiveness, but behind a filter of age.
The night April air wrapped around Ottley as he left the house. He had just stood, watching his mother stretch, as he grew angrier and angrier. He thought about how he could have just remained with Tim for a while longer instead of returning home. The extra time would have changed everything – he wouldn't have botched the goodbye-hug, leaning awkwardly to the left as she went to her right, which caused his nose to mash into her cheek. Ottley had stressed for many nights about how to approach kissing Tim, and was always proud of himself when he resisted the numbing urge to try. Now, all he could think about was his certainty that Tim saw his wayward nose as evidence of a failed kiss, which she had thwarted.
He'd considered standing there until his mother finished, but was suddenly filled with the urge to leave. Ottley could feel his bed, his entire room weighing down on him even from several walls away. He had no desire to sleep among such sterile walls, despite their being painted in various vibrant colors by his mother's decorator.
What Ottley loved most about his neighborhood was its schizophrenia. He used the word “neighborhood” to describe more than simply his street or development; it refered to the greater square mile around his house, which encompassed Tim's neighborhood, a pretentious design district and a seedy line of bars and restaurants. Ottley pictured the numerous strip malls as having fallen from the sky, crashing into the ground in a haphazard arrangement that no one bothered to organize. It would explain the uneven sidewalks that circulated the neighborhood.
Just a few moments after shutting the front door Ottley was already surrounded by concrete walls and ghostly white floodlights. He wandered through empty parking lots and desolate alleyways, occasionally stopping to look inside an overturned box or overfilled trash can.
Ottley wasn't certain how much time had passed, but turning down another alley filled him with fatigue. Everything about it, from the moon positioned perfectly between the flat concrete walls and a gray wooden fence that seperated the next door neighborhood, to the way the white plastic garbage sacks drooped out of dumpsters along every other store's back entrance, made him realize he was ready to sleep. He was ready to return home – by now his room wouldn't feel so imposing.
Turning brought its own confusion, because he realized he was halfway down the alley. The road he turned off of and the road up ahead were an equal distance away. Then, he noticed that the concrete wall was not, in fact, blank. Rather than matching the faded wood, its rough surface bore an intricate web of graffiti. Ottley marveled at the patterns and words, all written in an inscrutable language and font. They stretched all the way down the middle store's wall. Ottley couldn't even tell what store it was, because tentacles of black paint covered the wall.
Despite the graffiti's connotations, Ottley felt a sudden sense of comfort. He leaned against the wall, slid his body down, rested his head back... and fell asleep.
“Shouldn't you be in school?”
Ottley woke without opening his eyes. Lily's voice had snapped him from a dream where flocks of owls carried him higher and higher into the sky, where they dropped him and swooped down to catch him just before he hit the ground. He was thankful that Lily had woken him, but didn't want to admit that she was there, speaking to him.
He gave in. Opening his eyes, he could barely make out the gray glow of the morning sky. Overhead was still mostly a dark blue. He could hear the squawks of birds and morning rustle of commuting cars. Eventually, he was able to wipe the sleepy cataracts from his eyes, and see powerlines stretching overhead. He felt like he could feel them humming.
“It's, like, six am.”
“Smart boy,” Lily said. She was smiling. She looked the same as before, which surprised Ottley. But then, he had the impression that her appearance was constantly shifting with the intent that it look exactly the same. She wore a tight blue tank top and long, loose brown skirt that folded around her squatting form. “Come on, we'll get you some breakfast. Plenty of time before school.”
Ottley knew at that point he wouldn't make it to school that day. “Sure,” he said. He hadn't eaten since lunch the previous day.
The donut shop was very close to where Ottley had slept, but there was no straight path to it from the alley. The two emerged on the bustling road, then looped back to enter the glass and linoleum building on the opposite street.
Lily rubbed her hand through his hair. “Get anything you want. I'm buying.”
The first thing that struck Ottley was the child, only four or five, pressing himself against the glass case while his mother looked down at him from the cash register. He was fingering the window, pointing at every donut that caught his eye. It occurred to Ottley that to the tiny boy, he was conducting magic. He needed only to point at a pastry, and the rube-goldberg spell commenced. The Korean woman behind the counter plucked the sprinkled dough with a wad of tissue paper, bagged it, and handed it to the mother, who then exchanged her green reagents. But the kid didn't associate any of their actions – he associated the pointing. If it didn't result in a donut, then clearly something was wrong with the spell, not with his intention.
Lily noticed the toddler as well, and immediately started talking to him and his mother. Ottley grew uncomfortable; something about Lily dealing with children seemed unnatural.
The mother handed her child his donut. He returned to patterning the window, this time with just one hand. Instead of pointing, he started drawing with his oily fingers. A few times he leaned forward and breathed on the window. He left dozens of symbols and scrawls.
Ottley wondered if his little sister would have been the same way, if his mother hand't lost the baby in her miscarriage. Of course, that April his sister would have been much older than the little boy, but at one point she'd have believed in magic.
“Why do you suppose he's doing that?”
Ottley jumped. He hadn't noticed the old man sitting in the booth next to him. He had a halo of gray hair on an otherwise bald head, and he exuded a sense of health even though his skin was covered in liver spots and gaping freckles. It was almost hard to find his eyes, which were as brown as the spots. When he spoke, Ottley could smell his rank breath, though his teeth were gleaming white.
For the first time since speaking with the detective, Ottley wasn't sure if he was in the presence of a Stranger. He was certain of Lily, but he had never seen two Strangers in one place, and figured that if it ever happened the two would annihilate each other. Strangers held too much gravity to simply ignore another. The detective had obviously been human, but with the old man he simply couldn't tell. The man had the same undivided attention – the same sense of presence. Ottley felt like he had been sitting in the donut shop for years, and would remain there long after the teenager left.
The old man, with his coffee in hand, pointed to the child. “It's marvelous, really. It never ceases to amaze me just how much y'all like to scrawl on walls.”
Ottley wasn't sure if “y'all” referred to his generation or his species. “He's just bored, I think.”
“No, that's not it. You'll understand eventually.”
Lily started patting the child's head. She must have said something to unnerve the mother -- “So delicate” was all that Ottley heard – because the young woman suddenly grabbed her child's hand and led him out the door. “Sorry, we must be going,” she said. The child, who had been busily stabbing his finger at a frosted donut, wailed as he was pulled away. Even at the door, he was still pointing, trying to arc his magic across the room.
But the spell was broken.
They wandered the neighborhood streets as Ottley ate his donuts. He wanted to ask her questions – he knew why she was interested in him. She began showing him little tricks as they walked. She picked up a bottle cap off of the ground, tossed it into the air, caught it, and had him blow on it. “The bottle cap remembers the bottle,” she would say, or something equally cryptic and cliché. She ran a few quick motions of prestidigitation, and pulled the bottle cap out of his ear. Ottley was unimpressed. He had seen his father do similar tricks with pennies.
Then she pulled the whole bottle from his ear.
“Open it,” she said.
“I don't like warm coke,” he responded, but opened it anyway. The top fell off. He brought the bottle to his lips and took a swig. The taste of mold filled his mouth, like hot chocolate made from spoiled milk. He spit it out, spattering brown liquid on the sidewalk.
His hand was wet, but not from spitting. Bubbles of condensation covered the bottle. He took another taste.
Cold.
Little tricks, but Ottley took them all in stride. He figured if he refused to acknowledge Lily, then she would stop trying to get him to tap into magic again. Finally, she revealed a hint as to why she was following him, like folding the corner of a page.
“I need your help, Ottley.”
“I don't want to help you.” He wasn't sure if he meant her specifically, or just refused to use what she was referring to. He didn't mention that he didn't even know how it had worked, that at one moment he was yelling at Ron and the next felt himself filled with what he could only describe as nothing. It probably hadn't helped that he was raging drunk.
“You have a gift. I can help you use it.”
“I don't want to use it.”
She clicked her tongue in aggravation. “Such a tragedy. I guess we just have to hope it doesn't happen again. A little boy with no idea how to control his power...”
Ottley didn't respond.
“That's what it is, Ott,” she continued, placing her hand between his shoulders. To Ottley her gestures seemed like they were meant to be sensual, but for some reason didn't resonate. “There's a reason why every religion bans it. They're afraid.”
“I cant help you,” Ottley said. He knew he spoke the truth.
They were passing the same alley in which Ottley fell asleep. Ottley heard a roaring noise as they walked by. He saw a half-dozen men milling around two flatbed trucks parked where he'd slept. Even from where he stood, Ottley could see long, thick hoses coiling out of the trucks. They connected to large, bulbous canisters in each flatbed. The men were manipulating the hoses to spray a white liquid on the wall.
Ottley turned without telling Lily. He wasn't surprised when she followed him, even though she had been a few paces ahead. As he got closer, he could that wide sunglasses protected all of their eyes. The glasses stretched around the sides of their faces, looking more like goggles the more Ottley looked. The canisters, which Ottley could see were filled with chemicals, barely fit inside the trucks. He wondered how all of the men could fit inside the cabs.
He then saw that the spray wasn't liquid at all. The men – two appeared college aged, but it was hard for Ottley to tell with their eyes covered – blasted the wall with a constant stream of white powder caustic enough to grate the graffiti from the wall. The men followed each section with a rush of water from what looked like a firehose. The powder and water combined to form a milky, viscous substance that flowed down the side of the wall and followed the grooves in the pavement until reaching a nearby grating.
“Have you ever seen anything so stupid?” Lily asked. “No matter how much I watch people, I'll never understand why they do stupid stuff like this.”
Ottley noted the difference between “people watching” and the way Lily talked about “watching people.” Watching people.
Seeing that Ottley wasn't going to respond, she kept talking. “What are they going to do, whitewash the whole city?”
Ottley ignored her and walked the rest of the way to the trucks. A tall, stout man waved angrily at him from the truck. He had dark tan skin that looked to have the same texture as the concrete they cleaned.
“Get out of here, kid! This stuff will blast your skin off.”
Ottley grabbed the canister's spigot and pulled himself up on edge of the truck. “I want to help,” he said.
Lily and the supervisor both balked.
The water in running in Tim's kitchen sink burned his hands, but Ottley washed them for the third time anyway. Tim's mother insisted on defrosting frozen chicken with scalding – rather than lukewarm – water. It was one of the things Ottley liked about her mother, and about Tim: their irreverent ways to tackle a problem.
He'd called home straight after arriving on Tim's doorstep. He missed all of school, but the day before he'd promised he would come over for dinner. Ottley's mother didn't say much, just “Ok sweetie” and hung up.
“What happened?” Tim exclaimed when she'd opened the front door. White powder covered Ottley's entire body. He told her that he'd spent the day cleaning up the neighborhood, and asked if he could borrow their shower before dinner.
Once in the kitchen, scrubbed clean and wearing clothes given to him by Tim's dad, he found himself washing his hands every few minutes. They felt powdery and chapped no matter how many moisturizers or soaps he used. Tim's mother, a short woman with mushroom-shaped hair that fell to her shoulders, chastized him for washing them over the chicken. So, the third time he washed them, he pointed the faucet away.
Tim's whole family helped with the meal, from her young brother to her boisterous father. Whenever Tim handled the food, her mother stood by and commented. Ottley was reminded of Lily standing a dozen feet from the trucks – far enough that the supervisor couldn't drive her away – from where she chided Ottley for his foolishness. Tim's mother was hardly as irritating. He wasn't sure how Lily's voice carried over the machines, or why the other men didn't react to her, but Ottley heard every word.
The men were “doing it wrong,” that if they wanted to erase everyone's thoughts they should “start with toilet stalls and school desks,” and how the wall would “probably be painted again before morning.” What confused Ottley the most was when she started complaining about how as soon as she figured out why people draw on walls, people became obsessed with erasing them.
Once dinner was ready, Tim's entire family surprised Ottley by grabbing their plate fulls of food and taking up seats in front of the television. Ottley grabbed a can of off-brand Dr. Pepper and sat on the couch next to Tim.
Tim's father commanded the remote. The family chattered while he switched station to station, occasionally pausing on a baseball game or funny commercial. Eventually he settled on the evening news, which he set to just high enough volume to create a background buzz for the room. Nobody paid the images much attention, until a few minutes later when Tim's mother gasped.
“How horrible,” she said. “Can you believe it?”
Ottley's food lost its flavor. He was certain the TV would be showing information about Ron.
He looked, and was only momentarily relieved.
On the screen, police officers escorted a gaunt woman out of her home. Neighbors and reporters were barely restrained by lines of uniformed men. The walls behind her strobed red and blue from the off-screen police cars and ambulance. The text crawl read: Suburban Mother Drowns Child in Bath Tub.
As glad as he was that the reporters had forgotten about Ron for the time being, the new target of attention frightened Ottley even more. “I know her,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“Where? Her?” Perked Tim.
“Yeah, she was in the donut shop earlier.”
Tim didn't ask what he was doing in a donut shop before skipping school, but she noticably paused to process the information. Ottley hadn't been forthcoming about his truancy, but he knew she didn't want to bring up in front of her parents.
Unease gave way to anger. Ottley knew exactly who to blame for the tragedy. Lily's attention to the child earlier made a much more sinister sense. What angered him more was the feeling that the child's death was another way for her to irritate him, like when she dragged her finger in a rolling curve along the wall as she walked him home after cleaning the graffiti. The supervisor had broached the subject of payment, to which she mocked “half dollar, half dollar, a penny, and two bits!” Ottley turned him down. And while walking him home, her dragging finger left behind a dark red pigment on the concrete.
“I should go,” Ottley said abruptly, placing down his fork. “I told Mom I would be home soon.”
“I'll walk you home,” Tim responded before her parents could object.
Tim waited until they were outside and rounding a corner to offer him a Parliament. He accepted, and handed her his lighter once his was lit.
“How long were you working with chemicals?” She asked.
“Is it still that noticeable?”
Tim laughed. “You smell like our bathroom floor.”
“I cleaned a wall today.”
“How exciting.”
Ottley grinned at her sarcasm, but he was proud of the job they had done. “One of the guys there,” he flinched as he realized he was still omitting Lily, “was saying some interesting stuff. Cliches, but like how everything is connected.”
“I don't follow.”
“Well, this wall, it was just a small part of the neighborhood, but by cleaning it we could effect the whole city.”
“Like fractals,” she said.
“Sure.”
“So you were doing the same thing as those other people, the ones who painted it first.”
Ottley paused his step. “What?”
“Well, by removing their mark, you left your own, right? Did you at least sign it?”
Ottley had wanted to, but the foreman wouldn't allow it. Lily had gotten a laugh out of that one.
Tim took advantage of the pause to stop and light her cigarette. “It sounds like fun,” she said. “I want to help too some time. Only lets join a team that is painting pictures over the graffiti instead. I don't want to look like a snowman when I get home.”
Tim left Ottley at his street's corner, and he very nearly turned around and followed her when he saw Lily sitting beneath his tree. Instead, he tensed his muscles, and walked directly towards the woman. The lights in his mother's window were out, even though it was barely after sunset.
“What did you do to that kid?” Ottley demanded.
Lily didn't move, except to turn her head towards him. She looked like she could bend her neck in any direction. Orange glow from the streetlights trickled through the tree branches into her eyes. “I didn't do anything. His mother did.”
Ottley crossed his arms, trying to buttress himself. “No, she loved that kid. I saw her protect him from you.”
“Maybe she loved him too much,” Lily sighed.
Ottley's resolve melted away. Something about her response terrified him. He realized he had been confusing her dark eyes and old gaze as filled with depth. He was close – they were hollow. He wanted to tell her to go away, to never see him again, but he knew he had no power over her. Just because she needed him didn't mean he could control her.
“You killed him,” he said.
“I wonder what the sentence is for incinerating another human being?”
“That was different.”
“Was it, dear? Oh you poor thing, you just care for that Tim girl so much. I'm sure seeing her kissed by that brute was just unbearable.”
Ottley didn't respond. Lily stood and cupped his cheeks in her palms, drawing her face very close. He should have been able to feel her breath.
“That was supposed to be your kiss, wasn't it. I understand. Having something that means so much to you just get taken like that.”
Her fingertips chilled his skin.
“You're wrong,” he said.
She smiled, and it was a hideous smile. “I don't think I am, dear. I've been watching your species ever since you created me with your myths and fairy tales. And now, I finally understand enough.”
Ottley jerked his head back. Her hands slipped from his face. He wanted to hit her, to do something to her, but he knew that being angry – and being scared – wasn't enough. There was nothing he could do.
Instead, Ottley went inside. He turned on the porchlight, the living room light, and made his house look as inviting as possible. He was surprised to find his mother at the kitchen table, and even more surprised when she stood up and hugged him.
----------------------
For the next two weeks, the news stations effectively ignored the mysterious case of Ron Sloane. The reporters had plenty to keep them occupied. A rash of infant and child deaths had struck the city. Four more children died mysteriously by the end of the first week, causing such fervor in the media that even standard SIDS cases – which had also spiked – received coverage.
Ottley liked to think that he could forget about Ron too, but he still saw Lily almost daily. He knew, deep down, that her mere presence was causing the deaths, and that he was the reason she remained in his neighborhood. Even when he didn't see her, he felt her presence almost constantly – especially at night.
Ron returned to the spotlight at the end of the second week.
Tim and Ottley were in English class. Mr. Polk, in his charcoal shirt and wrinkled slacks, ceremoniously placed The Scarlet Letter on his desk. The board behind him read Connections Between Hawthorn and Orwell.
Ottley had only bothered to read one assigned book that year, 1984. He remembered being unimpressed, and Mr. Polk was only drying up the subject further. The teacher even rattled about the brilliance of the first sentence, one of “the top first lines of all time,” to which Ottley scoffed.
To Ottley, there was nothing impressive about saying “It was a bright, cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen.” If the past weeks were any indication, every day in April was bright and cold, and every clock always struck thirteen.
Mr. Polk was in the middle of making yet another point about the power of words and letters when the police entered.
Ottley considered jumping out of the window, but that entailed a drop of three stories. So he waited.
The two police officers showed Mr. Polk a slip of paper, unhooked a pair of handcuffs... and walked directly past Ottley.
“Kelli Newhaus, you are under arrest for the murder of Ron Sloane. You have the right to remain silent...”
Mr. Polk tried valiantly to continue his lesson, but no teacher for the rest of the day was able to stifle the silent buzz. Rumors circulated before, during and after every class for the rest of the day, and every time Ottley saw a group of teenagers standing together, he knew exactly what they were talking about.
For the brief duration of the afternoon, Ottley allowed himself to think that the police were right. For the first time in weeks, he looked back at the events after the Lacrosse party. In particular, he focused on what he couldn't remember. After watching Ron crudely press his lips to Tim – who then slapped him – Ottley found a close friend in beer. The rest of the night was such a haze, such a tangle of emotions and confusion, that he figured he must have dreamt the horror in a drug-induced nightmare.
Clearly, Lily and the Strangers were wrong.
His optimism ended just before the school day did the same. A new rumor smashed through his rationality. The guarded secret of the Newhaus family, which an early news broadcast played at 3:00 for the whole city to see: Kelli Newhaus was pregnant.
Ottley wasn't surprised. No one he knew at school was, either. What bothered him, what ended his short respite, was the fact that he already knew. And he didn't know how.
Found Wanting
Everything happened in April. The month was only half over, and already Ottley was ticking off days like a prisoner ticks off years. Another hour before he said he would meet Tim at the park. She would probably be early, but Ottley decided to stay beneath the highway overpass as long as possible.
He enjoyed the rumbling roar of cars as they sped over him. The road in front of him was less used than the freeway overhead, but occasionally a vehicle would pass through. Those inside rarely saw Ottley. If they did turn their heads, it was to look at the graffiti on the opposite wall. He thought of ignoring Tim, and staying beneath the overpass all night. Or he could just invite her to hang out beneath it. They were just going to smoke and talk about philosophy anyways, they might as well do it in the cavern of concrete. But if he stayed there alone, he could fall asleep. He could sleep through school the next day, not worry about anyone asking him questions or prying into his life. Ottley knew that he wouldn't do it. He never missed school – and he really wanted to see Tim.
His iPod had run out of batteries earlier. Ottley had found that freeway overpasses were just about the only place in the city where he couldn't find a power outlet. He'd once heard that at any given time, you were within ten feet of a cockroach. He realized the same was true of power outlets – except for where he was standing.
Just as well, he'd rather hear the noise of cars anyways. He fantasized about standing beneath a large freeway interchange, with hundreds and hundreds of cars crisscrossing all around him in an elaborate shamrock. Unfortunately, standing anywhere along the freeway was illegal, let alone at the multi-million dollar exchanges.
If Ottley could just wait beneath the overpass long enough, then April would be over. He knew, logically, that the police investigation would still continue, that he would still have to go to classes, and that his mother would still be asleep by the time he got home, but if he could just get past the end of the month, things would clear up.
If he was lucky, the Strangers would stop approaching him.
Then he noticed the woman standing beyond the nearby concrete column. All Ottley could determine was that he recognized her – but didn't. He had the impression that he had seen her long, dark hair and the willowed body that looked tall even though she wasn't. He had seen her pale skin that still looked healthy. She felt familiar, though he had never seen her before.
He knew that she knew he was there. She had her back turned to him, but she was clearly staring right at him. He also knew why she was there, just not what she was. All of the Strangers were attracted to him because of the events of this heinous April, but so far they had all been in the guise of homeless men or creepy cab drivers.
She turned to him. Her face was old – very old – but then he blinked and noticed she didn't have a single wrinkle. Her skin was smooth, her dark eyes deep. Her flat cheeks tapered down to a pointed chin. Her mouth moved. Despite the cars overhead, he heard her clearly.
“Hello, Ottley.”
She smiled, and it was a beautiful smile.
Ottley didn't tell Tim about the woman under the freeway, who's name was Lily. He wasn't sure why. He got a since of comfort from not telling her, attributing it to the idea that Tim might feel jealous or threatened. He pictured Tim developing an irrational dislike for Lily – because that would mean there was something to be jealous about. It was just a fantasy, a trail of bread crumbs he followed inside his head. He knew Tim wouldn't be jealous. Worse – she would be intrigued. That was a validation Ottley didn't want.
He tried to picture what Tim would look like jealous. Ottley whipped together fantasies of the thin, dangly-armed girl taking a last drag on her cigarette – as though she could suck in more drama – before throwing it to the ground and storming off, leaving him alone in the park as night fell. She wouldn't have, which was part of the reason he didn't tell her.
He'd devoted enough thinking that day to the strange wisp of a woman, and he knew most of his school day tomorrow would be spent the same way. His not being able to concetrate during school wasn't so unusual, just his being distracted by the same thought every few minutes.
“I can't believe Mr. Polk assigned all of The Scarlet Letter. Is he insane?” He and Tim were walking along the road that made up the park's perimeter. Ostensibly they were going to her house, but they would eventually detour. She had been fuming about their English teacher for the entire strip of sidewalk. “Does he expect us to finish? There isn't even a quiz!”
Ottley laughed. “Yeah, what an ***. I'll bet nobody does the reading.”
Tim elbowed him. “I'll skip it if you do.”
Ottley wanted to say that she wouldn't, that he wasn't planning on reading it anyways and she was probably half way through. If he was feeling particularly insightful, he would point out that even if they did blow the reading, it would be for different reasons. Tim because she protested the poor teaching of good books, Ottley because he never got the urge. He saw the seperate reasons hung up like “his” and “hers” towels, personalized and embossed and for the same entirely mundane purpose.
“Sure,” he said.
The sun sank lower, changing the park from greens to grays. The only lights stood over the baseball diamond, but the dirt was grown over with grass, leaving only the bleachers and chainlink fence for color.
The two teenagers chose one of the bleachers to pause. They both knew that loitering in the park at night was not a bright idea, especially with their cigarettes acting like beacons. Still, the park was rarely travelled, and was located conveniently between their two neighborhoods. The road acted as a line of demarcation between the manicured lawns of Ottley's neighborhood and the converted garage homes of Tim's.
They sat. Tim had finished her cigarette and dropped it to the ground. They were facing away from the baseball field, so without the cigarette's small pucker of light her face became a silhouette.
“Don't tell anyone,” she said softly, as though they weren't alone, “but when I'm older, I want to play tennis.”
“Like, professionally?”
“No, no. In my own court, in the yard. I just want to play tennis all day.”
Ottley squinted at her, which reduced her narrow face even further. “Do you even know how to play tennis?”
“That's not the point,” she said. “I just want to play tennis, like Mrs. Newhaus.”
“You want to be a trophy wife?”
Even in the dark, he could see Tim's blue eyes widen – part in surprise, part in horror. “No! It's just – I don't think I've ever seen her in anything but a tennis outfit. Whenever Kelli invites me over, her mom is in some white skirt-tanktop outfit.
Tim paused. “Come to think of it, I've never actually seen her play tennis.”
“No need to stay in school,” Ottley joked. “You can just drop out now and find a rich doctor.”
Tim pushed hard on his shoulder, nearly causing him to spit out his cigarette. “Shut up,” she said, laughing. “I'm getting my degree first. I'll have a career and be awesome at it and everyone will beg me to stay, but I'll say 'no, I'm in love with a rich doctor and our kids are more important,' and hand off the company to my protege.”
She pulled out another cigarette and put it in her mouth. She cupped her hands around her lighter as the end flared up. “Besides,” she said, “I can't be a trophy wife. I haven't got the boobs for it.”
A quiet followed. The baseball field light bordered her face, which only filled in when she breathed into her cigarette. Ottley knew she was thinking about Kelli. He hated it.
“They still don't know who did it,” Tim said.
Ottley waited before responding. He tried to determine what length of pause would add to his innocence, but in trying to figure it out he paralyzed himself for long enough that it felt natural. He hoped it came off as a pause of introspection. “Anything new?” He asked.
“No. It's just so weird. How could anyone...”
She trailed off, and Ottley was afraid to finish her sentence – something he usually took pride in doing. How could anyone... burst into flames? Set someone else on fire? Murder another human being?
What scared Ottley the most was what ahd happened to Ron Sloane after his death. Nobody said “he deserved it,” or “if anyone had it coming, it was...” Instead, everyone was surprised. Horrified. Crying. Maybe it was because of the way he had died. The sheer drama of it. Burned alive, with himself as the source of the flames. Flailing around before eventually jumping into the pool. No trace of kerosene or any flammable substance was found, unless you count his astronomicaly high blood alcohol level.
“And to think,” she continued – and Ottley knew what she would say, for she had dwelled on the point many times before. “We were there. We saw him before it happened. I just can't forget that.”
The police couldn't get it either. They kept asking Ottley questions. The first time a detective approached him, Ottley thought he was another one of the Strangers. Like the hobos, or the bus driver. What seemed different about the detective – what made him seem human – was that he occasionally broke eye contact. Strangers didn't seem required to look around because they were already aware of their surroundings, like an insect moving its antennae but not its head. The detective, his eyes moved. He looked at Ottley's outfit. He sized the boy up, took in the painted park railing and the woman walking her dog. He had a perfect poker face (his eyes didn't widen at all when Ottley, unprompted, admitted to dropping acid) yet there still existed some small, some human shifting of focus.
He'd asked about the bruise, and Ottley told him about Ron knocking him aside. Ottley told everything, and so far as he could tell, the cops discounted him as a suspect for that very reason. His story was suspicious, but they were looking for someone vicious, someone with more than a bruise after what must have been a giant struggle.
Tim didn't say anything else. If it had happened any month but April, they would be speaking disparagingly of that party. Tim and Ottley went to only a few Lacrosse parties a year. Usually they were hosted by a particular Indian family who felt it was better to have all the teenagers drinking in one place, where they could keep an eye on them. Hell, even let them all sleep over so they don't drive drunk. Tim and Ottley joked about such an obscurely upper-middle-class act, which combined the negatives of underage drinking with the negatives of poor parenting – and failed to make a positive. The guys with girlfriends certainly appreciated sleeping over. Tim and Ottley never stayed. They would invariably end up in Sobuck Park, talking about how much more responsible they were about drinking because they didn't do it for the sake of getting drunk. They could have talked about how Ron was all over his girlfriend Kelli Newhaus, or how awful the beer was. They got drunk anyway, but that was hardly the point. They were teaching themselves good habits, Ottley would say.
It always amazed Ottley that the parents at his school could simultaneously be present and absent from their children's lives.
The silence began to make Ottley feel uncomfortable. He wasn't sure what to say to fill it, and as an act of desperation was about to mention Lily. Anything to vanquish the quiet.
“Oh,” Tim said, “did I tell you? An owl roosted in our yard.” Her voice was as awkward as casual. She was trying to change the subject, but for some reason Ottley felt like she hadn't. “It's the weirdest thing.”
Ottley used the same excuse he usually did when the conversation turned awkward, or when it was actually getting too late. “I should get home, or my mom will get worried.” Both he and Tim knew that it wasn't precisely true. Ottley did indeed have to return home, but he knew that his mother was already asleep.
He wasn't expecting her to be asleep on the living room floor, but he wasn't surprised. He assumed she had been doing yoga, due to the jazz music playing on their surround-sound system. A glass of wine sat next to her.
“Mom?”
He closed the door loudly on purpose. He hadn't walked Tim to her house, instead choosing to part from her straight from the park. The lights on the way back reminded him of his father, from when they would walk their Labrador when Ottley was young.
“Mom,” he said again, louder.
She snapped awake, jerking her head forward and knees up as though she were doing a crunch halfway. She gasped, said hello, and apologized. She rested her head back against the ground, her palm on her forehead to block out the ceiling lights. “What's that smell?” She asked.
“I was smoking.”
“Oh...”
Ottley waited for more, but she rolled over and slowly got to her knees without speaking. Her back was too him. She rose and walked to the kitchen. Ottley followed, picking up the empty glass as he passed.
He placed the glass on the kitchen's white countertop. His mother, still squinting from her sleep, pulled the cork out of a bottle she had just retrieved from the refridgerator. The sauvignon blanc was half empty. She took the glass, supporting the bowl with the end of her palm and the stem tucked between her middle fingers.
“You shouldn't be smoking,” she said. White wine swirled from bottle to bowl.
Ottley considered that the perfect moment for someone to shout, but neither did. Instead, his mother walked past him, patting him on the shoulder as she went by. He heard her feet scrape across the stone-tiled floor until they reached the muffled carpet of her bedroom.
She'd left the wine out. Normally, Ottley would have corked it and put the bottle away, but instead he turned, abandoning it to remain rising out of the counter like a minaret.
He stepped into his mother's room after spending the short walk mustering as much indignation as he could. He pictured himself drawing energy from the abstract and primitivist art on the walls, of tapping into the color fields and fetishes. He stopped just inside her door.
She was stretching again. It was a part of her bedtime ritual – a glass of wine and a stretch of yoga. But sometimes the former got the better of the latter. She must have forgotten that she had already stretched before falling asleep on the living room floor.
Ottley was about to speak, but stopped as he watched his mom. She grabbed her knees and pulled her legs to her chest. Her ankle-length sweat pants rode up to her knees, exposing her shins and calves.
Seeing his mother's legs made Ottley uncomfortable. Not that they were unnatractive. Her tanned ankles, while perfectly complexioned, revealed their age with hair follicles and the rare vein. Ottley remembered finding an old Playboy of his father's, which was filled with women the 1960's considered glamorous. Photography was different in those days, and even through his hormonal excitement Ottley noticed the difference in texture and tone. The pictures were grainier, and the colors more neutral. Someone had autographed one of the pages, one filled with pictures of the same woman in different nude arrangements. She was outdoors in a field, and what struck Ottley most was her tanline: a diving curve of white through each breast, stark against her otherwise brown skin. Ottley felt a pinch of pride upon reading the inscription (to Justin, who always saw me with the naked eye – Eileen Walsh,) which was followed by embarrassment. He wondered who this woman was that his father had known before marrying. Ottley never returned the magazine, but he never again opened it either.
His mother, her lower legs bare, elicited the same discomfort, evoked by the same image – a woman that fit within the mold of attractiveness, but behind a filter of age.
The night April air wrapped around Ottley as he left the house. He had just stood, watching his mother stretch, as he grew angrier and angrier. He thought about how he could have just remained with Tim for a while longer instead of returning home. The extra time would have changed everything – he wouldn't have botched the goodbye-hug, leaning awkwardly to the left as she went to her right, which caused his nose to mash into her cheek. Ottley had stressed for many nights about how to approach kissing Tim, and was always proud of himself when he resisted the numbing urge to try. Now, all he could think about was his certainty that Tim saw his wayward nose as evidence of a failed kiss, which she had thwarted.
He'd considered standing there until his mother finished, but was suddenly filled with the urge to leave. Ottley could feel his bed, his entire room weighing down on him even from several walls away. He had no desire to sleep among such sterile walls, despite their being painted in various vibrant colors by his mother's decorator.
What Ottley loved most about his neighborhood was its schizophrenia. He used the word “neighborhood” to describe more than simply his street or development; it refered to the greater square mile around his house, which encompassed Tim's neighborhood, a pretentious design district and a seedy line of bars and restaurants. Ottley pictured the numerous strip malls as having fallen from the sky, crashing into the ground in a haphazard arrangement that no one bothered to organize. It would explain the uneven sidewalks that circulated the neighborhood.
Just a few moments after shutting the front door Ottley was already surrounded by concrete walls and ghostly white floodlights. He wandered through empty parking lots and desolate alleyways, occasionally stopping to look inside an overturned box or overfilled trash can.
Ottley wasn't certain how much time had passed, but turning down another alley filled him with fatigue. Everything about it, from the moon positioned perfectly between the flat concrete walls and a gray wooden fence that seperated the next door neighborhood, to the way the white plastic garbage sacks drooped out of dumpsters along every other store's back entrance, made him realize he was ready to sleep. He was ready to return home – by now his room wouldn't feel so imposing.
Turning brought its own confusion, because he realized he was halfway down the alley. The road he turned off of and the road up ahead were an equal distance away. Then, he noticed that the concrete wall was not, in fact, blank. Rather than matching the faded wood, its rough surface bore an intricate web of graffiti. Ottley marveled at the patterns and words, all written in an inscrutable language and font. They stretched all the way down the middle store's wall. Ottley couldn't even tell what store it was, because tentacles of black paint covered the wall.
Despite the graffiti's connotations, Ottley felt a sudden sense of comfort. He leaned against the wall, slid his body down, rested his head back... and fell asleep.
“Shouldn't you be in school?”
Ottley woke without opening his eyes. Lily's voice had snapped him from a dream where flocks of owls carried him higher and higher into the sky, where they dropped him and swooped down to catch him just before he hit the ground. He was thankful that Lily had woken him, but didn't want to admit that she was there, speaking to him.
He gave in. Opening his eyes, he could barely make out the gray glow of the morning sky. Overhead was still mostly a dark blue. He could hear the squawks of birds and morning rustle of commuting cars. Eventually, he was able to wipe the sleepy cataracts from his eyes, and see powerlines stretching overhead. He felt like he could feel them humming.
“It's, like, six am.”
“Smart boy,” Lily said. She was smiling. She looked the same as before, which surprised Ottley. But then, he had the impression that her appearance was constantly shifting with the intent that it look exactly the same. She wore a tight blue tank top and long, loose brown skirt that folded around her squatting form. “Come on, we'll get you some breakfast. Plenty of time before school.”
Ottley knew at that point he wouldn't make it to school that day. “Sure,” he said. He hadn't eaten since lunch the previous day.
The donut shop was very close to where Ottley had slept, but there was no straight path to it from the alley. The two emerged on the bustling road, then looped back to enter the glass and linoleum building on the opposite street.
Lily rubbed her hand through his hair. “Get anything you want. I'm buying.”
The first thing that struck Ottley was the child, only four or five, pressing himself against the glass case while his mother looked down at him from the cash register. He was fingering the window, pointing at every donut that caught his eye. It occurred to Ottley that to the tiny boy, he was conducting magic. He needed only to point at a pastry, and the rube-goldberg spell commenced. The Korean woman behind the counter plucked the sprinkled dough with a wad of tissue paper, bagged it, and handed it to the mother, who then exchanged her green reagents. But the kid didn't associate any of their actions – he associated the pointing. If it didn't result in a donut, then clearly something was wrong with the spell, not with his intention.
Lily noticed the toddler as well, and immediately started talking to him and his mother. Ottley grew uncomfortable; something about Lily dealing with children seemed unnatural.
The mother handed her child his donut. He returned to patterning the window, this time with just one hand. Instead of pointing, he started drawing with his oily fingers. A few times he leaned forward and breathed on the window. He left dozens of symbols and scrawls.
Ottley wondered if his little sister would have been the same way, if his mother hand't lost the baby in her miscarriage. Of course, that April his sister would have been much older than the little boy, but at one point she'd have believed in magic.
“Why do you suppose he's doing that?”
Ottley jumped. He hadn't noticed the old man sitting in the booth next to him. He had a halo of gray hair on an otherwise bald head, and he exuded a sense of health even though his skin was covered in liver spots and gaping freckles. It was almost hard to find his eyes, which were as brown as the spots. When he spoke, Ottley could smell his rank breath, though his teeth were gleaming white.
For the first time since speaking with the detective, Ottley wasn't sure if he was in the presence of a Stranger. He was certain of Lily, but he had never seen two Strangers in one place, and figured that if it ever happened the two would annihilate each other. Strangers held too much gravity to simply ignore another. The detective had obviously been human, but with the old man he simply couldn't tell. The man had the same undivided attention – the same sense of presence. Ottley felt like he had been sitting in the donut shop for years, and would remain there long after the teenager left.
The old man, with his coffee in hand, pointed to the child. “It's marvelous, really. It never ceases to amaze me just how much y'all like to scrawl on walls.”
Ottley wasn't sure if “y'all” referred to his generation or his species. “He's just bored, I think.”
“No, that's not it. You'll understand eventually.”
Lily started patting the child's head. She must have said something to unnerve the mother -- “So delicate” was all that Ottley heard – because the young woman suddenly grabbed her child's hand and led him out the door. “Sorry, we must be going,” she said. The child, who had been busily stabbing his finger at a frosted donut, wailed as he was pulled away. Even at the door, he was still pointing, trying to arc his magic across the room.
But the spell was broken.
They wandered the neighborhood streets as Ottley ate his donuts. He wanted to ask her questions – he knew why she was interested in him. She began showing him little tricks as they walked. She picked up a bottle cap off of the ground, tossed it into the air, caught it, and had him blow on it. “The bottle cap remembers the bottle,” she would say, or something equally cryptic and cliché. She ran a few quick motions of prestidigitation, and pulled the bottle cap out of his ear. Ottley was unimpressed. He had seen his father do similar tricks with pennies.
Then she pulled the whole bottle from his ear.
“Open it,” she said.
“I don't like warm coke,” he responded, but opened it anyway. The top fell off. He brought the bottle to his lips and took a swig. The taste of mold filled his mouth, like hot chocolate made from spoiled milk. He spit it out, spattering brown liquid on the sidewalk.
His hand was wet, but not from spitting. Bubbles of condensation covered the bottle. He took another taste.
Cold.
Little tricks, but Ottley took them all in stride. He figured if he refused to acknowledge Lily, then she would stop trying to get him to tap into magic again. Finally, she revealed a hint as to why she was following him, like folding the corner of a page.
“I need your help, Ottley.”
“I don't want to help you.” He wasn't sure if he meant her specifically, or just refused to use what she was referring to. He didn't mention that he didn't even know how it had worked, that at one moment he was yelling at Ron and the next felt himself filled with what he could only describe as nothing. It probably hadn't helped that he was raging drunk.
“You have a gift. I can help you use it.”
“I don't want to use it.”
She clicked her tongue in aggravation. “Such a tragedy. I guess we just have to hope it doesn't happen again. A little boy with no idea how to control his power...”
Ottley didn't respond.
“That's what it is, Ott,” she continued, placing her hand between his shoulders. To Ottley her gestures seemed like they were meant to be sensual, but for some reason didn't resonate. “There's a reason why every religion bans it. They're afraid.”
“I cant help you,” Ottley said. He knew he spoke the truth.
They were passing the same alley in which Ottley fell asleep. Ottley heard a roaring noise as they walked by. He saw a half-dozen men milling around two flatbed trucks parked where he'd slept. Even from where he stood, Ottley could see long, thick hoses coiling out of the trucks. They connected to large, bulbous canisters in each flatbed. The men were manipulating the hoses to spray a white liquid on the wall.
Ottley turned without telling Lily. He wasn't surprised when she followed him, even though she had been a few paces ahead. As he got closer, he could that wide sunglasses protected all of their eyes. The glasses stretched around the sides of their faces, looking more like goggles the more Ottley looked. The canisters, which Ottley could see were filled with chemicals, barely fit inside the trucks. He wondered how all of the men could fit inside the cabs.
He then saw that the spray wasn't liquid at all. The men – two appeared college aged, but it was hard for Ottley to tell with their eyes covered – blasted the wall with a constant stream of white powder caustic enough to grate the graffiti from the wall. The men followed each section with a rush of water from what looked like a firehose. The powder and water combined to form a milky, viscous substance that flowed down the side of the wall and followed the grooves in the pavement until reaching a nearby grating.
“Have you ever seen anything so stupid?” Lily asked. “No matter how much I watch people, I'll never understand why they do stupid stuff like this.”
Ottley noted the difference between “people watching” and the way Lily talked about “watching people.” Watching people.
Seeing that Ottley wasn't going to respond, she kept talking. “What are they going to do, whitewash the whole city?”
Ottley ignored her and walked the rest of the way to the trucks. A tall, stout man waved angrily at him from the truck. He had dark tan skin that looked to have the same texture as the concrete they cleaned.
“Get out of here, kid! This stuff will blast your skin off.”
Ottley grabbed the canister's spigot and pulled himself up on edge of the truck. “I want to help,” he said.
Lily and the supervisor both balked.
The water in running in Tim's kitchen sink burned his hands, but Ottley washed them for the third time anyway. Tim's mother insisted on defrosting frozen chicken with scalding – rather than lukewarm – water. It was one of the things Ottley liked about her mother, and about Tim: their irreverent ways to tackle a problem.
He'd called home straight after arriving on Tim's doorstep. He missed all of school, but the day before he'd promised he would come over for dinner. Ottley's mother didn't say much, just “Ok sweetie” and hung up.
“What happened?” Tim exclaimed when she'd opened the front door. White powder covered Ottley's entire body. He told her that he'd spent the day cleaning up the neighborhood, and asked if he could borrow their shower before dinner.
Once in the kitchen, scrubbed clean and wearing clothes given to him by Tim's dad, he found himself washing his hands every few minutes. They felt powdery and chapped no matter how many moisturizers or soaps he used. Tim's mother, a short woman with mushroom-shaped hair that fell to her shoulders, chastized him for washing them over the chicken. So, the third time he washed them, he pointed the faucet away.
Tim's whole family helped with the meal, from her young brother to her boisterous father. Whenever Tim handled the food, her mother stood by and commented. Ottley was reminded of Lily standing a dozen feet from the trucks – far enough that the supervisor couldn't drive her away – from where she chided Ottley for his foolishness. Tim's mother was hardly as irritating. He wasn't sure how Lily's voice carried over the machines, or why the other men didn't react to her, but Ottley heard every word.
The men were “doing it wrong,” that if they wanted to erase everyone's thoughts they should “start with toilet stalls and school desks,” and how the wall would “probably be painted again before morning.” What confused Ottley the most was when she started complaining about how as soon as she figured out why people draw on walls, people became obsessed with erasing them.
Once dinner was ready, Tim's entire family surprised Ottley by grabbing their plate fulls of food and taking up seats in front of the television. Ottley grabbed a can of off-brand Dr. Pepper and sat on the couch next to Tim.
Tim's father commanded the remote. The family chattered while he switched station to station, occasionally pausing on a baseball game or funny commercial. Eventually he settled on the evening news, which he set to just high enough volume to create a background buzz for the room. Nobody paid the images much attention, until a few minutes later when Tim's mother gasped.
“How horrible,” she said. “Can you believe it?”
Ottley's food lost its flavor. He was certain the TV would be showing information about Ron.
He looked, and was only momentarily relieved.
On the screen, police officers escorted a gaunt woman out of her home. Neighbors and reporters were barely restrained by lines of uniformed men. The walls behind her strobed red and blue from the off-screen police cars and ambulance. The text crawl read: Suburban Mother Drowns Child in Bath Tub.
As glad as he was that the reporters had forgotten about Ron for the time being, the new target of attention frightened Ottley even more. “I know her,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“Where? Her?” Perked Tim.
“Yeah, she was in the donut shop earlier.”
Tim didn't ask what he was doing in a donut shop before skipping school, but she noticably paused to process the information. Ottley hadn't been forthcoming about his truancy, but he knew she didn't want to bring up in front of her parents.
Unease gave way to anger. Ottley knew exactly who to blame for the tragedy. Lily's attention to the child earlier made a much more sinister sense. What angered him more was the feeling that the child's death was another way for her to irritate him, like when she dragged her finger in a rolling curve along the wall as she walked him home after cleaning the graffiti. The supervisor had broached the subject of payment, to which she mocked “half dollar, half dollar, a penny, and two bits!” Ottley turned him down. And while walking him home, her dragging finger left behind a dark red pigment on the concrete.
“I should go,” Ottley said abruptly, placing down his fork. “I told Mom I would be home soon.”
“I'll walk you home,” Tim responded before her parents could object.
Tim waited until they were outside and rounding a corner to offer him a Parliament. He accepted, and handed her his lighter once his was lit.
“How long were you working with chemicals?” She asked.
“Is it still that noticeable?”
Tim laughed. “You smell like our bathroom floor.”
“I cleaned a wall today.”
“How exciting.”
Ottley grinned at her sarcasm, but he was proud of the job they had done. “One of the guys there,” he flinched as he realized he was still omitting Lily, “was saying some interesting stuff. Cliches, but like how everything is connected.”
“I don't follow.”
“Well, this wall, it was just a small part of the neighborhood, but by cleaning it we could effect the whole city.”
“Like fractals,” she said.
“Sure.”
“So you were doing the same thing as those other people, the ones who painted it first.”
Ottley paused his step. “What?”
“Well, by removing their mark, you left your own, right? Did you at least sign it?”
Ottley had wanted to, but the foreman wouldn't allow it. Lily had gotten a laugh out of that one.
Tim took advantage of the pause to stop and light her cigarette. “It sounds like fun,” she said. “I want to help too some time. Only lets join a team that is painting pictures over the graffiti instead. I don't want to look like a snowman when I get home.”
Tim left Ottley at his street's corner, and he very nearly turned around and followed her when he saw Lily sitting beneath his tree. Instead, he tensed his muscles, and walked directly towards the woman. The lights in his mother's window were out, even though it was barely after sunset.
“What did you do to that kid?” Ottley demanded.
Lily didn't move, except to turn her head towards him. She looked like she could bend her neck in any direction. Orange glow from the streetlights trickled through the tree branches into her eyes. “I didn't do anything. His mother did.”
Ottley crossed his arms, trying to buttress himself. “No, she loved that kid. I saw her protect him from you.”
“Maybe she loved him too much,” Lily sighed.
Ottley's resolve melted away. Something about her response terrified him. He realized he had been confusing her dark eyes and old gaze as filled with depth. He was close – they were hollow. He wanted to tell her to go away, to never see him again, but he knew he had no power over her. Just because she needed him didn't mean he could control her.
“You killed him,” he said.
“I wonder what the sentence is for incinerating another human being?”
“That was different.”
“Was it, dear? Oh you poor thing, you just care for that Tim girl so much. I'm sure seeing her kissed by that brute was just unbearable.”
Ottley didn't respond. Lily stood and cupped his cheeks in her palms, drawing her face very close. He should have been able to feel her breath.
“That was supposed to be your kiss, wasn't it. I understand. Having something that means so much to you just get taken like that.”
Her fingertips chilled his skin.
“You're wrong,” he said.
She smiled, and it was a hideous smile. “I don't think I am, dear. I've been watching your species ever since you created me with your myths and fairy tales. And now, I finally understand enough.”
Ottley jerked his head back. Her hands slipped from his face. He wanted to hit her, to do something to her, but he knew that being angry – and being scared – wasn't enough. There was nothing he could do.
Instead, Ottley went inside. He turned on the porchlight, the living room light, and made his house look as inviting as possible. He was surprised to find his mother at the kitchen table, and even more surprised when she stood up and hugged him.
----------------------
For the next two weeks, the news stations effectively ignored the mysterious case of Ron Sloane. The reporters had plenty to keep them occupied. A rash of infant and child deaths had struck the city. Four more children died mysteriously by the end of the first week, causing such fervor in the media that even standard SIDS cases – which had also spiked – received coverage.
Ottley liked to think that he could forget about Ron too, but he still saw Lily almost daily. He knew, deep down, that her mere presence was causing the deaths, and that he was the reason she remained in his neighborhood. Even when he didn't see her, he felt her presence almost constantly – especially at night.
Ron returned to the spotlight at the end of the second week.
Tim and Ottley were in English class. Mr. Polk, in his charcoal shirt and wrinkled slacks, ceremoniously placed The Scarlet Letter on his desk. The board behind him read Connections Between Hawthorn and Orwell.
Ottley had only bothered to read one assigned book that year, 1984. He remembered being unimpressed, and Mr. Polk was only drying up the subject further. The teacher even rattled about the brilliance of the first sentence, one of “the top first lines of all time,” to which Ottley scoffed.
To Ottley, there was nothing impressive about saying “It was a bright, cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen.” If the past weeks were any indication, every day in April was bright and cold, and every clock always struck thirteen.
Mr. Polk was in the middle of making yet another point about the power of words and letters when the police entered.
Ottley considered jumping out of the window, but that entailed a drop of three stories. So he waited.
The two police officers showed Mr. Polk a slip of paper, unhooked a pair of handcuffs... and walked directly past Ottley.
“Kelli Newhaus, you are under arrest for the murder of Ron Sloane. You have the right to remain silent...”
Mr. Polk tried valiantly to continue his lesson, but no teacher for the rest of the day was able to stifle the silent buzz. Rumors circulated before, during and after every class for the rest of the day, and every time Ottley saw a group of teenagers standing together, he knew exactly what they were talking about.
For the brief duration of the afternoon, Ottley allowed himself to think that the police were right. For the first time in weeks, he looked back at the events after the Lacrosse party. In particular, he focused on what he couldn't remember. After watching Ron crudely press his lips to Tim – who then slapped him – Ottley found a close friend in beer. The rest of the night was such a haze, such a tangle of emotions and confusion, that he figured he must have dreamt the horror in a drug-induced nightmare.
Clearly, Lily and the Strangers were wrong.
His optimism ended just before the school day did the same. A new rumor smashed through his rationality. The guarded secret of the Newhaus family, which an early news broadcast played at 3:00 for the whole city to see: Kelli Newhaus was pregnant.
Ottley wasn't surprised. No one he knew at school was, either. What bothered him, what ended his short respite, was the fact that he already knew. And he didn't know how.
I'm a fan of androgynous or outright gender-wrong names.
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