The Cost of Knowing, page 3
“No need. I drove your car here so you wouldn’t have to take the bus.”
I smile, but inside, my heart sinks. The bus is so much cheaper than gas, and it requires me watching zero visions of my steering wheel and gear shift, so lately I’ve been leaving my car—my little 2001 Geo Metro—at Aunt Mackie’s house. I don’t know when I’ll be comfortable enough with it to call it my house. Maybe when my parents come back from the dead and start living there too.
“Thanks, Talia,” I say instead.
2 The Photo
BY THE TIME TALIA orders her double scoop cone of half s’mores, half rainbow sherbet, which sounds absolutely disgusting together but has always been her favorite, and I order my plain old chocolate scoop in a cone, and we squeeze into my blue Geo, it’s begun to rain, despite the heat. Talia makes a fantastic copilot. She flips on the radio, blasting static into the car for a brief moment before switching it to Bluetooth and cranking “Feel Good Inc.” This car may be a piece of crap as old as me, but the sound system is bumping. I can feel the rhythm in my chest as we fly down Clark Street.
I glance over at her as she licks some of her s’mores into her sherbet. I like her hat like this. It sits right at her hairline, with all her hair tucked up into it so I can see her whole face. It sharpens her jawline. Then I remember that she asked Scoop if she could talk to me about something.
“Hey,” I say. “Did you say you had something to tell me?”
“Oh yeah!” she exclaims. She bounces with excitement in her seat and nestles her ice cream cone in the cupholder, then reaches up and dramatically rips off the hat. Waves of electric-blue hair fall over her face, and she shakes her head and beams at me proudly.
“Whaaat?” I grin, sounding pleasantly surprised, even though I’m actually terrified.
The blue hair.
It’s happening.
One step closer to her breaking up with me.
“You like it?” she asks, raising her left shoulder to her chin, lowering her eyes and pouting her bubblegum-pink lips slightly.
Damn, do I like it.
I nod and swallow the lump in my throat. If I can’t even hold her hand without seeing her breaking up with me, how can I even think we could ever have sex?
“Ready for a lick?” she asks, jarring me from my thoughts. I turn my head and stick out my tongue, she holds the cone up to my face, and I lick, savoring the cold, creamy sweetness. Talia and I used to visit Scoop’s all the time when we were little, when Shaun was with us. I’m sure my face betrays that I’m thinking about him, because I can feel Talia’s eyes linger on me before she faces forward again and licks her own cone in silence. I glance over at the rainbow and white and brown all swirled into a monstrous tower.
“I swear I’ll never get used to looking at that,” I say with a grin. The rain picks up, pelting the windshield mercilessly, and I take a long, deep breath and glance at Talia. She doesn’t reply, her eyes transfixed on the road, her mind somewhere else.
“Hey,” I begin, trying to distract her from the rain. I look down at her hand. I wish I could take hold of it, look her in the eyes, and tell her that it’s okay to grieve every time it rains, even if it’s been three years. But I’m better at offering distractions.
“Did you check on Isaiah while you were at the house earlier?”
She smirks at me, and her eyes brighten.
“You know I did. He’s been playing music in his room all day, though. He used to be fun to play with, once upon a time. When we were kids.”
“We’re still kids,” I remind her as we stop at a red light. The words don’t sound convincing when I say them. I don’t know what I feel like, but I don’t feel sixteen. It’s hard to feel like anything in the present when I’m staring into the future every thirty seconds. The light turns green and I put my hands on the wheel again, triggering a vision of my car sitting at the top of a junk pile the size of my house at the dump, years from now because I’ve touched the wheel so much, and seen so many visions of it.
This car, my little Geo that I love so much, will end up flooded with water one day. A few weeks ago, on one of the hottest days of the year, I stopped for gas on the way to Talia’s house. We had everything planned out for a perfect summer day. We were going to put on our bathing suits and head to the Garfield Park Community Center for a swim. Talia had stocked her freezer with Popsicles for us to enjoy on the walk over. I was leaning against my car at the gas station, excited, happy for a moment. I was about to see my favorite girl. But when I put the pump away, sat down in the driver’s seat, and grabbed the steering wheel at four and eight, I saw a vision I’ll never forget. Two hands, white, seeming to belong to a man in his twenties or thirties, wearing a wedding band, took the place of my black hands on the wheel. A torrent of water barreled down on the windshield and sprayed glass into the car, releasing the flood into the cabin.
I panicked.
I thought about stopping the vision.
But curiosity, I guess, is a helluva drug. It’s like standing in front of a train as it barrels across a broken bridge. Yeah, it’s horrific, but is any normal person going to look away? Nah. So I watched on. A notebook flew past my face, and my left hand went to the driver’s-side door, but it wouldn’t open. I couldn’t see anything with the surge of water battering my face. When I opened my eyes, I still saw nothing. Just inky blackness. Those hands with the wedding band were slumped over the wheel in the dark, unmoving, probably cold.
And then, red.
Then I commanded the vision to stop. I couldn’t take any more. I was back in my Geo—my dry, functioning, safe little car parked at pump two on the corner of Harrison Street and Independence Boulevard. It was sunny outside, and sweat was beading on my forehead. My chest was pounding. I wanted to go back to thirty seconds before, when I was looking forward to Popsicles and swimming, and seeing Talia in a swimsuit. But I couldn’t. I was stuck in that moment, sitting in my car alone, staring in a daze through my windshield at two carefree girls about my age in jean shorts with swinging brown ponytails. They were laughing and climbing into a Jeep in front of me, while I was absorbing the fact that whoever gets my Geo next is going to drown exactly where I was sitting. Exactly where I am sitting. How could I go have a day at the pool with Talia with that on my mind? I went home.
That was the day I learned to avoid seeing anything I didn’t have to.
It was going to happen whether I knew about it or not, and I might as well protect myself from the knowledge.
“Hey,” says Talia. I look over at her and realize she’s holding my chocolate cone inches from my face. It looks like it’s about to drip. I dutifully lick the outside, and she rotates a little too fast, and a huge glob falls and lands on my shoulder.
“Ah!” she exclaims, handing me my cone and reaching for the glove box, where I always keep extra napkins. “Lo siento.”
“Uh…,” I begin. “Is that ‘Let me get that’?”
She sighs.
“No. ‘Lo siento’ is ‘I’m sorry.’ You could at least make flash cards for yourself or something. Act like this is still something you want to do.”
“It is,” I say.
I’m trying. Spanish is hard. Or at least for me, without the time or energy. I guess she’s had to tell me what “lo siento” means more than she should have.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Uh… lo siento.”
She carefully wipes the chocolate from my shoulder without a word as “Feel Good Inc.” fades into silence. There’s a gap between it and the next song, and in that moment, I absorb the sound of the rain pelting the car. Talia does too. I know this when I hear what she says next.
“I’m bringing Shaun flowers tonight.” I can feel the weight in her voice. I keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, and I realize I’ve been tensing my jaw. I take a deep breath and wait for her to keep talking.
“I was wondering if you want to come with me.”
Shaun. Her brother. My brother from another mother.
“I…,” I begin, wanting so badly to be able to say yes. I choose to be honest instead.
“I can’t, Tal,” I say. I struggle to find the words. What do I say? How do I tell her that I can’t hear Shaun’s name without feeling like I’m going to fall apart? “I’m so tired,” I continue. Always a good excuse. “I’m so grateful for you coming to get me from work, and I’m glad to be off early.” But I’m scared. “But I’m tired.”
It’s not too far-fetched. I’ve been working all day, so it’s believable that I’d be too tired to do anything more than heat up something for dinner and go to bed. My stomach twists into a knot of apprehension. The number of things I have to touch just to make dinner, even something microwaveable, is going to be mentally exhausting. I wonder what tonight might look like if I were… “normal.” Aunt Mackie is probably home, unless she’s showing someone a house, but she wouldn’t ask questions if Talia and I stole away into the theater room in the basement together for a few hours. And we wouldn’t have to worry about Isaiah, since he’s been going to his room for the evening earlier and earlier these days.
Talia and I would have the house to ourselves.
“I get it,” says Talia, crunching into her waffle cone and licking the dwindling brown-and-rainbow ice cream tower. I lift my own cone and savor another lick of creamy chocolate. We ride in silence for the rest of the trip, which Talia doesn’t do unless she’s retreated into her thoughts, which she doesn’t do unless she’s hurting.
I sigh and decide that if I can’t distract her from the rain, I can at least leave her to endure it in peace. But it kills me to just leave us to the sound.
I can feel her pain.
I’m remembering him too.
I try not to let the hard knot in my stomach turn itself into nausea, which has been known to happen with me, usually when I’m hungry. The merciless rain has receded to a drizzle by the time I drive through the black iron gates of Santiam Estates, the gated community Aunt Mackie has lived in since before I can remember.
Each house in this neighborhood costs over a million dollars. All of them are at least two stories tall, with a basement, forced air, and a well-maintained lawn, as is mandated by the Santiam Housing Association. I should know. Aunt Mackie is a real estate agent. Kind of a famous one around Chicago proper. Her face is on buses, park benches, and taxis. She knows the rules of the homeowners association better than anyone else in the community, and has had a hand in shaping so many of them over the years.
As she says, “Whoever makes the rules controls the narrative.”
We drive past Talia’s favorite house. It’s a humble one compared to its neighbors, gray with a bright yellow door. I see why she likes it. It’s the only house with any color. Bright pink hydrangeas line the front of the house, all the way up to the front door.
“We’ll have a house like that one day,” she said dreamily, six months ago when we announced to Aunt Mackie and Talia’s mother that we were officially together. I haven’t held her hand long enough to find out if we will.
And now, I don’t know if I ever can.
We pass a cream-colored house with black shutters. The sprinklers are spewing water across the front lawn, even though it’s just finished raining. Mr. and Mrs. Sanderson must not be home yet. Isaiah and I have been mowing their lawn and trimming down their dogwood bushes every summer since we moved in with Aunt Mackie four years ago. Mrs. Zaccari’s house next door to the Sandersons’ is looking a little overgrown too. I consider asking Isaiah if he wants to walk over here with me tomorrow to make an extra twenty bucks, but I doubt he’ll say yes. We have nothing to talk about anymore. Nothing in common except one thing—that aching empty space where our parents used to be, and that topic will probably always be off-limits for him.
We finally reach Aunt Mackie’s house—the brown one halfway down the block. The sunset-auburn-colored house halfway down the block, Aunt Mackie insists. Looks like plain old reddish-brown to me.
“Dammit,” hisses Talia as I pull into the wraparound driveway and park my car around the side of the garage so the neighbors can’t see it.
A two-decade-old Geo isn’t exactly the curb appeal I’m looking for, Aunt Mackie said to me when I first drove it home from the used car lot.
“What’s up?” I ask.
Talia pops the last of her ice cream cone into her mouth and holds what remains of my chocolate cone out to me.
“Your aunt’s already home.”
I eat the last bite of my cone and she swings open the door and jumps out. She shuts it a little harder than I think she meant to. I suddenly realize why she wanted us to come home early, why she was so happy to show me her new hair, why she was looking at me like that when she took off her hat.
I sigh in relief and get out of the car. For the first time in my life, I’m grateful that Aunt Mackie is home early. Better to have her home than risk being left alone in the theater room with Talia and see the disappointment in her eyes when I have to bail out before she reaches for me. Goddamn it, I hate this. If I can’t touch her for fear of seeing the future, how am I supposed to convince myself that our future includes a big gray house with a yellow door and hydrangeas, and us not touching each other forever? By simple logic, we have to end at some point. I just want to go through life blissfully unaware of when that’ll happen.
I pull my keys out of the ignition and lock my car door. I shoo away the vision of me locking my keys in the back seat of my car in a few years and follow Talia through the jet-black front door into the foyer. The unmistakable smell of pizza bites and baked sweet potatoes overtakes my sinuses. This smell combination means two things: Isaiah has eaten dinner, which is always pizza bites, and Aunt Mackie has been home for at least twenty minutes to meal prep—one of the few times she cooks each week.
“Alex?”
“It’s us, Aunt Mackie,” says Talia, slinging her black messenger bag off over her head and running her hands through her new electric-blue hair. She sets the bag down by the copper console table, with a mirror the size of a standard sofa above it, and steps farther into the house until the carpet begins. Then she steps out of her black combat boots and makes her way into the living room and around the corner.
“Oh my gah—” comes Aunt Mackie’s hushed voice. Talia’s giggling starts immediately.
“What did you do?” asks Aunt Mackie.
I kick off my Vans and take a shortcut to the dining room through the kitchen, around the island, and through the walk-in pantry with boxes and cans neatly arranged to the ceiling.
“I wanted something a little different,” says Talia, just as I reach the dining room. Aunt Mackie is sitting at the other end of the dining table, which has papers strewn all over it. She looks up at me over her glasses with her mouth agape in shock.
“Do you see what your girlfriend did to her hair?” she asks me. I don’t know why she expects me to be outraged. If she knew any of the music I listen to, saw any of the artists, she could’ve anticipated my response. I hold up the devil horns with my right hand and shut my eyes for maximum effect.
“I think it’s pretty metal.”
Talia raises one hand to the ceiling, twirls around in a circle, and curtsies.
“Hella metal,” she says.
Aunt Mackie slips her glasses down her nose and reaches up to touch her edges. She’s got a new hairstyle herself—her normally shoulder-length wash-and-go is now twisted up into Marleys, tied into a giant bun right at the crown of her head—neat and professional. She’s looking over her glasses at Talia’s blue hair, which seems to glow in this dining room otherwise filled with beige, brown, white, and black.
“I just hope you dye it back before the start of the school year. What’ll happen if colleges ask you to send in pictures of you doing extracurricular activities throughout high school, with your applications?”
“Pretty sure plenty of college students have blue hair,” says Talia.
“But not during the admissions process.”
“Well, then my pic will be even more accurate. They should know exactly what they’re getting themselves into if they admit Talia Gomez—nose ring, blue hair, eighteen-inch back tattoo and all.”
It takes a solid five seconds of staring before Aunt Mackie processes that last part.
“Did you say eighteen-inch back tattoo?” she asks.
Talia nods, and I try not to smile as she drags out the joke.
“Yeah, I got it when I went to Mexico with my cousin last summer. It’s a picture of you with the word ‘gullible’ underneath.”
That’s my girl.
Even Aunt Mackie has to smile in defeat at that one. She taps the table a few times.
“All right, all right, I’m glad you think it’s funny to watch my blood pressure go through the roof,” she chuckles. “But I’m serious. Colleges can deny students based on absolutely anything. I’d hate for you or Alex, or Isaiah, to get skipped over because of something so silly. You kids are my babies, y’know? I hate to say it, but sometimes you have to play by rules you don’t agree with, just to make it in life.”
“Yes, Aunt Mackie,” says Talia with an eye roll.
Aunt Mackie nods in reply, rising from her chair and rubbing her temples as if she’s been straining her eyes all day. “I have to leave in a few minutes to pick up a petition from Mrs. Zaccari about this concert at the Wall this weekend—”
“Ooh, ooh!” cries Talia. “Rex and the Thimbles? Icey London?”
“Who?” asks Aunt Mackie.
“Plush Frog?” presses Talia.
“I don’t—”
“Who’s playing this weekend?” asks Talia.
I have to smile. If a concert is happening anywhere near us in the next three months, Talia usually knows about it. Rex and the Thimbles and Plush Frog are both playing at the Wall this weekend, which is only a mile away from here, but I can think of only one artist playing that would warrant a petition from Mrs. Zaccari.
“Shiv Skeptic,” I say.
