Absolute Brightness (6 page)

Leonard just dangled there, unsure of what to say.

“
Do you hear me?
”

“I hear you,” he replied. And that smile, which had rarely left his face since he had arrived on our doorstep, entirely disappeared.

 

four

THE HOLIDAYS WERE
bearing down on us, and every customer had an appointment scheduled. Like all red-blooded Christians, Leonard and I had a responsibility to get our shopping done before the twenty-fifth of December, so even though Mom was booked, she agreed to drive us to the mall and then pick us up afterward. I knew from past experience that if I wasn't waiting outside Sears and in plain sight at the appointed time, she would leave without us and we'd have to find our own way home. That was the deal.

I've always considered myself an expert at the timing and execution of my weekly expeditions to the mall. I would make the usual rounds, stopping at the Gap, Foot Locker, Banana Republic, Victoria's Secret, Barnes & Noble, the Candle Corner, Dollar Bob's, and still have time to get a slice and a Coke at the cheesy Pizza Hut that was built to look like someone's idea of an authentic Italian villa. I could be in and out of those places like a mad bee flitting from flower to flower, ready to sting anyone who got in my way. But Leonard had insisted on coming along with me, and though I did manage to lose him in a surge of shoppers going through a revolving door at Stern's, my shopping clock was off, and I was running late.

Leonard was the kind of person who always stood out in a crowd; but that day he was pushing it, sporting a cherry-red beret, pink-and-purple-striped jeans, and a white patent-leather belt. I had almost forgotten how outlandish he looked in plain daylight. But when I rounded the corner of the Bagel Boutique and saw him standing there wearing those ridiculous six-inch platform sneakers, I stopped in my tracks.

Right after Thanksgiving, Leonard made up his mind to find a pair of platform sneakers. He felt that these were about to become a major thing, the big featured item of the next fashion wave, and he shopped for them as though they might actually be out there, an undiscovered item just waiting for the right person to appreciate them publicly and thereby start the trend. When he couldn't find a pair for sale anywhere within a fifty-mile radius, Leonard made up his mind to create his own. He bought a dozen pairs of flip-flops at Dollar Bob's, cut off each thong part that fits between the toes and then glued the rubber slabs of flop to the bottoms of a pair of purple Converse high-tops. When he had added six inches of rainbow tread to each sneaker, he proudly modeled them for us in our living room.

Hideous.

I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen. Wearing rainbow-colored platform sneakers, I informed him, would put him in physical jeopardy. They were a definite fashion hazard. Finally, I had to explain to him in plain English that if he intended to go out in public wearing those things on his feet, he would soon be running for his life.

He claimed that they were entirely safe for walking and, to prove it, he pranced around the living room several times.

*   *   *

“You've
got
to help me!” he said in a desperate voice that is usually reserved for actors when they find themselves in an action movie. “They're after me.”

Under normal circumstances I would have stayed out of sight until my mother showed up, but Leonard was waving and calling to me as if he were in real danger. He called out my name several times and then clomped quickly toward me.

“What's the matter now?”

“Travis Lembeck and that Calzoni kid with the pig face. They cornered me outside Payless and took all my money. Okay, so I don't care about the money. They can have the money. But they took my gold-plated Yves Saint Laurent money clip, the one my mother gave me, and it's all I have left of her in this world.”

Travis and Curtis (that Calzoni kid) came striding out of Sears, pushing the doors hard and looking very satisfied with themselves. Both of them were toting hefty shopping bags.

Travis and Curtis were a grade ahead of me, and you could tell just by looking at them that they were trouble, the kind of boys who had too much past and no future. As a result they had a power over everyone in town. People were speechless around them. Nobody called them “poor white trash” to their faces or made fun of them for having parents who couldn't care less. Nobody offered to tutor them in algebra. Nobody bothered them about their SAT scores, asked them what they did over spring break, or where they planned to go to college. The fact that Travis's eyes were a little too far apart and had an evil slant to them never came up as a topic of conversation either. Curtis's badly bowed legs, which caused him to walk with a conspicuous waddle, were also not discussed. No comments were ever made about their clothes; no one said, “Why do they wear those matching black down parkas? It's May, for God's sakes.” And as far as I know, nobody had ever asked them point-blank if they carried firearms.

Something had to be done. Leonard didn't look like he was capable of anything other than a flood of tears at that moment, and there was no one else around. It was up to me to step up to the plate.

“If I don't get that money clip back right now,” I told them, “both of you are dead meat.”

Anyone with half a working brain cell could tell you that threatening Travis Lembeck was not a smart idea. Not in public. Not anywhere. Ever. But I couldn't just stand by and let him and his henchman, Curtis, walk away with Leonard's lousy clip.

“That's right, Lembeck,” I said, moving closer to where he and Curtis were standing. “I'm talking to you.” And then I added, “Now.”

I reached out my hand expecting him to fork over the clip. I could almost hear him thinking,
Who does she think she is
? When nothing happened, I realized that he was in shock. He never would have predicted that I had it in me to do such a thing. Then the right side of his face resumed its usual sneer, and he looked at me out of one narrowed eye.

“Really? And what if I don't feel like giving it up?”

“No problem. I just report it stolen and give the police a couple of names.”

There was a moment when everything just hung in the air between us. I thought Travis might haul off and hit me in the head. Curtis kept looking back and forth from Travis to me, from me to Travis. This was making me very nervous, because I knew that Travis was going to have to do
something
in order to prove to Curtis that he was still the alpha idiot.

“Tell you what,” Travis finally said. “How 'bout I give you the clip and then
you
get to be the one who's dead meat. How's that?”

“Whatever.”

I was suddenly a cartoon superhero with cartoon superhero powers. I felt that I was able to see through the cloth of Travis's down parka and into his sorry little pocket—some stray lint, a few bits of loose tobacco, coins, an old butterscotch-flavored LifeSaver, and a pack of matches were all nestled up against Leonard's money clip. I just knew it was there and I wanted it.

I had no way of making Travis give it to me. Not really. Leonard's sob story about how his mother had given him this useless thing would never sway the likes of Travis and Curtis. I just kept thinking,
What next? What next?
And then a new thought occurred to me.
What if I had miscalculated my move, what if I was in the middle of leaping a tall building in not quite a single bound, what if I didn't know what I was doing?
I wasn't sure if it was the fright, but my legs began to wobble beneath me, and my shoes felt like they were shrinking as I stood there for what seemed like forever.

“So, you queer, too?” Travis asked me.

“Excuse me?” I heard him all right, but I needed some time to think about how to answer.

“You heard him,” Curtis piped in. “Wants to know if you're a lesbo.”

And then Curtis let out a squeal of girlish laughter that shook his middle and forced tears to his piggy eyes.

That's when I made my move. I'm not even sure how it happened; I was just there, attached to Travis's mouth. Leonard gasped with surprise, or maybe it was horror. Curtis lost control of his shopping bag, and it landed with a clank on the pavement. He had stopped laughing and just stood there watching me kiss his friend. Travis went rigid for a minute and tried to pull away from me. But his mouth had developed a mind of its own, and I could feel him kissing me back. His tongue, small and darty and fully alive to the possibilities, was busy leading him forward, into the future and closer to me. He tasted like an aluminum measuring cup or those old canteens from our camping days with my dad. I also caught a whiff of tobacco that clung to his hair and skin, and the smell of him, a surprising mix of chocolate milk and hard candy.

“Whoa,” I heard Curtis mutter in the background.

When I stepped back, Travis looked like a totally different person to me. All his usual hard edges had been smoothed. He seemed like someone I might want to talk to once in a while, someone who could take a joke. I wondered whether I looked different to him, too. It was probably just a lot of hormones getting released into my bloodstream, causing me to see things in a whole new light.

The honk of my mother's car horn broke the spell.

“Come on, let's get out of here,” I said, grabbing Leonard and pulling him along toward the car.

“But—”

I was not about to let him finish his sentence.

“Just get in.”

I took the front seat. Leonard climbed into the back.

“Who are those two boys?” my mother asked as she checked out her hair in the rearview mirror.

I rolled the leftover taste of Travis around in my mouth, savoring my success.

“That's her new boyfriend,” Leonard chimed in from the backseat. “That one. The one on the left.”

“Shut up, you. He is so
not
my boyfriend. And you of all people should know it.”

“I hope not,” Mom said as the car pulled away from the curb. “Neither of them look much like boyfriend material to me.”

I sat there in the front seat of Mom's car, fingering Leonard's stupid money clip inside my coat pocket and feeling that little lift that comes when I've scored. As someone who has had some experience in the world of shoplifting, I've learned that the release of endorphins is definitely one reason to take the risk and pocket merchandise. I mean, for people like me, it's rarely a matter of actually
needing
the stuff. It's the high I'm after, the lift.

When I was good and ready, I reached over into the backseat and presented Leonard with my balled-up fist. Then slowly, really slowly, I opened my fingers one by one until the money clip was visible in the sweaty center of my palm.

“Here,” I said.

Leonard's mouth literally dropped open.

“But how…”

Even after he had grabbed hold of the clip and then sat there staring at it, I could feel the ghost of the thing still in my hand. When I looked, there was a deep impression in the middle of my lifeline.

Leonard looked at me as if I were the Blue Fairy in the Pinocchio story, the one who had the power to turn him into a real boy. There were actual tears in his eyes, and he mouthed the words “thank you.”

Jeez
, I thought,
I'll never get rid of him now.

And that's when I burst out crying.

Don't ask me why. Maybe the wiring of my deep inner emotional life had gotten crossed and I had lost the ability to tell the difference between happiness and sadness. Maybe crying was just a new form of laughing, and vice versa.

When we got home, I marched Leonard out behind the house, sat him down on the trash bin, and told him the story of Winona Ryder. Because I had once been a huge Winona Ryder fan, even going so far as writing letters to her and sending them to her talent agency, I knew her
E! True Hollywood Story
by heart and had no difficulty working it into our conversation. Even though she had already had a whole career by the time I was old enough to appreciate her and had gone into semiretirement when I was about ten, she still held some kind of fascination for me. Her story was enough to inspire anybody.

“Winona was, like, eight or nine years old and living in Petaluma with her family. She was a total tomboy, and the first week at her new school, these kids attacked her, called her a wuss and worse. Then, for good measure, they gave her a beating. And you know why?”

Leonard was engrossed in the story; he stared at me and didn't seem to realize that the question was, in fact, directed at him. So I repeated it.

“Do you know why they beat her up?”

“Um … I dunno. Because her last name used to be Horowitz?”

Frankly, I was surprised as hell that Leonard knew this. But that was not the reason she got beat up.

“No,” I told him. “The reason they beat her up was because they thought she was a sissy boy.”

Leonard blinked at me as though he were determined to send me an encoded message by opening and closing his eyelids. I didn't know the code, however, so it had no effect on me.

“Thank you for getting my money clip back,” he said.

I felt that it was important to tell him the rest of the story; he needed to know that following the beating-up incident Winona's parents took her out of school, gave her home study, and enrolled her in the prestigious American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where she was later discovered and given a screen test for the role of Jon Voight's daughter in
Desert Bloom
. And even though she didn't get the part, it did lead to her being cast as a poetry-loving teen in
Lucas
(a movie I've seen seven times).

But telling Leonard this was obviously a big mistake, because he smiled too brightly and said, “Wait. Are you saying I should take acting classes?”