“Oh, where in Michigan?”
“I don’t know exactly. Somewhere in the north. He’s an English professor.”
“That’s interesting. Where does he teach?”
“Um, I’m not sure the name of it,” I say, and it hits me for the first time, really, that Daniel lives somewhere in Michigan, but I don’t know where. I don’t have his address. I have his phone number, I guess. Unless he changed it. But if something happened to him, I don’t know where he is. Even though we’re not close anymore—hell, he drives me nuts—I used to be the one who looked out for him. And realizing that he’s out there, in god-knows-where Michigan, is… unsettling.
“Colin?” Rafael is looking at me, but I can’t tell if his expression is concerned or if he just realized that I’m a total asshole who doesn’t even know where his own brother lives.
“Huh?”
“I said I’ve never been to the Midwest.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
Rafael nods slowly and checks his watch. “I should go. How about I text you the address and the info for Saturday?”
“Sure.” I follow him into the living room. “Let me give you my cell number. I called you from the shop phone before.”
“What’s your last name?” he asks as he adds me to his phone.
“Already have another Colin in there, huh?” I tease, but he just shakes his head. Jeez, this guy has no sense of humor at all. “It’s Mulligan.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll be in touch. I think this is going to be great.” He pats Shelby good-bye.
When he opens the door, I almost don’t want him to go. This is the first actual conversation I’ve had—one that wasn’t about beer, sports, or music—in… well, in I don’t know how long, and I want to give him… something.
“Listen, Rafael,” I say. “Thanks.” He looks down at me and his open expression encourages me. “For asking me to do this and—and for the other night. You were right. I was getting my ass handed to me.”
A real smile this time, lips and crooked teeth and warm eyes.
“You’re welcome. Call me Rafe. Only my mother calls me Rafael.”
WE’RE ON
for Sat. 10-1. 11th & Mt. Vernon. Park on Mt. Vernon if you drive. The kids are really excited, Colin.
Rafe’s text comes in just as I’m starting my last job of the day.
“What’re you smiling at?” Brian asks, trying to look over my shoulder at my phone. I quickly shove it back in my pocket and swat him away.
“Can you do some work for once, dipshit? Clean that crap up.” I point to the corner of the shop where Luther knocked over a bucket filled with burnt transmission fluid and threw sawdust over it to deal with later. But now it’s later and he already left and I’ll be damned if I get stuck with it again.
“Hey,” I ask Pop as we jack up an Audi, “how did you start explaining cars to us?”
“When you were kids? Christ, I don’t remember. I talked out loud about whatever I was doing and you boys were always there, so you listened, I guess. Why do you want to know all of a sudden?”
I shrug, distracted by how he looks a little unsteady as he works.
“Hey, you feeling okay?” I ask him.
“Yep, just felt a little dizzy.”
“I thought Sam said you had a headache earlier.”
“Eh.” He waves a hand, dismissing the subject.
“Uh, hey, listen, Pop, I need to take this Saturday off.”
“Oh?” He wanders around the garage and fiddles with some odds and ends lying around, then wanders back to me.
“Colin,” he says seriously, looking me right in the eye, “you got some girl knocked up again?”
My face heats up instantly and my palms start to sweat just thinking about Maya. “No! Why would you think that?”
“Well, what am I supposed to think? You’re asking shit like how to teach a kid to fix cars and taking a Saturday off. I figure you’ve got some girl.”
“No, no. I just need the day, Pop, that’s all.”
“Yeah, okay.” He pauses and studies me. “You’re sure it ain’t about some girl?”
I shake my head.
“Huh. Too bad,” he says and leaves me to finish the Audi, heart pounding.
SOME GIRL.
Jesus. Maya.
I was seventeen and every little thing that anyone did—the way they tapped their pencils or flicked their hair or cleared their throats; the way they said “hey” or fist-bumped or smiled kindly—stirred a rage inside me that was just looking for a target. And god help anyone who gave me one.
Brandon Starkfield caught me looking at him near the auditorium one day, so I kicked the crap out of him and he never made eye contact again. Mrs. Goldzer, the German teacher, offered to let me retake a test I failed and I called her a fat cow. In German. Girls would smile at me and I’d fix my expression into an uncaring neutrality so cold that I would watch them startle and look away. I hurt everyone around me. Everyone. But Maya was the worst.
I had sixth period free that semester so sometimes I’d cut seventh period study hall, leaving after fifth to wander around until football. In the previous few months, though, my grades had been shitty enough that I was worried I’d become ineligible to play, so I started doing homework in the library during sixth period. Maya always came in after choir. She lived in my neighborhood, so I’d known her awhile, though we weren’t really friends. We’d chat a little, or sometimes just sit at the same table doing homework. She was a pretty girl—dark skin, big hazel eyes, curvy, great smile. And somehow she didn’t trigger the furious reactions that I had so little control over with most everyone else. Because she was an exception in that way, I thought maybe she would be an exception in the other.
I spent a lot of time staring at her, not listening to what she was saying, just trying desperately to catalogue her physical attributes and figure out my reactions to them. I’d stare at her tits and appreciate how round they were, how soft they looked; sometimes I’d even pop wood because tits reminded me of sex and sex was… well, sex, and I was seventeen. I’d look at her mouth and recognize that her lips were full and she looked devious when she grinned, which was cool, but… it didn’t make me feel anything.
One afternoon after a few weeks of this, Maya caught me by the wrist and pulled me into the choir room music closet. She was the instrument monitor for the orchestra—she played violin and always had this mark on her neck from it that boys would tease her about, like it was a hickey—so she had keys. She pushed me up against the inside of the door and told me that she’d seen the way I was always staring at her and she was into it. Then she kissed me and grabbed my dick through my jeans.
A few hours before, I’d gotten hard sitting behind Jake, the new kid in my English class who transferred from somewhere in California. He had longish dark blond hair and blue eyes so light they were almost silver. He’d turned around to ask if he could share my book, and those eyes had made my stomach tremble. When I nodded my assent and he leaned closer, the smell of him—something blue and fresh, oceanic—got me hard in five seconds flat, and I’d been on edge ever since.
When Maya grabbed me, I think she felt the effects of Jake, because she grinned that devious grin and started stripping off both of our clothes. She was pretty tall and I hadn’t grown my last few inches yet, so we managed to do it standing up, against the door. At one point I knocked into some triangles that were on a hook against the wall and the sound of tinny percussion nearly gave me a heart attack. The whole thing was incredibly awkward. It felt good the way getting enough sleep feels good, or eating a burger when you’re really, really hungry—the fulfillment of a physical need that doesn’t touch anything deeper—but the second it was over, I felt a rush of hot shame so intense I squatted down on the floor of the music closet, the smell of all those dusty instrument cases and resin making me feel sick. When Maya asked if I was okay, I said I dropped my lighter and pulled my pants up quickly.
That night I dreamt of a smothering blackness that wrapped around me like a midnight ocean, seeping into every pore and plugging up my nostrils, my mouth, my eyes, until it consumed me.
I never went back to the library during sixth period. I ignored Maya when she tried to talk to me, cutting her as hard as I’d cut all those other girls. I wandered the halls like a poltergeist, invisible in my misery until someone set me off, then the very picture of fury.
About two months later, I got home to find Maya and a man who must’ve been her father at the kitchen table with Pop. Maya was crying and wouldn’t meet my eyes, and her father looked at me like I was a turd he’d just stepped in. She was pregnant, and like a scene from one of those awful books we read in English class where the girl is going to be cast out of society unless she can find someone to make an honest woman of her, Maya’s father was there to demand that I do the right thing: marry Maya and help her raise the baby.
Pop agreed. And in that moment, I looked at the life ahead of me and saw only the smothering blackness from my dream rushing to drown me.
I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the month that followed. Pop tried to talk to me, and I think I nodded but never heard anything he said. At school, the voices blended together into a kind of aural static that set my nerves on buzzing edge and gave me a near-constant stomachache. I felt the way I imagined people feel in a war zone: aware that every step could trigger the explosion or signal the shot that would end them but too exhausted by that reality to watch where they walked.
At football practice I ran until I puked and set blocks I knew would get me steamrolled. At home, I put so much hot sauce on my food that my lips burned for hours after dinner. I turned the shower painfully hot and cut myself when shaving.
Maya lost the baby. I felt such a wash of relief when she called to tell me that I had to sit down, my legs unsteady and my feet numb. For a few days, I felt alive again, like the sword that had been hanging over my head had finally disappeared. But the relief quickly faded back to neutrality again, and I found that my panic over Maya and the baby had only temporarily overshadowed the other thing. The bigger, scarier, more permanent thing. The thing that had made me go along with Maya’s seduction in the first place. Now that I wasn’t going to be married with a baby to take care of, the problem that was
me
returned with a vengeance.
THE WORKSHOP
is in a church, across the street from a basketball court, and there’s a colorful sign in the window that says “Use side entrance for North Philly Youth Alliance” with an arrow pointing me in the right direction. I’m a little early, so I wander in, hoping I’ll stumble across Rafe.
“Oh, good,” a gray-haired black woman says when she sees me. “I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.”
“Uh, excuse me?” I say, looking behind me.
“To fix the sink.”
“Oh, no, ma’am—”
“He’s with me, Ms. Lilly.” Rafe comes from somewhere to my right and puts his hand on my shoulder. “This is Colin. He’s doing a workshop with the kids.”
“Oh, hello, dear,” the woman says, but she looks disappointed that I’m not the plumber.
Rafe takes my arm and leads me to a large multipurpose room where I put down my stuff.
“How are you?” Rafe asks. He’s more animated than he was the other night.
“Kinda nervous. Just, I mean, I’ve never taught anyone anything.” I was thinking about Daniel on the drive over and how weird it is that this is what he does every day. But at least he went to school; I’m totally winging it.
“Don’t worry. The kids are going to be really into it. Just talk. Just explain. You’ll be fine.” Then his tone changes. “I’m excited about it too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The only thing I know about cars is how to hot-wire one. And I haven’t done that since about 1994.” He winks at me. “But don’t tell the kids.”
“Oi, Conan!” someone yells as the doors open and kids start coming in.
“Hey,” another kid says to Rafe, but he calls him something I can’t make out.
“What are they calling you?”
He snorts and rolls his eyes in the kids’ direction.
“Conan, like Conan the Barbarian, and Khal Drogo. They think I look like this actor who played those characters. I don’t know who he is, but they think it’s hilarious. I keep meaning to look it up online.”
“Uh, like Arnold Schwarzenegger?” Rafe looks confused. “Wait, who’s Khal Drogo?”
“Someone in that show
Game of Thrones
. I’ve never seen it.”
“Huh. I don’t know.”
After a few minutes, about a dozen kids have arrived, chatting, teasing, and hanging all over each other. A few of them look in their early teens and one or two look seventeen or eighteen, but the majority are fourteen or fifteen. At about five after eleven, Rafe addresses the group.
“Hi, folks. Welcome. Today we have a special guest who’s going to do a workshop on auto maintenance and cars. Maybe he’ll talk a little bit about what it’s like to work as a mechanic.” He looks to me and I nod. Hell, at least that’s something I
know
how to talk about. “So, this is Colin. Why don’t you introduce yourselves and then we’ll head out to the lot.”
The kids all look at each other in an attempt to avoid going first. Finally, the kid who called Rafe “Conan” speaks up. He’s one of the oldest ones there. He’s wearing a white wifebeater and has the arm muscles of someone who only lifts weights to look tough.
“I’m Carlos,” he says. He tips me a little head nod, like he’s giving me permission to hang out with him or something. Jesus, I feel like I’m back in high school again. I nod back.
“Ricky,” a skinny white girl says, pointing to herself. She doesn’t look older than fourteen, but she has a nose ring and a crude tattoo on her thin wrist. Her bleached-white bangs almost cover eyes ringed with black makeup. I smile at her and she looks away.
“Hey, sweetie. I’m Mikal, but you can call me anything you like,” says a pretty-boy black kid wearing denim overalls and a shiny purple shirt. Is this kid flirting with me? I expect the rest of the group to turn on him—Carlos looks like the type to react poorly to a gay kid—but most of them just smile.