by Rachel Dorn
The first thing he did, he told me, when he got out of the hospital after his traumatic brain injury, was smoke crack with a guy he met at the bus stop. “He offered it to me, what was I supposed to do, say no?”
Kai and I were sitting on a blanket on a grassy patch near the shoreline of one of the city lakes. It was late and the air was clinging to our bodies like a damp sheet, unseasonably hot for a June night, but still too early in the year for mosquitoes. Shortly after dusk he’d picked me up in his dad’s old MG convertible, with a pepperoni pizza in tow from his delivery job, and driven us in figure eights around the chain of lakes, eventually landing at this somewhat secluded spot across from the main beach on Cedar.
“I feel like you can say no to crack,” I said. “I mean, it’s crack. From the bus stop.”
“I guess it just felt right in the moment,” he said with a shrug. “It felt amazing, actually.”
It was our first time hanging out, although I’d had my eye on him for a while. We ran in the same circles, he was friends with my old roommate Tasha’s ex. We’d officially met the weekend before, at a Memorial Day cookout at Mickey’s place over on the northside, and quickly bonded over our dead dads—mine from colon cancer when I was 13, his from suicide when he was 24. That night I got a friend request and a message from him on Facebook. I like your aura, he’d written. He was several years older than me, in his early 30s, but he had this quiet, coy way of speaking, almost like a little kid, or someone who had just landed on earth from a distant planet.
“Why were you taking the bus after the hospital anyway?” I asked him.
“Because my bike was all smashed up.”
“Isn’t that, like, a ride situation?”
“It was late. I didn’t want to bother anyone.”
He passed me the last of a joint and I asked if he wanted to get in the water.
“You first,” he said, touching my knee lightly. A surge of heat engulfed me.
Ever since I’d learned about brain-eating amoebas, I had a rule against swimming in city lakes. They grossed me out; it seemed like the city was always putting up signs to warn about rising E. coli levels. But as with most of my rules, this one became less rigid after the sun went down. At night you couldn’t see the signs. I wanted him to think I was cool and daring; I wanted to be the kind of girl who took her clothes off on a first date—not to have sex, but to dive into a lake.
I gave my best attempt at seduction as I peeled off my tank top and unbuttoned my Levi’s cutoffs, holding eye contact for a few beats and then gazing past him. I hesitated for only a split second, standing there in nothing but a pair of lacy black panties—my date underwear—while he stared up at me with an amused little smirk. Then I discarded those too, and ran across the sand into the pitch-black water, almost tripping over all the slimy vegetation until I got deep enough in to go completely under, emerging seconds later with a graceful shake of my French braids.
I tried not to think about what was going on microscopically, the inevitable yeast infection that I would wake up with in a day or two. I floated on my back in the light of the moon, not quite full, remembering the summer a few years ago when a group of us skinny dipped in Nokomis, drunk after bar close, and a cop pulled up and shined his brights on us, demanding over a loudspeaker that we all get out of the water immediately. What a perv, Allison kept saying.
“The water’s warm,” I called out to Kai, even though it wasn’t. I was starting to shiver. He was watching me, standing now, laughing, and at that moment he stripped down to his boxers and came toward me. He had olive-toned skin and shoulder length black locks, which he tied back in a bun as he waded in. I was boobs-deep in the water, and when he got close enough he suddenly lunged at me and tipped me over, playfully, with his face just inches from mine and his hand on the small of my back. I held eye contact so long I started to giggle, and then he shut me up with a kiss.
***
“I have an idea,” Kai said. “Before I take you home. It’s kind of a secret.”
I was in the passenger seat of the MG, wrapped in the blanket because we’d neglected to bring towels. I was dripping lake water, smelling pungent and chilled to the bone. I wanted to know all of his secrets, but at the moment what I wanted more was a long shower. I watched him as he drove with both hands on the wheel. On his forearm he had a tattoo of a single straight line. He was driving us past the light rail tracks, into a block of flat industrial warehouses where nobody ever went, especially not at this hour. Darkness in all directions. A Slowdive tape on the stereo. He pulled into an empty lot and parked next to a dumpster. For a split second, I panicked. I wondered if I had completely misjudged his character. Was the dumpster for my body?
“C’mon,” he said. I brushed the thought aside and got out of the car with him. “Now ask the universe a question. Anything. Think big.”
“Um, okay. Uh…what happens after we die?” I ventured. He smiled. He reached into the dumpster, the whole upper half of his body disappearing over the edge, only to pop back up a moment later with a fortune cookie in hand, looking satisfied.
“That,” he pointed to the nondescript building behind us, “is a fortune cookie factory. This is where they chuck all the busted ones. I’ve been coming here for years.” He tossed me the cookie. “What’s it say?”
I pulled the crinkled paper out slowly and read it to myself before reading it out loud.
“Face the truth with dignity.”
***
In the shower I felt euphoric. I couldn’t believe this was happening. From the moment I’d first spotted him at The Hex a year ago, playing pool with Jason, I’d wanted to know him. He walked with a shuffle, sticking to the sidelines, dressed in all black. There was something so mystifying, and alluring, about a man who didn’t need to take over a room.
I replayed our lake makeout over and over, my body steaming and electrified as I lathered coconut soap into every crevice, scrubbing away that invisible film of summer grime, sloughing off whatever aquatic organisms might have been clinging to my skin. I let my mind luxuriate in the possibility of us together, slotting him into the rest of my summer plans, and then the rest of my life. I imagined him by my side on the pontoon at my uncle’s cabin. Could he water ski? Would my mom like him? I pictured us on a weekend getaway up on the north shore of Lake Superior, where I’d spent most of my childhood summers. I hated camping, but I liked imagining him pitching a tent, starting a fire, roasting me a hot dog on an open flame. I saw us eating ceviche in the Florida Keys. I tried his last name on for size. Shit. Why did my crushes always do this—go from zero to 100 seemingly without my consent? Like a tiny zit you pick at once and all of a sudden it balloons into a nightmare. Stay in control, I told myself, a little pathetically, knowing it was already too late for rationality to intervene.
Still, in a little over two months, I’d be leaving Minnesota for grad school out East, so all of this was moot. Or was it? Two months was enough time to fall in love and abandon my plans. Sometimes the whole purpose of a plan was to have something come along and derail it. The rest of the summer was a blank expanse; anything could happen. I was working part time as a research assistant for one of my undergrad professors who was studying the neurological effects of sensory deprivation on healthy volunteers. A morning or two a week I picked up shifts at Espresso Royale by the campus, where I’d worked all through college. These weren’t real responsibilities, though, and I wanted to relish in one last season of debauchery, of possibility, before my life became something else, a gridlock of predictability.
***
The next night I went out with my roommates, Serena and Franny. At the entrance of the Eagle’s Club, where we went for karaoke most Fridays, there was a black felt letter board for Deaths and another for Nursing Home. Listed on each were the names of every patron who had recently died or gone into a nursing home. Texas Jim was on the Nursing Home list that night. Texas Jim was a Vietnam vet with a pinup girl tattoo who always sang “I’d Do Anything for Love,” all 12 minutes of it, always a little off key. I wouldn’t miss him.
Across from the main bar was a big banquet hall where the elderly had polka nights and next to it was a slightly smaller hall for abrasively loud punk shows. Karaoke was in the main bar, which specialized in Jello shots. Often all of these things would be happening at the same time. We ordered drinks and grabbed one of the big booths in the corner, settling in for a debrief while we perused the song binder.
“I’ve heard he hasn’t been the same since his accident. Like, kind of…off? Or something,” Franny was saying.
“I like when guys are kind of off though. I hate being bored,” I said. I thought about my last fling with Andrew, who was studying to be a CPA, and before him, Robby, who gave up Grand Theft Auto for Lent every year. Both had the grating arrogance of someone who had never been through anything more traumatic than a parking ticket.
“I get that because same,” Serena chimed in.
“I don’t know. He’s cute though. Just be careful. Should I do Mariah Carey or Bjork?” Franny was poring over the M section with a fine-toothed comb.
“Oooh, do 'Fantasy.' By the way, I told him to meet us here,” I said. They squealed in unison. I stirred the ice in my vodka tonic, wondering if he’d actually show. He’d been sending me Vines all morning, but when I’d invited him to karaoke he didn’t respond.
I turned my phone on silent and set it face down on the table, not wanting the constant evidence of his non-response staring me in the face. Franny had just broken up with her landscaper boyfriend, for the third or fourth time, I couldn’t keep track, and now she and Serena were dissecting his latest message with a surgeon’s precision. I tuned them out, eyes glazing over as I watched a woman in cowboy boots stumble through Shania. I kept one eye on the back of my phone, willing myself not to pick it up.
***
“Hey pretty girl,” said a voice in my ear that I hadn’t seen coming. I looked up and Kai was sidling up next to me in the booth, with his best friend Jason loping behind him. I’d met Jason a couple summers ago when he had a brief fling with Tasha, and he’d instantly gotten on my nerves. He was a functional alcoholic, a drunk diatriber always railing about something or other, well-read to a fault.
“Kai told me you’re recruiting test subjects,” Jason shouted at me over Kai, whose hand had found a resting place on my thigh.
“I guess you could say that. You in?” I asked, secretly satisfied that Kai had already been talking about me. I had told him about my job the night before, how we’d been having trouble recruiting people because the study involved being tethered to a headset for four days straight, essentially a fancy pair of goggles that removed all vertical energy from the field of vision, creating a drastically altered visual environment. Most people quit after a few hours. They couldn’t stomach it. Kai said Jason would be down, he was the right amount of desperate and psycho to do something like that. I scribbled the coordinator’s email on a napkin and passed it to him, wondering if he’d be able to last four days off the bottle.
When Kai and Jason went to the bar to buy a round of Jello shots for the table, I deliberated with Serena and Franny about song choices. I wanted to sing something that would really make an impression. I settled on Lana, "Born to Die," even though I didn’t have the vocal register for it. I knew that karaoke was more about the performance, and that part I always could nail. When I got to the line you like your girls insane, I fixed my eyes on Kai with a smoldering stare, but he was by then completely absorbed by whatever point Jason was emphatically belaboring. Later, he sang "Angst in My Pants" and didn’t look at me at all.
***
He sang it again on the drunken half mile walk back to his house, well after midnight, past the bowling alley and the co-op and the forlorn glow of empty intersections, and again on the attic mattress as he took my dress off. He lived in one of those old South Minneapolis four squares that was falling apart at the seams. Outside it was a chain-link fence with gaping holes, a yard where weeds grew rebelliously through cracks in the sidewalk, porch paint chipping and crap strewn everywhere.
Inside was more clutter, mismatched Persian rugs and an ancient player piano in the foyer. He was an only child of divorced parents, so when his dad died, the house and everything in it became his burden. He stayed in the attic, and the rooms downstairs he rented to an unstable rotation of transients, crust punks and poets. He had a cat named Virgil and a rabbit named Luella. Luella had equilibrium issues because one of the tenants had stepped on her last year, and while she didn’t die, she now had to hop with her head tilted to the left side at a nearly 90-degree angle, with her ear grazing the floorboards.
We had sloppy sex in the dim light of his salt lamp. He came and I didn’t; he was, like most men I’d been with, not particularly invested in my pleasure, but it didn’t bother me too much because what I’d always liked more than sex itself were the moments right after, when a man was naked and clinging to me and for just those few minutes, I could pull back the curtain on his soul and see what was really there. I laid there with my ear to his chest, listening as his exhales slowed and his heartbeats returned to an even pace. A faint alcohol smell leaked from his pores; I breathed it in.
“That was the last painting my dad did before he died,” he said, breaking the silence. He gestured toward a canvas propped up against the wall opposite the mattress, which I could barely make out in the dark. He shined his phone flashlight on it. It was a pastoral scene, a barn and silo surrounded by golden fields. I tried to examine it for signs of a troubled mind, but it just looked like standard middle-aged hobbyist painter fare.
“Do you ever feel guilty?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure why. Too invasive; I instantly wished I could grab the words and shove them back into my mouth. My face grew warmer and warmer as I waited for him to say something, anything.
“All the time,” he said finally. “All the time.” And then he was asleep.
***
We saw each other the next day, and the day after that; the early days of knowing him—or trying to—became a whirlwind propelled by both desire and curiosity, with only a shade of uneasiness. We’d bike to the 38th Street Dairy Queen or to the lake or to the Salvation Army to look for things to flip, and at night we would watch the NBA playoffs in Jason’s basement. Sometimes after the games we’d go to see their friends’ bands play at Medusa, a DIY space near the freeway, where the floor was always coated in a wet layer of something and the bathroom smelled fungal. With him a whole world was opening up to me, one that I’d only been on the fringes of before, one that had nothing to do with the path laid out for me come fall. One day we dropped a little bit of acid and took the train to the Mall of America to ride the rides, but when we got there he was convinced that the log chute was a portal to hell, so we sat in the food court, all radioactive orange and vibrating, and stared into each other’s faces for hours until the mop lady came over and asked if we were okay.
Kai was always talking about the future, things he wanted to do with me. He told me he wanted to know everything about me, and then pivoted to telling me that the United States government was manipulating the weather, which he explained with such resolute conviction that I was almost tempted to believe him. He talked about his past in parables, never directly, leaving me with little fragments of cross-country travels and former loves that never quite formed a cohesive picture. It made me hungrier.
On Tuesdays I went with Kai and Jason to the free dinner at St. Mark’s Episcopal, the church down the street from his house. It was geared toward the homeless, but anyone could go, he assured me, he and Jason had been going forever. So I went too. When we got there, there was always a line spilling into the hallway, men in winter coats even though it was June, women juggling multiple slobbering toddlers. And me, in my American Apparel skirt. We’d go through the line and volunteers in hairnets would serve us a helping of soggy chicken parmesan, string beans and a wedge of unripe watermelon, telling us to enjoy our meal with a patronizing smile. Kai and Jason sat at a round table with a smattering of other regulars, guys with names like Bones and Herman, who discreetly tried to ask them where to score.
***
After one of these dinners, Kai and I left Jason lingering back at the grocery table, filling his backpack with molding produce, and went out to the parking lot to wait. Bordering on an alley, there was a barrier of overgrown raspberry bushes, and in its shadow something brown and alive caught my eye as we stood there. I got closer, and then I crouched down and saw four tiny cottontail rabbits in a nest, eyes closed but breathing rhythmically. Gnats whizzed all around them. Four helpless little things.
“Oh my God,” I said to Kai, who was now on his knees next to me. “I’ve never seen ones so small like this. Do you think the mom abandoned them?”
“It’s possible,” was all he said. He had his face up close to the nest and was studying them intensely. I took out my phone and started Googling wildlife rescues, was there an after-hours wildlife crisis line? Would this qualify as a crisis? But before I got very far, Kai asked me what I was doing.
“I’m just looking to see, I know my friend Sam volunteered at a wildlife rehab cent-”
“No,” he practically yelled, grabbing my wrist. I flinched. And then after a few seconds passed, he added, “Sorry, sorry. But I think we can do this. If we get them back to the attic we can rehab them ourselves until they’re strong enough to release.”
“What if the mom is just out on a little quest?”
“Could be,” he said. “But we can’t bank on that. We can’t risk the coyotes finding ‘em.”
What coyotes, I thought. The only time I’d ever seen coyotes it was down by the river, never roaming the city streets. I opened my mouth to keep reasoning with him, there was a nagging sense within me that this was a bad idea, but my mind got caught on the word we. He saw us as a we. A we that could do this. It was a project, a task, a purpose that would bind us together, as long as we could keep it alive.
So we were taking the rabbits home. I kept watch over them while he ran back to the house for supplies: a crate, a wagon, blankets. When I was eight or nine, my sister and I kept a baby squirrel in a crate in our backyard for a week. It had come up to us while we were playing outside that summer, scrambled over our feet, and we convinced our parents to let us keep it. It was injured or sick or maybe just traumatized. After a few days it went into a coma. That was the first time I heard the word coma. When it died, after a few more days, my dad scooped its body into a paper bag and took it down to the ravine by the river. The next year they got us a puppy.
Jason finally emerged from the building and found me beside the rabbits. When I filled him in on the plan, he immediately burst out laughing—a crazed, maniacal laugh. “That’s Kai for ya,” he said. And then he stopped, grabbing a can of Hamm’s from his backpack and popping it open. “Have you named them yet?”
“No. You got ideas?”
He crouched down and peered over the nest. “Steph, Curry, LeBron, and MJ,” he said decisively, using a twig to point to each one as he said it. Then he chugged the rest of his beer in one go and crushed the can in his palm. He looked at me with a dopey smile. I laughed and we didn’t say anything else until Kai reappeared with the wagon.
***
Waning evening light was streaming in through the attic skylight as we ascended the narrow staircase with the rabbits, dust motes floating in its beams. The air up there was muggy, trapping smells of cat litter and cedar. We situated the crate in an empty corner and brought an old fan over. They’d all survived the trip. What now? I plopped down on the mattress and opened my phone again. All the forums advised against rescuing cottontails. Baby wild rabbits have a 90% mortality rate in human care, one of the posters warned. No goat or cow milk, only kitten milk, and not until they open their eyes, another added, but you really should just leave them be.
I read these aloud to Kai, asking him again if he was sure about this. He came over and sat down on the bed next to me, wrapping his arm around my side and pulling me into him. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “Relax. I know rabbits.” He gestured to the corner where Luella was asleep in her pen, and it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure if his intention was to rehab and release the rabbits, or to keep all four as pets.
***
That night I had a dream that Kai and I were standing on the edge of one of the towering limestone bluffs that rise above the Mississippi. It was dusk and we were peering over the sheer drop-off into a steady current a hundred or more feet below us. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a seal appeared in the water, a big brown one, lost and alone. Before I could stop him Kai was jumping off the cliff, he was trying to save this renegade seal, don’t worry, he said. He landed with a splat and the brown water swallowed him.
I woke up and Kai was already out of bed, peering over the side of the crate.
“Dead,” he said, only partially looking in my direction when he heard me stir.
I sprung up and darted over to him.
“All of them?”
“No,” he said, “I think this guy’s still breathing.” He pointed at the one with a little white mark above its nose. His voice wavered, like he’d been crying or was about to start.
“LeBron,” I said quietly.
“LeBron,” he repeated.
We sat there for a while, not saying anything, and then I watched him as he scooped up the three limp bodies, with their little eyes still closed. He brought them downstairs, and then outside into the backyard. We spent the morning digging a hole near the garden, and then we painted little rocks like basketballs to mark the spot. And then we returned to LeBron.
***
Over the next week LeBron became the center of Kai’s world, and mine by proxy. I grew attached too, but there was something about the whole situation that felt like high school students toting around a sack of flour in a car seat, albeit with slightly higher stakes. Kai lost interest in doing things that didn’t involve LeBron. One day, walking back from the gas station with jumbo lemonades, we ran into Floyd, a towering man with a gold tooth and chains who sold crystals off of folding tables in his front yard—a sprawling array of gemstones shimmering as the sun caught them. Kai asked if he had one for strength and protection and Floyd waxed poetic about the black tourmaline and the root chakra. “Saved my nephew from a real dark place,” he said. Kai was sold.
We put it in the corner of LeBron’s crate, a talisman. After a few days he had opened his eyes, and was taking the kitten replacement milk we’d bought, a dropper full twice a day. During feeding times we’d take turns picking him up and holding him. He seemed at ease in our care, not frightened or skittish like so many of the blog posts had warned. Kai always looked at me with adoration when I was caring for LeBron, he said I had a natural touch. One time, both of us hunched over the crate, he said I love you but his voice was so soft and I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to LeBron so I didn’t say anything at all.
***
Summer was moving along on its own timetable, long days that passed in a hurry, and suddenly it was mid-July, the All-Star break, a month until I was set to leave for school. I hadn’t done anything to prepare; whenever a reminder crept up, I pushed it back down like I was hitting the snooze button on my alarm or swatting away a mosquito. My mind was fixated instead on my birthday, which was that weekend. I’d always been someone who made a big deal about birthdays, the only day you could reliably get people to do what you wanted, without guilt, or without much of it anyway. What I wanted was to go cliff jumping at the rock quarry a couple hours outside the city, and I assembled a crew for a day trip. I wanted, of course, for Kai to be there, I felt it would somehow make whatever we were doing more official, but I was worried it would be a tough sell to get him to leave LeBron for an entire day. Somewhat to my surprise, he accepted without protest. He’d have one of his housemates look after LeBron, he’d show him the feeding protocol.
The morning of, everyone gathered at my apartment early, yelping and clamoring as we filled coolers with cheap beer and glass pitchers of home mixed sangria, bags with sunblock and Doritos. Then we divided into cars and set out. Kai and I were in the backseat of Allison’s Camry, and pulling onto the interstate I watched as familiar landmarks rolled by—the car dealerships with their inflatable tube men, the chain hibachi restaurant, the Quality Erections billboard on a clear blue sky. We drove past the Fleet Farm, which gave way to regular farms, rows and rows of corn in the morning light. Everything was the same and everything felt new, with Kai next to me. We had to stop several times because Allison had a breathalyzer car; last summer she’d gotten two DUIs and instead of revoking her license, they’d outfitted her car with a device that beeps every thirty minutes until you blow into it and blow clean.
***
The quarry was nestled inside a state park. Everyone else was waiting in the lot when we pulled in. A winding path took us through the woods, across a bog, bugs everywhere. And then a glimpse of the glassy, green-blue water, ringed by sheer cliffs of jagged red-hued granite. We staked out a spot on the rocks, laid down our towels and emptied our goods. There were bands of shouting teens running in every direction, doing flips off the cliffs, a last hurrah for the small-town prom kings. "Trap Queen" was blasting from somebody’s Bluetooth speaker. Kai approached the edge and looked over at the water.
“Did you know there’s a net? Maybe 10, 15 feet down?” he said, looking back in our direction.
“You know, to make it easier on the divers, in case anyone doesn’t come back up.”
“How many people do you think have died here?” I asked.
“Um, we are NOT talking about that,” Franny said, handing me a pitcher. “Drink.”
We drank and swam in the crisp, clear water, our jumps taking on increasingly daring forms as the day wore on. In the early evening we decided to pack it up. Kai had agreed to be the sober driver for Allison’s car, but I’d noticed him knocking back cans throughout the day and wondered if he’d pass the test. He didn’t, which meant the rest of us didn’t stand a chance. He was visibly upset, cursing under his breath and saying something about LeBron. I kept half an eye on him as he went off to the side and made a phone call, while the rest of us played hacky sack and the parking lot emptied out. “I told him to feed at 4, can you please just go check?” He was pleading with someone on the other line.
It was past ten by the time we got back to Kai’s, the block was dead save for the drone of cicadas. All the lights were out in his house. He practically raced up the steps to the attic, and I followed behind, a lethargy from sun and booze suddenly taking over my movements. When I caught up to him, one look at his face told me everything I needed to know, before he said it.
“I swear I just talked to Gabe a couple hours ago, everything was just fine,” he said, stretching out his words, like he was trying to hold reality back. I didn’t say anything, just looked over the edge of the crate at LeBron’s lifeless body.
“It’s my fault,” I said, after a while. “I shouldn’t have made you come.” I wasn’t really convinced that it was, but I wanted to hear it from him, to be absolved of the guilt that was creeping in.
He didn’t argue, though, or try to reassure me. He just sat there, staring at LeBron, and then off into the distance.
***
Kai wasn’t answering my calls or texts. It had now been nearly a week since LeBron died, and I hadn’t heard from him. I went through the motions of my week feeling both exposed and invisible, like I was walking through a dream and yet still excruciatingly aware of every sensation. I wondered at what point my fantasy had eclipsed the reality of him, wondered if maybe there had never been a reality at all. I read through our texts, over and over, looking for proof. I shuffled through the catalog of memories in my head, coming back to certain ones like a finger finds a scab, picking at it until it bleeds.
***
On Friday I went into work and was mildly surprised to see Jason on the monitor, wearing an Adidas tracksuit and strapped into the headset. A Styrofoam cup of coffee rested on the table beside him.
“How long has he been in?” I asked the lab manager.
“Hour 18. He’s doing better than most.”
I grabbed my clipboard and stepped into his room.
“Jason?”
He didn’t move at first. That was normal. The headset made people move slow, like they were underwater. I shifted into his direct line of vision.
“Whoa! You look so different without your vertical lines. Or whatever the hell,” he chuckled, tapping the headset. I told him he was doing great. And then, lowering my voice, I asked if he’d heard from Kai.
“Nah, not in a while, why? He missing again? He does that sometimes, hey, can I get some more coffee?” He pointed at the cup.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Six pack of beer?”
***
I wasn’t in the mood to socialize, but I allowed my coworkers to drag me along to the post-shift happy hour anyway. We went to one of the dives nearby, with its too-bright lighting and wood-paneled walls, and staked out a table in the corner. A middle-aged woman in tie-dye was making the rounds selling tickets for a meat raffle and Craig, one of the other techs, bought a whole sheet and then handed me a strip of three tickets, ruffling my hair. “Chin up buttercup,” he said. Craig was the kind of guy who would bite into a tamale without unwrapping it first, and then forget and do it again. Once at an all-staff potluck we had to go around the room and say what we’d be doing if we could be doing anything else in the world. Craig said state trooper. He looked at me as if he was doing me a huge favor by sacrificing a few of his tickets, like a win might turn my entire life around.
It came as no surprise when the host called my number. I awkwardly plucked a package of pork chops from the cooler while the rest of the table whooped and clapped. Great, I thought, now I have to be responsible for these pork chops. Here was a prize I didn’t want, and didn’t ask for, but in the end I didn’t mind too much because it gave me a convincing reason to dip early.
Instead of going home, I decided to bike past Kai’s, with the pork chops as a thinly veiled excuse to see him. He had a grill, I didn’t. I biked through the streets I’d known my whole life, with their lush canopies of trees, but everything looked strange, like my perception was stuck on the wrong setting. Maybe it was the drinks. When I got there, I dropped my bike and went around to the back. Gabe was reclined on a lawn chair, shirtless, balancing an egg on his head. A new meditation technique he was trying out, he explained, and I sensed a vague irritation that I’d interrupted his flow state. I continued past him, onto the deck, through the kitchen, and up the two flights of stairs to the attic. I could hear Kai’s music leaking out, something droney, and I knocked lightly as I opened the door. He looked up, almost as if he was expecting me, as if he’d forgotten that he’d been ignoring me for days.
“Oh hey,” he said.
“I come bearing gifts,” I said, and fumbled through my bag, presenting the sweating package of raw meat like a peace offering. I told him about the raffle, about Jason and the headset, and then I apologized again about LeBron. He glanced over to where the crate had been.
“Don’t apologize. It’s fine. It’s not your fault. Maybe Floyd’s,” he said with a slight smile, “but not yours.” He was looking me in the eye. After a beat he added that it was good to see me, that I’d been on his mind. We went downstairs to put the pork chops away and then out back to where he buried LeBron with the others. He’d added a fourth basketball rock, this one slightly bigger.
“It’s sad,” I said after a while. I didn’t know what else to say,
“I know, I really thought the little guy was gonna make it. Do big things,” Kai said. He seemed to be in better spirits.
He gave me a little shoulder squeeze and I instantly relaxed under it. Everything would be fine. He started to say something else and then was interrupted when his phone rang. He raised his pointer finger, stepping off to the side of the yard to take the call. He was too far away and talking too softly for me to quite make out what he was saying, but every time I glanced over he was smiling. I wasn’t sure if I should stay or go. I stood there awkwardly and waited for him to be done. After what felt like ages, he hung up and shuffled over to me.
“Sorry about that.”
“Who was that?” I asked.
“That was…” He took a deep breath. He looked away and then back at me. “My girlfriend,” he said, drawing out the last word like a slow pour.
“What?” My body suddenly felt weightless, like I might pass out, and my mind was spinning so fast I couldn’t grab onto a single thought. I just looked at him with a razorblade glare. “How long? What’s her name?”
“Two years. Anna,” he said sheepishly. “We were kind of on a break when I met you and I thought—” he trailed off.
I had already turned around. I yanked my bike helmet from the crook of my arm, buckled the strap and walked away, past Gabe and his stupid egg, and out through the gate. I tried to ward off the tears that were forming, at least until I was on my bike and off his street. I had known something was off, I wasn’t stupid, but I hadn’t expected it to be this. Since we first met, I’d been building a whole future with him in my mind, giving myself a reason to stay; more than anything I’d wanted his reciprocation, wanted him to beg me to stay, but the shades of it he’d given me were flimsy, fleeting, like a kid who builds a house of cards only to kick it over on a whim.
I kicked off into the evening light, sun in my eyes, fire in my veins. Two years. Two years of what? Lake kisses? Animal rescues? At a stoplight I pulled out my phone, went on Facebook, searched for her profile. Anna. She was easy to find, his only friend with that name. I scrolled through her profile pictures. In one she was at her law school graduation, another at the beach. And then, scrolling further down, a post from a week ago, the day before my birthday. She was in Kai’s attic, in her big hoop earrings, holding LeBron. Holding him like he was hers. I brought the photo closer, zooming in on details like I was looking under a magnifying glass, like maybe if I looked closely enough I would find a different rabbit or a different attic. Finally I turned my phone off.
I pedaled until the moon was out and my thighs burned, going nowhere in particular. I biked in circles, not wanting to be home, not wanting to be anywhere. I biked south to the lake and looped it, fantasizing about throwing my phone into it, or maybe my whole body—feeling it sink to the bottom, no net there to catch me. Then I rode back up Hiawatha, past the old grain silos. I found myself in the industrial park where Kai took me that first night. The fortune cookie dumpster. I rode until I found it. I wasn’t ready to let go. I got off my bike and hoisted myself up, reaching and reaching, my arm a mechanical claw. I asked the universe what my problem was. I grabbed a cookie greedily and opened it, uncurling the paper slowly.
You will soon achieve perfection, it said.
I shredded it into scraps and let the breeze scatter them. When I looked up I saw a raccoon standing in the beam of the alley’s floodlight. It seemed to be gazing directly at me, like it recognized me, and then it vanished behind the building. I stood there for a long time before realizing I was only waiting for myself.
______
Rachel Dorn is a writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
[GO HOME.]