Young Writers Society

It’s summer of 1983, and two runaway boys live in my house: Raymond and Shane. Raymond lives in the stuffy hot furnace room, next to the kitchen, and Shane lives in the basement with the spiders. They have been here for at least half a year, maybe longer. I like Raymond, because he talks to me more than anyone, and I don’t like Shane, because he talks to me hardly at all.

Raymond, the runaway boy, is at the front door, getting ready to leave for work. I watch him from behind the stair banister as he pulls on his jacket, his favorite puffy neon one with the purple stripes up the sides. Once I asked him why he wore a jacket to work in the summer, and he told me that sometimes it gets really cold in the Dairy Queen where he works, because they have to keep the ice cream cold, right? But it keeps the people cold, too. I also wonder if he wears it to cover some of those circle-shaped scars on his forearms, but I don’t ask about those.

“Are you leaving?” I ask him, knowing that he is, wishing that he wouldn’t. Sometimes, if he has a day off, we play Monopoly. I like playing Monopoly with Raymond, because sometimes I win. With Matt, my older brother, I never win.

“Yeah,” he says, brushing a strand of golden-brown hair out of his eyes. “Gotta pay the bills.”

I lean my face between the cool wood of the banister. “What bills?”

“The bills.” He laughs, and reaches over the railing to ruffle my hair. “The ones that gotta be paid.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. I’m fairly sure that he’s avoiding a real answer, but I let it pass. “Can we play Monopoly later?”

“Mm.” He purses his lips as he pulls up the jacket zipper. “Don’t know about tonight, Mel. I’m going out with some pals...might be back late.” He tugs on one sneaker, then the other. He’s got on the coolest blue and red striped socks, but even they can’t stop the disappointment from pooling in my stomach.

“Oh.”

Raymond tuts and shrugs his patterned backpack onto his shoulder. “Hey, don’t look down. Why don’t you play with Misty?”

I stick my tongue out, thinking.

“Vacation.”

He bends down to tie his laces. “Linda?”

“Summer camp.”

“Kristin?”

I hesitate. “...She’s a little crazy.”

Raymond snorts and straightens up, patting his pockets to check for his keys. “Aren’t we all?” He pauses and fixes me with a regretful glance. “Look, Mel,” he says gently, “You’re basically a young adult now, aren’t you? Nearly nine! You can find something to do. Tag along with Matt or something.”

I press my face harder against the wood, crowding out half of my vision with the flesh of my cheek. “Matt doesn’t like me.”

Pain flashes over Raymond’s face. “Well...that’s a shame. You’re pretty great.” He takes an uncomfortable breath, like the compliment felt unnatural, before opening the front door. He flashes a smile. “See ya later, Meligator.”

“In a while,” I mumble, turning my back before he does. The door clicks shut, and I know he’s bounding down the steps to run to work. I scoop up my book from where it sits on the stairs, frowning. Raymond’s always late. I probably didn’t help, but he refuses to say anything.

I wander to the back door, through which I can see Bobby Schwitz, the kid neighbor, brandishing an archery bow. He spots me in the window and waves, accidentally releasing the arrow he’d been nocking. It flies swift across the yard and sticks with a clunk in the wood of our fence. I don’t even flinch. Matt still has a red scar right above his knee from Bobby Schwitz. It’s no surprise that he missed, but this means that the backyard is out of the question.

I turn on my heel and walk down the hall, past the front room. Mom sits on the couch, staring blankly out the window. Joshua, my baby brother, plays happily at her feet. The morning light filters over their faces and glows in Joshua’s dark hair. The noise of my brother’s cars cracking together fills the house, along with the clattering of the ancient dishwasher, and the whush-whushing of the washing machine. There isn’t much money to go around in our house, which tends to be the case when your dad is a traveling minister and your mom is often empty-eyed. But Mom says that even so, we have to make home for the two runaway boys.

“Bad home lives,” she’ll murmur with a meaningful glance towards the furnace room door, Raymond’s room. “The world is hard, but God is good.”

My father had been the one to meet them both at the youth organization he runs at the local high school, but my mother had been the one to invite them to stay.

My dad is a big man, a wrestler-turned-golfer, an atheist-turned-minister with a head of jet black hair that he keeps combed back. He’s got a big voice and a loud laugh, but lately I don’t hear it too much, because he’s been traveling for a lot of faith conferences. My mom is a thin woman with a long torso and wild auburn hair that she likes to tease into a great big tuft at the top of her forehead. During the school year she works part time as an office lady at my school, but during the summers she’s just sad.

Dad says that sometimes her heart gets too heavy, so that’s why she has to sit down, or lay down, or cry some of the weight out until she can get up again. Sometimes the heaviness makes blinking hard, and she’ll stare out the front window for hours without any change in expression, watching the cars streak by too fast for a neighborhood, and the fluttering of the leaves of our maple tree as Joshua plays with his Matchbox cars.

Today is one of her Sad Days. Dad is gone on a trip, the last one of the summer.

I leave without a word, shutting the front door behind me.

~

Raymond comes home late, long after dinner. I hear first his right shoe- thud- then his left one- thud- in the threshold as he throws them off, and Shane’s shouts from the basement to keep it down up there, a man’s got to sleep. Joshua knocks down the card tower I was building on the living room floor with a giggle.

Raymond collapses into the worn living room chair, his hair disheveled. He smells like cigarettes and something else I can’t identify. He drops his bag onto the carpet with a heavy sigh.

“Hey Mel,” he says, without looking at me. His voice is low and scratchy. “How was your day?”

Before I can answer, Matt calls out from the kitchen table. “She got in trouble with Crazy Dave.” His math homework is flung across the wood like a tornado had grabbed it, his thin lips twist up in a grin.

I shoot him a glare, then glance back at Raymond. The runaway boy’s light blue eyes watch me from under the shadows of his hair. Sometimes I wish that I had blue eyes instead of brown. My whole family has brown eyes speckled with black, like wet sand. Joshua pushes some cards onto my knee, hoping that I'll build another tower so he can knock it over.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I protest. “I just fell into his rose bushes.”

Raymond blinks. “You fell into his rose bushes?”

“Yeah.” I show him the palms of my hands, which Mom had dabbed in ointment and plastered with band aids that had Baby Muppets on them. There had been a lot of thorns. By the time I had run back home, rivulets of blood were trickling down my fingers, dripping onto the concrete sidewalk and onto my black Converse. Crazy Dave’s shouts still ring in my ears. You damn kids! I’ll call the fucking cops on you, I swear I will!

“God, Mel,” Raymond breathes. There are dark bags under his eyes that I haven't noticed before. “You need to be careful around people like him.”

“I know.” I turn around to build another card castle for Joshua. My little brother is nudging a stink bug with his finger as it picks its way over the beige carpet.

Crazy Dave used to be a vacuum salesman, but now that he’s retired, he likes to yell at children, tend to his rose bushes, and paint his trees the same blue as his house. The blue paint is as light as the sky, spreading from the roots, along the trunk, up to a few inches on the main boughs. I used to wonder if Crazy Dave had managed to catch slices of the sky to wrap around the trees, but now I know that that can’t be true. The paint is starting to flake around the knots in the bark, revealing the natural darkness within, and the top branches are beginning to die, turning gray and ashy as the leaves wilt. I still think that if I were to take a chisel and chip at the sky, I’d somehow find dying tree bark underneath.

But then I think that maybe nighttime is when the bark shows through, even more beautiful that the blue pigment, speckled with stars and wisps of galaxies.

Raymond’s voice breaks through my thoughts. “I have a story for you, Mel.”

The card castle is nearly done, and Joshua watches it hungrily. I pause the construction and look up. Raymond likes to tell me stories after work, sometimes. I don’t always understand them, but I like to listen to them. The runaway boy sits with his legs draped over the chair’s arm, his chin tucked to his chest like he's sleeping.

“There once was a boy with a hole in his stomach. It was a pretty big hole, as big as this.” Raymond forms a softball-sized circle with his hands. “He had always lived with it. When he was born, the doctor said, ‘This boy is not finished growing, but I can’t put him back.’ So he had to live with it. It didn’t hurt much, but it made him feel cold when the wind would whistle through, and he was always hungry. Sometimes people would laugh at him. They would say, ‘Why does that boy have a circle of empty in his stomach? Why is he incomplete?’ So he thought, maybe I can find something to fill this empty space, here. Maybe I will find the right circle thing, so that I can be whole again.” He sighs, eyes fluttering closed.

Matt flips over one of his papers on the table, clicking at his calculator. The beagle next door begins to yodle a long, warbling howl.

“Sorry, Mel. I’m too tired to finish,” Raymond says, swinging his legs down from the chair. He rubs the back of his neck and stifles a yawn. “I’m going to my room.”

“Okay,” I say, wondering about the hole-in-the-stomach boy and how someone like that could be. He shuffles through the kitchen, squeezing Matt’s shoulder on the way. He pauses only to grab a piece of bread and an orange off of the counter. Matt is grimacing at his math homework when Raymond shuts the furnace room door with a click.

I finish the card castle, and Joshua knocks it over with a sharp laugh.

The stink bug inches across the floor.

~

Raymond comes home from work at the normal time the next day, and it’s a Better Day for Mom. She even cooks a beef stew in the crockpot, with peas and carrots and onions and everything. Crazy Dave didn’t bother me again, but my hands still hurt, so I can’t help cut up the vegetables or the bread. I set out paper napkins instead. Matt is in his room, and Joshua is in the living room, trying to pull the fur out of our cat’s face. It poofs up and hisses at him, but he doesn’t leave it alone.

“Evening, Mrs. Andrews. Hey, Mel.” Raymond dodges around my mom as she ladles stew into bowls, dumping his backpack in the furnace room. “How was your day?”

I shrug. It’s been a Better Day, in that I didn’t fall into anyone’s rose bushes, but I don’t feel like telling him about the bunnies.

I’d never known this, but apparently there’s a rabbit nest under our maple tree. I found out when I leapt down from where I was reading my book and landed inches away from it, nearly crushing them. They shot from the nest like a firework, into bushes and across the green lawn and one of them, over the curb and into the street. I realized that their very lives were in my hands, so I had grabbed a bucket, and started catching them, one by one, their fragile, squirming, soft baby bodies wriggling in my hands. Once I had captured them all, the bottom of the bucket was a writhing mass of gray ears and tiny claws.

Matt materializes in the hall. He sticks his head around the corner and grins, showing off the gap between his two front teeth. “The house project got burned down again.”

“Really?” Raymond scoops up some spoons and scatters them on the table. He forgets that Dad isn’t here, because he puts down six. Shane never joins us for dinner.

“Yeah. Everyone knows that it’s Tony, but he says that if anyone tells, he’ll burn down their house before the police can get ‘em.” Matt’s eyes are gleaming, as if he wished that he had been the one to do it. “The smoke was so thick, you could smell it across town. They were almost done with the skeleton of the project, too.”

Mom shakes her head as her glasses steam up with the heat of the stew. She can’t stand that pyromaniac, but what Matt said is true. Tony loves fire too much. We’re just lucky that he’s sticking to houses without people in them. Crazy Dave is only one of the many “wild” people that live in our neighborhood, Mom always reminds us.

“The summer heat brings it out more,” she likes to say, “Sin festers when it’s warm.”

I’ve never been too sure of what that means, or if I believe it, but as the summer drags on, and houses burn, and the cuts from the rose bushes sting in my palms, I’m starting to consider it.

Joshua yanks out a tuft of fur from the cat. It claws him in the cheek, and soon they’re both yowling. Mom rushes over. Matt, Raymond, and I pick up our bowls and take our seats at the table, murmuring a quick prayer under our breath before plunging into the hearty stew. Maybe Joshua will learn his lesson this time.

We eat for a while before Raymond scrubs his face and yawns. “I have a story for you, Mel.”

I put down my spoon and straighten, thinking about the hole-in-the-stomach boy. “Okay.”

He taps his fingers on the table for a moment, thinking. He’s wearing a faded Coca Cola shirt today, and his eyes are brighter. The purple bags under them are still as prominent as yesterday, though, and there’s dirt under his fingernails.

“There was a man who lived on the dark side of the moon, all by himself. He didn’t know how he got there, just that he is.” Raymond takes a long pause, eats a bite of stew. “The dark side of the moon isn’t all that bad, but it’s lonely, and cold. The man can see the sun sometimes, from out of the corner of his eye, and somehow, he knows that on the other side of the moon, there was the Earth. A planet full of people like him, living in the light. And he knew that the moon revolved around that Earth, so certainly, one day he would have to see it.”

I imagine the crater-pocked ground of the moon from my school books, spreading in every direction, with no one to talk to, no one to help. A gaping sense of loneliness opens up in me, and I pity the moon man. I want him to find the Earth.

“You know what the funny thing about the moon is, Mel?” Raymond asks, tapping on the table again.

Joshua walks over to sit beside him. He stares into his bowl of stew, a bandaid on his cheekbone.

“I learned this not too long ago,” says Raymond. “The far side of the moon never faces us, even though it’s always turning. We always see the same side. So even though the moon man tried to walk around, he remained in the dark side of the moon, because he was walking against the rotation.”

I blink slowly. “So... he’ll never find the Earth?”

He tilts his head, presses his lips together. I know that he is only eighteen, but Raymond suddenly strikes me as very, very old.

He has an answer, but he asks a question instead. “Have you ever seen an eclipse, Mel?”

I shake my head. “No.”

He picks up his bowl and goes to the sink. “Yeah. Neither have I.”

That night, I go out to check on the bunnies. The dusk is warm and sleepy, and their mom must have come back by now. I learned, earlier, that baby rabbits are not very smart. I learned that if you can manage to catch all of the panicking babies, you can put them back. They are so small, helpless, and dumb that if you just take the fluff of fur on top of the nest and hold it over their twisting bodies for less than a minute, they will fall right to sleep. I think it’s the illusion of their mother’s warmth and the pressure of her body, when in reality it was my rose-bush-scratched hand covered in Muppet band aids pushing down on them. I tricked them into forgetting that I had nearly crushed them beneath my black Converse only minutes earlier.

But that night, when I look into the dark crevice beneath the maple roots, they’re gone. I realize that even though the babies had forgotten about the danger, their mother must have recognized it. She had seen it, smelled it, and had known to take them to a new, safer place.

I’m sad that they’ve gone, but I like the thought of new beginnings. I gaze up at the new night sky, inky and scattered with stars, and wonder about the two boys from Raymond’s stories.

Maybe the boy with the hole in his stomach needed the moon, I think. Maybe the moon man just needed to start walking in the other direction.

I go back into the house.

~

Summer break is over, and Raymond has been gone for five days. He went to his second-to-last day of work on Friday and didn’t come back.

I sit on the front porch steps, the summer dying hot on my skin. A brilliant crimson spreads over the roofs of my neighborhood, and some songbirds gather in our maple tree with hesitant song.

I stare out at my street, lined with houses that look the same, filled with people that look the same, too. We’re all white-skinned, all big hair and colorful clothes. The houses are all the same mold, the same tan color- except Crazy Dave’s blue house, but even his trees match the sky- and I wonder if identical houses mean identical stories. I wonder how many runaway boys live in their furnace rooms and basements. I wonder if they think about boys-with-a-hole-in-his-stomach or moon men, all alone and cold.

My birthday was yesterday. Dad came home just in time, pleased but exhausted after the drive home all the way from Cincinnati. His broad shoulders filled the entire hallway when he came back, suitcase in tow, black hair swept neatly over his one bald spot. His booming voice fills the house again, and it is somehow warmer with him here, even if the summer is dead. Mom made me a cake, chocolate, but it was a Sad Day, so Dad sang louder than anyone as if he could drown out the unease that curled under the table and in our guts.

Shane didn’t come up from the basement, and Raymond is gone. No one has mentioned him.

Late August birthdays can be bittersweet like that, I think.

I’m nine, now. Matt turns eleven in September. He says that when you turn eleven, you enter the age of doubles, of which you probably only experience nine, if you’re lucky. “11, 22, 33, 44... all the way to 99, and then maybe 100, a double zero. But that’s really old, and you’ll probably die before that,” he told me last year. It’s strange to think that he’s had the same amount of doubles as Raymond has: one for turning eleven, even though Raymond is 7 years older.

The dying sun is bright and painful, and suddenly my eyes are full of tears. Raymond didn’t come back for my birthday, so why should I think about his?

I scrub my eyes and blink rapidly, suddenly ashamed and fully aware that I’m crying on the front porch step. The world is too big for me, I think. The people don’t make any sense. Sometimes they paint their trees blue, or they have to put baby rabbits in buckets. Sometimes they tell you stories of the moon, and then they leave. For days, or maybe forever.

I go inside. I get out Monopoly, even though I know that there’s no one to play with.

~

The front door clicks open and closed later that night. Matt turns over in his sleep above me, the bunk bed creaking a soft protest. I slip out from under my sheets. My sleep shirt, one of my dad’s XL short sleeves, tangles over my athletic shorts as I creep down the upstairs hall in the pitch black. I hear a deep sigh, the thud...thud of shoes hitting the threshold.

Raymond is back.

My chest fills with a bubble of joy, but then I pause. I’m still angry at him for leaving. The bubble sinks into my stomach, turning into something greasy, but I climb down the stairs anyway.

His shadowy figure is outlined by the dim outdoor lights by the front door, but the hall is dark. He is standing still, a hand splayed over his face. I lean against the banister, watching him. My eyes adjust better, and I can see that his shoulders are slumped, like he is holding up the whole world.

“...Raymond?”

He startles violently, stumbling back and nearly cracking his head on the framed picture of our family, before Joshua was born. Mom keeps saying that we’ll replace it soon, when she can hire a professional photographer again.

Raymond draws in a raw, cracked breath.

“Mel.” His hand doesn’t leave his face. He makes no move to turn on a light. “You should be in bed.”

“I heard you come in,” I say.

“Oh,” he mumbles. “Well, you should go sleep. I’m gonna crash, too.”

There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what. His voice is scratchy, like mine can get when I’ve been fighting with Matt and yell too much. Raymond draws back from me, curving into himself.

“Mom made baked chicken and potatoes for dinner,” I tell him, forgetting that I’m angry for a second. Sometimes he forgets to eat, which I never understand. “There’s leftovers in the fridge that I can microwave for you, if you want? Mom has started letting me use it.” We got a microwave only this year, but most of the kids in my class have had one for a while.

He shakes his head almost imperceptibly, his fingers covering his right eye. “That’s okay. Go sleep, Meligator.”

The greasy bubble starts welling back up in my stomach, angry and black. I stand up. How can he just come back after five days and immediately try to send me away? Raymond, of all people. I thought he was my friend.

I reach instead for the light switch on the wall.

He takes a sharp step forward. “Mel, don’t-”

My eyes smart at the sudden brightness as the lights snap on. I glimpse Raymond’s face.

His eye is the color of eggplant, round and swollen like a small moon beneath his slender fingers. Raymond drops his hand, the game over, a dark emotion flashing over his face too quick for me to recognize.

I don’t say anything, but we both feel the question in the air.

“Go to bed, Mel,” he says, his voice low and hard.

He watches me for a moment, his expression unreadable, before turning and starting down the hall, towards the kitchen. Towards the furnace room.

“You were gone for five days,” I call after him. My voice is wobbly, and I hate it. “No one said anything, and you didn’t tell me. You forgot about me.”

Raymond stops with his back to me, muscles tensing. He doesn’t look at me.

“God, Mel,” he spits out, “Not everything is about you, okay?”

His words ring in the air, sharp and awful. We both freeze, tasting them, holding the bitterness on our tongues. They go right through my body, like radiation. He turns, regret shining on his face.

“Okay,” I whisper.

“I’m sorry. I just meant...” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. His right eye is sunken, hidden beneath the swollen red skin, and his lip is split. A tear glints in his good eye. “I’m going through a lot right now.”

“Okay,” I say.

Raymond shifts his weight. “And I need you to go to bed.”

“Okay,” I say, louder, but my voice trembles again. I turn to go back up the stairs. The bubble in my stomach has popped, and now all that greasy, cold blackness has coated my insides. I think about how it is like the far side of the moon, now. I don’t like being there at all.

Raymond’s voice echos up the stairs before I reach the top. “Mel...”

I look at him, at his purple eye, at his split lip, starting to scab, at the way he holds his shoulders. I am taller than him on the stairs. He suddenly strikes me as a very sad person, but it’s a different sadness than Mom’s, one that I’m both familiar and unfamiliar with.

“Let’s go sit outside, okay? Please.”

I don’t say anything, this time. I walk down the stairs, push past him, and open the door.

~

The moon is a sliver of a smile in a black sky, and the crickets sing, apparently having yet to realize that the summer is over. Raymond is silent beside me on the porch step, his breathing slow and even. I find a Monopoly dollar in my shorts pocket. I scrub it between my fingers as a cool breeze ruffles my hair. I’m not tired, but I don’t feel awake. I’m just... there. We watch small ribbons of cloud shiver across the moon, one at a time.

Finally, Raymond says, “I wish I could still see the world like you do, Mel.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t know what he means.

“You still see it as something to explore. And good, usually. You see the good in people, too.” He talks fast, like he’s worried that he’ll lose what he’s trying to say. “The universe is vast and incredible and you want to see it. You want to see it, because you think that there are things to see. And you could, if you tried.”

He sighs, and lapses into silence again, rubbing the circle scars on his arms.

I fidget with the paper money. I don’t know if what he said is true, but I do know that the universe can be beautiful. I know that there are trees the color of the sky, baby bunnies and summer nights, parents who love you, birthdays. But I also know that there is a lot of wrong, that there are hole-in-their-stomach boys and Sad Days, burning houses, runaway kids with purple eyes, moon men, all alone. I don’t know what to think of all that.

I tell Raymond this, and he smiles sadly. “Yeah. Neither do I.”

Then I look at the sliver of the moon, which will be back to a whole in a few nights’ time, and I think about how there are dark times for everything, even the moon.

The crickets sing to me, Raymond, and all the universe, under a glistening tree bark sky.