Unlucky Catkill Court (part 1.03)

Tuesday, Feb. 4, well past someone's bed time

Quinton never thought he’d actually tell anyone about his dad’s illegal hobbies. The usual daydream was that one day, Quinton would hop off the school bus with Midori behind him, and there’d be a grand collection of police cars with flashing red and blue lights parked outside his house because his dad was secretly a drug lord and not an unlicensed practitioner of whatever he did.

But plans change, and now Quinton stands outside the Fukui house at some criminally early hour with a handful of mulch chunks in his right hand. Midori’s window shimmers above him, reflecting the light of a street lamp across Catkill Street. Right next to hers is her brother’s window, reflecting the same yellow light with a somewhat less inviting shine.

That may just be Quinton remembering the time Toby caught him lurking outside at one in the morning last fall.

With a slow, deep breath, like the ones Quinton always remembers Brooke taking last year, he raises his left hand and prays he’ll hit Midori’s window and not her brother’s. He also prays that Toby doesn’t wake up anyway and hurls a giant, damp woodchip into the night air.

The mulch chunk hits Midori’s window with a hollow, muffled thunk.

Quinton heaves a sigh, shoulders sagging under his ski jacket. He shuffles a tad to the left and picks another chunk to throw. “Please let Midori wake up first,” he mutters. “Please, please, pretty please.” Then he throws another and another, giving four-second intervals between each throw, not bothering to add the ‘Mississippi” between numbers.

When all the woodchips have disappeared from his hand and there still is no Midori poking her head out the window, Quinton grumbles about best friends not being where they need to be. He sighs again, his breath freezing in the wintry, black night, and starts back to the bushes lining the Fukui house’s front walk to retrieve more mulch.

“You’re what, thirteen?”

Crap. That’s Toby.

“Look, I don’t know when you think you’ll be old enough to date, but I really think middle school is too early.”

Quinton’s face is already pink from the cold, but Toby is making his cheeks heat up and turn apple red. Midori has always been and will always be a friend; she will definitely never be Quinton’s girlfriend.

“We’re not like that,” Quinton says, turning back to the house.

Toby leans against the door frame, arms crossed, sharp eyebrows bent in unimpressed disapproval. He’s in grey sweatpants and a sweatshirt too, which Quinton almost finds funny, since Toby is only ever dressed in the latest, most fashionable clothes.

“I just… I need her help,” Quinton continues.

After a moment of consideration, Toby breathes on his hands and rubs them together. “If it’s homework, you can come in and I’ll help you,” he offers. “But Midori is a pain to wake up, so I’m not getting her for you unless there’s an emergency.”

It’s definitely an emergency, but Quinton isn’t going to tell that to Toby. “It’s not homework,” he says, halting and slow. He’s not sure how to word this in a way that will keep Toby away and seem urgent enough to warrant waking Midori. “I just really need her advice. It’s important.”

“You need Midori’s advice?” Toby asks. “That’s rich. Midori never gives good advice.”

“But it’s…” Quinton scratches his nose and bites his lip. He just needs someone to talk to about his dad, and Midori is the one least likely to give the single answer he doesn’t want. “It’s about my dad, okay? And I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want any trouble.”

Toby’s lips thin, and he gestures for Quinton to come inside. “Fine. I won’t ask you what’s going on, and I’ll wake up Midori, but I know the answer you want, and I’m going to tell you right now that it’s not the right one. No matter how much you don’t like your mom, Monsieur L’Enfant isn’t a good dad either.”

By everyone else’s standards, Toby is probably right, but Quinton can’t go back to his mom; her brand of awfulness is even worse than his dad’s.

“I know,” Quinton says. He steps into the house, and Toby pulls the door shut, leaving Catkill Court silent and serene.

But a minute later, the tranquility cracks. A man wails, his smoke-scratched tenor shaking the air. The white house next door to the L’Enfant’s, where elderly Mrs. Kovacs lives, bursts into life. Its apple green shutters slap the siding, and the lights flicker like a dying, red ember. The old wooden shingles bubble and splinter, threatening to fall to the ground like an army of dominoes. Only the cement foundation peeking out from behind the flower beds seems to be keeping the house together.

Then a croaking old woman’s voice breaks in, and the chaos ends, cut off like a child scared of its mother’s wrath.

“You’re dead, Andrei!” the old woman shouts. “You’re dead, and you’re ninety years too old to be throwing temper tantrums.” In the window of one of the gables, the woman’s white shadow scurries to the window like a ghost. “Now let me sleep in peace or I’ll call an exorcist. And it won’t be the nice young people across the street!”

Then she closes her window with a bang worthy of a new year’s firework, and Catkill Court can finally rest until dawn.