Calvin & Hobbes fic Part II
Then he ruins everything, again, but this time he doesn't mean to. He goes back to his house, shivering and cursing the cold, sneaks back up to his bedroom and takes a shower so hot he can barely stand the water on his skin. He's got two hours to kill before he has to dress and meet Susie down in front of her house for the walk to school, so he falls face first into his bed and hugs Hobbes and smiles and just wallows in his happiness, generally. Which results in him falling asleep. When he wakes up the sun is neon-bright through the window and the clock says it's ten thirty.
The massive weight of what he's done is so heavy that he can hardly get out of bed. He tries to console himself by imagining that he dreamed the whole thing, but he didn't, it happened, he had it and now he's lost it already. All he had to do was stay awake for a few hours. It would have been so simple, but he's got to go out of his way to ruin everything, he's just got to, without fail. He peers out his window as he gets dressed, and Susie is not still waiting for him, sulking on her front porch. Not that he wants her to be. He hopes she only waited five minutes. Maybe ten.
He runs to school without his books. Lately he just wants to run everywhere, and he pretends that this is life or death, that Susie is being held captive by -- what? he can hardly think -- Nazi occultists, or something, anyway, he has to get to her, and there's not much time.
By the time he gets to school he feels like he's going to throw up, and then he does, mostly from the running, and it's all water. He shakes it off and chews some Big Red, trying not to give up. It's the giving up that's really ruined things in the past, not the screwing up. It's the moment after things are wrecked when he tries to save face, and he's not interested in self-preservation at the moment.
Second period is almost over, and he waits outside of Susie's Honors Chemistry class. He should be in Math Helpers, and he wishes he were, he wishes they'd walked to school together and held hands and that he'd kissed her cheek respectfully when they parted at the door of her home room. But that didn't happen and he's not giving up. He peeks through the skinny window on the classroom door and surveys the occupants, considering them as dangerous as any more traditional captors he might dream up. They could have brainwashed her already, reminded her that Calvin is not to be trusted. But he is, that's the hell of it. He can't even enjoy the experience of being a bad guy because he isn't one really.
Then the bell rings and Calvin feels like he's been shot and suddenly kids are pouring out of the classroom and looking at him like he's in the way. He stands there anyway, the kids flowing around him like they're water and he's a rock covered in moss and maybe barnacles, some always motionless thing. Susie is one of the last ones out, and she looks at him as if he's just flung fish guts at her and expected her to appreciate them. She's wearing lip gloss, which he's never seen her do.
"Listen," he says.
"Why do you hate me?" she snaps. "You know what, no, I don't even care, but if you do, why can't you just leave me alone?"
"I don't -- I just overslept."
"That's great, that's fine!" She laughs, moving past him. He follows her down the hall, pushing through the crowds of kids who are flooding out of the emptying classrooms.
"That's just how you're always going to be," she says, talking mostly to herself while Calvin hovers. "And that's fine. That's great! But I've just got to, I've just got to -"
"Susie, I -"
"And it would be helpful if you didn't show up in my room at two in the morning and kiss me," she says, stopping to turn and glare at him. "That would be good, for me, if you didn't do that and get me all worked up again over something that - that -"
So he just kisses her there in the hallway because he doesn't know what to do. Her books hit the floor with a loud slap that makes everyone turn, but Calvin shuts his eyes and pretends not to feel the other kids' eyes on him. He holds Susie's face and she's kissing him, she's kissing him back. Then she jerks away and looks at him just like she did when they were kids and he ignored the rules of whatever game she was trying to get him to play.
"Calvin," she huffs, indignant but not unkind. Some people are still staring, some are clapping and laughing. Calvin bends down to pick up her books, and when he stands up again she's not making that face anymore.
"Please," he says. "I shut my eyes for five seconds and then it was ten thirty. I'm sorry. I hope you didn't wait long. I'll never make you wait again, I promise, I swear."
She shakes her head and takes her books back, and when she heads down the hall he follows close, bumping his shoulder against hers.
"I want to take you on a real date," he says. She laughs, but when she does she accidentally looks authentically happy for at least two seconds.
"One you'll show up three hours late for?"
"No. I'll meet you and walk you home from school - no, I'm serious, I will! - and then we'll go to my house. And we can have snacks or something and my parents will be so impressed. And then I'll take you out. Wherever you want. I don't care. I've got money."
"Your parents will be so impressed?" she says, whirling on him again, and he's glad, because maybe it'll be another excuse to prove a point by kissing her. Her cheeks are bright red and she's still more beautiful than she was the last time she saw him, and maybe it will keep building and building until the sight of her face burns out his retinas. "Is that what this is all about?" she asks. "Impressing your parents? Dating a nice girl after you lost their trust with -"
"You know what this is all about," he says.
And he couldn't put it into words if he tried, but she must know, too, because her eyes change, the corners going soft.
"Meet me at the soda machines at the end of the day," she says, lifting her chin a bit. "If you're not there, I'll consider you a lost cause."
"I'm going to the soda machines right now!" he says, trotting alongside her as she heads toward her next class and tries not to smile. The warning bell is ringing. "I'll be there all day! I'll chain myself to them!"
"Oh, Calvin." And the way she says his name! She leans up to kiss him quick on the mouth before she ducks into her Trigonometry class, and he stands in place for thirty seconds, absorbing it, before he takes off for the vending machines.
But his plans are foiled, of course they are, when a gym teacher sees him loitering some time between fourth and fifth period and asks him for his hall pass.
"What if I said I quit school?" Calvin says, because he's going to anyway. "Could I just stand here if I signed a paper saying I quit?"
"If you're not enrolled here then I'll have to have you arrested for trespassing," the gym teacher says, and at the mention of being arrested Calvin allows the teacher to escort him to detention.
Unlike in the rest of high school, he's kind of respected in detention, a regular figure and not as superficially frightening as most of the usual suspects. It's where he met Jessica, and she's there when the gym teacher plants him in a seat near the front. Jessica is leaning against the wall and glowering at him so viciously that he wishes for the happy yet terrifying look she'd get when she was about to burn something down.
After half an hour of staring down at the graffiti on the desk, Calvin senses her coming closer, and he wishes he had a book to stare at or some worksheets to fill out. She slinks over, sits in the desk next to his, and stares until he looks over at her.
"Hey," she says. Her eye makeup is heavier than usual, as if it's armor that she's reapplied. He thinks of the first time she kissed him, in the arcade at the movie theater, and how surprised he was. It took him a few minutes to actually be happy about it.
"Hey," he says, and then he looks back at the desk he's bent over. Someone has scratched 'Parker Cox is a Homo' into the fake wood finish.
"Becky told me you were kissing Susie Derkins," Jessica says, scoffing as if this is actually impossible and she's only awaiting confirmation. Calvin picks at the news about Parker, pieces of graphite flaking out of the words and getting stuck under his fingernails.
"I was," he admits, not looking at her. She goes quiet until he glances at her. She's looking at him like suddenly she's a complete person and he should have treated her like one all along. It's something she probably should have communicated to him back when she was telling him he was a fag for crying in the backseat of the police car that took them in, because back then she was more like a screeching bat person who was sneaking bites of his heart, making it smaller and smaller every day.
"You like her?' Jessica asks.
"Yeah."
"Well. I mean. I don't care."
Calvin can't look at her, and then she's just gone, disappearing to the back of the detention room-slash-holding-cell, where she is the reigning queen. This is where they met. Calvin had snuck a look at her and she was smiling like she already had big plans for both of them.
When the final bell rings he races through the halls toward the soda machines, banging into cheerleaders and smashing through gathered groups of D&D nerds, afraid that if he's even a few seconds late Susie will have already written him off. He crashes into the Coke machine when he arrives, and Susie is there, her shoulders tense and her hands tight around the straps of her book bag. She stares at him with her mouth open. He's out of breath and sweating a little.
"I had detention," he says, sliding across the machine and closer to her. The color of her hair is enough to convince him that the world was actually designed to make him happy after all. He can't even come up with a word for it; it's dark but warm, and it's hers so it's perfect. This has definitely never happened to him before.
"Of course you did," she says.
"You don't get it," he says. "I'm fighting the forces of evil to be with you."
She smiles so big that the roof seems to blow off, and he grabs her shoulders sort of involuntarily. She laughs.
"That's the first thing I've heard you say in two days that actually sounds like you," she says.
They walk home from school holding hands. Calvin stops at every storm drain and puts his hands on her waist, kissing her until she laughs into his mouth. She talks about her classes and he tells her about his arrest. She touches his arm like she wants to take away the memory and he wishes that she could.
"You're not really going to leave, are you?" she asks when they reach his driveway.
"I don't know," he says. "Would you come with me?"
"Come with you and do what, Calvin?"
"I don't know. We don't have to go to Florida. We can go anywhere we want."
"No, we can't," she says, frowning, and he never liked that about her, the way she brings him back to earth, but he knows she's right.
If she'd just ask him to stay he would, but instead she accepts the lemon bars his mother optimistically made for the occasion and laughs with her about a neighbor who is already putting up her Christmas decorations. Calvin eats lemon bars and watches them together, wondering why he didn't try this sooner, and what if Susie hadn't walked by that day while he stood on the roof of the men's restroom and looked at the giraffes?
They go up to his room with a free pass, as if his mother thinks they'll be working on homework. Calvin locks the door, Susie throws her book bag on the floor, and they fall to the bed, kissing and pulling each other's shirts off without really thinking about it. She laughs so hard that he has to cover her mouth with his hand.
"I don't do this," she says when he's leaning over her, smiling and touching her hair, which he's pretty much obsessed with now. "Ever."
"Me either," he says. She rolls her eyes, probably thinking of Jessica, and when she does she sees Hobbes lingering up near his pillow. Calvin forgot to stow him away when he raced off to school.
"Oh!" she says, grinning and reaching for him like she's greeting an old friend. "You still have him?"
"It's just that I can't sleep without him, I mean, without - something in my arms, and I got used to it when I was a kid -"
"Aww," Susie says, hugging Hobbes to her chest, and Calvin almost snorts, imagining his pet tiger blushing and blubbering at the chance to be clutched against a girl's lacy bra. "I love you," Susie says, and he almost misses it. She goes red and hides half of her face behind Hobbes' head.
"I was talking to Hobbes," she says.
"You remember his name," Calvin says.
"Of course I do," Susie says, petting Hobbes' back. "I always wondered what happened to him."
"He was here," Calvin says. "All the time."
They set Hobbes aside and there's a lot of squirming and laughing - she keeps running her hands up and down Calvin's sides, and it tickles, and this seems to be the point - and somehow they end up on the floor. He wants to watch her laughing like this for the rest of the night, every muscle in her stomach moving with it, but then his mother knocks on the door and they hurry to put their shirts back on, holding their breath to keep from cracking up again.
Susie and Calvin's dad talk about Current Events at dinner. Calvin and his mom watch them fondly, playing with their food, and they even look at each other across the table at one point, smiling like they're forgiving each other everything, because this is the only way to do it, impulsively and instantly and without speaking.
After dinner they all gather into the living room to watch the news. Calvin falls asleep on Susie's shoulder. He's never been so tired in his life. When he wakes up she's holding his hand and his mother is offering ice cream.
He walks her home at ten o'clock, curling around her shoulders when the wind blows in cold. Winter is coming and the air smells like snow.
"I didn't do any homework," she says, tossing her book bag onto the porch like it's a dirty pair of boots.
"Welcome to my world," he says. She rolls her eyes and drapes her arms around his shoulders. She's standing on the porch and he's on the second step, so their faces are level.
"From now on we're going to do our homework together," she says. "Every night."
"Even Fridays?" he says, knowing this will never actually happen. Even beyond his own willfulness, he's got a sense of the future and what she's talking about is not in the cards. "Even Saturdays?"
"Okay," she says. "Not on Fridays. Not on Saturdays, unless I have some big project to work on. But on Fridays you can take me to the movies."
"Everybody will see," he says. "They'll know you're with me."
"You kissed me in the middle of the hall today. People might already suspect something."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry."
"Calvin! Don't be sorry. I'll be a celebrity in my honors classes. They'll all ask me if you really drink goat's blood for lunch."
"I don't want to go home," he says, pulling her flush against him. "Will you be mad if I show up at your window again?"
"We can't do that every night."
"Why not? Didn't I marry you once?"
"Yeah, I think Hobbes was the officiant. But actually you stormed off in the middle of the ceremony and told me you were becoming a mercenary and moving to Ecuador, and that I shouldn't write you."
Thirty minutes later he's shaking from the wind, which is blowing in with increasing chill and strength, and she kisses his red-tipped nose and tells him to get home. He lingers for five more minutes, his face pressed against her neck while she giggles in his ear, and then he heads home, looking back only twice.
When he gets back to his room, he launches himself onto Hobbes like old times, laughing and wishing he could still talk to him. He's not sure when Hobbes stopped talking back, but Calvin tells himself he should be glad that he did.
"You were right about everything," he tells Hobbes, who always liked Susie.
He dreams about the fire anyway. It's all around him like never before; even the sky is burning. Jessica is laughing somewhere, but every time he tries to fight through the flames to find her and catch her and stop her they flare up and beat him back into a narrowing circle that is filling with smoke. He can smell it, and then he's coughing, and the coughing wakes him up.
The light outside the window is wrong. It's still night time, but it's bright, too. He coughs again and pushes himself out of bed. When he sees Susie's house burning, flames flicking out of her bedroom window, he thinks he must be dreaming, and it's so cruel, worse than anything his subconscious has ever foisted on him, that for almost a full minute he doesn't even approach the thought that he might actually be awake. And then he touches his bedroom window, and something about the fact that it's cold under his hand, not warm like the bedsheets, makes him realize that this is real.
Then he's outside and running and it feels more surreal than any dream ever has. When he sees Susie standing beside her father in their front yard, wearing a ratty robe and slippers and crying into her hands, he's lifted off the ground with relief, so high that he's afraid all over again.
"Susie!" he shrieks, and she turns, a photo album clutched tightly in her arms. She passes it to her father and runs to meet Calvin, who hugs her so hard that she lets out an oof that almost makes the situation comical. She's okay. Her father is okay. Everything else can be replaced.
"What happened, what happened?" he asks, holding her tight while she sobs onto his shoulder. She seems to be intact. He touches her hair, and it's not even singed, not even very messy, just crackling with static in the dried-up air.
"What happened?" her father barks, and when Susie squeezes Calvin tighter it's like a preemptive apology for what her father is about to say. "Like you don't know, you little shit?"
"Daddy," Susie sobs, turning to him. "It wasn't -"
"Tell your little boyfriend that the police are on their way and he'd better head for the hills if he doesn't want to get locked up!" Mr. Derkins shouts. "I know his MO, I know what he's like!"
"It wasn't him!" Susie shouts. Calvin can hear the sirens already. He's dressed, his car keys in his pocket, like a firefighter, ready to go.
"Yeah?" Mr. Derkins says. "We'll see what a team of officers who aren't sixteen-year-old girls think when they get here."
Mr. Derkins never liked Calvin. Susie's mother used to give him the benefit of the doubt, but she's gone. Susie is clinging to him, two handfuls of his shirt pulled into her fists.
"It was Jessica," she whispers, looking up at Calvin. "Wasn't it? It was her, we'll tell them."
"They won't believe me," Calvin says. Susie looks older in her robe, ash on her face, and he tries to imagine her in medical school, the late night study groups, and him working the graveyard shift at a tow truck company while she falls in love with a future anesthesiologist. He's just something from her past that she wants to reconcile, and he's going to prison for real if he doesn't leave in the next five seconds.
Mr. Derkins is crying, saying his wife's name over and over again, as if she's still inside the home they made together, gone forever now. Calvin knows this is his fault. This is what he does, it's what he's always done, forever escalating. He smoothes Susie's hair down and lets the static-coated pieces stick to his palms as he lifts his hands away.
"Sorry," he says, stepping backward. "I shouldn't have - "
She was never one to beg, so she just stands there in her robe and watches him go, her father crumpled to the ground behind her as the roof goes up in flames. The sirens are just a street or two away, and Calvin prays his transmission will hold as he throws himself into the driver's seat of his dad's old car. His parents are running out into the yard as he pulls away, wearing their pajamas and wild-eyed with shock. They probably think he did it, too. It's okay. It doesn't matter anymore.
He's halfway to Florida before he realizes that he forgot Hobbes. So he won't be doing much sleeping, wherever he's going. He can smell the ash from the fire on his skin and he thinks he can feel it seeping in, too, sinking into places that can't be scrubbed clean. He imagines he's a contract killer with a secretly pure heart, and he's just left his partner and his girl behind, but it's for their own good, because the cops are onto him and the highway is the only place he belongs. When he gets wherever he's going, he'll even make up a new name. Fin Blackwater. No, too obvious. His eyes fill up and he thinks desperately of another: Archie Hammond. Too boring. Bertrand Davis. No, they're all wrong. The only name he can think of is Susie's, playing over and over his head, as if it's something that's ever going to mean anything to him again.
*
It turns out that Jessica was right. The shrimp smell really bad.
Calvin gets work almost immediately. Shrimp farm managers aren't picky. Basically they're just looking for someone who won't steal shrimp all day. After two weeks of working with them, Calvin can't imagine ever wanting to eat them again, so it's not a problem for him.
He lives in his car for awhile, then the car dies and he lives in a motel for a week, then he moves in with a guy named Yunel who needs help with his rent. Yunel is from Cuba and doesn't speak much English, but his housekeeping style matches Calvin's almost uncannily -- laziness verging on absurdity but stopping short of living in downright filth -- and they both really like to watch TV. Yunel works at the shrimp farm, too, and he's got a truck that occasionally works, and he misses his family so much that sometimes he cries, and Calvin can relate so they get along pretty well.
"Why are you here?" Yunel asks him one night when they're sitting on their apartment's tiny back porch after work, stinking of shrimp. Calvin has been teaching him English, and it's very weird to finally feel like an authority on something.
"What do you mean?" Calvin asks. His back is killing him, and he thinks of what Mr. Bederman said. His eighteenth birthday is in two days.
"In Florida," Yunel says. "Alone."
Calvin stretches his legs out in front of him and considers the question. He doesn't know what happened with Jessica and the fire, but he's pretty sure the cops aren't looking for him. He lost his nerve just before inventing a social security number, so he's working under his real name. He just hopes the cops didn't question Susie for too long, and he hopes she doesn't feel guilty if she broke down and told them where he was headed. But he thinks she probably didn't.
"There was a big fire," Calvin says. Yunel's eyes widen.
"Literalmente?"
"Ci, con figurado."
"Figuradamente," Yunel corrects. He's teaching Calvin Spanish. Calvin is kind of surprised at how easy it is, considering all the trouble he had with it in school.
"Yeah," Calvin says. "That's what I meant. Anyway, there was a big fire and I ran. How come you've never asked me before?"
Yunel shrugs. They've been roommates for almost a year and a half, but neither of them usually feels like talking. It's comforting to have someone around and to not have to make chit chat.
"I thought," he says, frowning as he struggles to come with the right phrasing. "It would be something. Like that."
"Why?" Calvin hates the idea that it's obvious to everyone that he's walking around with this weight always bearing down on him. He's not a sad person, or anyway not a person who's determined to be sad. He's still waiting for life to shower him with meaning and happiness, and he hasn't given up the hope that it will. With his eighteenth birthday so close, he no longer feels so certain that he won't live past it. And lately he's thinking about going home.
"I don't know," Yunel says, his favorite English phrase. "Sometimes, when you're sleeping. You say things about fire."
Calvin laughs self-consciously. He's always nodding off on the couch while Yunel watches soccer games, and when he jerks awake Yunel is usually looking at him with concern. He'd always thought it was because Yunel pitied him for being unable to appreciate soccer.
Two months later Yunel tells him he's moving to Miami while they're walking to work.
"I have friends there," he says, because Calvin has never been a real friend. Calvin feels abandoned anyway, and after work he walks to the car dealership by the Red Lobster and uses all of the money he's saved to buy a 2002 Corolla.
"That's a real dependable make," the salesman says. He's sweaty; he seems nervous about the ease of the sale.
"Do I smell like shrimp?" Calvin asks as he takes the keys.
"A little bit," the salesman says.
So Calvin quits his job and spends three days showering vigorously. Yunel moves out in the meantime. When Calvin feels less shrimpy, he turns in his keys to the landlord, calls his parents' house and hangs up when his mother answers. It'll be a long drive. He'll have time to think about what he's going to say.
On the way there he listens mostly to talk radio; music is too jarring. As he drives through Tennessee he feels like he left home only a few days ago, but by the time he's cutting through Illinois he can hardly remember what his old bedroom looks like. He feels forty years old, and it's not just his back. He misses sleeping through the night. He thinks about Susie every day.
He tries to come up with a good scenario as he gets closer to the old neighborhood. He's a soldier who fought in World War II and was missing, presumed dead, but now here he is, showing up out of the blue and all in one piece. After living in a POW camp in Cuba for a year and a half. Where they treated him surprisingly well. No, that's trite. Russia -- or Cuba, whoever -- ended up bombing the U.S. during the Cold War and he somehow got separated from his family during the fallout. Like, he somehow sacrificed himself. While his family ran into a bomb shelter. Which was only big enough for three people, but he let Susie have his place. Yeah. But then he ended up surviving. So now he's back, but he's got to detox first so that he won't contaminate his loved ones. Or maybe he already did that.
He sighs. The usual stuff's not working.
When he pulls up to his parents' house the first thing he sees is Susie's. Or what used to be Susie's -- it's a completely different house now, though roughly the same size. He can still smell the construction residue in the air -- sawdust and insulation, fresh paint. It looks brand new, and there's a beach ball on the yard out front, a mysterious red van in the driveway. Well, of course they're gone. He sits for a long time looking at the spot where Susie's bedroom used to be. That side of the house is flat now, no ledge protruding under the second story window, which is much larger than Susie's had been. He can see what looks like part of a large aquarium inside the new room that lives in the place where he first kissed her.
He checks his face in the rearview mirror one last time. He shaved before he left Florida but his fuzzy blond beard has already started to grow back in. He knows his mother won't like it, because when he left home he would get only a few soft hairs over his top lip if he skipped shaving, which he did anyway, because back then he'd wanted to feel older.
Walking to the door is the hardest thing he's ever done. He should have written. Or called. How hard would that have been? What was he thinking? Where did the time go? He knocks, and thinks of the day he never went to Susie's door and never knocked and all the time he's wasted and how other kids seem as if they're allowed to waste time and not face the kinds of consequences he has. His mother opens the door.
"Oh my God," he says, even though that's not his line, but she looks so old. She slaps her hand over her mouth.
"Calvin," she says, like she just wants to practice the name for a moment, and he can hear the creakiness of it on her tongue, how she hasn't said it in awhile. She hugs him tightly and he congratulates himself on not crying. He feels like a grown up, like a man. Maybe disappearing for awhile is what it takes.
"I'm sorry," he says. She tenses around him and then lets him go.
"Don't say anything for a minute," she says. She leads him into the living room by the hand. "Your dad's at work."
"I thought he might be."
She makes him a ham sandwich in silence and he pours himself a glass of Gatorade. There's nowhere to begin when you haven't seen your mother in a year and a half. There's no entry point.
"Susie and her dad moved away?" he says after she's watched him eat the sandwich. She doesn't look as old as she did at first. Calvin glances at the clock. He's not sure he can deal with his dad yet.
"Yeah," she says, shaking herself out of the trance she seemed to be in. "They're up in St. Cloud now. Well, her dad is. Susie went to school on the east coast. University of -- Maryland, I think it was? Her father -- he apologized to us, you know. For the things he said that night."
Calvin shakes his head, but then he wants to hear more. He doesn't need to ask.
"They arrested that Jessica girl," his mother says. "We gave the police her name and they got a warrant, searched her house and found proof that she set the fire. I think she pleaded mental instability or something - they put her in an institution for treatment. I don't know where she is now. Calvin. You didn't have to go."
His mother's jaw doesn't seem as tight as it once did; he can hear it in her voice. For some reason it makes him sad, though the sound of her voice when her teeth were clenched used to be so horrible.
"I gotta go," he says, standing. His mother makes an astonished sound.
"Where?"
"To Maryland. I'll come back." He has the insane desire to go up to his room and get Hobbes, but how would he explain that?
He hugs his mother before he leaves, and she pets down the back of his hair, squeezing him tight. The house is so quiet, like it got burned down and rebuilt, too, only it looks exactly the same.
"When you were a little boy you used to threaten to run away to Madagascar," his mother says, starting to choke up and still holding onto him. "While you were gone - I always thought of you as being there. Living in the trees with the birds and the monkeys. Like Tarzan, I guess. Isn't that ridiculous? I liked the thought of it, I don't know why. Calvin, you've got to come back. Your father needs to see you."
"I will," he says, pulling away. "Mom. Did she. What happened after the fire?"
His mother knows he's asking about Susie, not Jessica. She touches the sides of his face, pressing her fingers in a bit to test the solidity of him.
"The last phone call I got from her was about three months ago," his mother says. "I think she started school just a few weeks ago."
"When she called -"
"She didn't ask about you, Calvin, no. But that was the reason she was calling. She was waiting for me to give her the news."
He drives to Maryland with a map spread out in the passenger seat beside him, doesn't stop for food and is almost out of gas by the time he gets the campus of the state university. He prays his mother remembered the right school, because if she didn't, he's afraid he's going to disappear. This is nuclear winter, and he's been living in it for eons. If he doesn't see the sun in the next hour he's not going to make it.
He doesn't really know where to start, so he buys a razor and a travel-sized canister of shaving cream from a convenience store on campus and shaves in the bathroom of the romance languages building. Other guys, normal young men who are working on their degrees in French and Italian, come in and eye him nervously, but he ignores them.
He asks a professor-ish looking person where the Biology department is, and is directed to the other side of campus, where he parks illegally and consults a map of the Biology complex. There's a whole building devoted to radiation oncology, and Calvin haunts it for the rest of the afternoon, searching the crowds of students for Susie.
The sun goes down, the students disperse, and he still hasn't found her. He wanders the campus, feeling hopeless. He should be at home with his parents, he should be enrolling in high school equivalency programs, he should be at least eating something, because his stomach is whining with hunger pains. He drifts toward the dining hall and peeks in its windows at the students who are inside, laughing and eating from trays. He's turned himself into Tarzan when he could have been one of them.
"Can I help you?" someone says sharply, and Calvin turns from the windows to find a pretty young woman with long blond hair eying him suspiciously.
"I'm looking for my sister," he blurts. "Susie Derkins. I'm supposed to - she's in the pre-med program and I can't remember the name of her dorm."
"Is she a freshman?" the girl asks, frowning.
"Yeah. Just started two weeks ago."
"Well, all the freshman pre-med girls are over in Hoover. It's about a mile that way, across from the fountain."
"Thanks!" Calvin is already running in the direction. It's been a long time since he ran anywhere, and it feels so good that he laughs, though the thought of facing Susie is terrifying. He imagines that they were spies, working together during the Cold War. Something went wrong, and they've been living apart in the post-apocalyptic world. She thinks he betrayed him to the Russians just before the bomb dropped, but he didn't actually, and he's got to explain.
Of course, first he's got to infiltrate the heavily-guarded safe house where she's been living under an assumed name. He walks into Hoover Hall pretending to be casual, and as he's whistling and admiring a bulletin board covered with pictures of the residents, he sees one of Susie. It's like being punched in the gut, just looking at her picture. She's standing outside of her dorm room with her roommate, both of them with fading, forced smiles. The roommate is a pudgy girl with red hair; a significant obstacle, Calvin imagines, but he's also been given a gift that will make his infiltration easier. The number of Susie's room is visible just over her left shoulder: 256. He commits to memory.
He can't seem to walk away from the picture, even though the conspicuous factor is increasing as he lingers. Susie looks much the same as she did at sixteen, but a little taller and more straight-backed. Prettier, and her hair is neater, as if she finally broke its spirit and it now obeys her fully. Her mouth is open slightly, as if she was going to say something but didn't have time before the picture was taken.
Calvin sneaks past the check-in desk while the girl who is manning it is laughing at something a boy who is leaning on the desk has said. He races up to the second floor, his heart hammering. He's got no weapons - if he's caught, he's done for, and his former partner will never know the truth.
When he gets to room 256 he looks up and down the empty hall. It's quiet. Too quiet. He knocks very softly, praying that Susie hasn't already met a future doctor who is out cavorting about the town with her.
She opens the door wearing her pajamas: the blue tank he remembers, and pink and white striped pants. He's still a little stuck in his Cold War-era spy story, so he actually puts a finger to his lips when she stands there staring at him in shock.
"Can I come in?" he whispers.
"How did you-?" she stutters. He can smell Kettle Corn in the room behind her, and she looks about a zillion times better in person than she did in that picture. Just her bare shoulders in the low light of her dorm room are enough to nearly kill him. He's weaponless, after all.
"Listen, I'm really sorry," he says when she still hasn't moved from the doorway.
"No, no!" she says, and he knows that voice, the way she used to get just before she took all her toys and went home in a huff. "You've used up your apology quota."
"Okay. Alright. But can I come in?"
"What is that sound? Is that your stomach? Are you in trouble? Are you running from the police?"
"Yes, and no. And no."
Susie groans and pulls him into the room. It's small and full of girl-things: colorful pillows on the two twin beds, hairbrushes on the side tables, and a bra Calvin thinks he recognizes hanging over the back of a chair. Susie snatches it up when she sees him looking at it and stuffs it under the pillow on the bed that must be hers. Her face is red when she looks up again.
"What do you want?" she snaps.
"You're mad at me," he says.
"Did you think I wouldn't be? Calvin, you didn't have to go! You never listened to anything I said - okay, fine, you know what, it doesn't matter. If you came back here to, to -"
"Can I have some of that popcorn?" he asks. There's a bowl of it sitting on Susie's desk, half-empty. She glances at it and frowns.
"It's going stale anyway," she says before thrusting it at him. He eats it in handfuls and it's gone in five seconds.
"Where have you been?" she asks, still frowning.
"Florida. At a shrimp farm. Like I told you."
"You were serious?"
"I didn't want to go. Not after. You know. But then the fire happened and I had to. I had to go, or I thought I did. I guess I was pretty stupid."
"Yeah, you were," she says, and this sort of breaks him. He hands her the empty bowl and sits on her bed. She seems to want to protest, but then just sits across from him on her roommate's bed.
"Where's your roommate?" he asks.
"In New Haven with her family for the weekend. But that doesn't mean you can stay."
"I didn't think -"
"You know what I told her about you? What I tell everyone? I've gotten really good at it, do you want to hear? It's a really great story, everyone always laughs. Okay, you be her. Or whoever. Ready? Ask me if I had a boyfriend in high school."
She looks so shaken that he's afraid not to do as she asks, though really he just wants to sleep in her bed for days. Even if she doesn't want to sleep in it with him, he would be halfway satisfied just with the smell of her sheets all around him.
"Did you have a boyfriend in high school?" he asks glumly, afraid of the answer. Is this the part where she tells him that she met someone else as soon as he was gone, that they did normal things like prom and movie dates and that they're engaged to be married? And the wedding is tomorrow?
"No, well, kind of." She puts on a fake smile and sits up straighter. "It's actually this kind of hilarious story. I grew up next door to this kid, and I was in love with him, I mean in love, for as long as I could remember. Like, we used to throw snowballs at each other and steal each other's toys, and he was so mean to me but we were always trying to get each other's attention, and then this one day he, like, held my hand on the way home from school when I was crying, and, oh my God, I loved him so much. But he was also this kind of weirdo, like, he was a really bad student, and when we were in high school he started dating this psycho girl and they got, like, arrested for burning down a concession stand together."
She stops for a minute, her fake-cheerful voice beginning to strain and her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
"This is the part where you laugh and ask me if I'm serious," she says flatly, but then she goes on when Calvin only sits and stares at her.
"Anyway, so he's dating this crazy girl, and I'm, like, all heartbroken of course, and so jealous, like, just the sight of her in the halls at school used to make me sweat with rage, I mean, it was ridiculous. So, but, listen, okay, he breaks up with the girl after the whole arrest thing, right? Probably just because his parents made him. And he's all, like, trying to be good, you know, because he's on probation or whatever, so he starts trying to date me. And I'm a total sucker for it - like, this one night he showed up at my window at two in the morning, and I just thought it was the most romantic thing, of course. And I'm imagining that we're going to go to prom together, me and the crazy neighbor boy, like we were destined to be together or something stupid like that, and then, you'll never believe this. His freaking crazy ex-girlfriend set fire to my house! No, I'm not kidding! They, like, locked her up in a mental institution and everything. And the guy, the crazy neighbor boy, he left town. Because he was afraid to get implicated in the investigation of the fire. But no, no, I don't think he had anything to do with it. And no, I don't know whatever happened to him. I never saw him again. So that's my high school boyfriend story."
The humor has drained out of her voice, and the light out of her eyes. Calvin doesn't know what to say. His voice will crack if he speaks, so he just sits there with his hands clamped between his knees.
"It's usually much funnier," Susie says. "I'm usually not telling it to you."
"Can I just stay here?" Calvin asks weakly. "Please?"
"No," she says. "No, you can't."
But then she just goes to her desk, opens a big Biology textbook and pretends to read it. Calvin doesn't know what to do, but he's not going to leave until she's screaming at him to go. He takes off his shoes and lies down in the bed. She doesn't object.
"Do you like college so far?" he asks.
"Don't talk to me," she says. "I'm working."
So Calvin shuts his eyes. He can hear the rattle of the room's heater, and the scratch of Susie's pencil as she makes notes on her reading. This is what he wants to do every night for the rest of his life. He's never been so certain about anything, and he's never had a real dream that lasted for more than an hour, but this is it, this is his life's work. This is what he's meant to do: keep her company while she studies and fall asleep knowing she's there.
When he wakes up the room is dark and she's sliding against him, smelling like toothpaste. He rolls into her arms and she shakes like she's going to start crying, but then she just wraps her leg around him and buries her face in his hair.
"You'll leave again," she says.
"No," he says, his voice muffled against her neck. He kisses her there just once, softly, and she sucks in her breath. "Listen." He hoists himself up onto his elbow and looks down at her; doing so takes every ounce of energy he has left. "I'm going to move here. I'll work for a landscaping company or something, I don't know. Something where you get to be outside. And I'll get a little apartment and you can move into it with me if you want. I'll even be clean. I promise. I'll do all the cleaning, since you're in school and that's way harder than whatever I'll be doing."
She's quiet for awhile, pulling absently at the short hairs on the back of his head. He kisses her forehead and begins to suspect that she's actually going to forgive him.
"Why didn't you write to me?" she asks. "Or your parents, at least? We didn't even know if you were alive."
"I don't know. I guess I was embarrassed. Of the way I ran off like that. And, just, of everything."
She watches him for awhile, thinking. He starts to shake, so tired he can barely even support himself on his elbow, and she pulls him back down to her.
"Why do I even love you?" she asks, as if he knows. "Just because you lived next door?"
"I loved you when you lived five million miles away," he says. It's a rough estimate, granted, Florida to Iowa, Florida to Maryland.
She kisses him, and then she's taking her clothes off, but it's not like Jessica did that first time, the next step in the direction they were headed. With Susie it's different. She's uncertain and quiet and trembling hard in his hands.
"Say something," she begs.
"Okay, okay." Maybe he's shaking worse than her. The heater has gone quiet. "When we were freshmen, one time I cut school and sat up in my room and watched the road, and I saw you walking home, and you - it was raining, and you tripped - and I should have run down, I should have jumped out the window, I should have gotten there somehow and helped you up. I wanted to. It wasn't long after - your mom. I still think about it. I should have at least knocked on your door."
"You saw that?" she says quietly. "I remember that day. I felt like God had flicked my back and knocked me over. Like someone was laughing at me."
"I should have gone over there. I should have, dammit. What - what would have happened if I had? You think you would have let me in?"
"This," she says, stroking his face, then all the way down his chest. "This would have happened. Let's pretend it's raining. Let's pretend it's that day. Okay, could we? If you'd have shown up at my door - you would have made me so happy. But I probably would have been mean to you, just in case. But who cares, let's say you did show up, and that, that -"
"You'd been crying and you were still soaking wet -" He kisses her and she clings to him, makes his skin burn until he's not afraid of fire anymore.
"Yeah," she breathes as they continue the scenario without words. "Exactly."
*
He sleeps through the night and dreams of his parents' house. It's not on fire, it's lit up by the sun, and he's six years old again, tearing through the halls with Hobbes clutched tightly in one hand. His mother is shouting and his father is reading the paper, and he bangs out the front door, knowing that Susie is in her backyard with her dolls, waiting to be entertained.
Susie wakes him up the same way she put him to sleep, warm and all around him, and he doesn't deserve her but she seems to want him anyway, even in the light of day. They lie in bed for a long time, not quite sleeping. Calvin tells her about the shrimp and Yunel. She assures him that he doesn't smell like shellfish anymore, and talks about school, and her roommate, whom she hates.
"She can't fall asleep without the TV on," Susie says. "And I swear, once, I was afraid to open my eyes, but I think she fell asleep to porn."
"One time Yunel brought home a live chicken."
"Oh my God! To eat?"
"No, as a pet. These trucks full of chickens used to drive by the pools where we worked and sometimes a chicken would escape. So he caught one of the escapees one day and named it Lupita and he really liked that chicken, but the landlord found out about it so he had to donate it to this weird guy we worked with who had an organic farm. But the guy was a vegetarian, apparently, so Yunel's chicken was safe. It was a big drama."
"I imagined such horrible things," Susie says, touching his face. She can't seem to stop doing that, and Calvin doesn't mind. "But that doesn't sound so bad."
Susie buys him breakfast at the dining hall, and it's buffet-style, so they're there for almost an hour, Calvin stuffing his face while Susie watches him, drinking coffee. She seems to be studying him for signs of sincerity.
"I'm going to find a job today," he says when they're on their way out. She shakes her head.
"Do it tomorrow," she says. "I want to show you around."
It's Sunday and the campus is quiet, a few students roaming about, and most of the buildings Susie leads him into are empty and loud with the echo of their footsteps. Calvin is fascinated by everything she shows him, though he isn't sure why. The Biology complex is new and the whole thing has a fresh, plasticky smell, like it's all untouched. He holds her hand all through the sciences, the humanities and the library.
"There are some cute houses around here," she says as they're walking together through the neighborhood that surrounds the campus. "This is my favorite," she says, stopping to nod to a little brick house with a big yard and several pine trees that look like they were around during the time of the dinosaurs. It looks a little bit like Susie's old house did, only smaller and tidier, as if every bright red brick was polished that morning.
"I'm gonna buy you this house," Calvin says, and it hits him as soon as the words are out, how good it feels to finally want to do something, even if it's hard. Especially because it's hard. Susie laughs.
"I mean it," he says. "We're eighteen now, right? Okay. I'll buy you this house when we're twenty-five. That'll give me almost seven years to save." He's excited and talking fast. As soon as he gets a job he's going to do the math. He's going to be strict, really and truly; he'll wear the same clothes for seven years if he has to.
"Fine," Susie says, and he can tell she doesn't believe him, but it's true. This is his thing he's going to be good at: they're going to have some kids and she's going to be a doctor and he's going to stay in this house they're standing in front of and play with the kids while she works. He thinks he'd be good at that, really, truly.
They walk to a sub shop to get some lunch, Calvin swinging their arms together like they're kids and Susie laughing at his enthusiasm. He wants to tell her about the plans that are racing through his mind, but it would sound dumb out loud. He doesn't know how to explain that he's suddenly discovered the purpose of his life and that it feels like flying does in dreams, effortless and thrilling, so he just asks her if she remembers the time when he cut his leg while they were chasing each other through the woods and how she bandaged it during the cease fire, and she says yes, yes she does.
//
back to Part I