Fourteen. Until
I opened my eyes, bleary, to the piercing light of a new morning. A hung-over morning. Faint light filtered through the window. I could only process thoughts in segments as the night came pounding back with a vengeance. Along with a headache.
Nick sat cross-legged with Stu’s yellow trucker hat cocked on his head. “I am not MOVING ever again.”
I tumbled towards the bathroom, hitting every wall along the way. A crash erupted from the kitchen. After a long pause came Nick’s scraggled voice. “I’m alriiiiight.”
The air in Jack’s room hung with the distinct comforting scent of too many cigarettes smoked not quite near enough to the window. White beams of daylight streamed from the fluttering curtains. But Jack wasn’t there. My credit card was on the floor with a piece of paper wrapped around it.
“Jack left, by the way,” Nick said as I unfolded it to find a $140 receipt with my name signed neatly in Jack’s handwriting on the bottom. “Emily was dragging him out the door.” Nick chortled. “Someone’s getting taken care of.”
My phone glowed with messages. “Something happened.” Something was different. Leslie’s voice skipped and bounced with a happy cadence I had never heard from her. Immediately I knew – they had found out about Dan.
“I’m not sure how. But he’s not here anymore. The manager showed up with him one night and watched him clear out his stuff and that was it. They said you’re expected in the manager’s office tomorrow morning to explain what happened.”
The following morning I found myself across from a beady-eyed man sitting unimpressed in a brown shirt as boring as his unimportant desk. He shuffled his papers and stared at me over reading glasses before finally letting out a deep sigh.
“So. You abandoned your room. Endangered your flatmates. Put a strange boy in their quarters.”
“Dan was a friend from class.”
“Did he pay you rent?”
“Certainly not,” I said.
“So you let him stay in your room for free.” The man tapped a pencil against his knee. “Why would you do that?”
“I wasn’t using it. And I had already paid for it. He told me he was staying in some hostel with a homicidal maniac.”
“Homicidal maniac.”
“He had his suspicions.”
“And he never paid you anything.” I smiled and rolled a shoulder. “Because Dan said – ” he consulted his notes. “Something about a check for five hundred and forty dollars.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” That bastard sold me out. Probably in exchange for indemnity. I knew I would never see him again. That deviant hardly ever went to class – what kind of person would do that?
“I’m sure your bank statements would tell a different story. Those records can be confiscated, you know.” I didn’t know whether or not he was making that up.
“Now, this is a serious breach of housing policy. Grounds for ripping up your contract. You could lose your student visa. That would lead to deportation. However…” He tapped the pencil against his leg. “There is another option.” He scribbled a number onto a large white pad and slid it over to me.
I leaned over. One thousand, eight hundred. “What?”
“The exact cost of rent on your room during the time Dan stayed. Return the money and the charges will be dropped. It’s up to you, Miss Banks. You can either pay us that money back or get kicked out of the program.” He cast a snide look across the desk.
My gaze hardened. “So if I bring you this money, this whole case will be closed.”
The pencil nodded. “You have till eleven am tomorrow. Bring cash.”
Night fell and I wandered over to Flat 56. Handle inwards, key pointed, angled slightly to the right, click. The door swung open as I balanced grocery bags balanced alongside my hefty black schoolbag.
“If anyone wants to go to a plant store,” a voice drifted in from the balcony, “I can assemble everything we would need to make a ridiculous amount of gunpowder.”
“Potassium nitrate,” Morgan was saying as I stepped through the window. He gazed happily at some abstract point above the metal roofs as Adam stole his cigarette. “I can easily make a kilo.”
Adam considered this. “You recognize a kilo is a massive amount of gunpowder, Morgan.” Then he flashed a grin. “I thought you said that you couldn’t cook, look at you, always preparing dinner on Tuesday night! Tuesday night —the night for dishes.”
“Wait – it would be two kilos,” Morgan corrected. “The ingredients come in one kilo bags.”
Adam’s eyes widened. “We could blow up a car! Although,” he added, “we’d have to be more careful than last time.”
“When have ever not been careful? Hey,” Morgan jabbed at Adam with his cane. “Remember that napalm-making session where we got high on petrol?”
“We got very high on petrol,” Adam remembered.
“Have either of you seen Jack?” I asked.
“Try the bar downstairs.” Adam let out a short snort. “He’s more often there than he is home.”
I trotted down the stairs two at a time and halted at the pool hall. At the end of the bar a man’s forehead was in deep conversation with the wood. Behind the bar the owner tipped the gin bottle back towards his glass.
“Why do you have to sell?” Jack moaned from under his arms.
“I’m starting a family now,” A smile overtook the man’s face. “Once I get married I’m a new man.” He rested his arms on the bar. “You’ll understand someday, when you fall in love.”
The pile of arms and hair didn’t move. “Love is a chemical,” it mumbled.
“I thought you were over the bars,” I reported, sliding onto the seat next to Jack.
“It is a statistical fact,” he slurred, “that ninety percent of what Jack says is bullshit.”
“Listening to Adam – that’s not like you.” I reached for his drink.
A girl sitting next to him with wide eyes and clenched teeth screamed when she heard the accent. “I’m so jealous!” she cried, exuberant. “I would do anything to see New York. But I probably never will. Instead I’m stuck here.”
Then her gaze softened. “How old are you?”
Jack said nothing. I told the truth.
“Only twenty! What a doll!” She squeezed my fingers. “I’m getting old.” Her eyes rolled upwards, demonstrating an occasionally wrinkled brow. “I hate it.” She rubbed her temples. “Soon I’ll be twenty-three. I can’t believe it.”
“I hope I die before I’m 30,” the bartender said.
“Things don’t have to change.” Jack ran his fingers through his hair. “It’s all about keeping your worlds separate. For instance, I never let anyone at work know what goes on at Flat 56.”
Jack talked on as if nothing was wrong I saw the flip side of Jack not getting affected by anyone. Maybe part of Jack not having to answer to anyone meant that he would never belong to anyone either. Maybe his greatest era, this false start between childhood and the responsibilities of an adult, was coming to a long delayed end, the grinding realities and timetables and consequences, but he was gripping, gripping, not willing to give in and let that glory phase quietly slide. Jack’s gaze drifted along the empty hall. It was as if waiting for something while fearing that it may have already passed him by.
“Did you know,” he asserted after another beer, “that more of our soldiers were killed during World War II than British?”
I spun some figures in my head. “That can’t be right, can it?”
Jack beamed. “Of course it’s right!” Jack sat up a bit straighter. “And the Battle of Crete…” Jack listed facts and figures, ticking them upwards on extended fingers – the black sea of German paratroopers falling out of the Greek sky, and the soldiers that fought on after all the big guns and tanks had gone.
Jack began, but then glanced slow around the bar. No one was listening.
“That’s a really helpful
opinion to have.” The bartender laughed. “If anyone bothered to listen.”
For once Jack said nothing.
“I used to have ambition,” the bartender sympathized, studying Jack’s stoic face. “But then reality sort of got in the way.” The man’s eyes lowered as he nodded in agreement with himself, the words pouring back and forth across the channels between his ears. “You can’t just be normal, you can’t just want it. You have to be actually good at something.”
Jack had new lines around his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about when you leave. And it’s going to be great. It’s going to be a new start for me.” He nodded easy, as if he were still convincing himself. “Everything is going to get better.”
“It may be sooner than you think.” I told him what happened and his back snapped. “What? He can’t do that to you!” Then he pressed a hand to his chest. “I happen to know the university’s Dean of International Affairs over there. A lovely woman. You tell her your story – she’ll be on your side. You’re not giving him anything.”
A week later I sat in the office of someone completely different. “Well, you’re either incredibly smart or very, very ignorant.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked, trying to sound dumb.
The dean sighed. “Short-sighted as your actions may have been,” I rose in my chair, “I don’t think that this dalliance in freelance accommodation is grounds for removal from the program.”
“Thank you sir.”
“But there will be discipline in other measures. You are hereby banned from all future dorm activities.” Excellent – I could keep up my unblemished track record of not having attended a single one. “And of course, you are ordered to return to the Railway campus until further notice.” There were only two weeks left in the semester anyways.
“And you go to school in New York.” He examined his paper. “Are you returning there once classes end?”
“I’ve decided to stay on through the winter, sir.”
“I can see you have a lot of spirit. Which is good. But be careful.” He looked down a steady nose. “Make sure you don’t throw your life away over something stupid.”
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