It’s supposed to be funny and the only thing I’m laughing at is how the studio managed to disguise an uncomfortably dark movie as a summer comedy.
It’s about a guy named Chase who strikes up a conversation with some cute girl on the train about where she’s going. She tells him, “Somewhere good.” He digs deeper but she doesn’t respond. She leaves her phone on the train, and Chase chases (sigh) after her to return it, but it’s too late, so he goes through her phone and discovers a bucket list of things she wants to do before ending her life.
By this point, Thomas has fallen asleep. I should probably do the same thing, but I hope it gets better . . . and it never does. Near the end, Chase pieces together she’s going to kill herself at the pier and when he finally gets there he’s greeted by the blinding red-and-blue siren lights of police cars. He smashes the phone.
I want to smash something, too.
My recap to Thomas when he wakes up: “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
He stretches and yawns. “Your throat looks fine, though,” he says.
I sort of, kind of, definitely like summer in my neighborhood: girls chalking hopscotch; guys playing card games under whatever shade they can find; friends blasting their stereos; shooting shit on the stoops. And while my apartment is small, it’s moments like these that make those walls feel bigger than they are.
I point to the red hospital across the street. “My mother works over there and manages to be twenty minutes late every morning.” Down the block is the post office. “And my father used to be a security guard there.” Maybe all that time alone with his thoughts was where he went wrong.
The fire hydrant on the corner has been wrenched open. The screaming kids remind me of all the times we filled up buckets and spilled water all over the playground, throwing ourselves down the wet slides since we couldn’t afford to go to an actual water park.
“I don’t know what my dad does,” Thomas replies. “The last time I saw him was on my ninth birthday. I was watching him from my window go to his car to get my Buzz Lightyear, but instead he got in and drove away.”
I don’t know when we stopped walking or who stopped first, but we’re both still.
“Asshole.”
“Let’s not go taking dark turns, okay?” Thomas eyes the sprinkler and mischievously raises his huge eyebrows before pulling off his shirt, his arms flexing. He’s got some God of War–like abs coming in and all I have is serious rib cage. “Come on.”
“I don’t want to get my phone wet.”
“Just fold it inside your shirt. No one’s going to steal it.”
“You do know we aren’t in Queens, right?”
Thomas tucks his phone inside his shirt and leaves it against a mailbox. “Your loss, dude.” He runs with an athlete’s sprint and bounces back and forth through the sprinklers, the sun glinting off his belt buckle. Sure, some people are looking at him like he’s insane, but he doesn’t seem to care.
I don’t know what possesses me, what chokes out all my insecurities and allows me to pull my shirt off, but it’s freeing. Thomas gives me two thumbs-up. I don’t feel like a scrawny kid right now.
I pull my phone out—but before I can roll it inside my shirt, it buzzes. Genevieve is calling. I freeze.
“Hey!” I answer.
“Hi. I somehow miss your dumb-idiot face already. Fly out here so we can build a house in the woods and start a family,” she says.
“I miss you more but not as much as I hate camping.”
“It wouldn’t count as camping if we spent our lives here.”
“Truth.” I picture her smiling despite the distance and it makes me happy, no, happier. I want to beg her to come home, but I want her to stay focused on her art and not worry about me. “Have you started painting yet or is there some lame orientation?”
“The lame orientation was yesterday. We’re taking a quick break before doing some still life on trees and . . .”
I nearly drop my phone when I see Thomas doing push-ups from inside the sprinklers, showing off for these girls across the street. I put the phone back to my ear when I hear Genevieve calling my name. “Sorry. Thomas is making a dick of himself.” He doesn’t care like I would’ve.”
“You boys playing more Suicide?”
“Nah, it’s just me and Thomas.” I feel too exposed with my shirt off. “I think I’m heading home in a little bit, though. Pretty tired. You think you’ll be free to call me tonight? I want to hear all about the five hundred paintings you’ll finish today without me around to bother you.”
“Yup. Call you tonight, babe.” She hangs up before I can say bye or tell her I love her.
Now I feel like shit for getting distracted, but she’ll call later. I’ll explain how I really needed something fun to do, which is sort of her fault since she left me here, but if she hadn’t left, it would’ve been my fault, so I guess I can’t really go blaming her. Hopefully she’ll send me a punch across the country and all will be okay. I tuck my phone inside my shirt and kick my sneakers off, leaving everything on the ground. I charge toward the sprinklers in jeans and socks and jump through the jets of water. I’m laughing when I land on the other side.
“Woo-hoo!” Thomas whistles. “About time.”
I shiver from the cold. “Okay, uh, I miss my clothes.”
“Be free for sixty seconds, Stretch.” Thomas grabs on to my shoulders like he’s prepping me for the last game of the season—what game that is, I don’t know. “Forget about everything. Forget about your father. Even forget about your girlfriend. Pretend like you’re the only one around.” He lets go after coaching me and sits down on the ground. The water continues to wash over him.
I sit down across from him and get soaked. “I’m the only one,” I quietly tell myself, shedding my worries as if they could sink down the sewage drains. I squeeze my eyes shut and count up, feeling lighter as each second passes, more myself. “Fifty-eight, fifty-nine . . .” I don’t want to let go of the last second. “Sixty.”
I open my eyes to a group of kids playing tag around us.
“It’s going to be impossible to get out of these jeans,” I say. I can barely hear myself with the water crashing into my ears and the splashing and the children. Thomas stands and offers to help me up.
I clasp his forearm.
He shouts, “No homo!”
We’re both laughing as we go back to our abandoned belongings. Thomas dries his chest off with his shirt, soaking it up. “I don’t know if it’s because of that nap, but I feel great! I haven’t had that much fun since . . . nothing comes to mind.”
“Good to hear. I mean, sucks for you, but glad to know I’m not wasting your time.” I start putting my shirt on but poke my head through the wrong hole and get lost. I wrestle with myself until I feel Thomas’s hands steadying me.
“Stop! Stop!” Thomas is cracking up. There aren’t enough No Homos to excuse us from the fact that he’s dressing me right now. After some wrangling around, I’m sorted and find myself facing him. “I can’t take you anywhere. You’re making an ass of yourself.”
I look across the street. The girls who were checking out Thomas are laughing at me. I would’ve probably been really pissed if I didn’t have Genevieve. Then I see Brendan and Me-Crazy chilling not too far off, smoking the cigarettes Me-Crazy steals from his father. They’re looking at me like they don’t even recognize me. I nod my head to say hey, but they must be too high from smoking some of Brendan’s weed earlier.
“You doing anything tonight?” Thomas asks. “Besides sleeping, which you can do at my house.” He smiles. “Okay, that sounded wrong. No homo.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Since I feel like The Final Chase may or may not have slightly disappointed you—”
“It one hundred percent did,” I interrupt.
“I thought we could wat
ch Jaws on my rooftop.”
“I’m down.”
I’ve always felt the worst time to be treated like a kid is during the summer. Sure, most of the parents around here give us 10:00 p.m. curfews, but we normally stay out until midnight, sometimes even 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. This is not about rebelling or seeing how far we can push the adults before they come outside with a belt. (Fat-Dave has it bad like that.) It’s just that we’re exposed to more grown-up shit versus those in the safer boroughs and white-picket-fence neighborhoods. But when I call my mom to tell her I’m going to go stay over at Thomas’s, she talks to me as if I’m five years old. She needs to meet Thomas to make sure he’s not a drug dealer or some devil on my shoulder who might talk me off a roof.
We go wait for her by one of the brown picnic tables in the second court. This is the same spot where Brendan broke the news to me that he was going to spend the summer in North Carolina with his family when we were thirteen. I started drawing comics when he wasn’t around and he came home to find himself drawn as a Pokémon trainer.
Mom comes downstairs in my eighth-grade gym shirt, and I wish she had left her keys at home so Thomas wouldn’t see all her supermarket discount cards. “Hello.”
“Hi. I’m Thomas,” he says, offering a hand.
“Elsie,” she says with a smile, shaking it. “Please tell me that’s not sweat on you two.”
“Sprinklers,” I say.
“Thank God. What are your plans tonight, boys?”
“The movie we just saw bombed, so I thought I could show Stretch here Jaws,” Thomas says.
Mom looks at me. “You didn’t call and tell me you were going to the movies.”
“I got back in one piece.”
Her eyes fall on my scar and then back at me.
“He knows,” I say.
Thomas cuts in, “If it helps, Ms. Elsie, I can give you my address, my phone number, and my mother’s phone number. But I feel like Aaron hasn’t lived until he’s seen Jaws. You’re more than welcome to join us if you haven’t seen it yourself.”
This gets my mom smiling again. “I saw it in the theaters when I was a young girl. Thank you.”
Thomas almost looks jealous that she was alive when the movie came out. Maybe he thinks Back Then was a better time to be born. I personally think Much Later would’ve been a better time instead of Right Now.
“I’ll be at the supermarket late tonight anyway, so you can go,” Mom tells me.
I’m smiling like a dumb-idiot. I haven’t gotten this excited about a sleepover since Fat-Dave’s mother took us all to buy the newest Throne Wars game at midnight, and everyone stayed up all night playing at his house.
“Thomas, please make sure he’s asleep before two, remind him to use the bathroom first, and don’t let him spend more than a dollar on candy.”
I would make a you-know-what joke for how embarrassing she’s being, but it would prolong the agony. Mom hugs him, and then me. She thanks him for letting me sleep over, takes down all of his information—address, his number, his mother’s number—and we start walking away.
“Your mother’s cool,” he says.
“Yeah, when she’s not treating me like a little kid. I should probably go grab some clothes to sleep in.”
“Don’t worry about it, I have stuff.”
We’re only going a couple blocks down, but as someone who will likely never have enough money to go see the pyramids in Egypt or boat down a canal in Venice, this day away from home already feels like I’m headed to another country.
The orange cord follows us to the rooftop and snakes across the pebbled ground, where all evidence of my night with Genevieve is gone. Thomas props the projector up, but it’s still light out so we can’t watch the movie yet. I lie down with my arms spread out like I’m going to try and make a snow angel.
“What are you doing?” Thomas asks.
“Drying off.” I shut my eyes, but can still see spears of orange and feel the sun cooking my face. I can’t tell how much of my drenched shirt is water and how much is sweat. Summer sucks that way, but winter can go die twice because I always refuse to leave the house—even whenever Genevieve wants to go out and build snowmen and take silly couple photos.
“No homo, but you should take your shirt off,” Thomas says.
I look up and his shirt is already off and he’s draping it over the ledge to dry. I sit up, take my shirt off too, throw it at him, and sprawl out. The baked pebbles burn, but it’s not any worse than the sand at Jones Beach. Speaking of which, two shirtless guys on a rooftop isn’t all that different from two shirtless guys at the beach, so we really shouldn’t have to No Homo this.
Thomas plops down next to me. “I used to watch movies with Sara up here. Well, we would start watching something and then start messing around.”
“You had sex with your ex up here?”
He laughs. “Nah, never sex. Just other stuff.”
“Was she your first?” I ask.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah, Sara was my first too,” I say. Thomas smacks my shoulder so hard it leaves his handprint. I punch him above his heart but his chest is firmer than mine. “Your breasts are hard.”
“They’re called pecs, and I paid a lot of money for them.”
For some reason I feel uncomfortable talking about his body, probably because it’s better than mine. “Do you miss Sara? Be real.”
“No and yes,” he answers. “I had to break things off with her because we really weren’t right for each other anymore. I just miss having someone to call and go out and have fun with. But it never had to be Sara.”
“I get that.”
We drop it and talk about random things as the sun falls out of sight behind the city’s buildings: video games and favorite comics; how much we hate school and the hot teachers and girls who make it easier; his birthday coming up—on the same day Genevieve gets back—and how he’s never smoked before, not even a cigarette. He looks disappointed when I admit to blazing up with Brendan and the others a few times. To keep it light, I admit something incredibly shameful: “I don’t know how to ride a bike.”
“How is that even possible?” he asks.
“No one ever taught me. My mom doesn’t know how to either, and my dad was going to but never got around to it.”
“I’ll have to teach you then. It’s a basic life skill, like swimming and masturbating.”
The sky is dark now.
The quality of Jaws is really poor since a) the movie is old, and b) we’re watching it on a brick wall. But I wouldn’t trade in this experience for a perfectly clear DVD on a big-screen TV.
It’s getting chilly, but I can’t pull myself away to get my shirt because I’m too concerned about the girl running into the ocean like she doesn’t know she’s in a shark movie. “How many times have you seen this?”
“Lost count,” he says. “More than War Horse, less than Jurassic Park.”
After some serious “Oh shit!” moments where the shark eats more people and the survivors’ boat blows the hell up, we put our shirts back on, pack up the projector, and carefully go down the fire escape—even though the roof door is open.
“Ma should be sleeping by now so we need to be quiet,” Thomas says, opening the window and climbing through.
His room smells like clean laundry and pencil shavings. The walls are green and decorated with posters of movies and pictures of his favorite directors. I step over the balled-up socks on the floor and see the toy basketball hoop fixed to the door where he must play when he’s bored. Drawn all over the door are deadlocked games of tic-tac-toe, quotes from Steven Spielberg movies, doodles of dinosaurs, a spot-on drawing of E.T., and lots of randomness I can’t make out.
His bed isn’t made but it looks comfortable, unlike mine. My bed is basically one level better than a cot. He even has his own desk, wher
eas the only surface I can sketch on is a textbook on my lap. There’s an open notebook on the desk where it looks like he crossed out some music notes he was composing in favor of a screenplay he hasn’t gotten very far with.
Thomas opens his closet door—something else I don’t have—and starts throwing some shirts on his bed. “Come find something to sleep in, Stretch.”
I check out the shirts. Most are too baggy, too tight, too childish, too geriatric, and, I shit you not, too extraterrestrial. It turns out the last shirt was a gift from his aunt’s visit to Roswell, New Mexico. I settle on a white T-shirt and quickly change into it. In the corner of the room behind his laundry basket is a board with a pie chart and several notes thumbtacked to it. It reads: LIFE CHART.
“What’s this? Old school project?”
“That’s what I’ve been working on the past couple of days,” Thomas says, changing into his Snoopy pajamas and a tank top. “I decided I would direct myself on the course of life I want to take. You know, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, except not something that will make me so obsessed to figure out every last detail.”
I have no idea who this Maslow guy is, but Thomas’s chart seems plenty obsessive. Thomas carries the board across the room and props it against his dresser. We sit down in front of it. The categories in this pie chart are divided by school/work, health, self-actualization, and relationships.
“I think I’m doing okay with health. I eat right and work out. I’m struggling a bit with financial security because I can’t seem to find a job I love. The money in my savings account can’t even buy me a movie ticket.”
At least he has a savings account, something that might suggest he once had enough money worth putting away. If I get birthday or Christmas money, I usually slip almost all of it inside Mom’s purse since she knows where we need it most. It sucks paying for a home you don’t love living in, but it beats the alternative. See? Silver linings.
“I’m finding my biggest struggles are with love and purpose,” Thomas continues. This chart is the work of a madman who wants his happy ending; I should imitate his insanity. “It might’ve been a blow to my self-esteem after breaking up with Sara. But chilling with you kept me from falling into a black hole about it, I think.”