Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“How?” Will said, remembering the way Marcus had defended himself so fiercely with his slingshot when they first met. “By stealing their garden hose?”

Angela drove up her eyebrows again, crinkling her forehead, which she did whenever she thought he’d said something weird, which was most of the time. “Anyway. Kids say he’s not missing. He just hates his foster home. They see him all over. In parks at night and abandoned buildings and under bridges. They say he’s living somewhere in the woods and eats berries and drinks deer blood for breakfast.”

“Hiding? Like Outside? Where?” Will asked, fascinated by the notion that the Outside could actually be inhabited for any sustained duration.

“Who knows,” she said, sighing, already bored. “Anyway, kids are coming and going from his foster home all the time,” she added. “Maybe he got transferred to another one and they just forgot.” Will would’ve visited this foster home, but the thought of the journey through the culvert to County Park withered him.

Angela ate her lunch from a long store-bought bread bag — always just four margarined slices, usually including the heel. She didn’t have a mother, a condition Will found unimaginable. Her mother had hopped into an old boyfriend’s semi-truck cab the very day Angela stopped nursing. Now her father, a former railway ticket agent, spent his days on their stoop soaking his insides with a flammable grain alcohol he procured down near the harbor. “Why wouldn’t he just find you another mom?” Will had asked when she told him. “There are women everywhere Outside.” Angela’s face darkened and she said she had to go Inside for her treatments.

Angela had a disease, something to do with phlegm stuck in her lungs like mortar. Her breath crackled like buckshot on the rare occasions she laughed unmockingly. The school nurse had to go at her chest with a vibrating wand every afternoon during lunch. Whenever Will considered the traffic jam Inside Angela, he had to fight the urge to cough.

“The treatments are okay,” she said. “I think about Jonah while they do it.”

“Are your hands free to draw masterpieces?”

She gave him another scrutinizing grimace. “You’re weird because you talk too much and say weird things. You shouldn’t do that.” Then she asked him if he liked anyone in class, by which she actually meant their vaginas.

He said he was going to wait until someone liked him.

“Girls don’t work like that,” she said.

“How do they work?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, waving her head like a cobra.

What he knew about girls was that they closed ranks and whispered malevolently out of earshot. They spritzed their architecturally sculpted bangs with complex bottles. There were rumors they had been making bracelets.

Angela said the reason that nobody talked to Will was because he was a pussy and a baby who still slept with his mother, which he did, actually, but he’d set up a cot in New York and could tolerate the occasional night there. He wondered how his classmates knew and hoped it was only a good guess.

While sharpening his pencil, Will often looked out over Thunder Bay, his eyes skiing down the hill and over the steppes of asphalt-shingled roofs, brown, black, and green, each sheltering an entirely different Inside of their own (he still couldn’t believe there could be so many Insides), then down to the monstrous cloud-wrapped lake and the tired, shabby buildings that kneeled beside it. Like the creek, Thunder Bay had proved smaller than he imagined. “It was once a charmed place. Now it’s just an old rusty ruin” was something his mother said so often it sounded like an official slogan. But he liked the ruined parts, best of all the empty grain elevators that the newspaper called a blight, standing like foreclosed castles near the shore now edged with ice. He decided that if he ever somehow became as good an artist as Jonah, they would be the first real masterpiece he’d paint.

In rare but uncomfortably emotional digressions from his lesson plan, Mr. Miller professed that he’d worked at the elevators to put himself through teachers college and couldn’t bear to see them empty today — but Will only caught half of it because it sounded too much like history, which was actually Mr. Miller opining about how much better things were before he got old and had to give speeches to uninterested children every weekday.

Then one Friday morning the janitor brought Will a new desk and placed it in the row beside Jonah’s. When Jonah Turtle entered the classroom, Will recognized him instantly as the same boy who’d told him to walk away from Ritchie that day by the creek. Jonah was tall, with thick, swooping eyebrows, and he moved precisely, with a startling elegance, like a gymnast on a beam. He wore a button-up cardigan over old T-shirts and leather old-man shoes, not sneakers. His skin was like gingerbread, darker than Marcus’s, and he had close-cropped black hair except for long bangs that often dangled in his eyes dramatically like a cape, which he then hooked effortlessly behind his ear, as if they had been grown expressly for that purpose.

Will observed Jonah during art class that day, which was more like cooking than making masterpieces: Mr. Miller drew the recipe on the board with a meter stick and colored chalk, and the class was expected to replicate it. Today’s recipe called for tissue paper to be wrapped over the ends of pencils, then glued in bunches to toilet paper rolls. A Christmas ornament, he said.

Now glue was mixing with the tissue paper pigment and seeping onto Will’s toilet paper roll, while Jonah’s ornament was perfect, orderly rows of spiraling color. After wringing out their magic in private, Will had finally hung Jonah’s masterpieces in New York, and his mother complimented them as “an interesting new direction in realism.” Will had practiced his own masterpieces of skateboarders and skulls, but they were warped and unconvincing. He could do color fields and free splatters, but never anything real. Lately, Will had begun to question his genius-hood, mostly because there were so many things he clearly sucked at: throwing (anything with his arms), drawing, remembering to bring both his lunch and pencil case to school, math, vaginas, spelling (his mother maintained it was what you mean that mattered), and compared with that of his classmates, his cursive looked like an earthquake readout. But if Will did have a special power, it was his ability to see the Black Lagoon everywhere. He could tell that Mr. Miller was actually afraid of his students, and they didn’t fear him nearly as much as they did failing a grade and falling behind their friends. And that Angela was afraid both of silence and of having nobody to talk to, and that someday her disease would forbid her to breathe. Will had imagined there’d be less fear Outside, but everyone was afraid all the time: of failure, humiliation, harm, though he was still working out in what order. Jonah, however, in his silence that even Mr. Miller respected, didn’t seem to fear anything.

Later that day at recess, Will and Angela were standing around as usual, drowning the interval with half-meant words. “I think he’d talk to you,” Angela said, gesturing toward Jonah, who was drawing with fingerless gloves on, his skateboard at his side, near the big rock at the fringe of the schoolyard. “You have lots in common,” Angela added.

“Like what? Being weird?”

“You’re both artistic.”

Will scoffed but accepted it greedily as the first compliment he’d garnered in probably his entire life from someone other than his mother or a deliveryman (those were more for his mother). At home his mother produced praise like water from a tap, and it was just as tasteless.