Lisa Ko - The Leavers

“Are you going to talk to her again?”

“Maybe.”

Kay picked up the envelope and tapped the bottom of it against the table, straightening out the papers inside. “By the way,” she said. “I received a curious phone call the other day. From Charles, Angel’s boyfriend.”

“Oh?”

“He said you borrowed money from Angel and haven’t paid her back. I asked him why he was calling me about and he said I should ask you. So, I’m asking.”

Daniel tried to detect whether he heard an accusation in Kay’s statement, whether she was still assuming the worst from him, if he was the Daniel that fucked up or the Daniel who needed to be cared for. “She must have been talking about this one time we met up in the city. I didn’t have any cash on me and I had to borrow some to pay for dinner.”

“It sounded like more than that. What Charles said, it sounded serious. And wasn’t she talking at Jim’s birthday party about a thief?”

“It’s not serious. He’s making it up.”

“But why would her boyfriend call me and make something like that up? Please, explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain. For all I know, he might be jealous. Of me and Angel being such good friends. Some guys get like that.”

Daniel saw, in Kay’s expression, the same mix of hurt and suspicion as when she learned about his expulsion from Potsdam. He got up, taking the envelope. “But you reminded me that I forgot to pay Angel back. I’m going to go do that now, on my computer.”

HE PASSED BOTH HIS classes for the first part of the summer term, a C+ in Comparative Politics and a B in Microeconomics. The second part proceeded in the same joyless vein, Macroeconomics in the mornings, an American History course in the afternoons. In late July, a lone text message appeared from Roland, asking Daniel how he was doing. Daniel wrote back, congratulating Roland on the Jupiter gig and wishing him the best, echoing Angel’s wish to him in her e-mail — which had been insincere, as she’d sicced Charles on him.

That night, he borrowed Peter’s Volvo and drove around by himself. He had missed driving while in the city, the steering wheel hard beneath his palm, free hand floating out the open window with air thick between his fingers, the easy slide down the curving two-lane roads. He remembered driving through the night with Roland their senior year, all the way to Boston, drinking gas station coffee and singing along to mix CDs. They’d been driving to a friend’s house when they decided to get on the highway and keep going east, couldn’t bear another Saturday night in Ridgeborough, and when they got to Boston they had breakfast at a diner, waffles and pancakes and Western omelets, a bright winter morning with flurries of snow. Daniel had watched the joggers in their thermal outfits crossing the bridge over the Charles River, college students in sweaters and scarves toting large cups of coffee. He had dreamt about leaving home and being on his own, about the life that awaited him once he left Ridgeborough. When he could be free, in the way Michael thought he already was.

Now, looping around town with no destination, his phone plugged into the car’s speakers, skipping from song to song and album to album and growing bored with each track after a few seconds — he was sick of all his music, five thousand songs and not a damn thing to listen to — the music went silent.

He pulled over to the shoulder. Either his phone’s battery had died, or the cable needed to be replugged. He rolled down the windows and heard layers of chirping crickets, opened the door and walked out to the street. There were houses in the distance, the occasional light, and a swath of tall grass on the corner he pushed around with his feet. He and Roland used to practice wheelies on their dirt bikes near here. He stood still, absorbing the night.

For so long, he had thought that music was the one thing he could believe in: harmony and angular submelody and rolling drums, a world neither present nor past, a space inhabited by the length of a song. For a song had a heart of its own, a song could jumpstart or provide solace; only music could numb him more thoroughly than weed or alcohol. With Roland, he had wanted to fill other people’s silences, drown out their thoughts and replace them with sound. It was less about communication, more about assault and plunder. That was how he’d preferred it. But standing on the dark street, a pressure released inside him, the crickets a consolation for his remorse over leaving the city, that he had pushed his mother away before she could tell him the truth.

Most nights Daniel began to stay in. He did homework, wrote music, used an old condenser mic to record several tracks onto Peter’s computer, which ran a pirated version of Pro Tools faster than his laptop. The songs he was writing weren’t anything like the ones he and Roland played. They lacked structure, didn’t cohere in a predictable way. They were too bare, too vulnerable, they cared too much to be cool. He no longer wanted to make music that forced itself on you, or tried to be something it wasn’t. The challenge was not to overstate, but to be honest, unguarded. In class, he worked on lyrics as Professor Nichols droned on about X and Y variables; it felt like he was defrosting a windshield, that the fog would eventually reveal clear glass.

In the back of his closet, he found a stack of cassettes. One of them had a label drawn in marker: NECROMANIA: BRAINS ON A SPIKE !!!! He remembered recording it on Roland’s mom’s old tape player one afternoon, his first year in Ridgeborough, the two of them wailing along to a three-chord backing track they had downloaded online. He put the tape in a padded envelope along with a note that said, “Remember when we used to jam?” and mailed it to Roland’s apartment.

HE WAS AT CODY’S on a Friday night in August, in the Campbells’ basement, watching an MMA fight. Cody was the only person he talked to these days, besides Peter and Kay. Amber wasn’t taking classes for the rest of the summer and had gone to visit family in Connecticut.

The match ended, the guy in the red shorts standing over the prone body of the guy in the black shorts. Blood ran down both their faces.

Daniel had transferred the tracks he’d mastered from Peter’s computer to his phone. “You want to hear something I’m working on?”

Cody looked over.

“Will you turn the volume down for a second?”

“Hold on.” Cody waited to see if the announcer was saying anything important. When the match switched to a commercial, he hit mute.

Daniel took out his phone. He heard the familiar first notes, the guitar, his own voice, tinny and monotone on the microspeaker. The sound was too poor to make out most of the words.

“That you?” Cody said.

“Yup.” The song didn’t need any more changes or rewrites. It didn’t matter if he’d ever perform. It was exactly what he wanted it to be.

“You’ve changed, Wilkinson,” Cody said, after the song ended.

“How so?”

“In high school, you were all like—” Cody hunched over, curling his shoulders in and looking down at the carpet. “ Reave me arone, ” he said. “You barely spoke English! Now you’re all American.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I spoke English.”

“You called that English?”

“Fuck off, Cody. Fuck you.”

“You need a drummer,” Cody said, as Daniel headed toward the door. “Like those guys at the Black Cat Open Mic. They rocked.”

HE COULDN’T SLEEP; HE decided to sit on the porch. Looking for his phone, he spotted the manila envelope from Kay, grabbed it and then went outside. Beneath the porch light, he examined the printout of the permanency hearing report. Foster parents plan to petition for termination of mother’s parental rights on grounds of abandonment. He held the envelope upside down and shook it hard, until the rest of the contents fell into his lap.