Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

Tristan nods his head toward one of the guys near the keg, which I take to mean he’s going to swipe his wallet too, so I stop at the fridge and search inside for the rest of the wine bottle I’d started. I’ve only ever had boxed wine, so my standards may be low, but it’s the most amazing wine possibly ever made and I wouldn’t mind some more. Quickly, I grab the bottle and close the door. I’m in such a hurry I slam it too hard, and cause a note to fall from the fridge to the floor. I pick it up and try to put it back in place with a magnet. Then I notice the entire door is covered in sticky notes. In the middle of them all, there’s a big calendar of the month of December, with every Tuesday and Friday circled in red. The note beneath it says, “Don’t forget to feed Frida.” Below that, there’s a photo of a cat. And the numbers 1416.

Right as I get the note back in its place, Tristan pulls on my arm. “Time to go,” he says. He drags me forward and pushes me toward the door. Not the front door, where we first came in, but a side door that leads to a laundry room and then opens into the garage. From behind us, I am pretty sure I hear a woman shout: “Oh my goddddddd! Where’s my wallet!” Another voice shouts, “I bet it was that shady-looking elf!”

When I hear this, my knees become so weak I think I might fall over. But I don’t have time to fall over, because Tristan is pressing the garage door button and breaking into a run, still holding my hand. I follow him blindly, skirting the edge of the house back toward the bushes where we’d left our bikes. Just as we’re mounting the seats, three or four girls begin pouring out the front door, pointing in our direction. But they are drunk, and we are fast. We are already pedaling. Their shouts disintegrate into the cold winter air. We don’t slow down till we’ve biked several miles down Lake Drive, back into Milwaukee, where we belong.

It’s my idea to break into the mansion in Shorewood. Between the calendar and the notes I discovered on the fridge, I am pretty sure that the place is unoccupied, except for the two days a week that the only child of whoever owns the place arrives to feed the cat. Tristan thinks it’s too risky, but he says he is open to convincing. It takes me a few tries, but eventually, I persuade him to bike up to Shorewood with me and watch the place around midday so I can show him it’s okay. We park our bikes across the street, in the thick enclave of dead trees that line the other side of the road.

“What are we looking at?” he asks me.

“You’ll see,” I tell him. I lean my bike against a dead tree and sit down on a dry patch of leaves. “Sit down. It might be a while.”

“Okay, lady. You’re the boss.” Tristan sits and we both light cigarettes, watching the smoke blend into the clouds of air coming out of our mouths. It’s not as cold as the night we came for the party, but it’s not far above twenty degrees. “What’s going on with that half-sister of yours?” he asks. He puts sister in air quotes. “Have you heard from her?”

“Yeah. She keeps asking me to take that DNA test.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t see how it would help her or my dad,” I shrug. “It’s not enough to get her to Israel.”

“Hm.”

I poke him in the side. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What, Tristan? Tell me.”

“I just… I can’t see her letting it go,” he says.

“Maybe not,” I admit. I take another long inhale. “It’s getting kind of annoying actually. Now that I don’t have a computer, I can only check my accounts at the desktop at Bremen, and it’s not like I have all the time in the world to go there.”

“So you’re ignoring her,” he says. He starts shaking his head. “I told you not to do that.”

“I have more pressing issues. Like where are we going to live?” A white van slows down in front of the house next to the mansion. I perk up. “There! Watch this!”

“I know you don’t believe me, but this girl is conning you,” Tristan says, keeping his gaze on the road.

I roll my eyes. “You think everyone is conning everyone.” I point ahead. “Are you seeing this?”

“Everyone is conning everyone. In some way or another,” Tristan says. But he follows my gaze across the street. Right as I’d suspected, the mail van skips the mansion and continues to the next building, another multi-level brick home with a balcony, and a matching large white fence wrapping around its lawn.

“What does that prove?” he asks me. We both watch as the postman sticks his hand out of his window and deposits a stack of papers into the box at the end of the driveway—I’m reminded again that we are no longer in the city, where the mailboxes are by the front door and require post office employees to walk through every kind of weather Wisconsin has to throw at them.

“They have a mail hold,” I explain. “It was the same thing yesterday.”

“Maybe they didn’t have mail yesterday,” he says. He takes off his hat and itches his thick head of hair, then begins to make a series of little jumps into the air. Now that we’ve been off the bikes for a while, the sweat we accumulated biking is making it feel even colder. I pedal my feet up and down, trying to get the feeling back in my toes, but I’m wearing a pair of ripped converse shoes, so it does no good. I may as well be wearing nothing at all.

“I checked the nearby mailboxes; everyone got the same coupons from Sendik’s yesterday. Plus, like I said: I heard someone at the party say they were in Greece.”

Tristan stops staring at the mail truck and turns to give me a look I still have to get used to seeing: one of awe. “Your brain is sexy,” he says, lifting his eyebrows. Will I ever get tired of hearing this phrase? My whole life it has felt like my brain has been a nuisance. My peers either get jealous or don’t fully understand my meaning or intentions, my parents use it as an anchor to force me into an education I don’t want. It definitely didn’t please my teachers to have their assignments questioned and analyzed.

Tristan blows into his hands then crosses his arms across his chest. “But what if the kid comes over unexpectedly?”

“Then we climb out the window,” I say, pointing at the row of windows on the first floor. In addition to the bottom windows, there are more the next flight up. “Or jump,” I add, pointing at one of the patio couches, a teal and brown one with clear plastic over it.

“All right,” Tristan shrugs. I thought it would take more convincing, but Tristan has a bad back. Sleeping on an actual bed appeals to him more than the danger of it scares him. Once I found myself asking him how he’s been managing on-and-off homelessness all these years with a bad back and turned to find him miming a needle to the arm. That put an end to the questions for a while. I didn’t like that he had the same answer to every one. His past filled me with awe but it also scared me.

“Let’s head out,” Tristan says. “I want to come back tomorrow to make sure the mailman skips the house again.”

The following day, he gets his confirmation, and around sunset, we park our bikes in a small cluster of trees behind the house and get to work finding a way into the back door. Normally, in Milwaukee, I’d be wary of neighbors, but a house in a suburb is—for once—an ideal location. The houses are spread out, and since people in the suburbs love to pretend they’re in nature, a burst of trees and wild vines or flowers extend between almost every yard. Standing next to the back door, we survey the landscape to the left and right of the raised deck, and are relieved to find you really can’t see anything but trees. Plus, it’s now dark, and there are no streetlights anywhere close by. All we have to guide us is the half-moon in the sky and a pocket flashlight attached to Tristan’s keys. There is the problem of actually getting into the house, though. Tristan starts looking under pots and rocks near the patio door.