Untaken Read online

  “Hey,” said Katie. “What’s up?”

  Zach gave the ball a couple of hard bounces on the pavement instead of replying. He’d been a scrawny little boy last summer, but now he was taller than me.

  “Nothing much,” I told them. Katie and Zach and I had been to the same elementary school. Katie and I had been friends once—she only lived a few streets away from us—but after Mom had seen Katie hanging out with a bunch of older kids, passing a bottle back and forth down at the park, I’d been banned from speaking to her. She hung out with a different crowd at school now.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever!”

  I didn’t know what to say. I still felt bad at the way I’d avoided her at school, pretended I wasn’t home when she rang the doorbell. She’d given up trying to talk to me a couple of years ago now, but it was still awkward to run into her like this.

  “We’re going over to the playground,” Katie said, finally. “Want to come?”

  “No, I don’t think I can—”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Gracie. I guess your mom won’t let you?”

  “It’s not that….” I said.

  “What then? We used to hang out down there all the time.” She laughed. “Remember our secret clubhouse?”

  It hadn’t been much of a clubhouse. Just a bare patch of pine-needley ground between a bunch of spruces that grew around the basketball court, but I remembered.

  “Well, suit yourself.” Katie brushed her long blonde hair back out of her face.

  My hair was long and blonde too, but instead of being sleek and shiny, it was a tangled mess no matter how much I brushed it. When we were six, we’d given each other haircuts. Katie’s mom had found us halfway through the makeover, and taken us to the salon to fix the mess.

  “Don’t you girls look pretty?” she’d said afterwards as we admired our matching bobs in the salon mirror. “Like twins.” I couldn’t wait to get home to show mom my new haircut, but she’d gone crazy. She’d called Katie’s mom and yelled at her until she hung up the phone, even though I’d told her it had been my idea. That had been the beginning of the end with Katie and me, although I was too young to know it then. It pissed me off that mom was always saying I should make friends when she’d stopped me hanging out with the best friend I’d ever had. It was so unfair.

  “Sure, I’ll hang out for a while,” I found myself saying.

  A pair of older boys I didn’t recognize were shooting hoops down at the playground.

  They nodded to Zach, who dropped his shirt on the parched grass and ran to join them. The eyes of the two older boys lingered on Katie, but it was like I was invisible.

  Katie stretched herself out on Zach’s abandoned shirt and stretched out in the sun like a cat. I plopped down next to her, rubbing at my sunburn. The dry grass scratched my tender legs, and the gun-shot whack of the ball on the blazing concrete combined with the shouts from the guys started my head pounding.

  “Do you think he’s cute?” Katie asked.

  “Who?”

  “Zach. He’s my boyfriend now, did you know that? But I don’t know. I kind of like Aaron.”

  “Right,” I said, feeling like an idiot. I wondered if Katie had noticed me checking out Zach’s bare chest.

  “What do you think?” she asked, plucking up a handful of dry grass and letting it float away.

  “About what?”

  “Zach or Aaron, duh.”

  “I don’t know who Aaron is.” My face was going red again, I could feel it. The more I willed myself not to blush, the worse it happened—it was always that way. I hated my stupid skin and my stupid hair. How would I know if Aaron was “better” than Zach, when no boy had ever looked twice at me that way? It was like I’d gone so long without talking to other kids my age I’d forgotten how. Maybe Mom had been right about me being an outcast.

  “That’s Aaron,” Katie said, pointing at the taller of the two boys I didn’t know. “He’s cute, isn’t he? He’s seventeen and he’s got a car.” She grinned at me like I should know what that meant.

  Aaron wore a Red Sox cap jammed backwards on his head. His ears stuck out from underneath it. An earring hung from one of them, flashing in the sun. I know what Mom would have said about a boy who wore an earring. “Only trash ruins their bodies like that.”

  Worse still, a black tribal tattoo snaked down the length of his back, disappearing into the waistband of his low-slung shorts.

  Katie grinned, staring at me over the top of her sunglasses. “Cute butt, huh?”

  “No!” I stammered.

  “No?”

  “I don’t know, Okay?”

  “What about Callum?” asked Katie. “He’s got a girlfriend already, but she’s kind of a skank.”

  I guessed that Callum was the third boy. His sunburn was almost as bad as mine, and the pooch of his belly hung low underneath the bottom of his stained T-shirt.

  “Um…”

  “Yeah,” said Katie, “he’s not hot or anything, and he doesn’t talk much, but Hanna—that’s the skank—said he’s a lot of fun when you get him in private. She got hickies all over her neck and she told her mom it was eczema. She made her go to the doctor, and they gave Hanna this special eczema cream and everything.” She laughed.

  Aaron glanced over. He was good-looking, even I could see that. My stomach sank as he tossed the ball from hand to hand and started to saunter over.

  “Who’s your friend, Katie?”

  “This is Gracie,” said Katie carelessly.

  “Hi, Gracie,” said Aaron, his eyes still locked on Katie’s.

  He sprawled down in the grass between us, and started fumbling in his pocket, pulling out a packet of smokes. Callum sat down on the other side of Katie, breathing hard from the game.

  Zach plopped down in front of us. He didn’t look too happy about the seating arrangements, but I could tell he was too in awe of the older boys to say anything.

  I felt sorry for him for about three seconds, until he piped up with, “Hey, Gracie, you used to be into all that space shit—what do you think is gonna happen?”

  Katie groaned. “Not that again. Can we please talk about something else, guys?” She slipped a cigarette between her lips and cupped her hands around Aaron’s as he lit it for her.

  I tried my hardest not to cough as the smoke drifted over.

  “Want one?” asked Aaron, offering the packet to me. I saw Katie exchange looks with Zach, her ducking her head so I wouldn’t see her hiding her smile.

  “Gracie doesn’t smoke.” She took another drag of her own cigarette. “Her mom won’t let her, will she, Gracie?”

  She was just trying to show off in front of the guys, but it still hurt.

  “So, tell us about these spaceships, Gracie,” said Aaron.

  I shrugged. “Like what?” My voice came out small and strangled sounding.

  “I’m telling you guys,” Zach said, “they’re not aliens. It’s all a conspiracy, right? The government put those ships up there to scare people.”

  Aaron snorted. “Why would they do that?”

  Zach shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s what my Dad said. You really think there are little green men in there?”

  We all looked up at the sky. Katie shivered theatrically. “I hate seeing them there every day. It feels like they’re watching all the time.”

  “They’re probably not even real ships,” continued Zach. “Just weather balloons or something, made up to look real.”

  “How could they possibly be weather balloons? How would they get them to stay still?” I blurted out. “And who’d pay for it?”

  “Of course you think they’re real.” Zach snorted. “You read that in one of your nerd books?”

  “On the internet,” I said. I still remembered when Zach wet his pants in third grade. I wasn’t going to be shoved around by him. “And the ships appeared all around the world. How could it be just one government? And there are more of them out in space, there’s satellite dat
a….”

  “Anyone could fake that,” said Zach.

  “Enough, guys.” Katie stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s giving me the creeps. Can’t we talk about something else?

  “If there’s anyone in those ships, how come they haven’t done anything yet?” asked Zach. “Since you know everything.”

  “Nobody knows that,” I said. “But we can assume they must be here for some purpose. Their technology has to be way more sophisticated than ours. Their civilization is probably more advanced in a million ways. Them talking to us would be like a housefly talking to you. Even if they could speak our language, we might still have no way of understanding what they were trying to tell us. They’ve been broadcasting messages in every dialect, in binary, in morse code. Nothing. If they’re intelligent enough to figure out intergalactic travel, there’s no way they don’t understand any of those messages. They’re choosing not to talk with us.”

  Zach yawned. “Sounds like bullshit to me. Do you guys want to play some more?”

  “Maybe they’re here for all the hot Earth girls,” said Aaron, ignoring him. “Watch out, Katie!” He rolled on top of her, and she screamed in a fake way.

  “Jeez, Aaron, you’re such an asshole!” But she still grinned, and didn’t make any effort to move away from him.

  “If they are, Gracie will be safe,” said Zach, sulkily. “Maybe we should come hide out at your house? If your stuck-up mom will let us in. She banned Katie from going around there, didn’t she, K?”

  “Zach!” Katie was trying to sound shocked, but she could hardly keep the smile off her face.

  “Gracie is too good to hang out with us,” Zach continued. “That’s why the only friends she has are in books with spaceships on the front.”

  “And on the internet,” Callum added. He and Zach sniggered and slapped off a high five.

  “That’s mean, guys,” said Katie, but she still laughed, just like the rest of them.

  I should have known they’d only asked me down here so they could make fun of me. I stood up, brushing the grass off my legs.

  “Where you going?” yelled Katie.

  “Aw, let her go,” Zach said.

  I wondered if Katie would call me back, but no one did.

  The sound of the basketball hitting asphalt and the laughter of the others followed me all the way down the street. It was my own dumb fault. I’d been the one who had dropped Katie when mom told me to. We’d been friends for years and I’d been too cowardly to stick up for her. I deserved to be laughed at. Me trying to talk to other kids was like the scientists trying to talk to those alien ships. It was never going to work; we were from two different planets.

  Brandon

  plugged the phone back in and held my breath. Nothing. I was relieved Grammy had given up, but kind of sad too. Just as I turned away from the damn phone, there was a knock on the door.

  “Brandon? You have a minute?”

  Biedermann again. Damn neighbors.

  The Kauffmans across the road were okay. Mr. Kauffman hunted too, and he and Dad would stop and talk about rifles and whitetails, or how the Pats or the Bruins were doing. Mr. Kauffman was a Mets fan so they didn’t talk baseball, but I guess no one is perfect.

  The rest of them didn’t even pretend to be friendly. Just because our grass grew too long in summer, and the sidewalk never got shoveled in winter, and the broken down fence in front of our house stayed broken down and made the street look bad. They had no cause to be snooty like that; it’s not like we lived in a real fancy neighborhood in the first place. They were no one special either.

  Biedermann was the worst one of all.

  I snuck through to the living room, skirting a line of Amstel bottles that Dad had set up like a convoy of marching soldiers in some weird moment of boozy three a.m. artistry, then peered through the window.

  Tom Biedermann shifted from foot to foot on the front steps, chewing a stumpy fingernail. He raised his hand to ring the bell again, then stuffed it back in his pocket.

  I snorted. Chickenshit.

  That’s what dad called Mr. Biedermann whenever he saw his Prius go by, with its lame hippie bumper stickers on the back.

  ‘Send your kids to college, not Iraq,” was the one that really got Dad steaming. He was all about supporting our troops—had wanted to serve himself, but never could because of having to raise me. I figured when I got old enough, I’d join the army myself.

  I was always keen to read about army guys, true stories or pretend ones. It appealed to me, that life. It seemed so ordered. When I joined the army, Dad would be proud. If he couldn’t be a soldier himself, I knew me becoming one would be almost as good.

  When the Biedermanns saw Dad’s truck parked in our yard with its own collection of bumper stickers, including “Ted Kennedy’s car has killed more people than my gun,” well, Mr. Biedermann would turn his nose up in the air like he smelled something bad, and Mrs. Biedermann would shake her head as if we were so far beneath her she felt pity. If Dad himself was in the truck, then they’d look more disgusted still.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if that was as far as it went. I figure that the world is a big place, there’s room for a few assholes up in the mix, but unlike the other neighbors, the Biedermanns didn’t have the sense to see that dad was never going to change his ways, and asking him to do anything was a surefire way of getting him to do exactly the opposite.

  The doorbell rang again.

  “Just get out of here,” I muttered under my breath. Dad coming home to find Biedermann on the porch would be worse than a thousand Stevies in the house.

  Dad had these pills he was supposed to take to keep him from flipping out, but over the past few weeks, he’d stopped taking them.

  “I don’t need pills,” he’d said. “Folks managed fine for most of history without no pills.”

  He’d spent the past month picking fights—with me, with the clerks at the 7-11, even with his buddies at the UPS depot where he worked. He had a big mean building up inside him, and it was only a matter of time until he unloaded it on some unlucky asshole.

  If I didn’t want dad getting in trouble, I’d just have to suck it up and get rid of Biedermann myself.

  Mr. Biedermann hitched a smarmy smile on his face when I opened the door, but I could see his eyes widen as he took in the state of the house behind me. He looked like a big old hound dog smelling game.

  “Your Dad home, Brandon?”

  “Nope.” I shrugged. “Help you with something?”

  “It’s about the yard,” he said. “I know we’ve had this discussion before.”

  “Yup.”

  He sighed. “Louise said she saw a rat last night.”

  “That so?” I said, my heart sinking. I’d thought that poison I’d laid down had gotten rid of the rats.

  “I don’t want to call the City, Brandon, but I’m going to have to if your Dad doesn’t get the yard cleaned up. What your dad does in his house is his own business,” he added. “But vermin in the neighborhood…” He gave a delicate little shudder.

  “I’ll tell Dad when he gets home.”

  “Is there a time I might speak to him myself?” Biedermann asked, his bushy eyebrows rising almost comically.

  Maybe the asshole was braver than I’d given him credit for. Or just real dumb.

  “If Louise and I can help in any way, you let us know. We’re right next door if you ever want to talk, Brandon.”

  Great, now they felt sorry for us too.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Say, did you see on the latest on the news about the ships?” he started, like we were pals now.

  “We don’t watch the news no more,” I told him. The Space Men were a touchy subject in our house. Nothing was surer to get Dad started in on ranting than someone mentioning them ships in the sky. “All them sheep too brainwashed to believe the jokers in the White House will let anything bad happen to ‘em. They should be standing and fighting like Americans. Why don’t they let
our boys nuke ‘em out of the sky? Guess those political types are too chickenshit to protect our land.”

  Biedermann nodded. “Sure. Ahem. Well, if you’re positive there’s nothing we can do to help. We’re not trying to pick a fight, we’re just concerned. I know your father has his share of problems….” He grimaced in phony sympathy. His mouth flopped open like he had more to say, but I shut the door in his face.

  Back in my room, I sat on the bed, my hands screwed up into fists. I wanted to break something, but there was enough broken junk in this house without me adding to it.

  Dad got home just before sunset.

  I ran out of the house to meet him as soon as I heard the splutter of the Dodge’s engine out in the street.

  “You hungry?” I asked him as he threw the truck door open. “I was gonna fry up some hot dogs.”

  “We ate at The Tap,” Dad said. “And I wouldn’t want no tired-ass hot dogs if I hadn’t. Not when we got ourselves fresh venison.”

  He winked, and jerked his head toward the flatbed of the truck, where there was a lumpy shape covered over with a tarpaulin.

  A little runner of dark blood dripped from the trail hitch, adding to the black oil stains on the bare earth.

  “Deer?” I asked, cautiously.

  “My son, the genius,” Dad snorted.

  “Funny sort of fish, a deer,” I said, trying to make a joke out of it.

  “Don’t get smart with me. Bob and his damn fish. Who the hell wants to sit on their can all day, staring at a damn lake?”

  I glanced around. I thought a curtain twitched over at the Biedermann’s, but it was likely just my paranoid mind.

  “Need some help getting it in the shed?” I asked.

  “What’s the rush? Gonna have a beer and rest my feet a minute, if that’s okay by you.” He stared at me; his pale green eyes looked like they was lit up with laser beams from the inside. However successful his “fishing” trip had been, it didn’t seem to have calmed him down any.

  I followed him back into the house, trying to convince myself that no one was even going to see that illegal, out-of-season deer.

  Dad had no sooner gone inside to shuck off his dirty hunting gear, than Tom Biedermann was striding up our path to bang on the door like he wanted to bust right through it. Seems that the lazy summer wind had lifted the tarp up to reveal the whitetail, with its belly gaping open from neck to asshole. The Biedermann girls had caught an eyeful and were now in the process of having a meltdown in the middle of the Biedermann lounge.