Chapter 2 - Sneakout

Blake decided to spend the night. Lisa decided that, too, but unfortunately for her her parents care a little bit more about what she does. (Speculate about that.) Nobody said otherwise, and my mother and grandmother were alerted to it, and so when Lisa went home at eleven - she really did try - I joined Blake and Kyle in the living room. Neither of them were sleeping. I didn't expect them to be. Instead, they were talking about people in school and how much they suck.

You know that saying 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything'? We don't follow that rule. Not all the time. We follow it when the people we can't say nice things about are present, but when they're not we judge them seven ways to Sunday. And I don't mean we gripe on what they wore or how stupid they are, we gripe about things that are in their control, not how they express themselves or how they're not capable of doing so. We don't mock people because they came to school with a bad hairdo like most of the student body of every school out there. We mock people because people are mean.

But I sat down beside Kyle, looked up at him, and said, "Yeah, she's a b***h. I'm bored." I happened to know the girl they were talking about; she was a Junior, but she'd been in eighth grade when I was in sixth and she'd given me hell. A lot of people had, and like he always did, Kyle had forced her and everyone else to stop, but I still remember vividly how I was called my first cuss word by that girl. I know, considering the language I use now, it's doesn't really mean anything. But she opened a floodgate and back then those words were naughty. And I don't mean Santa-gives-you-coal naughty, I mean Santa-contacts-an-asylum-and-demands-you-be-locked-up naughty.

But that was in the past and I effectively curtailed their analysis of just how bitchy she was and made them look at me. "So what do you want to do?" Blake asked.

"I don't know, I'm hungry," I said, adding on to my list of wants. I don't know how they tolerated me.

"We could go out to McDonalds," Kyle suggested. "Would that satiate your wanderlust?"

"The hunger, not the wanderlust."

Kyle groaned. "Why do I love you?"

"I honestly have no clue," I answered. "Blake, any better ideas?"

"Hm," he pondered gently for a moment, looking at me intensely, which is something he does when considering the aspects of a person and what might please/displease them, and then he snapped his fingers. "Got it. We'll go out to McDonalds, and then go to a park and pretend we're kick-a*s superheroes, and then we'll come back and go up to the roof to watch the stars."

Just making sure it was pretty clear that Blake's the one who comes up with ideas in our little unit. As strange as his ideas may seem, they always end up being enjoyable. I have no clue has he does it. It's a gift, I suppose.

"We'll have to sneak out at this hour, not just go," Kyle muttered, jerking his head toward my mother's room. "Or she'll go bonkers."

I shrugged. "So we say we're going to sleep, wish her gooodnight, make some noises for a couple minutes, wait a couple more, and then make sure we close the door with the handle turned all the way so there's no click when it closes behind us when we leave."

Blake comes up with the ideas. I figure out how to execute them. And Kyle carries them out.

And so Blake and I stood out of sight against the walls by the doorway while Kyle wished my mom goodnight. "We're going to sleep, mom," he told her.

"Already?" she asked. "It's only quarter past eleven and Blake's here."

Kyle's the one to carry these about because he is an insanely good actor/liar. "I told Elea to go to bed and she said she only would if I would."

"Why did you tell her to go to bed? You know she stays up reading until I shut her light off at midnight anyways."

"Her teachers don't need to get angry with her for being tired on the third day," explained Kyle, and I nodded seriously, as if taking it as a legitimate excuse. Blake was listening  with a look of intense concentration. He wears that look a lot. It's kind of his thing. Either that or tight-fitting vests over plain t-shirts and jeans. "She's sleeping in the living room with Blake and I."

My mother sighed from inside. "Oh, alright. I suppose that means I can turn in, too."

"Goodnight, Mom."

"G'night, Kyle. Tell the same to El."

"I will."

He shut the door behind him and we followed him out of the house.

All you need to know about our outing was that it was truly awesome. We lived in Ohio, and to make it more specific, we lived in Troy, and we went to Troy City Schools, home of the Trojans. We took pride in being Trojans at first, simply because it was cool to have your school mascot also be a kind of box of condoms in a drug store, but then we realized that it sucked to continually go around and have all your perverted jokes not appreciated, so we called ourselves the socks. Like socks for dicks. Ha. Ha ha. Right. Moving on! Troy is a bustling small city, and in it are several restaurants and shops and stores and a decent mall. We went, as planned, to McDonalds.

"I'll pay," Blake said immediately, reaching into his pcket for his wallet. His wallet is always in his pocket. I don't know why I don't just steal it. It's not like it's ever going to be anywhere else. Maybe because it's, like, a part of him. I don't know. He never has that much in it anyways. It's just there. Like a toddler's blanket or favorite stuffed animal.

And so Blake paid while we all got McFlurries and three ten-piece McNuggets and three small fries so we could dip the fries in our ice cream and then eat the nuggets afterwards because f**k you, that's why, it's delicious. And then we went to a park, like he said we would. I don't remember which one - "Fantastic writing skills, El, so adorable," I chastise myself - but we went to one, and we literally played on the swings and monkey bars and slides and pretended we were the Avengers. I was a pretty cool and not-ginger Black Widow, Kyle decided he was Bruce Banner/Hulk (the dude did not have the build for that but it is a game of the imagination), and Blake was Tony Stark/Iron Man/Robert Downey Jr. There's really no differences between the three.

We were five years old again, the lot of us, except for the fact that we made a lot of dirty jokes. We kicked and punched the air like bad guys, fell over from wounds, talked to each other on fake walkie-talkies, the works.The plotline is a bit obscured the way I remember it, but I'm fairly certain that a pole on the other side of the playground was Loki, and he had the Tesseract (and an army of fangirls) and we had to get it from him. We battled horrible undead monsters and slew millions of empty-minded alien freaks he had under his control and battled valiantly until we reached said pole, which was when Kyle started speaking for him. I remember him saying for Loki, "You will kneel!" to which Blake responded, "You heard him, he wants a blowjob," which caused me to break character and start laughing when Kyle added for the horned-helmetted demi-god, "I DO WHAT I WANT!"

And then we went home. We didn't go inside and we stayed out of sight of the windows, because just maybe she'd gotten up to use the bathroom or something and would see us (even though by then it was well past three A.M. and she usually conks out at around one-thirty), and we went to the weather vane and started climbing it. Kyle went up first, because he's the lightest (sigh), and then I followed suit because I was the shortest (by a small margin), and then Blake followed. When Kyle grasped my hand and helped me up, he patted me back so I wouldn't fall off the slanted tiles, and I moved awkwardly along it until I was near the top - which wasn't that far, the roof had a low peak from where it began - and then I laid down with my hands behind my head and my legs kicked out and I looked at the stars.

It was because I was thusly employed that I missed what occurred between the two of them. Kyle took his hand and helped him up like he had me, but when Blake got to the top, they both just froze for a moment and looked at each other. If the night hadn't have been so dark I'm sure they'd have seen each other blushing. But as it is, they didn't, and they just crouched there holding hands until Blake let go and took a deep breath and headed over toward me.

Blake laid down next to me but a little higher up so he could hold my hand without bending his arm. Kyle did the same thing on my other side, and soon we were all staring up at the stars. It was comfortable and cozy and warm and happy and the stars looked like gold pins on dark velvet.

Blake raised his free hand and pointed a little to the left in the sky. "That's Cepheus," he said, his tone curious. "What's he doing in the sky at this time in the morning in August?"

"What?" Kyle asked, voicing the word both of us were thinking.

"Cepheus, the constellation, right there," he said, jabbing his finger slightly to emphasize where he was pointing. "It's best seen in October at around nine at night. But I can see it now, if I look hard enough."

"What other constellations do you see?" Kyle asked, oddly gentle.

"Loads of them," Blake replied. "Right there's Aquila." He shifted his finger and we shifted our gazes in reaction. "It transaltes as 'The Eagle'. Always found that one interesting. Oh, and there's Capricornus," he said, shifting his fingers yet again, "which means 'The Sea Goat'. It's made of six named stars."

"Can you name them?" Kyle quiried, sounding as impressed as I felt.

"Prima Geidi, Secunda Giedi, Dabih, Nashira, Deneb Algedi, and Alshat," he said, the response instantaneous, as if he didn't even have to think about it. "This constellation's one of the 13 on the Zodiac, not that it matters."

"How do you know this?" Kyle breathed. The awe in his voice was undisguised and I remember it hitting me for the first time that Kyle had never had a girlfriend.

Speculate. Do it. Right. Now.

"My mom," Blake told him, and it was very clearly told to Kyle, because for all intents and purposes I was no longer there, and I had no problem with that because wherever I was it was strangely comfortable. "When I was a little kid, and my hamster died, my mom said we should bury him someplace special in the backyard, like maybe under a special star or constellation. So we kind of embalmed the hamster and froze him for the time being in the ice cooler we had in the garage and made sure he was salted beforehand, and went to the library and picked out a book of constellations. The biggest one they had. When we got home I tried to open it and dropped it on her foot." He smirked for a moment. "She didn't find that pleasant. That first night, we went to the roof and looked out at the stars and started learning about the different ones. The next day we buried my hamster, but I couldn't sleep, and so we went up to the roof again and read and talked and laughed. We did that every night until we finished the book, and then we got another book. We did it for years, looking up at the sky, learning their stories, components, everything about them, like they were actually people and we were trying to be their friends. Every night we'd talk about them and learn and just stare at them until I started to drift off and she'd piggyback me to bed. I was always asleep before my head hit the pillow." His voice had gotten quiet, and sad, and though I had no clue why, it made me a little reminiscent to hear him talk about this, as if I'd been there, too. "I kind of miss doing that."

Blake had never actually talked about what he used to do with his mom. Every now and then he'll look at something out of place and mutter something about her and it under his breath and he'll fix it or replace it or relocate it, but he never talked about her. And from what he said now, I could guess why, because as basically his family, we knew his mother had died falling off of the roof of their two-story house back when they had one.

I was sorely tempted to both move away and let them talk about it alone, or just sit together in comforting silence, and squeeze his hand, but I did neither. Nobody did anything after that. We all just laid there and stared up at the sky. Even though we didn't know their stories like Blake did, and we didn't know their components, it did still feel a little like we wre trying to be their friends. It was like magic. The air was peaceful and gentle and kind and the sky was friendly and bright with those glittering golden pins stuck in dark velvet.

That moment, that night, that story, are all supremely important. They didn't seem so to me. There are some important things that don't feel important because they drift away with the wind, and then there are some important things that don't feel important because they make the air change and when it changes their words change a little too and depending on who you're with, the whole world can seem to change a tiny bit. I think it was like that for Kyle on that night, but he's never told me exactly when. He says it couldn't possibly be pin-pointed. For me, however, the words didn't do anything to the air; they didn't even hang in it, they just sort of disappeared into the stars. It didn't seem important to me.

I fell asleep on the roof and somehow they managed to get me down and to the living room without waking me or anyone else in the house because I woke up on the floor with a comforter under me and a blanket over me and a soft pillow under my head begging me to go back to sleep.

I didn't take much stock of it at the time, but Kyle and Blake had both slept on the couch; it's obvious when I think back in hindsight. There were pillows at both ends and two blankets. But it didn't register until later that that had happened. When I woke up, it was to Kyle softly shaking my shoulder, and calling my name. "Wake up, El," he said softly, his voice barely above a whisper. "It's time to get ready for school."

As I blinked and yawned and slowly felt my brain unfog, I heard banging and sizzling in the kitchen, along with a low humming to an unfamiliar tune. I remember not being able to understand why Kyle's cheeks were flushed and his eyes were so bright and he looked worried about something so early in the morning, but I didn't say anything about it. Instead I let him help me to my feet and I stretched, and then I stumbled my way into the kitchen/dining room with him chuckling behind me at my early-morning discombobulation.

Blake and my mother were whisking about the kitchen, each doing something individually. It's a known fact that Blake is better than everyone else with everything to do in a kitchen so all my mom was doing was microwaving some bacon while Blake made flapjacks. "Morning, sweetheart," my mom said, smoothing my hair briefly as I passed her to open the refrigerator and get a glass of orange juice.

"Morning to everyone," I stifled another yawn as I greeted the rest of the houshold when I poured the orange beverage into my glass. "That smells good."

"Thank you," Blake said, his voice a little too cheery, and I refrained from raising my eyebrows because even then I knew he was only acting that way because of the weight of what he'd said the previous night. Kyle glanced at me, and the trouble in his face became a little more pronounced. To me, that is. Even whenever he masked his emotions I could always see a little bit through them. It made for a healthy relationship behind all the squabbling and poking fun. But then he covered it again and I was confused once more, because when he looked at Blake, it seemed easier for him to wear a smile, but when he looked at my mother, it seemed difficult.

Speculate.

(I should really come up with a different word when I need you to speculate; you're going to be very bored with me if I don't. Oh, well, moving on!)

I made it through the morning slowly, groggy, but by the time Lisa ran up to me at school I was awake. School really wasn't important at all that day so I'll spare you the hellish description. Not that it was hellish for any particular reason other than that it was, after all, a school day. By the time the bus dropped me off at home that afternoon, I collapsed on the nest I'd woken up in, and I fell asleep again. So sue me, I'm not the kind of girl who can just adjust to staying up until four and waking up two hours later. Doesn't matter. Neither of our friends came home with us on the bus, which they do kind of often, but when I woke up I was on the couch, and Kyle was sitting in the chair with a huge book on his lap.

I remember that I looked at it for a moment before giving up and asking what it was. "It's a book of constellations," he answered me nonchalantly. Damn, I never realized how totally oblivious I was. There were so many hints. How the hell did I miss them? Yeah, okay, go ahead, you can speculate about that, too, because at that point I didn't care at all and lugged the warm blanket and pillow to my room and started on my homework while I was still bundled up and kind of happy and I didn't focus on anything I should have been focusing on.

I really hope you're still trying to get answers without enough information. I understand that it's going to be irritating and I'm sorry, but it's necessary, because if you don't or if you just stick to one assumption and don't consider other options, this story is as black-and-white as an old newspaper - with the same kind of headlines: depressing, tragic, and then boringly decent.