Anchors
an excerpt

When I walked out of the house, the heat of the musky summer masking me in one swoop, I found Sam sitting on the porch. He turned his head, swishing his thick unruly curls, as he turned to look at me through his sunglasses. I spotted my reflection in the black reflective lenses, and noted with pride that the look seared on my face wasn’t a very welcoming one.

“Your aunt called me,” he told me, jumping up as I passed him without even so much as acknowledging his unwanted presence. I could hear his clumsy footsteps behind me, and even the dragging of his untied and dirtied shoelaces on the concrete, which only further fueled my annoyance for the current situation. He was messy, uncoordinated, too damn gangly and never serious – not to mention I probably fed his sick dog poison every morning, trying to get rid of the failed cooking experiments in my aunt’s fridge. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t allowed the pride of getting the job done by myself, of having to share the credit with someone else that had me all intense. But it was definitely something.

Or maybe that something was just the redheaded creature from hell.

“See, girls always whine about how guys use them to satisfy their desires and whims, but really, girls are exactly the same.” I was just about to head to his car when he took one large step, his long legs crossing in front of me, blocking my way. He sported his usual accessory: his lazy grin. “Exhibit A: right here, right now. You. Using me. For my car.”

“It wasn’t a choice,” I told him frostily.

“Oh, ouch,” he said, loudly sucking air between his teeth. “The Ice Queen has arrived, ladies and gentlemen. Please take a moment to thoroughly don your parkas.”

“You’re not funny,” I said, crossing my arms.

“No, but I’m useful, especially to you. Especially,” he said lowly, as he plucked something from his back pocket, waving it around in front of my face like a piece of meat, “since I have what you need. Two things, Appleton. A handy-dandy current map, and a working car.”

“Your car,” I sighed, pointing out, “has no AC.”

“Details, details,” he said, waving it off. “Totally and utterly insignificant in every possible way. It starts, it drives, and it gets you from point A to point B.”

I stared at him, in disbelief of the spectacle in front of me. He was wearing a white shirt with a large red stain on the bottom – fresh, too. His jeans were faded and frayed, holed in numerous places, and his sneakers were ratty and torn – the shoelaces were untied, and caked with mud. He had things written on his hand, already smeared and indistinguishable. One of them looked like a smiley face with three eyes. In his other hand I could see the silver flash of his keys, along with the rubber palm tree key chain with the emergency 911 number printed on the side.

“That look on your face,” he observed aloud, after I hadn’t responded in a full minute. He was peering at me. “You’re judging me.”

I moved my eyes back to his face. “I’m evaluating,” I said briskly.

“What, exactly?”

“How many years of life you could possibly have left.”

He made a face, stretching it out, as if impressed. “So, what’s the estimate, Madam Cleo?”

I turned my head away, shaking my head, wondering if some town out there was missing its village idiot. I dug out my business voice. “I don’t know. Look, we’ve got two paintings left to deliver, Sam. Hopefully we can get this done before the peak hours.”

He looked at me, almost as if he was caught off guard by my sudden serious approach, before he shrugged. He turned his face, looking out to where I was sure the sun would soon be smoldering down on us, licking his lips. His red hair almost glowed cooper in the light. I stared at him, struck by something. Then, in a single second, it dawned on me – in sparks, and flashes. Confidence. I didn’t see a single drop of insecurity and worn personal holes in Samson Bell – no marks, no breaks, no scars. As he stood there with his lanky build, his untamed hair springing out towards the sky, he himself was untouched. He was flawed… but he couldn’t have cared less. He was so flawed, in fact, and so impeccable at letting his flaws show through that I wondered whether he actually did it on purpose.

I’d seen wounded people before – the ones with those tragic pasts, the ones that had secrets, or nursed unhealed scabs. They carried it around with them like an invisible anchor, but with Sam, after all of the summers I’d come and gone – no matter which angle I looked, no where I watched him from – there was no anchor. No weight. Just a coolness in his breath, an easiness that rolled from the valley in between his shoulders that traced all the way down to his slender forearms, and that lingering, infuriating smirk always crouching behind his lips, ready to bound through at any given moment.

“I know this place like the back of my hand,” he was saying, once I’d gotten my ears to work again. “Just tell me the address and we’ll be there. You can drop off the painting, exchange your regular niceties like the good girl you are, and we can get this done. Sound good?” His chapped lips stretched across his teeth, but they barely showed through.

I tore my eyes away from his face, a little disturbed by my close observations of the boy who used to hide in bushes for hours on end only to jump out and scare the shit out of me when I went riding on my bike.

“Sounds great,” I said, dryly, as I stepped around him to the passenger side.

He scooted into the driver’s seat and I waited as he reached over and unlocked the door from inside. I got in, noting the uncomfortable lumpy seat, kicking a few bits of trash scattered on the floor. I frowned, looking at what he had littered on his car floor; I thought I recognized some of them from the last time I’d been in here. Burger King paper bags, empty silver gum wrappers, and numerous neon-colored band flyers everywhere. Sam’s classic Volkswagen beetle was a junkmobile. So fucking unsanitary.

“Yeah, you can just”—he reached down, his hand quickly shooting out and grabbing some of the trash, tossing it in the backseat with a flick of his wrist. I shifted, willing my eyes to stay towards the front, fighting the urge to look behind me. Who knew what was waiting for me there? Maybe I’d be greeted by a sleeping bum he’d picked up somewhere, blanketed by a quilt woven with Taco Bell packaging, or maybe a family of dead birds he’d found in the middle of the road.

“Ever heard of the modern miracles of a vacuum?” I muttered, glaring at the grease stain on the window.

“Heard of it,” he said, as he started up the car. The engine didn’t sputter and cough like I expected, but started smoothly and silently. I felt a sting of jealousy. A good car, but filled to the brim with all kinds of crap. Sometimes the world was truly upside-down. “But was never motivated to jump into what the rest of the kids are doing these days. Vacuuming cars? What’s next? Injecting lethal poisons into our veins?”

I turned my head to see his face, and though his face was turned the other way, I could see him from his rearview mirror, grinning. Not the slightest bit amused, I looked away, turning towards my window. Across from us, I spotted the old ladybug mailbox of the Nguyens’; an old Vietnamese couple that had lived there since before the Kennedys ever had their curse. For my birthday, they used to send me jade charms, and once they’d sent me one of Buddha and my mom hid it away from me for fear that it’d persuade me into turning Buddhist and she’d have to deal with all of this religious hoo-ha in the house. Not as to say my mom didn’t have religion. She did. It was called reading and Internet dating.

“You know, Appleton,” he said lightly, when his little joke was greeted with a cold-nosed silence, “you’re the only person that’s never told me that I light up their life.” He was turning the car around. I heard the crunch of small rocks and gravel underneath the tires.

I snorted. “How horrible it must be for you, Sam, that I don’t fall at your feet like everyone in town does.”

“No, well, I mean, I live,” he said, as the houses began to slowly blur past. He pressed on the gas a little more, his keys jingling as we went over a bump he’d forgotten to slow down on, and I jumped up in my seat, swearing. The neon yellow numbers on his rubber palm tree key chain peeked out at me through the flashing silver. “But it’s sort of like a breath of fresh air that you don’t necessarily like at first – because you’re not used to it, you know?”

I rolled my eyes.

“At first I thought it was because you’d been born without a sense of humor. Then I started hearing the jokes you cracked sometimes – a little cruel, I admit, but still. Funny at someone else’s expense is still funny, I guess.” He trailed off, and at first I thought he’d run out of things to say. Must’ve only been wishful thinking. “Redheaded creature from hell,” he chuckled, and I tensed in my seat. “That’s a clever one.”

Damn. Aunt Thelma must’ve told him that one.

We sat in silence, with me keeping my eyes focused on the scenery racing past my window. I heard the sudden click of the radio as he turned it on, catching a glimpse of the warbled static before he switched it to a CD. At first it was soft, then louder, and louder, until I could hear every single noise popping, every drum beating, and every guitar strumming. There was a tambourine in the distance somewhere, bells, and whistles. A man’s earnest voice came on, fluid and almost like broken velvet, melancholy, but sincere and desperate. I closed my eyes, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, and for a moment everything was unfocused. The world outside the window of the faded yellow beetle had swept me in and swallowed my up, and everything was hazy and ambiguous. Just colors, but no shapes. Just blotches but no definite, segregating lines. Reality, at the same exact pace of the climbing needle on the speed meter, was getting stripped away.

For a second, one fleeting second that had gone too fast but was too vivid to entirely forget, I saw a face. It was the face of the man that had been haunting me all this time, ever since I’d found him in a carefully hidden box tucked away in our basement. I remembered holding the picture in my hand – faded, worn, delicate. I held it so lightly that it barely brushed against my palms – the only thing that separated it from the odd force of my beating heart – as if I’d bent my fingers to clutch onto it from the sudden river of emotions I’d felt it would crumble into dust. If a breeze had swept in through the window, it would have probably grown wings and have flown away. Which I’d thought was funny, even at the time. Because there were no roots – no, not in people, and not in their things. Just things that moved, nomadic, like chess pieces on a slick board. If you tipped it over, they slid right off. Their sole purpose was to move, and trap.

They had all sorts of movements – L-shaped, diagonals, and hopping. There were strategies that people spent hours thinking over, sweating over. Sometimes it seemed like it was no longer just chess pieces on a chessboard they were seeing, but themselves, and everything they loved. As if everything was at stake.

Check. Mate.

“Liz? The address?”

My eyelids fluttered open, and I looked down at the slightly crumpled paper I held in my hand. I smoothed it out on my lap. “Three-two-four-one Alabaster Way.”

He was listening closely, before he clicked his tongue, nodding in understanding. “That’s not far from here at all. Five minutes,” he said, enthusiastically hitting his dashboard with his palm, “tops.”

“And abiding by the speed limit?”

He grinned shamelessly. “Fine, fifteen.” He switched the track, and a ballad began to start up with a few glittering plucks. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Appleton? Or did you leave that behind with your specs, too?”

“If I wanted to go on an adventure,” I pointedly told him, “I would go hiking, or kayaking. Not go on some deathride in the junkmobile.”

“Oh, now, you don’t mean that!” he howled, and suddenly I heard a screeching as the car began to violently swerve, spastically turning the wheel from side to side. I was forced backwards into my seat. Then, it was done. He was back to driving calmly on the road like a good citizen, perfectly aligned in the lane. I swore, breathing hard. It was only then that I realized the screeching I’d heard had been me, and that he was laughing to himself.

“What the fuck is your problem?” I hissed, clutching onto my seat. The rough cotton scratched my palms and the seatbelt seemed like it was suddenly cutting into my stomach. My heart beat erratically in my chest. Thump. Thump. Thump. “What the hell was that for?”

“You insulted the beetle,” he calmly informed me, making a right. “Number one rule of the beetle: do not insult the beetle. Have some respect, Appleton. I mean, geez, you’re only hitching a ride. The beetle is fairly picky of its passengers” – he glanced at me – “you’re lucky.”

I snootingly eyed the litter all around us. “Lucky, huh?”

“Increasingly so.”

“You could’ve gotten us killed, asshole.”

“I disagree. I had full control of the wheel the entire time.”

I shook my head. “You’re insane. Fucking insane. You know that?”

And then he only laughed again, looking ahead at the road. He reached out, his fingers turning the dial little by little, turning the music up louder, and louder, until I could hear the bass pulsating through my entire body. I was glaring at him, still waiting for my heart to calm down from his entertaining little stunt, but somehow the music had distracted me, and soon, I couldn’t tell the difference between the drumbeats and my own beats: heartbeats. We were going faster, blurring by cars and houses and little empty shops. I saw a flicker of beige and later on realized that it was a kid running after a ball, trying to get a game in before it got too hot out to do anything but fry some omelets on the sidewalk. And then I leaned forward to try and see the sky. I immediately snapped them shut; the sun’s blinding rays, rising slowly above the trees, had gone right into my eyes.