The Kid
Fiction writing for “ENGLISH 223: Creative Writing” in the fall of 2012
The kid knocked on Mark’s door at 9 p.m., which was pretty late considering Mark was already in bed in his boxers and watching SportsCenter. Except for the occasional night at the bar or a friend’s weekend wedding, this was Mark’s routine. He went to work as a bank manager, he came home to his small, one bedroom house on a quiet street, he made dinner, and he got in bed to watch television.
“Can I help you?”
“I need a ride.”
“Okay? To?”
“The high school.”
Mark opened the porch screen to get a better look at the kid. Short, sandy hair all ratted, maybe eleven. He looked familiar, probably one of the kids skateboarding in the street all the time.
“Don’t you have parents that can take you?”
“Oh, they don’t know I’m going,” the kid said, not missing a beat. He was holding a red Jansport backpack and a sweatshirt that read Wisconsin Football, which was unusual for Missouri. “I mean… it’s a surprise. I just need a ride.”
“I don’t know,” Mark said, rubbing his hands against his face to circulate the blood again. What time was it? He thought back on his terrible day in the office and how badly he wanted something, anything, interesting to happen to his life. He had never been known as a teenager or young adult to make the best decisions, but as he had grown older, his pull toward risky adventures was assuredly declining.
“Please?”
“Alright. Fine… Only because I like Wisconsin football.”
Minutes later, in the garage, the kid sat in the front seat of Mark’s new, black Honda Accord grabbing for the seatbelt. Is he tall enough to sit in the front seat? Mark opened the garage door wearing sweatpants and a white t-shirt, eyeing the kid inside his car. He was checking it out, pressing down on the plastic pieces covering the secret cup holders and opening the glove compartment.
“You ready?” Mark asked, getting into the driver’s seat.
“Yep.”
“Where we going?”
“I think west on 52nd street.”
Kid’s smart. It took Mark a second to remember which direction is west. Branton, Missouri didn’t exactly have landmarks to remind everyone which direction was where. There was no obvious lake or ocean on one side of town. There wasn’t even a mountain or a hill for God’s sake. It was Branton. It was in that upper northwest corner of Missouri where Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas seemed to have collided a long time ago, and no one cared much about the borders.
“Turn right here,” the kid said.
Mark didn’t really mind Branton. It was large enough to have a Blockbuster, a Walmart, and three bars, one of which, Maple’s, was in a four star hotel and was actually pretty nice. There were a couple of regional headquarters for plastics companies in Branton, and Mark had figured out when they sent their corporate blondes in for meetings and weekend stays in the hotel. The women would grab drinks at Maple’s after dinner at the semi-decent sushi place on Washington. Mark could always point them out because they dressed differently than the Missouri women. Their hair was always longer and their heels a little taller. It made their posture straighter and emphasized how slim they were and how curvy their breasts appeared under their suit jackets.
“I’m kind of hungry,” the kid said, “Do you mind?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess. What do you want?”
“McDonald’s is up here,” and he pointed to the only lighted building on the road.
Inside, Mark offered to pay for the kid’s chicken nuggets, but he refused.
“I can pay for it,” he said proudly.
They sat across from each other in a plastic booth with their nuggets. It started drizzling for a minute, and Mark realized they were the only two in McDonald’s at 9:30 on a Wednesday night.
“What’s your name again?”
“Ryan. You?”
“Mark.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah, you too.”
“Don’t you want to know why I asked you for a ride? Like don’t you want to know why I’m leaving?”
Mark suddenly realized he should’ve asked that question on the front porch before the kid got in the car. Was transporting a minor punishable by law?
“Oh yeah. Why’d you need a ride?”
“My mom. She’s driving me nuts.”
“Sounds about right. What’d she do?”
“Well, a lot of things. But I guess, most importantly, she won’t let me date Mandy.”
“Who’s Mandy?”
“Only the most beautiful girl in the city of Branton. She’s my girlfriend, but my mom told me I was too young to have her over to watch movies and stuff. So I tried to sneak her in a window last weekend, but her dad found out she was missing from her house and called my mom. Mom was pretty pissed. She told me Mandy can’t come over anymore.”
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.” So close. “So, anyway, I snuck out to meet her at her place last night, but when I was climbing the tree next to her window, I fell. It was slippery with the moss and stuff.”
Ryan took off the Wisconsin sweatshirt and proudly revealed the scab running across his left elbow before grabbing for his last nugget.
“See?”
“Uh huh.”
“Her dad heard me fall, called my mom. Whatever. So I got in a lot of trouble then and she grounded me. But I told Mandy at school today we’d find a way around all this. We’re meeting at the high school at midnight.”
“But it’s only 9:45.”
“I know. I wanted to get there early just in case. Plus, I didn’t know how many people I’d have to ask before someone would take me. My mom thinks I am at my best friend Brian’s because he’s upset about his parent’s divorce. They’re not getting divorced.”
Back in the car, Mark became oddly self-conscious of the radio playing “Lights” by Journey. The kid probably didn’t know who Journey even was. Did he know any 80s music?
“You can change the radio if you want.”
“No. It’s cool. I like this.”
They drove in silence past strip malls full of Chinese take-out places and fitness centers, and they drove past banks and parks, all the way to the high school parking lot and pulled into a space by the tennis courts, far from the main buildings. It was eery in the dark, and Mark realized he’d only been here once, when a woman he was seeing invited him to watch her oldest son play basketball. He had felt out of place among the parents cheering in the stands, keeping track of their younger children and singing the school fight song by memory. They all knew each other. The dads talked strategy and asked why Tommy had been switched to guard. The moms bonded over the high school gossip of Christmas dance dates and spring break plans.
“How old are you?” the kid asked suddenly.
“Um. Thirty-eight.”
“My mom’s thirty-seven. She’s single, you know.”
Mark contemplated for a second the thought of having the kid as his own son. They would watch Wisconsin football games together and sneak off after Wednesday dinners to McDonald’s for chicken nuggets.
“How do you know I’m single?” Mark asked.
“Well you haven’t mentioned any kids or a wife or a girlfriend yet.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Why are you still alone?”
“My marriage didn’t end up working out.”
“Why?”
“We got married really young. It turned out I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. I didn’t know myself really either.”
Mark remembered Jessica screaming at him through the locked bathroom door. She was crying, too, and pounding her fists against the wood. He hadn’t wanted her to take a job in China for her company, her dream job he realized later. He hadn’t wanted to move across the world to a place where he knew no one and didn’t speak the language. It was one of many fights, but that was the biggest. That one caused her to move out, but not to China.
“Was she pretty?”
“Yeah. She was beautiful actually,” Mark said. He began to reach for his wallet in his back pocket. Hidden behind his driver’s license he still had a photo. “Here she is.”
“She has brown hair just like Mandy, but Mandy’s is longer. She looks really nice though.”
“She was nice. She actually came to Branton one time, ten years ago.”
“Why?”
“She said she missed me, but I think she just wanted to feel loved again. It was almost two years after the divorce. We were still young. We acted like kids, running around this town. I was new here, and I didn’t know anyone, so I felt free to explore everything with her that week.”
For the first time, Mark really looked at the kid, his seatbelt was still on and his hair even more matted from taking his sweatshirt off and putting it back on. He hadn’t stopped looking at Mark during the entire conversation.
“What’d you guys do?” he asked.
“We actually went off-roading.”
“You took a girl off-roading?”
“Yeah! I used to have an old jeep. I actually just sold it to buy this thing.”
“Why would you sell a jeep? Those are so cool!”
Mark stared at the dashboard of his new Honda. Because he was an adult. Because he had to grow up. Because he couldn’t be thirty-eight and still driving a beat-up old jeep to work. Though, suddenly, these answers didn’t seem sufficient.
“Actually, you know what?” Mark said, starting the car. “It’s only ten. You said Mandy isn’t coming until midnight right? I could show you where we went off-roading?”
Mark turned the car perpendicular to the two-lane road so the headlights shone down the clearing under the power lines. The dry mud path between the fields seemed to endlessly disappear into the black. Mark turned the car off and opened his door, signaling the kid to do the same. They were miles and miles from the high school and the heart of Branton.
They jumped across the small ravine that separated the road from the field and started down the path. Thick tire tracks lay on either side of the power line poles. So people know about this place now.
“We sat in the jeep with the top down after driving miles and miles into this clearing. There were a ton of stars in the sky, just like tonight.”
“You just sat there?”
“Well we talked.”
The kid took some time to think about his answer, while Mark remembered the things they did that night when they weren’t talking. How they ran into the field like teenagers and made love one last time, even though they knew they weren’t saving anything.
“You think my parents did stuff like that?”
It occurred to Mark that he’d been answering a lot of questions and asking very few. And yet, he liked the kid. There was something freeing about opening up to a twelve year old who withheld judgment. He wanted to get to know him.
“I don’t know. You’ve told me a little bit about your mom. What’s your dad like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never met him really. He died when I was little, in a car accident. He used to drive trucks.”
Mark turned away from the stars to look at the kid. He could feel his heart beating.
“I’m so sorry, Ryan. That must be really hard on you and your mom.”
Silence.
“But you know? I bet they did a lot of this kind of stuff when they were dating and married. Young people in love do stuff like drive through fields and look at the stars.”
“Yeah. I bet they did do this kind of stuff. What time is it? I don’t want to miss Mandy.”
On the way back to the high school, Ryan asked Mark about his job as a bank manager and Mark asked Ryan about what he wanted to do one day.
“I’m going to go to the University of Wisconsin, like my dad almost did, and I’m probably going to be a lawyer or something because my mom says I can make more money than she does that way,” he’d said.
Mark advised him to pursue a career he is really passionate about, so his job doesn’t seem like work, which he later recalled as sounding cheesy but entirely true.
And just like Ryan had said, Mandy pulled up at midnight in her friend’s older sister’s car.
“She’s even prettier than you described her,” Mark said, as he watched Ryan leave the car. “I’ll be here when you need me.”
Ryan smiled and ran to the passenger door to greet Mandy. She was a little taller than he was, with the same hair as Jessica’s, just a little longer. They hugged and he looked in Mark’s direction before kissing her on the cheek. Mark noticed it was the first time he’d really seen the kid smile. Ryan sprinted back to the car.
“I want to surprise Mandy and maybe just talk to her,” he said through the window. “Can we take her to the path between the fields?”
At 12:30 in the morning, Mark watched Ryan and Mandy disappear down the clearing under the power lines and the stars. He could tell Ryan was nervous to grab her hand by the way he kept fidgeting and awkwardly putting his arm around her shoulder, probably asking if she was cold.
Mark admired Ryan’s courage at twelve to pursue a pretty girl like Mandy. He didn’t put enough effort to make Jessica feel special, and he knew he didn’t put nearly enough effort toward most aspects of his life now. In the stillness of the Honda Accord, Mark imagined what Ryan’s mom was like. Is she dating? Would she marry a thirty-eight year old bank manager? Would she have more kids?
He could picture a petite woman with sandy hair, just like Ryan’s. She was chatting with other moms in the bleachers of a high school basketball game and reaching for his thigh to give it a squeeze. He turned from the dad next to him and smiled at her before returning to his conversation about Ryan’s free throw averages and the team’s chance at winning the conference.
By now, Ryan and Mandy were out of sight, consumed by the fields and the darkness. Mark hoped he had kissed her. He would wait all night in the car if it meant Ryan would get to kiss that girl.
Mark closed his eyes and let himself sink into his memories of Jessica and dreams of a happier future. Ryan seemed to be on the edge of one million possibilities in his life, but maybe Mark wasn’t so far behind.