Black Chuck Read online

  Ré, at last.

  Leaning against the front panel of the Buick, arms crossed over his black T-shirt—the same one he’d had on last night? she wondered. His dark figure seemed to swallow all the brightness from the parking lot. The air around him was still. He didn’t smile when he saw them. And if Evie had hoped for any acknowledgment, any look that said remember, she was disappointed.

  The boys greeted each other with a quick clasp of hands.

  “Yo, you coming to my party next week?” Alex asked.

  Réal looked surprised, but he nodded.

  Alex punched him on the shoulder. “Good,” he said, then started headbanging to a silent beat, his hair flying. “School’s out for-evah!” he sang.

  Sunny arrived, and Alex attacked her like a puppy trying to play with a cat—grabbing, shouting, shaking, grinning. She let him do it, though she looked about as pleased as any cat would.

  Ré turned and got in the car, and they all fell into formation—boys up front, the girls in the back. Alex stretched his long legs out in the extra space of the front seat and twisted on the stereo. Black Sabbath poured out of the shitty speakers, rattling the dash and making Evie’s hair shake.

  “Yeah!” Alex whooped, nodding in time to the heavy bass. He threw a glance at Réal, who didn’t say a word.

  “Ugh!” Sunny shouted over the blast. “Dinosaur music! Turn it off!”

  Alex just turned, flashing bright eyes and a wicked grin, and sang the wrong lyrics over his shoulder at her, “Satan’s Own around the bend…”

  Sunny rolled her eyes and looked out the window. He turned back, ignoring her, and clasped his hands behind his head, grin cutting ear to ear, just like Shaun’s used to do.

  Evie blinked at the back of his gingery-brown hair. King Alex? she thought. When did that happen?

  The Olympia was packed. A wall of noise hit them as soon as they opened the door. Evie didn’t know if it was Ré’s reputation or just good timing, but when he glanced at a booth full of younger kids, they all quickly paid and left, giving them the last good seats in the room. Sunny and Alex took one side, Ré the other. Evie took the seat next to him.

  No one said anything.

  Evie cleared her throat. “So what about this party?” she asked.

  Alex grinned. “Next Friday, after exams. I’m gettin’ a keg. And, yeah, invite whoever. I want it to be epic.”

  Evie didn’t know who else she was supposed to ask. Everyone she might have invited was already sitting right here.

  “Cool,” she said quietly. She glanced at Réal, who was staring down into the menu like he’d never seen it before. “If June comes back, can someone order me fries?” She got up from the table and didn’t wait for anyone to say yes.

  Evie went down the hallway that led past the kitchen. The bathrooms were there, the ladies’ room mercifully empty. She pushed open a stall door and locked it behind her, leaning back against the scratched paint.

  She couldn’t help it. The tears just came, like she’d been hauling ten tons on her back all day and only just noticed it now. It wasn’t just Ré. Fuck him. If he didn’t want to see her, talk to her, look at her in the light of day—fine.

  It was everything else.

  She looked to her shoes, at the almost obvious way her body now pushed against her clothes. She put her hand on her belly, trying to feel something other than flesh, but her mind just filled with horror movies. Aliens. Creatures. Parasites.

  Evie heard the bathroom door swing open behind her. She took a shaky breath and wiped her face on her sleeve, then flushed the toilet needlessly with the toe of her shoe and opened the stall door.

  Sunny stood by the sinks, arms crossed. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, one eye squinted as though Evie were hard to see.

  Evie bent to slap cold water on her face.

  Sunny’s hand was suddenly on her shoulder, pulling her upright with more force than necessary. “I asked you a question,” she said, and panic punched through Evie’s chest.

  “I’m fine,” she said, shrugging Sunny’s hand away. “I’m just tired.” At least that wasn’t a lie. She was tired all the time now, it seemed.

  Sunny stared at her in obvious disbelief. Then she cocked her hip and said what she had probably really wanted to say last night, at the band shell.

  “You know, Ev, while you and Shaun were off in la-la land this year, the real world was kinda happening back here without you.” Her hand flew up in Evie’s face like a frightened bird. “You can’t just walk right in like you’ve been here the whole time and act like you’re one of us now. You don’t have a clue what’s really going on around here, so maybe just back off a little, huh?”

  “What?” Evie almost laughed. “What am I doing?”

  And Sunny did laugh, harsh and cold. “I see you two, you know. Your little glances at each other. I know something is going on with you and Réal. I mean, WTF, Ev. Shaun is dead. Ré was there. And you knew. And now you two are—what? A thing?” She shook her head in disbelief. “Do you even know how fucked up that is?”

  Evie twitched at the words. Sunny had hidden it well, but Evie could see it now beyond a doubt. And Ré had as much as confessed it last night, when she’d asked. Sunny and Réal were involved somehow, and no matter how “fucked up” things might really be, Sunny was plainly jealous.

  She was also fearless—she might actually fight her for this, even though she had no right to in the world.

  But that didn’t seem to matter to her.

  “I—I,” Evie stammered out, “don’t know what you’re talking about. Seriously. I’m just not feeling well.”

  She wanted to say, There is sooo much you don’t know, Sunny. She wanted to say, At least I waited till my boyfriend was dead! But she didn’t. She wasn’t going to blurt it all out in this dingy bathroom, with half the school on the other side of the door. She didn’t want the higher ground. She didn’t want Sunny’s sympathy or her hurt or surprise.

  Let her have her rage instead.

  Evie brushed past her and hurried back to their table, where Alex sat alone in front of three plates. “What the hell?” he bleated when he saw her. “Where did everyone go?”

  Evie slumped down into the seat opposite him and stared at her fries. The urge to toss them all on the floor was almost too strong to ignore.

  A minute later Sunny returned. Neither of the girls said anything, and Alex just looked back and forth between them as if a tennis match were playing out across the table. He tsked his tongue. “Everyone is so damn moody these days.”

  And then Réal slid down next to her, shifting the vinyl and old springs in his direction, his leg touching Evie’s under the table.

  “Where were you?” Sunny snapped.

  Ré gave her a look that sewed her lips shut. “You my parole officer or something?” he muttered. The first words Evie had heard him say since last night.

  He grabbed a fork and started jabbing French fries, elbows on the tabletop. The muscles of his arm stood out with each jab, as if the fries needed fighting.

  Alex quickly picked up his fork and followed suit. Sunny, as usual, was the only one without food in front of her. That X-ray skeleton on her tank top probably ate better meals than Sunny ever did, Evie thought bitterly. Then she stared down at her own plate, feeling defeated before she’d even begun.

  17

  R

  Ré pushed his empty plate away. Under the table, his heel tapped the floor. Restless. Itching to get out of this booth and away from everyone. He turned his wrist on the table, checking his watch. He glanced around the dining room.

  Where the fuck is Mark?

  The room was jammed with kids, but no sign of the one he needed, or of Ivan, or any of their friends. Ré pulled his phone from his pocket, checking his messages for the millionth time. Nothing.

  His foot began to tap again.

  This wasn’t exactly how today was supposed to go, but he hadn’t had the balls to say no to Alex for longer than
he liked to admit. Guilt is a powerful negotiator. And anyway, he was surprised that Alex had even asked him to come. They’d pretty much avoided each other since he’d told him about the night Shaun died.

  Maybe Alex just needed the ride downtown—but even if that’s all the invitation really was, Ré owed him that much at least.

  He wasn’t following the conversation, which seemed mostly to consist of Sunny’s voice, peppered with the occasional Alex. His eyes danced around the room, anxious. He chewed his bottom lip.

  It was too weird, this new configuration. Ré was used to being on the edges of the group, not smack in the middle like this was some kind of messed-up double date. If it were just Sunny here, he could handle that. Even Sunny and Alex. He’d handled that for months. But there was something else now. There was Evie. And he didn’t even know what that was yet, except that it felt an awful lot like sitting two inches from a house on fire.

  The springs in the seat below him squeaked in time with his bouncing leg.

  Then a hand pressed down on his thigh, and the whole world fell off a cliff. For a split second he was scared the hand was Sunny’s, even though he could see hers on the table in front of him.

  He looked down to his lap, then at Evie. Her eyes were red, like she’d been awake all night, or crying. Or both. She looked so bruised, he was suddenly ashamed that he’d tried so hard not to look at her before now.

  “Please stop,” she said quietly.

  He lowered his heel to the floor, flexing like it took all his strength to do it. A crush of words jumbled up in his throat. A thousand apologies for last night. A thousand more for today. He swallowed them all back. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  She lifted her fingers, and it took everything, everything, to keep his own hand from darting under the table to make her stay. To thread their fingers together, to let her in.

  And then Mark’s sister, Holly, walked through the front door, and Ré sprang up, tripping away from the flames.

  “Hey!” he said.

  Holly looked up in surprise. She was a small girl, with black, bobbed hair and dark eyeliner winged out at the corners of her eyes. He’d seen her around school and waiting tables at the Olympia, but she was two grades behind him, and they weren’t friends.

  “Hey,” she said back. “Réal, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, hands slipping into his back pockets. She kept walking toward the back of the restaurant, and he sidestepped along beside her. “I’m looking for your brother, Mark?” he said. “I was supposed to meet him after school, but I got kinda sidetracked, and now he’s not answering my texts.”

  She looked at him again, shrugging. “I haven’t seen him, but he usually comes by after six, if you feel like waiting.” She was tying a short black apron around her waist as she walked, obviously just starting her shift. “Or you could ask my mom,” she said, nodding at the other waitress.

  “June’s your mom?” Ré asked, eyes wide.

  Holly laughed. “Yeah, of course!” she said. “You didn’t know that?”

  Réal looked at the older woman sliding plates from the pass-through window and loading up her arms like a pro. She did not look like a Midewikwe. Or at least, not what Ré had pictured a medicine woman to look like. She just looked like a middle-aged lady working in a diner. He wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad.

  “Do you want me to pass on a message, if I see him?” Holly asked, drawing his attention back to her.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Tell him to text me. I gotta head home for a bit, but if he could wait right here for me, I’ll be back. I really gotta see him tonight.”

  Holly eyed him for a moment, then put her hand on his bare arm and gave it a squeeze. Nobody he didn’t already know real well ever touched him like that. For a small person, she was awfully bold.

  “Okay, Réal,” she said, nodding once. “If I see him, I’ll tell him he’s got to wait.” Her tone was so serious, he almost laughed, but really he was glad.

  “Thanks,” he said. He turned to go back to his table.

  “Réal,” she said. “Be strong, whatever it is.”

  He turned again, but she had already disappeared into the kitchen.

  18

  E

  The walk to Nan’s took exactly ten minutes from Evie’s front yard, and the house looked just the same as it always had: two stories of chipped white paint behind a slanted, faded front porch. The snarled remains of a garden. It had been pretty once, Evie guessed, but had run down, chip by creak, until Nan just couldn’t take care of it anymore.

  Shaun’s Challenger was still parked in the driveway, and she half expected to see him in the driver’s seat, grinning. Hey girl, where you been?

  She put her hand to the glass, peering into the car. When Shaun was alive, it had been as messy as his bedroom was, schoolwork, skateboards, old crumpled-up clothes piled in the cramped back seat. He’d patched the cracked upholstery with duct tape, and it had peeled up in places, sticky, black and filthy.

  Now it was spotless. The upholstery was still ruined, but the garbage was all gone, the carpets vacuumed clean. Did Nan do this? she wondered. And then she saw the For Sale sign stuck in the window. Call Sherrie, it said. His mom. Of course.

  Even though it made perfect sense—there was no way Nan would ever drive this thing—it still felt like a punch in the gut. As rusted out and used up and broken as it was, this ridiculous lime-green car was Shaun’s spirit animal. His pride. How could she think of selling it?

  Evie looked at the house again. They’d all avoided Shaun’s place for weeks. His best friend hadn’t even been brave enough to drive past. And it was easy to avoid—planted at the tail end of a long, bumpy road, past empty fields and factories and train tracks stretching away. A forgotten place, tucked under the rug at the empty edge of town with a bunch of other houses just like it.

  Evie climbed the front steps and pulled open the rusty screen door.

  She was surprised to hear a crowd of voices shouting and laughing inside, canned music playing in the background. She looked back at the green car gleaming in the sun. It was the only one in the drive. Whoever was inside must have walked over, like she had. Maybe the neighbors were here?

  She rang the bell and waited.

  As the door swung open, Evie was hit with the familiar smell of this house—wilted gardenias and cough medicine. Shaun’s nan stood before her, looking smaller than ever, translucent white skin hanging slack from her little round face. Her watery eyes fixed on Evie.

  Evie smiled. “Hello, Nan. Do you remember me?”

  Nan’s eyes worked, and Evie could see her trying to answer the question, but in the end she only smiled.

  Evie said gently, “I was a friend of your grandson’s.” Still no recognition. Evie wondered if Nan could even hear her, deaf as she was. Almost shouting, she said, “I knew Shaun!”

  And then Nan’s whole face lit up. “Oh!” she gasped. “Yes, I remember. Please, come in.” Her bony fingers closed around Evie’s arm, and the tiny woman pulled her through the doorway, into the house.

  It was dim inside, after the bright sun, and Evie’s eyes took a moment to adjust.

  When they did, her heart fell.

  The front room was a disaster. A chair was knocked over, pictures had fallen off the wall, dirt from a potted plant was spread across the carpet. Someone, probably Nan herself, had walked through it, trailing footprints back and forth to the front window. Evie thought of Ré, his two black eyes. Him and Shaun grabbing and clawing through this room like animals. That fight had been weeks ago—had no one cleaned this room since then?

  A stab of guilt twisted through her. They’d spent so many nights here, partying in this front room while Nan slept upstairs, deaf to it all. They had completely taken advantage of this house. And then they’d all just walked away. Including Sherrie—Evie guessed the only reason she’d bothered to clean Shaun’s car was because it was worth something.

  Nan shuffled down a short hallway to th
e kitchen, and Evie stepped along behind her. On the kitchen counter, a radio blared some kind of religious show at ear-splitting volume—the crowd of voices she’d heard from outside. Nan was very much alone.

  Evie looked around the faded kitchen as if for the first time. Stacks of plates and cups and bowls had all been taken from the cupboards and placed on the counter, on top of the microwave, even on chairs. There were half drunk cups of tea everywhere, their surfaces going hairy. Boxes of paper spilled onto the floor.

  It was like Shaun’s disaster of a bedroom had infected the rest of the house, and now the whole thing was sick with mess.

  A scorch mark ringed the burner on the stove, and a soot-black kettle perched there. Evie remembered Shaun telling her how much he worried about Nan, how she wasn’t safe alone. He’d missed so much school to take care of her that he wouldn’t have even graduated this year. It made her sick to think of Nan here without him.

  “Nan,” Evie said over the radio’s blare, “does anyone come to see you? Does Shaun’s mom ever come here?”

  But Nan didn’t answer. She was doddering at the counter, making small noises to herself, and Evie began to wonder if she’d forgotten that Evie was there.

  “Nan,” she tried again, going to the old woman’s side. Nan turned a sweet smile on her, but said nothing. She was busy stacking envelopes and junk mail, weeks-old flyers, making it all orderly amid the mess. “Does your daughter ever come here?” Evie tried again.

  “Oh, do you know Sherrie?” Nan asked, sounding pleased. “She’s all grown up now. She had a baby, you know.” For a second, Evie thought Nan meant another baby, that Shaun had a sibling, but then she realized Nan was just talking about Shaun.

  Nan tutted to herself, shaking her head and clacking the edge of the papers on the counter. “It was hard for her, being so young. She moved away a long time ago, I think.” The look on Nan’s face told Evie that she was trying to put together a puzzle, but for whatever reason, the pieces wouldn’t stick.