Fiction “Uhh.” I thought for a long moment. A car drove around the block below, then its engine cut out. “Just for people to l-listen, I guess.” My breathing went funny after I said it, like my throat wanted to take the words back where they belonged. Chase propped himself up on an elbow. “I listen to you, Dani.” “Yeah but-” but no one else did, but good girls were meant to be seen and not heard, “–but you don’t know all the things I don’t say.” “Whaddya mean?” His eyelashes, black and stupidly curly, beat together then opened again. “Sometimes there’s things I think. But the words don’t come out.” Chase thought for a moment, then slid me a piece of paper and a pen. “It’s gonna happen,” was all he said. * “What do you dream about?” I asked. We’d been busy, me scrawling out fragments, Chase pounding away at the typewriter. Just get it all down like you know someone’s hanging on your next word, he’d said. His jaw hung open and he folded his arms in on himself. He looked dumb, but I didn’t say so. I wanted him to answer. “Guess I wanna build stuff.” “Like an architect? You’re not going all grown-up on me, are ya?” “Nah, nah. Or, maybe. But I mean worlds, or like, you know when you walk into a room and it’s like another planet, and it’s not the walls or the furniture, it’s just a feeling?” “Yeah, I know.” The paper mill was like that. “I wanna build worlds like that. And have people live in ‘em with me.” He was blushing, and I knew how he hated blushing, so I didn’t tell him I was already living in one of his worlds, that world where someone was listening. * We started writing together. He’d give me the setting of the first scene, and I’d spin it out into a story. We wrote and wrote. He got blisters on his fingers. I got rugburn from lying on my elbows next to my pile of papers. When we started making our pieces into paper aeroplanes, I asked, “what do we do now?” “Easy. We find someone to read them.” “Aw, Chase.” “I’m not pulling your leg. I’ve got a plan. Come on, Dani.” I sat up. I was looking at hope, eye to desperate eye, like a bird two inches from your face that you’re praying won’t fly away. “I don’t know.” “Momma says deep down you always know. I think it’s the only true thing she remembers.” Chase was jutting his jaw out, on the offense now. “Okay,” I said softly. I was scared, but maybe it would be okay.
* We copied everything into a magazine using the scanner in the garage. Nobody paid us any mind. We used fake names. Casio and Dharma. Casio, like the watch, like the calculator, like all the machines Chase wanted to take apart to find what made their metal hearts tick. Like Cassiopeia, I thought, but didn’t say so. Dharma, like the book about bums my older brother was always talking about. Like the ashtrays in the living room and the idea that someday even cigarette butts could be reborn. It took us a week, but we put the magazine everywhere in town. We put it in mailboxes, running off afterwards, slippery hands joined. We slipped it into empty spaces on the library bookshelves. We tore some pieces out, folded them into paper aeroplanes and threw them off the highest sculpture in the park. We left some copies where we knew only someone curious would find them: in rock crannies where the lizards warmed themselves up, in the old treehouse, and in the antique store’s mystery book section. I never laughed so much as I did that week with Chase. * For the summer, we had it all. It took a while, but people read the magazine. In the interim, we raided the garage for chalk and paints and drew on the attic walls. Chase traced my silhouette all over the place, getting me to stand in different poses and fumbling the chalk round my outline. “So I’ll always remember you here,” he said. I smacked his shoulder. People got curious about the way they’d found the magazine, so they talked to everyone else about it. It took a while, but they worked out it was us from Casio and Dharma’s initials, and the way we went everywhere together. The local paper sent their youngest wanna-be reporter. She had seventeen years to my nine and pink on her cheeks that didn’t belong there. She even took our photo. We were crowded together, hugging, elbows at odd angles in striped shirts. In the paper it was grainy, printed in black-and-white ink. We clipped it out and hung it on the wall and blew kisses to it. * Chase and I saw less of one another in high school. In freshman year I tried to cling onto him, too tight maybe. We’d meet and he’d only stay fifteen minutes before running off with the soccer team. We’d shoot another agonized glances when we didn’t know what to say, caught in crowds by the bleachers, wishing we could fall flat into our shadows under the afternoon sun. I got bullied, but it was all words. If it had been sticks and stones, if I’d had scratches, maybe I could’ve turned up on his door and asked for bandaids. But I didn’t know how to ask for anything deeper.
NEW READER MAGAZINE
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