Read The Leaving of Things for Free Online Page A

reveal shimmering braces. What a beautiful contradiction. A sign that she was adorably imperfect—on the outer reaches of attainability.
    The braces were gone now, and Shannon had grown her hair out below her shoulders. Lovely and silky and long. Sipping beer from a plastic cup, she leaned against the kitchen counter, talking to me in her brown denim jacket. More a woman now than ever.
    I told Shannon what a great job she’d done in the fall play,
The Glass Menagerie
. I meant it; in fact, I’d gone to the play secretly because I knew she was in it. I asked if I could fix her a drink. She told me no thanks.
    “That’s good,” I said, “’cause I’d have no idea how to fix you one.” I regretted saying that—would it seem
un
cool?—but Shannon smiled and said she’d better be on her way. “Not really my scene,” she said. From her jacket pocket, she took out a knit cap, tucked it over her gorgeous hair and brushed strands of it away from her eyes.
    What impressed me was how Shannon didn’t sound the least bit embarrassed about saying something I wouldn’t dare admit out loud: that this wasn’t her thing at all.
Not her scene.
And she was happy to bail. I admired that.
    “Maybe next time,” I said as her shoes tip-tapped on the stone tiles of the floor toward the doorway.
    She gathered a cream-colored scarf around her throat and said, “Don’t wait too long.” And that was all. She was gone, and I felt invincible.
    By the time we left the party, the buses had stopped running. No choice but to huff it home. It would do us good, we said to each other, a chance to sober up in the late-October air, so we made our way up Monroe Street out toward Odana Road, to the farther reaches of the west side. I had no idea what time it was—surely much later than I’d ever stayed out. I dreaded going home, sensing behind the stupor of booze the fear of seeing my mother still up, waiting for me, stewing with an Indian mother’s shame and rage. But that night a reckless indifference had come over me, maybe the culmination of months or years of a pent-up defiance finally broken through to roam free in the deep suburban night. The recklessness helped to put the fear and dread out of my head and to enjoy its rewards, to be “in the moment,” as they say.
    On our walk, Nate started on the subject of life after high school. He said he’d put in an application to Madison, expected he would get in. But it wasn’t college he was excited about. No, he couldn’t wait until August so he could moveout of his parents’ house and finally get a room of his own on campus. Where we wouldn’t have to sneak around if wanted to smoke up or have a few beers. I thought what a glorious future Nate had in store.
    We huddled in our jackets, walking under the scant streetlights that threw halos of orange on the bare-bone trees. The aftertaste of the booze hovered behind my eyes. Nate grunted and shivered, digging his hands deeper into his jeans pockets, hunching his shoulders.
    “How great would it be to get out of this cold-ass place?” he said. “Florida or California or Arizona.” He chuckled. “I’d probably spend all my time playing golf and laying out in the sun.” He shivered again, we both did, and the wind cut through our jackets. “Screw it,” Nate grunted. “You know, I should say the hell with my parents not paying out-of-state. I should pack the car and head out to L.A. I wouldn’t mind, Vik. I really wouldn’t. Get high school over with, get in a car, and head out to California. You in? We can paint houses and make money all the way to L.A., and the rest falls into place, you know?”
    Falls into place? I wished I had Nate’s faith. But things had never “fallen into place” for me. Since the sixth grade, I’d moved around from school to school, state to state, almost every year. And getting through sophomore, junior, and senior years had felt like the last leg of a pointless, miserable marathon. All I wanted