The Narrows, page 7
The plan was set. Oliver had not anticipated seeing Jez at all on this visit, let alone having dinner with him and his mom and attending a New Year’s party. Although he hadn’t foreseen going to a friend’s funeral, either, so this week was chock-full of big surprises.
Thirty minutes had elapsed since the start of the reception, and the Coopers were only now filing into the parlor, appearing much more composed than before. Sarah Cooper’s red, swollen eyes sent a pang through Oliver’s chest. Belle continued forward to the buffet while her parents stopped in the doorway and addressed the room.
“Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming,” Greg Cooper said, his voice booming but fragile, grasping his wife’s hand in his. “I hope you’ve enjoyed the food.”
~
When he got angry, or nervous, or regretful, or—the list went on—Oliver would imagine conversations in his head with people. He’d go through what he wanted to say to them but probably never would, or how he wished he’d handled something in retrospect. Over the past two years, he held a significant number of these conversations with Noah. He’d lay in bed at night, tossing and turning, thinking about what he wanted to say to his friend. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like a need than a want. But he never said those things, and now he was never going to say those things. They would remain boiling frustrations in his head, bubbling over, threatening to spill out.
~
Sophia Won never had friends over. As long as Oliver had known her, he’d only ever been inside her house two times. Her primary reason being that she hated the way her house smelled due to her mother’s cooking. After decades of traditional Korean meals, the smells had intermingled and soaked into the walls, and she found it embarrassing. Oliver had never really noticed, but he respected her wishes to not hang out there.
That night, hours after the funeral reception ended, Oliver met Sophia at Pine Ridge Park again. The park was officially closed after “sundown,” according to the sign adorning the front gate, but it was a short fence and easy to hop. They had invited Davontae too, but he had family obligations.
So the two sat atop the playground’s geo-dome. Oliver always wondered if there was a proper name for the structure, but it wasn’t something he had ever thought to search for. He made a mental note to do so later, although he’d probably forget.
They both drank different flavored energy drinks, despite Sophia knowing full well it would keep her awake into the late hours.
The axes of the metal bars were connected by circular, brightly-colored plates of metal. At the dome’s apex, where Sophia sat with her legs dangling down into its center and swinging like fleshy pendulums, was the sole green plate. The rest were red, blue, or yellow.
Oliver ran a fingernail along the outer rim of a blue plate. He needed to trim his nails. He’d neglected to bring nail clippers with him, not expecting to be in town for so long.
He told Sophia about the service, about Noah’s gigantic, goofy portrait and everybody who was there and how his family had broken down at the head of the church. She listened in silence, drinking her drink, nodding along to his story. When he finished, she asked, “Did the priest say anything good?”
“I don’t know. I kinda tuned in and out. It was hard to focus.”
She nodded again, gulping the last of her drink. She’d downed it all throughout the course of his story. She crumpled the skinny can in her hand and balanced it on one of the slightly tilted yellow plates.
“It was weird.” He didn’t make eye contact with her while he said it. Didn’t look in her direction at all. He was never comfortable speaking like this with anybody. Always had to look somewhere else. “Not having you there was really, really weird.”
Sophia didn’t reply. She refused to look at him as well. She watched her empty can, teetering as a soft breeze blew. Finally, she said, “I never felt like I was as close with him as you and Davontae were. Him being a shithead the past couple years kinda overshadowed any closeness I had with him.”
“You two were plenty close,” Oliver said. “You’ve known him longer than Davontae has. You have several years on him.”
She shrugged.
Oliver didn’t know what else to say about it, but he felt compelled. “We’re his oldest friends. We should’ve both been there.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Me neither, but I went.”
She shrugged, flicking the can. It flew, slamming against a metal bar before careening to the dirt below.
That was probably all he would draw out of her on the subject. But that was fine. He hadn’t invited her out here to the park to have some sort of heart-to-heart. Their friend was gone. Ever since the beginning, it had been the three of them. It only felt appropriate to see her today, on the day he had to say goodbye to Noah. The world would have been unbalanced if he hadn’t.
“I’ll pick that up,” she said before he could chastise her for littering. She lifted herself off the green plate and slid through the narrow opening between bars. The dome had really been built for much smaller people than the two of them.
She came into Oliver’s line of sight as she bent down to retrieve the aluminum can.
In his mind, he told her, I’m still angry with him too. Even though he’s dead, and I know I shouldn’t disrespect the dead, I’m still so angry with him.
“Jez is having a New Year’s party,” he said aloud.
Sophia, observing the can, said, “Oh, yeah?” She then placed it back down on the ground, lined up her foot, and swung her leg. The can rocketed through one of the openings, flying off into the dark, landing with a soft rustle in the grass.
“Yeah, we saw him at the reception. He invited all of us. He wants us to come over early, to eat dinner with him and his mom.”
It was a tight fit, but Sophia squeezed through the metal bars and sauntered toward the can. “That sounds extremely awkward,” she said, growing more distant.
“Might be nice,” Oliver shrugged. “It’s been a long time since any of us have seen his mom.”
“That’s why it’d be awkward,” Sophia said. “I don’t know if she even knows about me. That’s a conversation I really don’t wanna have right now.”
It was a reasonable point. “I’m sure he’s told her about everything already,” he said. “And you know her, you know she’d be totally fine with it.”
“I know she’d be fine with it, but I still don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair. You could just come when the party starts instead, if you want.”
In the dark, he could see her bend over to pick up the can again. She turned, holding the can in her hand and her arm straight out, facing the dome. She let go and immediately swung her foot again, connecting with the can with a metallic crack! It zoomed past Oliver overhead, and he instinctively ducked out of the way.
“We’ll see,” she said, ambling back over to the dome. “I don’t know if I have the energy to deal with her. Or Jez, for that matter. Or any other douches he invited to that thing.”
Oliver laughed. The types of people Jez likely would’ve invited to the party were generally not the types of people he and Sophia enjoyed hanging around. Davontae had a much higher tolerance than they did.
“Well, dinner’s served at six-thirty if you wanna join. I think Davontae and I are gonna go. The party is any time after seven.”
“Alright,” she said, moving past the dome, searching for the empty can. She called back to him, “You wanna kick this thing?”
He climbed down off the dome, landing with a thud on the dirt, droplets of his own drink spraying out of the can he gripped in his hand. “Sure,” he said, taking a swig.
Sophia returned a moment later with the can in hand. “Swap,” she said, exchanging the empty one for his. “Send that motherfucker flying. Far as you can.”
He looked out where he knew there was the copse of trees, totally invisible, shrouded in the dark. There weren’t many lights in Pine Ridge Park, and a majority of them were located by the entrance gate.
He held out his arm like Sophia had, the can dangling from his hand, wet residue wiping off from the lid onto his palm. His fingers retracted, and the can fell in slow motion. He cocked his leg, swung forward—
The can hurled through the air, whizzing past the rusty slide, disappearing in the black night. Oliver took a deep breath, watching though he could not see.
“Dang,” Sophia said, doing a sarcastic golf clap with his drink in her hand. “Gotta go find it now, though.”
~
Oliver pulled up Ashlyn Coombs’s live stream again that night, watching for anything suspicious. Anything that felt off about her behavior. But there was nothing. She chatted with her fans, teased them, stripped, masturbated. No indication that anything was bothering her. No reminders of the previous night.
He lay restless in bed, the television in his bedroom having long since acquiesced to infomercials in lieu of real programming. The faint glow and quiet sounds usually helped him sleep, but not tonight.
He kept imagining the red-haired man in Shumard Springs, vomiting up the luminous orange goo, wondering if Ash had somehow heard him outside her window. But that was crazy. Even if the man had been real—which Oliver still wasn’t fully convinced of—he was long gone now. No way would Ash have heard him twenty-four hours later.
As Oliver lay in bed, thinking about the man, trying to make sense of anything that was going on, suddenly it struck him why the guy had looked so familiar.
The man was Eric Breen, and he would definitely not be supplying any fireworks at Jez’s party.
~
In his childhood bedroom, years and years ago, Oliver had a poster of Barney hanging on his closet door. The closet remained closed all night, so he had a perfect view of Barney from his bed. Barney, big and purple and beautiful, was joyfully throwing his arms in the air like he was praising God; his left foot was tilted up, as if mid-step in his celebration. Oftentimes Oliver would lay awake at night, not even pretending to go to sleep, looking over at the poster. There was one night, still vivid in his memory twenty years later, when he swore he saw Barney’s upturned foot tapping. Up and down, up and down, in steady, silent rhythm. Young Oliver stared, terrified, at the poster, the dinosaur completely unmoving except for that foot. His face frozen in a merry smile, his mouth a black void with no tongue and thin white stripes of teeth on top and bottom. The circular yellow toenails moving up and down, slowly, tap—tap—tap. The boy stayed in bed, clutching his comforter, pulled up to his chin but too afraid to cover his face and take his eyes off the poster, knowing that if he did, the creature would spring out of the thin, glossy paper and be at his bedside. He dared not call out for his mother or father. They could do nothing, and it would anger the creature that was taunting him. So he watched. He did nothing. He watched.
The foot tapped—tapped—tapped.
MONDAY 12/31/18
The Party
Jez’s wide bug eyes and toothy smile greeted them in his doorway the next night. “Hey, fellas!” he beamed, waving them inside. For the occasion he was wearing a beige sweater that fit loosely, the collar drooping around his pencil-thin neck. Off-center was a thick black circle with two dots and a curve, depicting a crude smiley face. “Y’all want anything to drink? Mama’s just about done cookin’.”
“I’m alright, I’ll wait for dinner,” Oliver answered. Davontae said likewise.
Eric Breen had been heavily weighing on Oliver’s mind the entire day. He had looked the guy up on Facebook while he drank coffee at his kitchen table, and sure enough, that was who Oliver had seen collapse in Shumard Springs while he stood there, doing nothing. He didn’t have the heart to deliver the news to Jez. The prospect made his stomach somersault.
They followed Jez past the staircase and down the hallway into the kitchen. It had been a long while since either of them had set foot in the house. Nostalgia washed over Oliver, filling him with memories of tasty home-cooked meals and long weekend nights playing video games.
Plagued by thoughts of Eric Breen and finding himself unexpectedly back in the Abbott house, Oliver began to feel a sense of otherworldliness. Even before the incident three nights prior, ever since Noah’s death—nothing felt quite right in Shumard. Everything was faintly off-center.
What hadn’t changed at all, though, was Ms. Abbott’s warm smile and booming voice. “Hello, boys!” she howled as they entered the kitchen, stirring some pots on the stovetop. “It’s been so long!” She gave the pots’ contents one more stir then waddled over to Oliver and Davontae, wrapping each of them in her arms.
Oliver hugged her back, surprised by the relief he felt with her embrace.
“Something smells good in here,” Davontae said. “Did you order food from Boston Market?”
Ms. Abbott gave him a playful slap on the shoulder. “Oh, stop!” she scolded him, laughing. “I made you guys a beautiful baked ham, roasted brussels sprouts, some rolls, and my macaroni and cheese.”
“With the honey added in?” Davontae asked.
“Of course! Like always. Take a seat, it’ll be ready in a minute.”
They obliged, taking their usual seats around the kitchen table. Oliver was surprised by how easily he and Davontae had slid back into the routine. It was like they were still in high school, coming over every weekend. Back when Mr. Abbott was still around to cause trouble. Oliver sat against the wall, near the head of the table, with Davontae in the chair beside him. Sophia had always sat opposite Oliver, with Jez at the head of the table.
“Jez, get them something to drink,” Ms. Abbott ordered.
“I already asked ’em and they’re waiting.”
“Just get them something!”
Jez stood back up and meandered over to the fridge, grabbing Davontae a Dr. Pepper and Oliver a Coke. He hadn’t forgotten their usuals. They thanked him as he handed over the cans, cracking open a Dr. Pepper for himself.
Something brushed Oliver’s leg, and he ducked under the table to find Tortellini, the Abbotts’ portly orange exotic shorthair. She rubbed her head against his leg again as he reached down to stroke her silky, soft fur. Tortellini had already been a few years old when Oliver met Jez, so she had to be getting up there in age by now.
After a minute, with Jez’s assistance, Ms. Abbott began to place the various foods on the table. It was a veritable New Year’s feast. They served themselves, and while they ate, she asked what was new in their lives.
So much had happened since they’d last spoken to her, Oliver wasn’t sure where to start. So he said, “Nothing, really.”
“Oh, come on!” she urged him.
He laughed. “I’ve got a job working in an office. I do customer service for, uh…well, when one of our products breaks, people call in to get them repaired and I handle scheduling guys to go out to fix them, ordering the necessary supplies, all that.”
“Do you like it?”
“Oh, of course not, it’s extremely boring,” he said, cutting into the slab of ham on his plate. Brown sugar and honey wafted through the air. It was intoxicating. “It keeps me paid, though. So that’s good enough for now, I guess.”
The food was as delicious as ever. Ms. Abbott had not lost her touch in the kitchen.
“A paying job is always important,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t like it, but hopefully something better will come along soon. And good benefits are nothing to scoff at, either. Are you seeing anyone?”
“Nah, not right now,” he said with an embarrassed smile. The last girl he’d been in a relationship with was Amber, but they had split during the last few months of college. He hadn’t made any earnest attempts to dip back into the dating pool yet, in spite of Davontae’s urging.
“Davontae’s seein’ a pretty little lady named Lily,” Jez said with more confidence than he should have. Oliver had no idea how Jez knew about Lily in the first place; maybe he was online more than they realized, keeping up-to-date with all the goings-on in their lives. Although it had evidently been a while since his last update.
“Lily! Pretty name,” said Ms. Abbott with gusto.
“Well,” Davontae laughed, “we actually broke up a few months ago.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry.”
“Crap,” said Jez, not wanting to swear in front of his mother.
“It’s all good,” Davontae assured them.
Ms. Abbott’s face drooped at the news. “I was hoping there would be a wedding soon! When are you boys gonna finally settle down?”
Davontae chuckled at the question. But Ms. Abbott just looked at all three of them expectantly, awaiting a response.
“Not any time soon,” he replied, stabbing a macaroni shell. “We ain’t quite ready for that, I don’t think. I know I’ve got too much goin’ on right now.”
Ms. Abbott turned her attention to Oliver. “Is he too busy for a nice girl?” she asked. He shook his head, and she turned back to Davontae. “Well, that settles it. Make your move!”
“Alright, alright, I will,” he grinned.
Oliver was beginning to feel more at ease by the second. The otherworldliness was slipping away, and he finally felt comfortable for the first time in a week. Or at least close to it.
When Jez explained that Davontae was busy making games, Ms. Abbott asked him to explain his game to her, which he valiantly attempted, though a great deal of it went over her head. But she nodded along politely, asking questions every once in a while. Jez was enthralled and told Davontae he’d love to hear more about the creation of it during the party. He had bought it that morning and loved it.
“Thanks, man, that means a lot,” Davontae told him.
Ms. Abbott positively glowed as she watched the boys eat.
“It’s so nice seeing you two,” she said. “It’s great to see you all together again. If Sophia were here, it’d be the full bunch!”
