Filed to story: Brace Face Betty Drama Story
Later, I sit with Max on the couch, watching Jeopardy, thankful that he’s oblivious to most of the shit that’s going on around him. He’s small for his age-almost the shortest kid in his class. He’s still obsessed with comics and loves animals. If Max could have a dog, his life would basically be fucking made. His hair is fine like Mom’s but dark like Dad’s. There’s something delicate about him. He isn’t rough and tumble like other boys. I worry sometimes that something hard will happen to him one day, the same as something happened to me, but it won’t galvanize him. It will break him instead, and I will have gone off to college and left him here alone with our absentee parents.
Max wriggles his toes, digging his feet underneath my legs-something he’s always done when his feet are cold. “Do you think Greg and Lou’s mom’s going to die?” he asks. He’s still fixed on the television screen, still scooping melted ice cream onto his spoon and ladling it into his mouth, but I can feel that his attention is now on me. This question’s obviously troubling him.
I squeeze his calf, and he grumbles, jerking his leg away. Turns out physical reassurance from his big sister isn’t cool anymore. “I don’t know, Maxie. I don’t think the doctors know, either.”
“How can the doctors not know? They know everything.”
I remember still believing that doctors were infallible, all knowing, all powerful beings that never put a foot wrong. It wasn’t too long ago that I still believed that, if someone was sick and they went to the hospital, then they were sure to get fixed and be just fine afterward. It came as a shock to me to realize that, just because it was a doctor’s job to fix people, didn’t mean it was possible every single time.
Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done. Sometimes, people just fucking die and no matter how hard we object, or fight, or battle with that, it can’t be changed.
I don’t want to be the person to tell Max any of that. Our parents brought Max into the world. They need to be the ones to break it to him that occasionally it’s a cruel, hurtful, horrible, fucked up place, where sometimes Moms get hit by cars, and they don’t wake up from comas.
“I don’t know all the answers, Maxie,” I murmur. “Things are complicated sometimes. Would it make you feel better if I called Mom?”
He blinks owlishly at the T.V. “No. It’s okay. It’s just really sad for Greg and Lou. That’s all.”
I move his legs and scoot across the sofa, drawing him into my side. He doesn’t shrug me off this time. “I know, Bud. It is, isn’t it?”
MARCUS POV
The bar’s heaving, packed to the rafters, the smell of damp lying heavy in the air. Every time a new customer walks in through the door, a good-natured roar goes up inside the Rock, the patrons already parked at the bar and crowded around the pool tables hurling a shower of peanut shells at the offenders guilty of letting the heat out.
The jukebox has been cycling through White Snake and ACDC all night, sporadically interrupted by the sounds of The Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Behind the altar, the name the Rock’s locals call the huge, sticky slab of mahogany that forms the length of the bar, Angela and Maisy have been busting their asses for the last six hours, working their hardest to make sure everyone has a drink in front of them at all times.
And me? I’ve been clearing tables, running food, watching the drunkest guys for any signs of hostility, and fielding the unwelcome advances of at least three middle-aged women who all seem intent on ‘making me a man.’ This always happens when I’m working at the Rock. Women get it into their heads that, because I’m young, I’m still a retiring wallflower virgin who’s never had his dick touched. Little do they know I could spend the night teasing them into fits of hysteria if I wanted to. They’d forget their own fucking names and lose all motor function if any of them could coax me to slide in between their bedsheets. They won’t, though. Unlike other guys my age, I’m capable of maintaining focus once the subject of potential sex comes up, and besides…I don’t shit where I eat. I have nothing against older women. Older women can be sexy as hell. But I like my job, and I like bringing in a paycheck, and I’m not dumb enough to risk any of that for one night getting my dick sucked.
“Hey, Marcus! Marcus, Montgomery’s asking for you!” Maia hollers across the bar. She’s in the middle of pouring three different drinks but she still somehow manages to hold up a black, corded handset to show me that the owner of the bar is waiting for me on the other end of the line. I spit out the toothpick I’ve been toying with between my teeth and vault over the altar, accepting the phone from her.
“Hey, man. What’s up?”
“Got a girl out back. Wants to try out,” a gruff voice informs me. “She’s young. Probably too young. Get out there and clock her. Tell me if you know her face.”
Montgomery runs with a club. A dangerous one. On the weekends, it amuses him to have girls strip for his buddies, and sometimes he calls on me to wait with the girls, to make sure none of his boys gets too handsy with them. Every once in a while, he has me head out back to see if I recognize them before he lets them out onto the bar floor to perform. Bad for business, he says, if a chick below the age of eighteen shows up, trying to earn herself a cool grand by artlessly taking her clothes off on a Wednesday night. Doesn’t work out in anyone’s favor, especially if the cops show up and shut the place down. It’s happened before.
“Sure thing.” I hang up the phone and head through the back, stepping over a pile of empty Corona boxes that have been tossed back here by the girls. Past the kitchen, and then past Monty’s office, I hurry down the corridor and boot the back emergency exit open, throwing my shoulder into the door when it sticks.
In the alleyway behind the Rockwell, a startled girl with bright blonde hair nearly jumps out of her skin when the door swings back and hits the wall by the dumpsters. Her dark eyes shine brightly. She’s wearing a coat with a fur trim around the collar and red PVC knee-high boots with a heel that could be used as a fucking prison shank. She nearly shits herself when she sees me.
For once, I do recognize her, and I don’t know what she’s told Montgomery, but she is not eighteen. This girl is in my fucking biology class; her name is… fuck, it’s right on the tip of my tongue. She pales when our eyes meet. “Oh, shit. It’s you.”
“Likewise.” I turn to head back inside. “Look, I can’t lie to the boss. He wants to know if you’re old enough to dance, and you’re not, so…”
“Please. Wait. Marcus, right? I need the money, okay. My mom’s blown her entire paycheck at the casino. Again. We can’t be late with the rent this month, or our asshole landlord’s going to kick us out. I can-“
“Stop. You have to be eighteen. There’s nothing I can do.”
Her eyes have grown round. Bright with unshed tears. This is obviously not an act; I’ve borne witness to enough of those before to see this for what it is: sheer desperation. I’m not unsympathetic to her situation. Far from it. I’ve been corralled into some seriously dark corners when I’ve been struggling to make ends meet, too, but lying to Monty is just something that I cannot, will not do. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears. “Look. I can take you in to see Monty. Maybe there’s some other way for you to earn out tonight, but I’m going to be honest with him. You read me?”
Somehow, I’ve conjured hope into her eyes with this suggestion. I immediately kick myself. Monty’s hardly a bleeding heart. Definitely not one for sob stories. Still, this is all I can do for her, so it is what it is. She follows me into the building, unsteady in her stripper heels. I have to catch hold of her at one point to make sure she doesn’t topple over. She shoots me a grateful smile, but not a single word is passed between us as I lead her back up the corridor toward Monty’s office. I knock once and wait for him to call us in before I push the door open.
Montgomery’s office is not what you might expect. It’s clean, for starters, while everything else at the Rockwell bears a patina of grease and sticky, spilled alcohol. On the wall, landscape paintings depict balmy summer scenes from Tuscany and Provence. Behind Monty’s white marble desk (completely clear, besides a computer screen and a single framed photograph of Montgomery’s dear departed mother, Babs), the man himself sits, wearing a bright red Christmas sweater with Rudolph emblazoned across the front of it.
“S’up, Kid,” Monty mutters. He’s yet to look up at me from his computer screen. His bright hair is long, tied back into a ponytail with a leather thong. Angela always says he reminds her of Brad Pitt from ‘Legend of the Falls.’ For a nearly sixty-year-old guy, he’s in pretty decent shape.
“Well?” he asks.
“Seventeen. Senior at Ravenshire,” I tell him.