Before he knew it, Ann told him about the long history of tensions between her and the girls at school, the false rumors her old boyfriend Nick Maddox had started about her “putting out” when he was upset she wouldn’t sleep with him, the difficulties of attending a school where your father was a teacher, how she thought her mother favored Poppy and her father cared more about his students than he cared about her.
He told her that his dad, a boxer, got hit in the head too hard in a fight and ended up in a home. “He can’t even spread peanut butter on a piece of bread or say his own name,” Michael said. “After my dad, my mom had this boyfriend. Marcus. He worked at the Red Star yeast factory. He smelled like a moldy piece of bread.”
Ann laughed—until Michael lifted up his shirt and showed her a dark brown stripe across his abdomen. “This is from when he hit me with an extension cord. And this?” He pointed at a lump on his shin. “This is from when he kicked me so hard I couldn’t walk for a week.”
“I’m so sorry,” Ann said. “How could anyone hurt you?”
Michael shrugged. “People hurt each other all the time.”
He couldn’t believe that he’d confided in her, and he couldn’t believe that Ann, Miss Popular, was so sincere in her concern. He’d always thought of her as someone who was totally inaccessible. She was confident and pretty. He saw how the boys tried to get her attention and the girls tried to keep up with her. He’d heard girls talk shit about her, like she thought she was all that, but he found her to be sincere and direct in a way other kids weren’t, which was why, that night, he’d told her more than he’d told anyone else when she asked him about his mom.
“She was a partier. But after Marcus left, she swore she would change. She did. She got a job, cleaned up. But then she got sick. She was tired all the time, had these pains in her gut. At first, I was happy. Her being sick meant she was home with me, and I could take care of her. I thought she’d get better, but remember when that bacteria got into the Milwaukee water?”
“Cryptosporidium? Sure. Everyone in the city got it. I threw up for three days.”
“Well, because my mom was already sick, it made her even sicker. I didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t go to the hospital. She hated doctors. I thought that I could take care of her myself, make her better. But I couldn’t, you know? Turns out she had AIDS.”
Ann gasped.
“See why I don’t tell anyone? I say cancer and people are sorry for me. I say she had AIDS and they do what you just did. I don’t have it. I’m not sick. Don’t worry.”
Ann put her hand on his arm to demonstrate her concern. “I’m not worried, Michael.” She said his name out loud with particular care and kindness. She reached for his hand and held it.
They fell asleep like that, at three in the morning, with hotel towels covering them instead of blankets. The shimmering, hazy light from the pool reflected on the glassy dome, the atmosphere safe, womblike. That night, he’d had Ann all to himself. It was perfect.
The next day, he ran his fastest 200 meters. She was right there at the finish line, cheering him on. After that, she started bringing sandwiches and snacks to him at school. Soon her parents invited him for dinner. The next thing he knew, he was sleeping on their couch. One day, Ed told him that he’d converted the office upstairs into a bedroom, and he gave him an extra key to their house. Ann became his constant companion. They walked to and from school together, and they ran along the lakeshore in the late afternoons. He wasn’t part of Ann’s social circle, but at home they were inseparable. They watched old movies, folded laundry together, and sat at the kitchen table doing homework until they lost focus and shot rubber bands at each other. Even though Michael didn’t have the best grades, he was a whiz at math, and he helped Poppy with her geometry homework. Connie took Michael to the dentist and bought him some new clothes at Kohl’s. He and Ed played pickup games at Riverside Park, and Ed asked him to join his bowling league at the Polish Falcons.
Michael had been so thrilled by this new arrangement that he hadn’t thought of how strange it must have seemed to other people—that is, until one afternoon when he’d stopped by Ed’s classroom and overheard Mr. Frederickson, the chemistry teacher, warning Ed about him. “He’s staying with you? Kid had a tough ride, I get it. Shit happens to all our students. You take on one Oliver Twist and pretty soon you could have half the high school living in your house. Michael doesn’t have to be your problem.”
“He’s not a problem.”
“Not now. Just be careful. Your girls are only what, a year apart? Irish twins? Beautiful girls in full bloom.”
“He doesn’t think about them like that.”
“Whatever you say. You know, I heard about a couple who woke up from a nap to find their foster kid standing at the foot of their bed with a hunting knife in his hand.”
Mr. Frederickson’s words were always in the back of Michael’s mind, especially when Ed and Connie asked him if he’d like to join them on “the Cod,” as Ed called it. Michael said yes, although the trip filled him with as much anxiety as excitement.
And now here he was.
He turned back and looked at the steep sand dune he’d just run down, and the dark, jagged path the beachgoers had cut into it. The parking lot was up there, and Ed and Connie. Why hadn’t they come down yet?
He had to leave. He needed to escape the girls with their long, knowing looks, and the ocean, and all those strange people dotting the beach who were nothing like him. Nothing.
He made a run for it.
Where are you going? The girls’ high voices were drowned out by the wind and surf. Where was he going? He had no idea. He only knew they couldn’t keep up, not even Ann. She had good endurance and could hold her own against the guys on the team, but Michael was a sprinter. He’d set the school’s record for the 100 meters. He could run fast to a finish line, but he ran even faster when he had something to run away from.
When he got to the top of the dune he was exhausted from his intense burst of effort uphill through the deep sand. He could see the heat hovering over the parking lot as if he were looking through a veil of sheer plastic wrap. The asphalt was hot as molten lava. Aside from the thump of his heartbeat and the sound of his bare feet hitting pavement, it was suddenly quiet, an eerie peacefulness he found both welcome and disconcerting.
He headed straight for Ed, who was pulling beach towels and tattered folding chairs out of the back of the Buick wagon. Ed didn’t look anything like Mr. Gordon the history teacher from Riverside High. At school, Ed wore polyester shirts with wide ties and kept his hair pulled back into a scraggy ponytail. But here he was, a family guy on vacation in his old Marquette Warriors T-shirt and ratty sandals. His curly salt-and-pepper hair, what was left of it, whipped around his head. They’d left Milwaukee two days ago and already his scruffy black beard was beginning to show. He said he never shaved in the summer. Michael thought about giving up shaving for the summer, too, but puberty hadn’t kicked in all the way; it took him weeks to establish anything thicker than peach fuzz.
“Forget something?” Ed asked.
Michael shook his head. His lungs felt the way they did at the end of a race, like they were filled with broken glass, and his spent quads twitched.