The Lease

note: Here's another story i'm thinking about submitting. feedback?

There was never anywhere to go. Most of them lived in small houses – Mike lived in a trailer with his mom and stepdad . No one’s parents wanted the five of them hanging around every night.
So they were always ending up somewhere. The friends would drive dark roads down into Illinois or walk the lakeshore as far as they could before private property cut off the waterfront. They talked about getting out of Kenosha. They did not name specific destinations.
One night, when it was almost summer, they walked the corridor of sand between the water plant and the boulders as if it were a prison exercise yard. The sand was dry and had tufts of grass sticking out here and there. Sharon suggested they put enough distance between them and the water processing plant’s lights to see the stars over Lake Michigan. They walked a little faster, but the soft sand made it feel like walking in place. After awhile the boulders gave way to a beach.
Brett picked up a stick and flicked away a few dead alewives so they could sit in a sheltered area under the eave of a boulder. The three girls and two boys cuddled together like ferrets. Lisa and Christine lay their heads on Mike’s lap, touching at the ashy crowns of their heads where the black dye stopped. Mike leaned against Sharon’s shoulder, and Sharon, trying to act as if this were just any night, wrapped her arms around Brett’s waist. He leaned back against her and sifted Christine’s hair through his hands.
They often piled their bodies together like this, listening to one another’s breath and heartbeats. The girls believed the cuddling showed that the group’s friendship was asexual, a spiritual communion cemented by hugs and handholding. The boys were careful not to let their erections poke anyone.
They looked at the stars over the lake. The reflection of the water plant’s lights still watered down the sky’s indigo, making it shine like a wet plastic slicker.
Mike said, suddenly, “We should all go to the same college.” Sharon looked at him to see if he was joking, but he was earnest, his sparse blond eyebrows raising up and down as he went on:
“We could rent a big house and paint the walls with laundry detergent. And have blacklights in every room so the laundry detergent glows.” Sharon reached out and stroked Mike’s downy hair, and felt his scalp on her fingertips. Mike was probably going to graduate next month, but Sharon knew he wasn’t going to college because his mother wasn’t interested in paying for it.
Brett snorted. “Mike, if you were going to college, you’d know where you were going by now. I’m still a junior and I’m already pretty sure I’m going to Notre Dame.” Brett was taller than any of them, and more aggressive. Both boys considered themselves more friends of the girls than friends with each other. But no one was boyfriend and girlfriend.
Sharon hadn’t told anyone, but that afternoon after school, Brett had kissed her in the playground, where they had been sitting on swings and talking. She had been surprised and flattered; it was understood that Christine and Lisa, with their willowy figures and porcelain complexions, were the ones all their friends had crushes on. Even Sharon loved them in a puppyish, crush way, even though she wasn’t gay.
After letting Brett kiss her once or twice, Sharon picked up her bag and they walked to the auditorium to see if Christine was finished auditioning for the summer play. Brett had walked beside the way a dog walks with his master, burning up extra energy by zigzagging onto the school lawn and out into the street. All he could think about was how close he had been to touching his friend’s breasts. He had felt them touch his arm or his back when they were hanging out, and he knew they were denser than he'd imagined, more like foam rubber than spongecake. But he’d never touched them with his hands.
Sharon wondered if he’d try to kiss her again when he drove her home that night. She didn’t know what it meant. Did he want to be her boyfriend? She was 15 and had never had a boyfriend. Lisa and Christine had consorted with this boy or that, but Sharon couldn’t imagine that they had seriously cared for anyone more than they cared for each other or for her. She didn’t want to be the first to break the tripod that had delivered her safely through the horrors of gradeschool and junior high.
In gradeschool Sharon had been pudgy and might have become the kid everyone picks on. But Lisa and Christine for some reason befriended her. They were a year older than Sharon and a grade ahead, and even at nine, they were elegant and different – in a good way – from the other fourth graders. In high school, Lisa and Christine dressed in black, and kept their skin very pale, like Goths, even though they didn’t hang out with the Goth kids who smoked clove cigarettes by the old archery targets at school. They hung out with Sharon, who had grown from pudgy to solid and athletic, and they hung out with Brett and Mike. No one else.
Mike they loved because for his dark sense of humor – twice he had managed to get art projects displayed in the hallways that included tiny, unnoticed cartoons of people being hung or beheaded. He spoke softly and seemed afraid that the friends might dump him at any time. Before high school, he had never had any friends at all.
While Mike walked around milky eyed and languid, Brett loped from one place to another, and even standing still he seemed like he had a coal engine laboring within him. He had straight A’s and engaged the teachers in long arguments in class. He was adopted. His thick black hair, which he wore hanging over one eye, came from his real parents, who were in Pakistan somewhere. Brett rarely suggested anything to do, but he was good at pointing out why the others’ ideas wouldn’t work. They didn’t blame him; they had seen enough cafes and CD shops open and close downtown to see that people’s plans usually didn’t work out.
That night, Brett put his hand on the top of Sharon’s head to prevent her from bumping it as she ducked into his car. She quivered inside at the protective gesture, and forgot that she had decided not to let him kiss her again. Before she got out at her house he touched her breasts under her paisley peasant blouse, and she felt so nervous that cool sweat trickled down the sides of her ribcage. She didn’t let him take off her bra.
After that Brett tried to drive Sharon home as often as he could. But they weren’t alone in the car more than a once a week, because they had to time the curfew rush right to drop everyone off in the right order. Sharon and Christine had to be home at 12:30, Lisa and Brett at 1. Mike didn’t have a curfew.
When school ended, Brett tried to get Sharon to spend the day with him, so they could drive to Silver Lake alone or go to Chicago together.
She wouldn’t do it. She liked to kiss him in the car at night, liked to feel his hands coursing up and down her back when she sat on his lap, the driver's seat pushed way back. But the talking scared her.
“You sing beautifully,” he told her one night, after they’d all spent the evening playing Lisa’s parents’ old Beatles 8-tracks and singing along. He always noticed things about her when they were all together, and he’d tell her these things later when they were alone.
She told Christine about Brett, alone in the older girl’s room. No one but Lisa and Sharon were ever allowed in here. Christine, with her black eye make-up and pale skin, would die if anyone else saw that she still had a pink canopy bed -- and liked it.
“So what’s the big deal?” Christine asked her. “We could tell he liked you. He’s cute.”
“I feel like he doesn’t want us to hang out with everyone else all the time. It seems like he always wants us to be alone,” Sharon said.
Christine laughed. “We don’t all have to spend every free second together,” she told Sharon in a voice she had used since fourth grade to remind Sharon that she was an entire year younger. Christine didn't tell her that Brett had already tried to get with Lisa and herself.
Lisa was out somewhere, they didn't know where. Not at rehearsal. Sharon felt a nameless uneasiness in her when Lisa disappeared like this, but she liked having Christine to herself. Christine, like Sharon, was still a virgin. Lisa had slept with someone, but she would never tell them who. Christine got out a bottle of black nail polish and started painting her short nails. Sharon tried it on too, but it smeared and she ended up taking it off.
On the Saturday night after the Fourth of July, four of them got into Mike’s car and went downtown where an antique shop/coffeehouse sometimes stayed open evenings. Christine was at rehearsal again. The school was doing a “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and she was playing a fairy.
A band was supposed to play at the coffeehouse. But when they parked Mike’s car they could see that the windows were dark. They stood around the locked door, smoking cigarettes, wondering where to go from there. It seemed too early to hit the all-night diner where they liked to drink coffee and eat from the complimentary breadbasket.
“We could go to your house,” Mike said to Lisa. Lisa’s parents were often out late on weekends, and they had a big TV and a VCR. They could rent a video. But when Lisa’s parents did come home, her dad would be drunk and try to act cool and hang out with them. That was a drawback.
“Let’s go to the park,” Sharon said. They were near the old park in the middle of town, a place now deserted by all but pot-smoking kids and homeless people. She pulled a glossy paper pouch out of her pocket. It was a packet that a kind of gum called Big League Chew came in. They always carried their marijuana, when they had any, in empty packages of Big League Chew. The packs were resealable and the powdery gum residue left on the inner foil seemed to soften the smoke.
A car turned down the deserted downtown street, and Sharon quickly put away the packet. But it wasn’t a police car, it was a blue Camaro. It stopped.
“Hey, do you guys know where Wet Pet is playing?” It was Rick Bell, who dropped out of their school last year at age 20. He’d hung around a few years because he was on the golf team and really liked that.
“It was supposed to be here,” Lisa told him. She leaned against his car, and the way she looked at Rick, Sharon wondered if he was the one she’d slept with. But then again, Lisa flirted with guys a lot. She liked getting them to buy her things, because she rarely had any money of her own.
“Well, hell, let’s bust in,” Rick said. Lisa laughed.
“There’s no point,” she told him. “There’s nothing going on in there.”
Rick looked at the coffeehouse again. His blue Camaro was reflected in the window.
“Oh yeah,” he said. The five of them stood in the street, Rick sat behind the wheel. Then Rick started laughing. He must have been pretty stoned.
“You guys wanna come to my house?” he asked. “I got like a pound of weed.” Lisa rode in Rick's car and the rest of them followed his Camaro to a bad neighborhood, over by the dormant auto factory. His house was two stories, with siding the color of urine. Rick parked his Camaro on the lawn. Outside an upstairs window, a swayback couch sat on the tar shingles of the porch’s roof.
“Cool,” Brett said, and Mike and the girls sighed in agreement.
“You have your own house,” Mike said.
When Lisa rejoined them they could tell that she and Rick had been drinking in his car. Her eyes shone and she talked more than usual. She smelled like canned cherries.
Rick did, indeed, have almost a pound of marijuana. He told them how much money he’d been making selling homemade glass pipes at Grateful Dead concerts. He had a glass blowing furnace in the garage.
Rick’s living room was like a furlough, sunken two steps below the rest of the house. He didn’t have any living room furniture, just a very expensive stereo. They sat on the wall-to-wall carpeting and passed a large bong that hadn’t turned out well enough for him to sell. If someone happened to be pulling on the pipe between songs, the loud gurgle made them all giggle. It was a horrible, drowning sound.
Later they left Rick in his house and drove for two hours along the northern edge of town, where lawns and fences gave way to fields and barbed wire. Mike was too nervous to drive after smoking all that pot, so Lisa was behind the wheel.
Sharon had an idea.
“Maybe Rick would rent us his attic,” she said, turning to address her three friends in the back seat.
“Why would we want his attic?” Brett asked. “You think there’s gold up there?” They laughed so hard that the windows began to steam up and Lisa turned on the heat by mistake. She meant to turn on the defrost.
“We could have our own apartment,” Sharon said. “We could pool our money and rent someplace cheap. After school we could hang out there. Put a stereo there. Decorate it and stuff.” She knew it was a good idea, but she felt she couldn’t explain it properly. She leaned her head against the window glass, which was damp but warm. They rolled down all the windows and hung their heads out in the wind, and Lisa drove faster so they could be cooled.
They started going to Rick’s house once or twice a week. After smoking up, Rick would disappear into his garage to work, and they would lie on the carpet watching the stereo lights as if they were a meteor shower. Sometimes they'd rummage around in the two ground-floor bedrooms Rick didn’t use. They were full of boxes left over from the people who used to live here. Mike found and old plastic typewriter in a blue case once, and he wrote a long, hilariously rambling poem about the group trying to walk around a very, very large lake. When they asked him if the big lake was Lake Michigan, he said “No, way bigger than that. Way bigger.”
Lisa and Sharon came screaming out of the smaller bedroom one night after finding a stack of pornographic party games on a closet shelf ("Sin Rummy," "Orgy, the Board Game.")
It was Mike who got up the nerve to ask Rick to rent them his attic, and when Rick declined, Mike looked embarrassed to death, even though Rick was nice about it. The attic was Rick’s bedroom, it turned out.
“I like to climb out that window mornings and survey the lay of the land,” he told them. “I’m king of the neighborhood.”
The more time they spent at Rick’s house, the more they talked about getting a place of their own. It stopped being Sharon’s idea and became group property. In their real homes, they felt like lingering houseguests. Sharon avoided going home between 6 p.m. and curfew, because her mother would inevitably suggest she stay in the rest of the evening, maybe play some Scrabble.
After spending a few hours on Rick’s living room floor, Sharon’s head pillowed on his stomach, Brett would desperately maneuver to drive Sharon home. Now that it was summer, her parents were less strict on the curfew thing. He would drive her to a housing development being built in the former cornfield near her neighborhood, and they’d park on the newly laid asphalt street next to a gaping square foundation hole.
There were no streetlights there. Brett would feel for Sharon’s hand in the dark, then pull it into his lap. She would feel the bulge there and laugh.
“Were you like that all night?” she always asked. He’d tell her the exact moment when his hard-on struck – while watching her raise an arm to lift a stack of old magazines off the bedroom closet shelf. Or the moment he lay down on Rick’s carpet and she kneeled next to him, looking down at his face, her shoulder length hair tickling his cheek.
“Wanna play Sin Rummy?” He asked the night the found the games, and “rummy” became their secret code for making out. Brett was 17 and a virgin, and he told Sharon that not sleeping with her physically hurt him, pulled at his muscles from the inside as if a fishing reel were tightening every sinew one turn at a time.
“I don’t want to lose my virginity in a car,” she told him.
“I could borrow my dad’s Blazer,” he said.
She laughed, and even though he hadn’t meant to be funny, he saw that it was and he laughed to.
The group took to buying newspapers and exploring the For Rent listings. When they divided the prices by five, it didn’t seem that expensive. Only $50 a month each for some.
They discussed it one day, sitting on the lawn outside the school auditorium where Lisa was rehearsing her play. She was supposed to come out in half an hour. It was so hot that they saw shimmering air above the sidewalk. But the grass felt cool.
Mike wanted everyone to pony up a little more -- say $75 a month -- to get someplace nice and big, since they'd probably end up crashing there on weekend nights.
For once Brett didn’t argue with an idea someone else put forth.
“Yeah, totally,” was all he said. “They want me to work more hours at Calvo’s anyway.”
Christine didn’t like the idea.
"Mike, your parents don't care if you don't come home at night," she said, but she directed her arch look at Brett. "The rest of us would never crash there unless our parents were out of town, and if they were out of town we wouldn't need to get out of the house anyway. We could fire up a big old crack pipe right in the living room."
They didn’t smoke crack. But it was nice to think that once they had the apartment, they could do that if they really wanted. They could do anything.
Lisa opened the theater door and a rush of air conditioning flowed over them all like water. Two men were with her. They were actually men, like in their 30s. She introduced them as guys from the play, and the friends smiled at them but said nothing. Sharon folded the newspaper and put it in her purse. They all walked down to Lake Michigan and stripped down to their shorts – the girls in their bras – and jumped off the dock into the freezing water. They pretended it was normal to have two men hanging out with them, and the two men pretended that they often took off their shirts and shoes and socks and jumped into Lake Michigan off the dock.
Lisa took off her bra and her shorts and underwear too, and dove in to the lake naked. Sharon grinned at her, proud of her friend’s courage and of the silvery-white slash of a body that Lisa displayed before disappearing into the water. Both of Christine’s friends from the play stood around chest deep in the icy water, talking to Lisa and Christine, pretending not to notice that Lisa’s pink, erect nipples were visible above the water’s surface.
They couldn’t stay in the water for long. They lay on the dock until their clothes dried. They wanted to talk about the apartment, but not in front of the two guys from the play. But then the Lisa and Christine stood up, with their damp clothes on, and went off with the two guys to work on their lines for the play. No one pointed out that Christine wasn't in the play, and Lisa only had one line.
Without them, Sharon and the two boys spent the twilight trespassing on the grounds of old lakefront mansions, most of which had metamorphed into institutions: a museum, a funeral home, a wedding hall. Then they went to the Sunshine Restaurant to talk about the apartment some more. Sharon felt odd being the only girl.
They bought a new paper from the box in front. The restaurant was run by a Greek family, with a revolving glass case near the register, displaying cream pies and cakes. There were probably 20 such restaurants in Kenosha, but they only patronized this one. Because they always tipped as much as they could scrape together, the staff rarely enforced the $2 per person minimum order.
While Sharon and Mike read the menu, struck dumb like children left alone with a stranger, Brett bent over the classified ads. By the time the waitress came he had found an apartment he liked enough to argue for. But without the other girls, Sharon and Mike couldn't put up much of an argument. Everything was out of balance.
They ordered three coffees and Soula, a waitress who tolerated them, immediately brought two ceramic dishes of half-and-half packets. Mike ordered a BLT and shared it with Sharon, who only had enough money for coffee.
Brett told them about the apartment he liked as if he had seen it, maybe lived there a few years, raised a family in its
two bedrooms, eat-in kitchen.
"The best thing will be that balcony," Brett said, spooning ice cubes out of his water glass and eating them. "You'll sit out there on hot nights, look down on the street. Like Rick’s roof. And you could see if the cops were coming, or if someone you don't like is coming over, you could go inside and turn off the lights."
They laughed at that. Brett was trying to get them warmed up, they could tell, and they made an effort to pretend that it was normal for the three of them to hang out without Lisa and Christine.
There were indeed a lot of kids at school they didn’t like, most of all the jocks and preppies who painted their faces at pep rallies and practically wet their pants trying to cheer loud enough to get the spirit bell. But it had been summer so long that they had nearly forgotten about all those kids who were not part of them.
“What’s the address?” Mike asked.
“2285-14th street,” Brett said.
"That’s by Beaver Pond," Mike said, watching Brett nervously as he spoke to make sure he wasn't’making the other boy angry. “Too many mosquitoes down there.”
Brett grinned. He wanted a debate. "You'll sit out there smoking. Smoke keeps them away," Brett said. He had ordered carrot cake and when Soula put it in front of him, he handed Sharon a fork.
"And we'll have one of those bug zappers," Brett added. The three of them giggled. “I'm serious. Those electric purple bug zappers are a trip when you're baked.”
Mike grinned into his plate and shook noiselessly when he laughed. It occurred to Sharon for the first time that it might be Brett that Mike loved the most, not Lisa or Christine, as she had always assumed. Mike, shy, powerless, unloved by his parents, might see a hero in Brett's edgy self-confidence. Sharon squinted at Brett and tried to see him that way.
That night Sharon’s parents were still out when Brett pulled his car in front of her house, so he came inside with her. It was risky; she wasn’t supposed to have boys over when she was in the house alone. But she was feeling warm and confident, and for once Brett wanted to talk.
He told her about how much he hated their school, and how anxious he was to leave this town. They lay on her parents’ couch, and he clutched at her clothes as if he was drowning, as if the blue velour of her mother’s old living room set was a stormy lake.
He mentioned his mom, and Sharon’s heart thumped. Brett’s mother had died three years before. Everyone knew about it. She was in a car accident. No one knew the man whose car she had been in, not even Brett’s father.
“I don’t really have any special memories,” he told Sharon. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be paying attention. I remember begging her to get sugar cereal at the store, and her coming back with Apple Jacks. And I was like, that’s not sugar cereal. It doesn’t even come in a foil bag.” They laughed and Sharon felt herself attaching to him more closely, as if they were two sides of a boot that someone was lacing up.
He put his hand inside the front of her jeans. Soon he was pushing his penis against the front of her underwear. He begged her to have sex with him.
"They could come in at any time," she told him. She imagined her father seeing her with her jeans slid halfway down her hips, her bra hanging around her waist. She sat up and put her bra back on. Brett sulked.
"It's just, I don't want to get caught," she told him.
“What about when we get the apartment,” he said. “Then, we could do it, right? We wouldn’t get caught there.”
“But everybody else would be there,” she said quietly.
“Not every minute,” he said, smiling, feeling himself close to winning an argument.
She said OK, and he went home. She watched him drive away from the front window. Just after he turned the corner, her parents’ car turned onto the street from the other side. She ran to her bedroom and turned off the lights.
She brooded over the promise. Was she obligated to keep it? She didn’t want to be a tease. She avoided him for awhile. Maybe he would forget about it.
She told Christine she’d sort of told Brett she’d do it.
“I said I would when we get the apartment,” Sharon said.
Christine laughed. “Well that’s fine. How serious do you think they are about getting an apartment? Hardly anybody has any money. You and me don't have any, and Lisa owes me like, fifty bucks.”
“But I really want to get one. It would be so cool,” Sharon said. “We could have one wall where people could write with crayons and draw pictures. And instead of furniture, we could just have big pillows all over the floor.”
They started trading ideas about what else they could do with the apartment. Christine thought they could start their own experimental theater troupe, hold performances there, and collect donations to help pay the rent. Sharon looked at her. She hadn't shown an interest in theater before. She longed to ask her about the two men from Lisa's play, what Lisa and Christine had done with them. But at the same time she didn't want to hear anything about it. While they were talking, the phone rang. It was Mike.
“Guess where I am?” he asked Christine, breathless. Sharon crowded her face near Christine’s so they could both hear. “OK, well, I’m at my house, but guess where I just was? I was viewing an apartment!”
Sharon felt that ominous feeling in her gut that she used to feel when she’d been bad as a kid, when she knew her parents would find out. She took the phone from Christine.
“Mike, who said you could just go looking at apartments? We didn’t talk about this.”
There was a pause. Mike’s enthusiasm was instantly deflated.
“It was cool,” he said. “Brett saw it in the paper.” Now Brett and Mike were going places without the girls? This was a first. Sharon felt like everything was coming unfixed, crashing around.
The next afternoon the three girls went to see the apartment, pretending to be totally unconnected to Brett and Mike.
It was right next to the Fire Department. It was a long attic room over a ramshackle old Victorian that was being rented out, floor by floor. Carpenters were putting kitchens into the first three floors, but the attic only had a microwave and sink. Exposed pink insulation lined the ceiling.
Christine grimaced. “This looks pretty shitty,” she said.
But Sharon couldn’t speak. It was worse than she feared. She loved it, she saw the possibilities. All the open space. They would have parties. With a band playing. No one would care about the noise, not right next to the fire department.
She sat in the stairwell, knowing her voice would quiver if she tried to speak. Where the roof peaked in the center of the room, the ceiling was 15 feet high. She imagined friends coming and going, each with their own key. They would be like teen-agers on TV. But better.
The landlord, a mailman, was telling them how this used to be his bedroom when he was a kid. His mother was going into a nursing home, so he was renting out her house. He showed them his window seat, where he would look down on the street.
"King of the neighborhood," Sharon whispered, and Lisa squeezed her hand.
They spent the afternoon at the playground, planning who would approach the landlord agreeing to rent it. Probably Mike, who was 18, although Brett looked older. They talked about what they could do with the place. Christine wanted to start an experimental theater troupe and hold performances there; they could raise money for the rent that way.
Ever since the day when Lisa and Christine had gone off with those two guys, Christine was suddenly into theater like Lisa.
“Come on,” Brett said. “You don’t want to call attention to the place.”
Sharon said they could get a puppy that they would all take care of.
“The landlord said no dogs,” Mike told her.
That night Brett drove her home. For once even he was flushed with ideas.
“We should get a calendar for the wall, where you could mark a day if you wanted to have the apartment to yourself that night,” he said, squeezing her knee.
She sighed. That’s not what she thought having an apartment would be like. She imagined Lisa, Christine and Mike laughing at the Sunshine while she and Brett went to bed together in the long attic apartment. Things would be different after they did it.
Then she thought of the experimental theater troupe Christine wanted to start. She’d tried out for a play with Lisa once already, and she’d hated it. If the girls were going in that direction together, Sharon would get left behind.
Brett pulled over. There was now a naked house, the writing on its drywall visible in the starlight, where a hole had once gaped.
She stared out the window, resisting when Brett tried to pull her into his lap. He sat there feeling uncomfortable. He didn't know how to ask what was wrong.
“It's like getting a divorce,” she said after awhile. “We're losing everyone.”
She couldn't explain further. She knew that it was too late to get the apartment, because they had lost Lisa and Christine. She sniffled.
“Hey,” he whispered, petting her hair. “Don’t cry. We don’t have to rent that place. We could find somewhere that allows dogs.”
She laughed and climbed on top of him. It wasn't just that Christine wanted to be in plays, and that Lisa wanted to hang around with boys who would buy her drinks, she realized. It was that the group had lost her too.
Brett had expected it to feel like winning when he finally got inside Sharon. Instead she was on top of him, guiding him in her soft hands, and he had never known losing could feel so good.