Bright Lights, Dark Nights (4 page)

Jason lived in a nice row-house building. His dad greeted me at the door after buzzing me in. He was shorter and rounder than I'd pictured, not that I'd spent a lot of time picturing Jason Mills's dad. “I'm Jason's secretary,” he said, looking down at an imaginary sheet of paper. “You have an appointment?”

I felt like I was in elementary school
—Can Jason come out and play?
Jason's dad sent me upstairs, where Jason was on his phone. Five minutes later, we still hadn't actually spoken.

“Why are you picking on
me
, is what I'm saying,” Jason said into his phone as he paced around his bedroom. He was always pacing and tossing out limbs like Mr. Fantastic. It was tiring to watch. “I only said the same stuff Jeff and Ty said, and they said it first anyway, and it wasn't even about you—”

I was sitting on the floor because I didn't know where else to sit. The bed was empty, but would that be weird? There was a chair Jason had sat in for all of six seconds, but I was already sitting on the floor and now this perfectly good chair was being unused.

“Just forget all that,” Jason said, a sudden change in his voice. Now he was sweet Jason. “When am I gonna see you?” Jason was popular with girls. I guess he was popular with everyone, actually. He was tall, always had some kind of a cap on. The stuff girls like: tall and with hat. He had a good combination of traits. Outgoing, a goofball, good-looking, talented, and smart, although he tended to keep that to himself.

Jason hung up, and in microseconds, he was sitting beside me and showing me phone pictures of a girl's butt. Clothed, thankfully. “This is Sherry. What do you think?”

“That's who you were talking to?” I asked, looking away from the picture.

“Name a girl in school, I've got a picture of her ass,” Jason said. I guessed he had no signed waivers. “Girls line up for my photography skills. I'm the Ansel Adams of butts.”

Jason kept playing with his phone, and I listened to the harp music coming from downstairs. I'd seen Jason's sister Naomi lugging that thing around school before. She kept starting the same piece over again, and flubbing in the same spot.

“Check this out: remember that beat we found last week?” Jason clicked on a track in iTunes, and the beat we found online came on, soulful and bass-heavy. The speakers blasted louder than I'd expected—you could see the windows vibrating. Jason came in a few seconds after the intro.

I tried to focus on Jason's rhymes, but I really wanted to turn the volume down 50 percent. I nodded, looked around. Even in its messy state, Jason's room felt sturdy and solid somehow. Lived-in, enjoyed. All my stuff at home looked like it was going to fall over or break if it wasn't on its back or broken. Jason's room looked like it was put together with an immaculate eye to look like a messy teenager's room, straight off a TV show.

Jason sounded good—he could really do this. Lyrically, I could see where he was coming from. There was a tension to it that I felt every day. The song felt like our home, our time.

“Be honest. Is it cool?” Jason asked, back in his chair. “No? Fine, whatever. Look, be honest, all right? What do you think?”

“It's really good,” I said, not lying. “It's fine as it is, but I had some thoughts, like, in general. Like, what if you looked inward more? Like, instead of just looking at the city and the people in it, talk about your own feelings.”

“Feelings,” Jason repeated, but not contemplatively. I'd already crossed a line. “That's your album, not mine.
By the Fireplace, with Walter Wilcox.
”

“You could be like a Drake, or a Nas,” I said, knowing he would be on board with that. We could both recite “Made You Look” from start to finish. “You're essentially introducing yourself to the world with any song you write at this point. Maybe you could show more of who you are and not just where you're from, or what you can do.”

“All right,” Jason said, leaping from the chair over to his bed. “Or like Eminem or someone—I could just talk about my life, and my friends and family.”

“Just don't kill any of them in your songs,” I said. The harp started up again. Jason's sister must have stopped when he was playing his song.

“Naomi with that friggin' harp all night!” Jason blurted out, a little too loudly. He stood up and towered above me. I hadn't moved from my floor spot. “Sick of that friggin' music. What is that, anyway? Who listens to harp music?”

“Maybe we can use it,” I offered. “Like, she could add on to a beat or something. It's a different sound, right?”

Jason contorted his face into a snarl. “Some kind of knights-of-the-round-table, flute-playing, castle-moat Final Fantasy chocobo rap? Nuh-uh.”

Jason turned away, attention on his phone. I wondered how someone like Jason would fare without his cell phone. Maybe he would be calm, in the moment, focused and attentive, polite, get good grades in school.

“We need song ideas,” Jason said, falling back in his chair and rolling across the floor. “If I'm going to talk about stuff.”

“What's on your mind—what are you feeling?” I had to have some fun with it. Usually it was me feeling uncomfortable around Jason. “Does school make you sad?”

“Mr. Feelings over here,” Jason said, and threw a car magazine at me. I tried to dodge it but just moved myself in the way. “You're like some straight-A, Sigmund Freud, sweater-vest-wearing bunny rabbit.”

“I don't wear sweater-vests,” I said. I don't really get any A's, either. And I'm not a bunny rabbit. “I'm just saying maybe you could dig even deeper.”

“You're surface-level deep,” Jason said. “I don't think I've ever heard you express an opinion on anything other than Superman's new costume design. What are your deep thoughts? What's your life experience? How many girls have you dated? How many places have you traveled to? What are you going to rap about?”

“But I feel stuff awesomely,” I bragged.

“You sit in your bedroom all day and feel stuff,” Jason said. “Feeling yourself up. I'm not picking on you. I'm trying to help. You're begging for guidance. Come out with me some weekend. What are you doing Saturday?”

I didn't think I could last a full evening out with Jason. I didn't want to try.

“The girls I could introduce you to,” Jason said, taking his phone out again.
Oh god, no more pictures.
He shook the phone for emphasis. “Right in here. I could call some girls. The things they'd do to you would send shivers down your spine. And I could hook you up easy. But here's your problem, and I'm gonna be honest with you: even if I skipped all the freaks and set you up with, like, a perfect study-buddy church girl, you'd just mess it up anyway. 'Cause you're closed off.”

Jason tossed his phone on his bed. He looked back at his computer and opened the Internet browser. “I mean, look at me. I'm ugly, and I get more girls than anyone, and you're actually not a bad-looking dude, for a scrawny white kid. Heck, some girls even like that. But even if they gave it up on their own, threw it at you, you wouldn't do anything. Because you don't know how to make a move. Not being mean, just trying to help. Cool?”

I played with my own phone for a bit and listened to the rain that finally broke out and came down in sheets.

“I'm not great with girls,” I said. “The only one I've had any regular relationship with was my sister. And she beat me up most of the time.”

“You still like girls, though, right?” Jason asked. “You still go home every night and make a mess of your bedsheets and stuff. You just need to do it to a real live human being. What kind of girls do you like? Come out with me. I'll even do the heavy lifting. You like heavy girls?”

“Maybe this is a song,” I said, changing the subject. “Giving girl advice or something.”

“Advice to lames,” Jason said, studying me like an injured animal brought in off the street.
Do we fix it up or put it out of its misery?
“It's cool, though. It's like you're cool with being a lame, so it's kind of your thing.”

“It's not my thing,” I countered, although he was starting to convince me.

Jason's dad appeared in the doorway. The hall was bright and well-lit, dim in the bedroom. “Don't let this boy talk to you like that, Walter. You know he can't even pee in a toilet without messing up the seat?”

“Pop! What the hell?” Jason said, moving back to his bed.

“Hi, Mr. Mills,” I said.

“Mr. Mills,” his dad repeated, leaning on the doorframe and putting his hands in his pockets. “I want to say call me Kenny, but I kinda like the ring of that Mr. Mills. Are you staying over for dinner? It's raining cats and dogs and I don't know what else out there. You walked?”

I nodded.

“Okay, you're staying for dinner, then. What do you want, burger and fries? We're placing orders.”

*   *   *

The first thing I noted about dinner with the Mills family was that there were no burgers or fries or fast food of any kind. The table was loaded with home-cooked food Jason's mom had made. I had smelled it cooking before, and Mr. Mills had answered the intercom at the door with “Welcome to Burger King. May I take your order?” so I had been pretty sure he was kidding. But this kind of setup was reserved for maybe Thanksgiving in my family and really not even that.

In my current situation, dinner was an afterthought. It was something my dad and I pieced together when we noticed we were hungry at some eventual point during the night. But even before, we all ate at different times, sometimes a couple of us at the table, sometimes in front of the TV.

The second noteworthy, and more important, observation was that seated at the corner of the table was Naomi Mills. She was a complete knockout. She had short dark hair, pulled back and tied together. Pronounced cheekbones that made her eyes squint a little. She always looked like she was at least partially smiling. She had the cutest smile I'd ever seen. I suddenly felt a lot more nervous.

“Walter, I'm Denise. Pleased to meet you,” Jason's mom said as we got to the table. She looked nice, dressed up. I felt like a slob, but Jason was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, so I guess I had him beat, at least. I wondered how his mom stayed so thin with this kind of food around, and the ability to just make it, whenever she felt like it. What incredible power to have.

“Thanks,” I said. “Denise? Is that okay?”

“Denise is fine, Walter,” she said.