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Wednesday, December 8th, 1993
Nico Faraday is 14 and mature for her age. She’s a freshman at Arlington Arts and she shares a room with a girl named Stevie Demopoulos, who she can actually tolerate. She tries to have dinner with her grandfather 2 school days each week and comes home every weekend. Everything she does is measured, practiced, and yet, sometimes, her brain breaks.
Sometimes, when she’s overwhelmed, she goes to the rowhouse. It’s old and crumbling into itself. Having not been occupied in nearly 40 years, it shows this fact readily. Her grandfather bought it with his first big acting check and has been letting it rot into the ground ever since. It’s funny how a man who’s dedicated 30 years of his life to restoring Fahy Tower has so easily left another relic of the past to desolation.
She’s been coming here to blow off steam since she first started at Arlington Arts when she was 12. There’s a key hidden in a gap behind a loose brick in the foundation on the rowhouse’s left side. Sometimes, she needs to be alone to be able to think. Sometimes, she just needs to be alone.
It’s finals week, and at an internationally recognized art school, that means a time crunch that would kill a weaker student. She’s walking back from the studios in Velvet Vale that the school rents out on their students behalf. It’s at least a 45 minute walk. Maybe 2 miles, past the Selis Bridge and along the shore of Wonder Bay. She’s definitely not regretting the fact that she got too focused in the studio and missed the last train that runs at 2. She could’ve called Zeke, his willingness to give her rides around the city was a standing offer, after all, but, she had it on good authority that he was currently getting high in his boyfriend’s basement apartment, so, unfortunately, that option was off the table.
She walks for a few streets, mentally kicking herself for remembering to bring her earphones and discman along with her but forgetting to bring any CDs. It only had one of Stevie’s Nirvana discs that she'd been begging her to listen to, and Nico got tired of it by hour three in the studio. Now properly pissed off, she stops at a convenience store on the edge of Velvet Vale, where it meets Carventi, buys as much shitty junk food as she has space for in her satchel, and then walks the 3 blocks east to the rowhouse.
She really doesn’t want to go to Fahy Tower and get lip for coming home late. She had planned to leave the studio at 11, get the train to Carventi, which let out a block away from the tower, and pass out in her actual bed. But, of course, she had to get caught up in her textiles project and lose all semblance of time. For how smart she was, she seemed to have been born without anything resembling an internal clock.
So, instead, she'll camp out there for a couple of hours, maybe take some fun shots of the place for her exploratory film final, and arrive at Fahy around 6 am. Eat Aunt Sav’s leftovers for breakfast and then pass out until noon. It was a foolproof plan. Never mind the fact that she’s been up since 4 am and is working on an hour and a half of sleep.
It’s simple. She slips the key out from behind the loose brick and goes through the overgrown garden to the back door. She never goes through the front door, because she knows that Gramps is still friends with old lady Koshek who is a terrible gossip and lives across the street. Mrs. Koshek also never seems to sleep and she wouldn’t put being up at 2:30 in the morning past the woman.
No one ever bothers this place. Maybe they did in the intervening years between her using it as a hideout and when her grandfather left it to rot, but no one’s been in it but her in the last two years. The rowhouse is like some sort of time capsule, forever stuck in 1958, The air smells stale, vaguely scented with mildew.
She reaches into the broken crevice that used to be a kitchen cabinet for the old metal flashlight hidden within, when she hears something; It’s not the sound of a shitbox backfiring two streets over or the pipes weeping in the walls. It sounds like footsteps. A floor, maybe two, up. Slow, careful, soft. Like they’re trying not to be noticed. Like the way Nico walks when she sneaks out of her dorm in Marble Hall.
Nico holds the heavy metal flashlight in her hand, prepared to bludgeon someone if it comes to that, and ascends the stairs.
If there’s one thing she’s gotten good at, it’s being quiet. Young people should be seen and not heard. It’s the sort of thing the elites and socialites and dick-ish social climbers that like to attend her Grandfather’s parties think. It’s absolutely total bullshit, but she’s not an idiot. She’s a Faraday, she knows how to act, especially to get what she wants. And what she wants right now, very specifically and only slightly desperately, is to not get stabbed while getting this squatter out.
There’s a hole in the middle of the second-floor landing that wasn’t there before. It had only been two weeks since she’d last been here. Seems like the old sodden supports had finally given way. She pauses, listening for footsteps, for the hundred other myriad sounds and signs of a person trying to stay hidden.
Then she hears it; humming. Its tune sounds like Kokomo by The Beach Boys and the absurdity of it nearly makes her laugh. It’s an active, tooth-and-nail struggle to keep it in. She climbs to the next floor, footfalls soundless despite the weight of her engineer boots. She flicks on the flashlight as soon as she reaches the 3rd-floor landing and when its beam shines into the cramped little room shoved up between the eaves, it catches on eyes the color of homeric seas - wine dark - it catches on a kid. Dressed in a torn sweater, patched-together jeans, and scuffed-beyond-belief oxfords. If it had been purposeful, Stevie would've called him grunge. He’s curled up in a corner with earphones on, a book held in a death grip in his hands. He looks like a deer in headlights.
The kid shoves the earphones from his head, trying to scuttle closer to the walls but being inhibited by the low pitch of the ceiling.
Nico raises her arms, the flashlight beams light cast to the ceiling, the universal signal to chill, that it’s fine. Even in the frankly awful lighting, she can still tell that the kid wants to run. She tries to think about the de-escalation techniques that one doctor lady she had to talk to several years ago told her about.
It’s absurd, this all feels absurd.
“I’m Nico, this place is mine.”
Unfortunately, despite the speech, diction, and etiquette coaches she had from ages 4-8, she always messes things like this up. Delicate things are always burned by her hands. The kid looks even more panicked, she can see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. Nico does the only thing she can think of doing, she plops herself down on the floor and begins getting things out of her satchel. Ignoring the kid, she pulls out a bag of Funions, a box of Reese’s Pieces, and a Redbull she bought at the convenience store. In her periphery, she can see that the kid has calmed down somewhat.
“You want some?” She asks without thinking
Without thinking. What a concept.
The kid shakes his head, in a way that tells Nico that he does but won’t accept it. Yet.
“So… how long have you been here?” Nico tries to say it in a way that doesn’t sound accusatory, she cringes a little when it comes out like that anyway. She can’t remember if it was one of her speech coaches or a physical therapist or maybe it was Grandmother, who told her that there’s a lilt to her voice, that makes her always sound accusatory.
“About a week,” the kid replied in a sort of weak and noncommittal way.
There’s silence for a moment before the kid starts speaking again, “If you don’t want me in your spot, I can leave.”
“Do you have anywhere to go? Any family?” Once again Nico regrets the question as soon as she asks it. The look on the kid's face is fearful, with the attempt he had made to school his features failing miserably. Instead, she uses the socializing techniques she never quite got down, and pivots.
“I’ve been coming here at least twice a month for the last two years, and no one’s been here until tonight. And I would know if anybody had been, I know how to check.”
Nico knows that saying that makes her sound weird, but it’s probably okay. So she just keeps talking. It’s like her throat is a broken faucet.
Proverbial word vomit.
“My school is loud, I live there most of the time, and it’s always noisy. The tower is like that too. My grandfather lets practically anyone stay there, old friends, kids trying to get their start in the acting business, on occasion people he meets and finds at least vaguely trustworthy. I come here when I need to think. And it’s finals week at my school and I really really need to be able to think. I wasn’t even planning on coming here tonight, it’s just that I stayed out too late and missed the last train.”
“You walked here?” The kid's voice croaks around the words.
“Yeah, I go all over the city. It’s easier that way. Not having to ask other people if I want to do things.”
Something about that relaxes him just a little bit, Nico can see it in the way his shoulders lay low, no longer around his ears. She hands him the bag of Funions as a peace offering and starts shoving Reese’s Pieces into her mouth like her life depends on it. Maybe it does, she only ate half her dinner in the dining hall and let Stevie have the rest. That was hours ago.
She stops making eye contact with the kid. She doesn’t like when other people keep eye contact when she’s eating, it makes her feel itchy, like when she had an allergic reaction to shellfish at that Italian restaurant when she was 5. Eye contact used to always make her feel like that when she was little, but she’s better now. Everyone always says that, that she’s better now.
The kid hesitates for a moment, and then takes the bag, ripping it open and eating a single ring at a time, methodically.
The only sound in the rowhouse is the humming of the pipes in the walls, and the crunching noise of the kid slowly chewing the Funions. Normally, it would make Nico’s head hurt, a sound like that, and it does, some part of her brain deeply displeased in a way she can never quite articulate, but she doesn’t let it show on her face, which means she’s okay.
After a while, she eats her fill and shoves the rest of the box into the pocket of her satchel, cracking open the Redbull while stifling a yawn.
Into the semi-silence, his throat clicking oddly when he doesn’t speak right, the boy says;
“My name’s Matt.”
•-•-•-•-•
Matt’s chest hurts and the feeling reminds him of tuning forks, of matching pitch and frequency. It reminds him of the feeling he got from the weird boy in the back of his history class, the one who only comes in like once a week. A tug, a feeling that something matches, or goes together, like a puzzle piece sliding into place. The girl keeps tilting her head and making a slightly funny face, one Matt can’t quite read, like she’s hearing or seeing something. He wants to ask her about it, but the words die on his tongue.
That’s been happening a lot lately. The whole not being able to speak thing. He values words, always has. But now, it’s like there’s cotton shoved down his throat.
Something about the pinched look on her face reminds him of Miss Evelyn, the lady who lived on the floor above him and his Mom at the Oriole Residential Hotel in Paper Mill. She was nice, she was younger than Mom but walked with a cane. She taught him how to play piano on the baby grand that she paid Ari Sobakov and 6 of his friends 50 bucks each to bring up through the defunct freight elevator.
It’s concern.
The realization hits him like a ton of bricks and makes his insides twist in a way that physically hurts. Like a stomachache. It should feel nice but mostly it hurts.
He’s glad that Nico doesn’t look his way, he’s glad that she stopped talking. Gradually, he works his way back to his corner, pulling out the mangled copy of 1984 he shoved under a loose floorboard when she came in.
He sees, out of the corner of his eye, her move towards the circular window that faces the street, where the light of the streetlamps breaks the haze. The flashlight is still on the floor, pointing out into the hall, turning it into an open, jagged throat. But he doesn’t feel scared, or nervous, as he hears the scratch of pen dragging across paper.
He lets everything slip into the background, book clutched in his hands like a lifeline, and begins to read;
“Does Big Brother exist?"
"Of course, he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party."
"Does he exist in the same way as I exist?"
"You do not exist.”
•-•-•-•-•
One thing Nico quickly finds out about Matt is that he hums the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ when he’s freaked out.
She has a sixth sense for when people are freaking out, even when, like Matt - like her, she doesn’t think - they pretend that they’re not. It makes her lower jaw hurt where the cartilage and sinew and muscle connect it to her skull. Like it did after she had to have her jaw wired shut. They thought it would fix her speech impediment and her jaw and her overbite. All she got out of it was a phantom pain in her gums from surgical bars that had been gone for longer than they were ever in, a series of speech therapists, and two chipped teeth. Her brain still associates the sight of wire cutters with the smell of antiseptic and vomit.
Nico is weird, all the kids at her old schools made sure to remind her of that tacit, brass tacks fact. But this kid is the unsettling kind of weird.
Sure, Nico’s family consists of actors and she goes to an art school and maladjusted is practically her middle name, more so than either of the ones her parents gave her. But this kid is, evidently, more maladjusted than her by a mile. Which, she knows very well, is saying something. It should probably make her nervous, but the only things that have ever made Nico feel nervous are her parents visiting, dinners with her grandmother, and public speaking.
The kid’s a spooky little literature nerd. If the beaten copy of 1984 he’s reading, crumbled in his hands like a child would a plush doll, is any indication. She’s not even trying to be mean or anything. She’s 5’2 and he’s a solid half a head shorter than her. He’s probably, at most, two years younger than her, she really can’t quite tell. She’s always been bad at guessing ages. Besides, the fact that he looks young and has the worst case of baby face she’s ever seen isn’t helping exactly matters. People have always said that Nico looks older than she is. It’s always made her vividly uncomfortable, the kid probably feels the same about people saying the opposite. So she doesn’t say anything at all.
Her brain has stopped doing that acting-without-thinking-thing, which makes her immeasurably happy, she doesn’t want to break this tentative… well, she’s not quite sure what to call it. But it feels nice, like when Stevie wraps an arm around her shoulders when they walk back to their dorm from the dining hall, like when Chuck laughs at her jokes, like when Zeke picks her up without question from parties she regrets sneaking into. Like Aunt Sav’s Wonton soup and her Gramps singing along to the Sinatra records he keeps in the den. It’s…
It’s pleasant.
Yes, pleasant is the perfect word for it.