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Zaxx laughed. “Eat shit. Drag your fat ass down here and get it yourself.”
~oOo~
An hour later, the crew sat together in what would become a back yard bumped up against a golf course. Perched on pallets of concrete block or sprawled on sacks of cement, they ate lunch.
Some kind of food truck came by at lunchtime three days of the week: tacos on Tuesdays, of course, Korean barbeque on Wednesdays, and pizza on Thursdays. On Mondays and Fridays, the crew fended for itself. About half the time, somebody would offer to do a fast-food run and their lunch boxes sat unopened, but that hadn’t happened today.
Zaxx didn’t mind; he got tired of the processed grease day after day—not that he’d ever turn down tacos, barbeque, or pizza, but McDonald’s or Wendy’s or Sonic could take a rest for sure. He was no crazy crunchy health nut, but he was not a fan of those greasy sploots fast-food joints called burgers.
As a kid, he’d had a weird relationship with food—or maybe it was better to say food had a weird relationship with him. His folks had been in eleventh grade when he’d been born, and they’d been entirely clueless about almost everything having to do with being human, let alone raising one. Neither Mom nor Pop had parents or siblings worth a shit, nobody to help them with the squalling bundle the hospital sent them home with, so they’d dropped out, got their shitty parents to sign off on permission to get married at sixteen, moved into a broken-down old Airstream on the property of a farmer who’d hired Pop as a hand, and then ... done some kind of good-enough job with him that he’d stayed alive.
They were both big fans of weed, and most of their money went to that. When they were high, they pretty much forgot they were parents. Foodwise, Zaxx had started out life in a feast-or-famine situation, often going days with nothing he couldn’t scrounge up himself—not much until he figured out how to reach the shelves or use the stove—and then being fed Happy Meals twice a day for a couple of weeks straight through.
When he’d hit school age, his kindergarten teacher had sussed out the trouble. Rather than report his parents to the authorities and land him in foster care, she’d helped them do paperwork for free school breakfast and lunch. She’d also kept clothes, soap, toothpaste and stuff like that in her classroom and gave him a time and place to use them. Mrs. Mayer had saved him before he’d fully understood he needed saving.
Zaxx didn’t hold all that against his parents anymore. Not much, at any rate. He’d known of far worse situations than their benign neglect. They’d eventually grown up enough to realize parenting was a job and to try to do it, and when they tried they did okay. Zelda, his baby sister, had come along eight years after him, and with her, Mom and Pop started really trying to keep everybody as healthy and whole as possible in their continuing poverty and struggle. They’d never been great parents, and they’d missed a lot of nuance about their kids’ needs, but they’d eventually managed food, shelter, and clothes well enough.
Besides, they were the opposite of authoritarian. Neither Zaxx nor Zelda had ever been struck, or shouted at, or even put on time out. The one thing Mom and Pop consistently were was gentle.
He was thirty now, and Zelda was twenty-two. Their folks were in their mid-forties. They were close enough in age to be friends, and they were decent friends to have. Especially if you liked to party; that, they’d never grown out of. Zelda still had big issues with them, but as far as Zaxx was concerned, the bad shit was (mostly) behind them.
Still, McDonald’s hamburgers came with a side of nasty memories, so he avoided the place when he could.
As he lifted the sandwich he’d made that morning—salami, provolone, tomato, pepperoncini, aioli, and a drizzle of balsamic on ciabatta—from his kit and started to unwrap it, his phone lit up beside him on his cinderblock perch. A photo of Zelda sticking her tongue out and flipping him off filled the screen; she was calling.
Like all other normal people, unless they were physically in the same space, Zelda and Zaxx communicated by text—except in emergencies.
The thing about having the parents they had: even when they were trying their best, Mom and Pop had floundered. All they’d wanted was their kids to be happy and healthy—like all parents who loved their kids, right? But that whole ‘opposite of authoritarian’ thing? It meant no structure, no rules, no boundaries. Just vibes.
Zaxx, who’d eventually, as an adult, been diagnosed with ADHD, had felt the drowning need for structure on his own and, with the help of Mrs. Mayer and other good teachers, had figured some rules out for himself that he could consistently follow. He held to most of them to this day. Zelda, on the other hand, hated all rules and structure. Zaxx suspected that she, too, had ADHD, probably with PDA: Persistent Demand Avoidance, meaning she was literally hardwired to react against any demand made of her. But she was extremely not interested in a diagnosis.
When her hair-on-fire approach to life got her into scrapes, she had Zaxx to pull her back into the safe zone and keep her there for a while. He’d done as much parenting as their mom and dad combined. Probably more. For sure, Zelda considered him the parent that mattered; she didn’t even bother to call their folks when she had any kind of need.
Zaxx set his wrapped sandwich back in his kit and answered his phone. “Hey, Peach. You okay?”
“Depends on your definition of okay.”
Closing his eyes and taking a breath, Zaxx replied, “I’m on the job here, sis. Just be straight and tell me what you need.”
“Um ... maybe bail money?”
He laughed. That was a classic Zelda joke, riffing on her misspent youth. When Zaxx was twenty, he’d moved out of the family trailer (by then they’d upgraded from the Airstream to a single-wide) and started life as an adult. Zelda had been twelve and old enough to at least know how to get her needs met, and he’d moved less than ten miles away, but still his sister had gone a little haywire without his steady oversight.
She’d been busted several times in her teens, for doing stupid teen shit—shoplifting, vandalism, breaking into places she shouldn’t be just for the thrill—but she’d never done more than a couple of days in lockup. It was all misdemeanor nonsense she’d gotten fines and community service for. Zaxx had made sure she completed her hours, and he’d paid all her fines in exchange for a promise to graduate high school, apply to college, and attend if she got in.
She’d been accepted at Missouri State, in Springfield. Her first few semesters there had been rough, she skipped too many classes and got too many Ds, some Cs, and a couple Fs, but he kept making her register for the next one, leaning on that promise, barely feeling guilty about using guilt and obligation to keep her more or less on track.
Then she’d discovered flat-track roller derby, and that structured chaos had settled her a lot. She was fully locked in with her classes now and might actually graduate, once she figured out a major she’d stick with. As Zaxx was footing the bill, he’d be glad of that day for more reasons than pride. As it was, she was on a six-year plan.
She’d better not have fucked all that up by returning to her high school convict ways.
“Don’t even joke about that shit,” he said.
“I’m serious, Zaxx. This is my one phone call. They’re about to take my phone away.”
Jesus fuck. The first question in his head was What did you do? but he knew better than to have that discussion while she was in a police station, even with her own phone. So all he said was “Fuck, Peach.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
