Nothing to See Here (6)

Everything was so easy, and nobody cared, and I lost interest. I started working after school, helping my mom clean houses. I started hanging out with idiot boys and girls who had access to weed and pills, and I’d stay with them as long as they didn’t expect anything from me. Then, when they did expect things, I just bought weed myself and smoked joints on the back porch of my house all alone, feeling the world flatten out. I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed. And that was my life.



As we neared the estate, all I could see were green pastures and what felt like miles and miles of white fence. I couldn’t understand what the fence was there for, because it wouldn’t keep anything in or out. It was purely ornamental, and then, like, duh, I realized that if you had this much money, you could make gestures that were purely ornamental. I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me. But I was still wild when I needed to be. I’d get smarter. Whatever Madison had, I’d get it easily.

The fucking driveway felt like it was a mile long, and it looked like it would lead you straight to the gates of heaven, that’s how perfectly maintained it was. It could have ended at a run-down pizza joint with bars on the windows and you’d still be so thrilled.

“Almost there,” Carl said.

“What’s the mail situation like?” I said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Do they have to walk all the way to the end of this driveway just to get the mail? Or do they have, like, a golf cart? Or does someone get it for them?” I didn’t ask if he was the one who got the mail for them, but I feel like maybe he knew that I was wondering.

“Well, the postman just brings it to the door,” he said.

“Oh, okay,” I said. I thought about Madison sitting on her porch, drinking sweet tea and waiting patiently while the postman crept up the driveway, bearing a letter from me about my ideas for a tattoo on my ankle.

I had often fantasized about Madison’s home. It seemed weird to ask her for a photo of the mansion, like, Hey, I could live without another photo of your teddy bear son but please send me pictures of every single one of the bathrooms in your mansion. When she sent photos, I could make out parts of the house, expensive and well maintained. Maybe if I’d cut them into pieces and reassembled them, I could have seen the whole mansion. Sometimes it was simpler to just believe that Madison lived in the White House. That made sense to me at the time. Madison lived in the fucking White House.

Now, as we pulled up to the estate, I felt this diamond form in my throat, and I almost grabbed Carl’s hand for support. The house was three stories, maybe more. I couldn’t crane my neck enough to see the top of it; for all I knew at that moment, it went all the way up to space. It was blindingly white, not one trace of mold or dirt, a house that you build in your dreams. There was a huge porch that seemed to wrap around the entire structure; it must have been a mile if you walked it. I had been prepared for wealth, but clearly my life had left me ill prepared for what wealth could be. And was Madison’s husband even really all that rich? He hadn’t invented computers or owned a fast-food empire. And yet his level of wealth had given him this house. It had given him Madison, who suddenly appeared in the front doorway, and she was waving, so beautiful that I knew I’d take her over the house every single time I had a choice.

Carl pulled the car around the fountain in the middle of the driveway and stopped right at the front door of the house. While the car idled, he swiftly ducked out of his seat and came around to open my door. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t make my legs work. Madison suddenly walked down the stairs and held out her arms for an embrace. But I couldn’t meet her. I felt like if I moved one muscle, the whole thing would evaporate and I would wake up back on my futon, the A/C broken again. Carl finally had to haul me up, rag-dolling me as if I were a gift for Madison’s birthday, and then I fell into her arms. She was so tall, so strong, that she held me until I smelled the scent of her, until I remembered her, the two of us in bed in that dorm room, and everything was tangible again. It was real. I straightened up, and there I was, standing there. It was the first time in almost fifteen years that I’d seen Madison, but she looked the same. She’d just gotten a little tanner and filled out in a way that suggested adulthood. She didn’t look like a robot. She didn’t look soulless.

“You look so beautiful,” she said, and I believed her.

“Well, you look like a supermodel,” I replied.

“I wish I were a supermodel,” she said. “I wish I had a calendar that was nothing but me.” And like that, it was the two of us again, me being weird and her revealing that, by god, she was weird, too.

Carl checked his watch, did this little bow, and then hopped back in the car and drove away. We could have spent the rest of the day watching him drive away. I kind of wanted to. I kept waiting for his car to turn into some dumb gourd and him to turn into a mouse. I waited for magic, and I didn’t think I would be disappointed.

“It’s so hot out here,” she said. “Come inside.”

“This is your house?” I asked.

Madison smiled. “It’s one of them,” she said, and her nose wrinkled and her eyes got all twinkly. She couldn’t talk like this with her husband, none of the other women who lived in luxury. This was good. She couldn’t believe her good fortune, either.