The Finch Effect

The chemistry exam runs seventy-eight questions, and the room reeks of dry-erase fumes and the salt-sour funk of teenagers who studied and teenagers who didn't. Tyler Finch walks in after everyone else has blackened a full page of bubbles. One AirPod leaks Lana Del Rey, and "Born to Die" goes tinny against the scratch of pencils. Every head in the room pretends it didn't turn. Above the whiteboard, the second hand of the clock stutters and jumps ahead.

Mr. Harrison keeps his eyes on his desk. He has bitten his pen cap through to the ink.

Tyler takes the back row and drops into the chair like a boxer paid to lose before the first punch. He pulls out a clear Bic click pencil, and the lead shows through the barrel like a dark vein.

His hand moves down the Scantron. C, B, C, A. C, C, D. His eyes stay half-closed. His jaw hangs slack while the pencil ticks down the sheet like a seismograph needle. He takes a chemistry exam the way people initial a rental-car waiver.

Emma Watanabe sits one desk over: pre-med track, 4.0 unweighted, a deck of flash cards rubber-banded in her bag and worn soft at the corners, and a white pill Cade Holt sold her for forty dollars. He told her it was experimental and European and so new the FDA had never heard of it. It was Adderall he'd quartered with a razor blade in his bathroom. Her pencil stops. She watches Tyler fill in answers without reading the questions.

Emma is circling question fifteen when Tyler sets his pencil down. It rolls off the desk and hits the linoleum with a dry tak. He leaves it there.

Mr. Harrison spits the pen cap into his palm. "Time."

Emma's Apple Watch gives her eight more minutes. The clock above the whiteboard has already spent them.

Mr. Harrison points the wet pen cap at Tyler. "Finch. Stay after."

Tyler is on his feet and walking before Mr. Harrison closes his mouth. The pencils keep scratching, frantic insects under glass, and the voice catches him as his hand reaches the door. "You should really try harder." Tyler pulls the door shut on the last word.

The hallway tile is the color of old teeth, and somebody has kicked dents into half the lockers on the science wing. Tyler walks to his in long strides and spins 8-23-41 without looking.

"Hey."

He turns. Cassie Winslow. Doc Martens with the leather still stiff. A Misfits skull stretched across her chest.

"Cade and I broke up. Want to hang out after school?"

"Sure."

The lock is already open. His thumb keeps turning the dial anyway.

The new boots march her off down the hall.

Tyler opens the locker. His iPhone screen was clean this morning. Now hairline fractures bloom out of its center like frost on a windshield.

He's had three phones this year.

He stares at this one until the bell rings.

Cassie's bedroom smells like vanilla candles and unwashed laundry and the bergamot oil she dabs on her wrists. Painter's tape holds gig posters to every wall. Cassie folds herself cross-legged on the bed. Tyler gets the desk chair with the wheel that won't turn.

She talks until the window over her shoulder goes blue. She talks about Cade, about the way he held her phone above her head when she tried to leave, about the bruise on her forearm she hid under a bracelet until it went yellow. Tyler leans forward. He asks one question, and she answers it with the whole story. When the story runs out she presses her face into his neck and cries. He feels each sob against his throat before he hears it.

He holds still and keeps his palms flat on the Misfits shirt.

She pulls away, wipes her nose with the heel of her hand, and laughs once at herself.

"Sorry."

"Don't be."

She kisses him. Vanilla chapstick and salt from the crying. Her fingers are cold on the back of his neck.

When he leaves, the porch light pops. The bulb flares white and dies. Tyler's hand goes to the phone in his pocket, and the cracked screen presses into his palm through the denim. Cassie calls after him from the doorway. He waves without turning around.

The rain catches him before the end of Cassie's street. It comes down hard enough to turn the air to static, and the buildings flatten into cutouts propped against the sky.

The taste of chapstick is still on Tyler's lower lip as he walks home. Water gets into his collar and runs down his back.

Fifth and Madison is four lanes and no crosswalk. Somebody keeps wiring flowers to the lamppost on the corner, under the SPEED LIMIT 35 sign, and every fresh bunch goes on over the brown remains of the last. Every bouquet is somebody who believed the sign. Tyler usually goes around.

A girl waits on the corner.

Yellow umbrella. It's so bright against the rain it looks hand-tinted. Blonde hair hangs wet past its edge and sticks to her neck, and her white Converse have soaked through.

She was here this morning, too. Tyler crossed the street to get around this corner on his way to school, and she stood here with the umbrella open under a dry sky.

One foot taps the sidewalk, tap tap tap, tap . . . tap . . . tap, tap tap tap, and starts over.

A black BMW cuts past, and a puddle detonates against her shins. She doesn't flinch.

A gray 2019 Camry comes down the westbound lane too fast for that sign, and water sheets off both sides of it.

The girl steps off the curb, and the yellow umbrella tilts forward with her.

Tyler's hands close, and his fingernails go into his palms until they bleed. The only word in his head is stop.

Tyler tries harder.

He reaches into the gap between one second and the next, and he squeezes.

The air shatters. A sound like a wet finger on a wineglass climbs until it breaks, and the street goes as quiet as a photograph. The rain stops in the air. Every drop hangs where it was. The Camry hangs with them, and the water it threw stands up off the road in two glass wings. Through the windshield Tyler can see the driver. The man is mid-forties. His thumb has stopped halfway across the phone propped on the wheel, and his wedding band sits just under it. Tyler smells ozone. The tips of his hair curl and singe, and the middle of his chest drains like a tub.

He walks to her through the hanging rain, and it breaks on his face as he goes. He takes her by the shoulders from behind and pulls.

The rain lets go and falls. The girl goes over backward onto the sidewalk. The Camry passes through the space where she stood, and its side mirror cuts the air close enough to tug at Tyler's jacket. Engine heat rolls over him. The Camry swerves right, and its tires lose the road.

CRUNCH.

The Camry folds around the lamppost with the dead flowers. The hood buckles. Steam bursts from the grille, and glass sprays across the lanes like a dropped tray of ice.

Rain on metal, rain on glass. Rain on the memorial flowers that lie all over the road in brown petals and green wire.

The horn sounds one long note until the driver lifts his forehead off the wheel. He's still holding the phone.

"Did you just—"

The girl lies on her back on the sidewalk and looks up at him. Her eyes are the green of antifreeze.

"I... yeah."

"Holy shit. You saved my life."

Tyler's knees fold. He catches himself on a blue mailbox. The metal is cold and beaded with rain. The street goes double, and the two copies slide apart.

"Hey. You okay?" She gets up and steps closer. "You look—"

"I have to go."

"What? You just—"

"Stay off the road."

He runs, and his Nikes throw water up the backs of his jeans. Halfway down the block his jaw locks and his teeth go through his tongue, and his mouth is all blood and rain, and a hymn his dead grandmother used to sing, "In the Sweet By and By," starts up out of the rain, and the house that burned down when he was two burns again in his nose, and the plastic melts, and the heat reaches his face from rooms away.

When it stops, he's on his knees, and blood is dripping off his chin onto the sidewalk.

A crow sits on a fence post close enough to touch. Its black eye holds Tyler's reflection: a bloody mouth, singed hair, a boy on all fours.

Tyler spits. He pushes himself upright and walks home.

His mother sits at the kitchen table with a glass of white wine and her laptop open to Zillow, where she scrolls through houses they can't afford. Beside her glass, the Honda fob shares a ring with the blackened, warped key to the house that burned down when Tyler was two.

She keeps scrolling. "Dinner's in the microwave."

Tyler goes to his room and locks the door. He lies on his bed with his shoes on while the wet soles soak the comforter, and he looks at the nail marks in his palms until the blood in them goes dark.

In the morning his iPhone lies dead on the desk. The frost on the screen has spread overnight until the glass is white with it. His MacBook seizes on boot. Symbols crawl across the screen like ants on spilled Coke, and then it goes black and stays black.

His hands won't lie flat on the desk. The tremor runs through them in small jolts, and his fingers drum the wood like a glass walking off the edge of a speaker. His tongue has swollen where he bit it, and his toothpaste tastes like a nosebleed.

Second period, his pen ruptures and blue ink goes over his hands, his shirt, and his cheek. Third period, his chair collapses. All four legs buckle inward at once. Tyler hits the floor and the class laughs.

He climbs to the third-floor bathroom nobody uses, because the hot water quit last winter and the soap dispenser has been empty since September. He locks himself in the last stall and breathes the way his grandmother taught him. She used to sit on her back porch in Decatur the summer he was eleven, with a menthol going and her eyes on the tree line, and talk him through it. "In through the nose. Hold it. Out through the mouth." Then she'd look at him. "Tyler, you carry yourself like glass. One of these days you're gonna believe it."

She died before school started again. The morphine turned her eyes to milk glass, and the breathing trick stayed behind when everything else went with her.

Somebody kicks over the trash can by the door.

"Finch."

Tyler steps out of the stall. Cade Holt's shoulders touch both sides of the doorframe. His name is stitched in gold thread across the breast of a varsity jacket in real leather, and his knuckles are scraped raw. On the wall the soap dispenser cracks down the middle, and a flake of dried pink soap drops into the sink. It's been empty since September. It breaks anyway.

Four boys crowd in behind him, and the five of them make one shape with ten fists.

"What do you want, Holt?"

"Heard you were at Cassie's yesterday."

Cade blinks too fast. His fists close.

"We hung out."

"Hung out." Cade rolls the words around his mouth like a marble. "That what we're calling it?"

Tyler's hands stay at his sides. His fingers won't close all the way.

Whump. Cade's fist sinks into the soft place under Tyler's ribs. Tyler's lungs lock. He folds, and his cheek hits the cold tile. Blood runs into his mouth, and his swollen tongue goes to the new split inside his lower lip.

The boys circle him. A boot drives into his left side, low, and the bottom rib gives. Another boot lands behind his ear, and the room turns into the snow on a TV between channels. When he tries to breathe, each breath stops halfway down. His blood spreads thin along the grout lines.

"Get off him."

The voice from the doorway is flat. Yellow umbrella, collapsed, held by the handle like a bat.

Cade straightens and wipes his knuckles on his thigh. "Who the—"

"Get out."

The mirror above the sinks splits from corner to corner. Every tap in the room opens at once, and water hammers into the basins and spills onto the floor. The light fixture by the stalls bursts and drops glass on the boys' shoulders.

They go. Cade doesn't look back, and his shoulders ride up around his ears.

She kneels beside Tyler, and the water on the floor soaks her jeans dark at the knees. The taps run on.

Tyler tries to get her face to hold still. It keeps sliding left and coming back.

"Hold still."

The paper towel dispenser is empty too. She tears a wad of toilet paper off the roll in the stall, holds it under the cold tap, and presses it to the cut behind his ear. Her fingers are colder than the water. When they touch his cheek, his ribs shift on their own, and his next breath goes all the way down.

Tyler can talk now. "I didn't call anyone."

"I know."

"No one saw me come up here."

"I know."

She folds the wad once. His blood has soaked through to her fingers.

"So how are you here?"

"You leave a trail. The fountain on the second floor is spraying the ceiling. The exit sign on the stairs is in pieces." She presses the paper back against his head. "How did you stop that car?"

Tyler grabs her wrist. She doesn't pull away.

"You tapped SOS with your foot on that sidewalk. Then you stepped in front of that car."

Her hand stops with the paper against his skin and holds it there longer than the cut needs.

"You don't know what I did."

"Then tell me what I saw."

She pulls the paper away and studies the blood on it. Folds it again. Presses it back.

"My name is Nell."

"Tyler."

"I know. You sit by the window in Spanish."

Tyler rolls onto his side, and his ribs cinch like a hot cable around his middle.

"You need a hospital."

"I need to know what you are."

Nell goes still.

"You were on that corner yesterday morning too."

She looks at his ribs, at the blue ink still on his cheek, at his hands with the knuckles scraped from the tile.

"You should have let the car hit me."

Tyler keeps his grip on her wrist.

"Not here."

Room 314 at St. Mary's looks out on the parking lot.

The IV needle sits in the crook of his left elbow, and the bruise around it has already spread violet down his arm. A monitor draws his heartbeat in green peaks. Out in the lot, late afternoon has gone the color of wet cement, and the rain keeps coming.

Two cracked ribs, one of them the floating one, and a bruised kidney. Every breath stops short on the left side, and the gown chafes his chest.

His mother came and sat in the chair and scrolled on her phone until the battery died. She left him a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos she had already eaten half of.

Nell waits in the hallway. Through the glass panel in his door Tyler can see her in a plastic chair. She has pulled her knees up and set her chin on her arms.

She comes in when the shift changes. She closes the door, brushes orange dust off the arm of his mother's chair, and takes the seat. In the little sink in the corner, the faucet drips, tink, tink, tink, and waits, and drips again.

Her fingers tap her kneecap, quick, slow, quick, and make no sound.

"When I touched your face in that bathroom, your ribs moved."

Tyler waits.

"The bone shifted back."

She turns her palms up. A white disc of scar tissue the size of a dime covers the pad of her right thumb.

"My mother was sick. In Dayton." She folds her hands. "She got better."

"And then?"

"And then everything I touched broke. The stair rail at my mother's came off the wall with me holding it." She hooks a finger in her collar and pulls it aside. A raised scar runs the length of her collarbone. "Fourteen stitches. The bracket got my thumb. My car wouldn't start the next morning. Then it started, and the steering pulled left into oncoming, and I had to ride the median for a quarter mile." She stops. Her left thumb goes to the scar on her right and presses until it blanches. "So I went flat. Same route. Same speed. I stopped wanting anything."

Rain hits the glass in a gust and she flinches. It's the first move Tyler has seen her body make without permission.

"And then I stood on that corner."

The IV drips.

"You stepped off on purpose."

She looks at him. "And then you showed up."

"Can it be stopped?"

"I don't know."

"What do you know?"

She gets up and twists the faucet handle, and it comes off in her hand. The drip goes on. She sets the handle on the edge of the sink, comes back to the chair, settles her hands in her lap, and looks at them.

"I know that when I touched your face, your lungs filled. And I know I didn't tell them to."

A crow lands on the windowsill. It taps its beak on the glass, tap tap tap, tap . . . tap . . . tap, tap tap tap, and starts over.

Nell's hands close in her lap.

"That crow. There was one on my mother's porch rail the whole time she was getting better."

The crow shifts its feet on the sill and taps again.

Tyler lifts his hand, and the IV line pulls taut. "If I touch you."

"I don't know what happens."

"Good."

"You don't even know me."

"You sat in that hallway for two hours."

The lamp over the bed flickers.

"You're going to make it worse."

"I know."

She takes his hand. Her fingers lace through his. Her skin is cold and then warm, and the change crosses in one heartbeat, and he can feel her calluses and the pressure of her grip, and her pulse knocks steady and hard against his knuckles.

The lamp goes out.

The lamp comes back on.

The IV bag has drained, and what's left in the line has turned the color of rust. The bruise at the needle has gone. The cracks in his ribs knit shut, and Tyler breathes in to the bottom of his lungs and lets it out easy.

Nell's free hand goes to her collarbone. "The scar. It's warm."

Outside, the crow opens its wings against the wind and keeps its place on the sill. Down in the parking lot a car alarm starts, and another answers it, and then the whole lot is screaming.

Nell's hand tightens in his.

The crow folds its wings and turns its black eye toward the lot. The alarms spread to the next block, and to the block after that, and keep spreading. The lamp over the bed dims and holds there.

Nell's thumb taps out quick, slow, quick on the back of his hand. Past the parking lot the streetlights along Fifth go out in order, and the dark comes up the street toward St. Mary's one pole at a time.

You’ve read one. Forty-one more wait in Dream City and Other Stories, on my e-store and on Amazon.