It Can Always Get Worse Than This

[Winter Rowley]

Winter Rowley sat in the driver’s seat of his trusty black Honda Accord and tried to remember when he’d bought the battery inside of it. Three years? No—it had been at least four. He’d been crashing in that apartment in uptown Burlington, and he’d had to pawn everything valuable he’d owned—and some valuables that other people had owned—to afford it. That had been in 2010, which made it at least five years, which meant that any warranty the battery might have had was certainly expired by now.

He turned his key in the ignition again, the seventh time in five minutes, and was rewarded with a feeble chuh-chuh-chuh from under the hood. Again.

“Shit.”

He contorted in the seat so that he could fit his hands into the pockets of his worn black jeans. There was nothing but empty pocket fabric where his phone ought to have been; he remembered, now, what a hurry he’d been in when he’d left the apartment.

He didn’t say anything. All there was to say was shit, and that would be redundant.

He stepped out into the parking lot of the LGBT center, which was empty of other vehicles. He slammed his car door with more force than necessary, and found that it didn’t make him feel any better. A few moments later, he was back inside the building he’d just spent four hours volunteering in, peeking into every dimly-lit room along the hallway for Erik, who had been the only one still there when he’d left. Winter found him in the main lobby, casting his long, thin shadow against the tile while he worked.

He was relieved despite himself.

“Hey,” he said. His voice sounded abnormally loud in the quiet. “My car battery died. Can I use one of the office phones or something?”

[Erik Stewart]

Erik looked up. He’d seen Winter around quite a lot. Normally this would not have been ideal, but it just so happened that he and Winter took the natural awkwardness their relationship promised in stride. At first Erik didn’t say anything at all; he shrugged and managed to gesture with the point of one bony shoulder towards the office, now dark and vacant.

He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the center’s halls echoed now that there were no other sounds to preoccupy them with. Erik heard enough to know that Winter was having car trouble. There wasn’t much Erik knew about, but cars were one of them: he’d grown up in the bowels of the deep south, after all, where the inner workings of guns and vehicles were considered common knowledge. He hovered just behind the doorway to the office, fussing with his jacket while he waited for Winter to finish up his phonecall.

“I could take a look at it if you want,” he told him, soon as he’d hung up. “There’s more than one reason a battery’ll go out.”

Besides, he needed a good break, even if he couldn’t get anything done, exactly. You could seldom patch up an engine without an entire workshop of tools.

[Winter Rowley]

Winter was satisfied enough with the shrug; even without past experiences considered, the two of them didn’t get much talking done. He slipped into the office and turned on the lamp to dial by. He had a brief conversation with Chris—most of his words were variants of fuck—and she promised to look up the number for the nearest towing service. He turned off the light, and everything was quiet again….

It was Erik who broke the silence. Winter gave him a measured look and replied with a nod and a shrug of his own. He was pretty sure the battery was shot, but whatever—even if it was, he preferred the company.

“It’s like five years old,” he said. “I noticed last week that my dome light was getting dim, or whatever, and I meant to check it and I forgot.”

Whatever the rambling attempt at conversation was, it was not a dismissal. He fished a mostly-empty packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and secured one between his lips so that he could light it the second they got outside.

“You been okay?” he asked, muffled.

[Erik Stewart]

“Yeah, okay,” he responded.

Mostly he wanted to go because he was bored. He was pretty much done with everything, and he’d taken to sweeping up whenever someone passed by (glancing at his phone when he wasn’t) in the hopes of looking busy. Despite the heat outside, the center was over-air conditioned and his bony shoulders were growing cold. His fingers had long since turned to ice and no amount of rubbing them or stuffing them into his pockets could change that - only a dip outside in the humidity. Once he was outside he’d let Winter lead the way, but for now he headed towards the double doors.

“Oh. It’s probably just a worn-out battery. It might be the alternator, or the fan belt, ‘r somethin’, but I think you might ‘uh noticed it before,” he said. “Anythin’ like that and you’d find yourself on the side of the road.”

Erik didn’t have a license. He knew how to drive just fine, knew how to look after them, too, probably better than most, but he still didn’t have a license. He knew he should go get one, but like most things, it’d fallen on the wayside. It just seemed like a lot of money and time he didn’t have. Not to mention a lot of the criteria involved a guardian figure of some sort, which he also lacked.

Winter’s car wasn’t too impressive. He put a hand on the hood; it wasn’t hot. “So you haven’t been drivin’ it, right?” which of course he hadn’t, and before he even answered Erik was lifting up the hood.

[Winter Rowley]

Winter nodded again, and didn’t ask any more questions on the way outside. He paused on the steps to light his cigarette, and then he led the way down the steps and into the parking lot, leaving a thin ribbon of smoke in his wake.

The night air was heavy, and the moon and stars were hidden behind a mottled blue-and-gray blanket of cloud. He could smell the summer even through his cigarette smoke, and for a while, the only sound was the crunch of their footsteps on the asphalt. He offered more absent nodding at Erik’s assessment of what was, or might have been, ailing his car.

It was a good car, truly, but it had been manufactured fifteen years ago, and you could see it in the details. The black paint was chipping around the hood and sides. The tires were probably a little more worn than they ought to have been. All things considered, Winter felt that it was commendable that it still managed to haul him from place to place.

“Nah,” he answered, even though Erik had already propped up the hood. He took a long drag from his cigarette. “It needs an oil change, too, but I went at the end of the month and they were out of the cheap kind. Apparently everyone in Pilot Ridge waited until inspection time.”

He studied the inner workings of his car—pipes and holes and bright-colored plastic, none of which meant much of anything to him—and then he studied Erik furtively from behind.

“Are you graduating this year?” he asked. He was just a little older than Winter’s younger sister, who had been pining for summer break for weeks.

[Erik Stewart]

Erik peered down at the car’s exposed guts: twisted metal, plugs and tubes, all doused in a pungent grease. “Seems alright,” he mentioned, before he reached down to put his hands in its metal viscera, searching for that one weak link. A flashlight would’ve been nice, but the streetlamp would have to do. That, and some plain old trial and error. “I can do that for free. Puttin’ it in, I mean. You get the oil.” Nothing at the fan belt. “If you got a spare battery, I can put that in, too. Don’t s’pose you got another car.”

There was the jump start option, but that took a wire and a whole new vehicle. Seemed an impossible task. It might’ve stood a chance if it weren’t so late, and most people had long since gone.

No way to test an alternator; one couldn’t tell if it were functional just by looking, and most tests were only done at service stations. Besides, like he’d said, it was something Winter would’ve noticed by now. A dead alternator meant an emergency pull-over; it wasn’t something that happened just sitting around in a parking lot. Not very often, anyway.

Erik laughed - more like snorted, or something in between - and shrugged his shoulders. “Nah, I ain’t graduated,” he said. “But I did drop out.”

He looked over his shoulder. He didn’t think Winter would have an issue with it, but he’d been surprised before. Seemed like he was the only person he knew who’d ever dropped out from that old place, or even planned to. “It wasn’t worth it, y’know. Wasn’t gettin’ anywhere.”

Erik looked back at the car. “I never was one for academics.”

[Winter Rowley]

Winter watched with mild interest as Erik’s hand disappeared into the greasy depths of his car. He seemed to know what he was doing; of course, even if he’d been wiggling his hand around for no reason and making shit up, Winter wouldn’t have known or cared.

“I left all my spare car parts in my other pants,” he said dryly, forcing a torrent of smoke through his nostrils. “With my fucking cell phone. Thanks, though. I appreciate you looking—I’ll take you up on the oil change, sometime.”

Winter looked at his car again; it looked pitiful with its hood up, in a weird, anthropomorphic Magic School Bus sort of way. If he had any immediate reaction to Erik’s news, it didn’t show on his face. Their eyes met when the other boy looked over his shoulder, and Winter raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch and nodded in acknowledgment.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wasn’t either. Probably wasn’t worth the time I spent trying to salvage it.”

Then, he shrugged.

“I’ve never known anybody in the real world to care much. You have a lot of common sense.”

He was still holding his cigarette pack. There was one left; he offered it to Erik, like a consolation prize.

[Erik Stewart]

He accepted the cigarette. Erik had his own zippo, lighting it up with a nod to Winter as thanks. “This shit’s gonna kill me one day,” he acknowledged, but didn’t stop, puffing at it contentedly.

Erik rubbed his hands. There were black grease marks on his pale skin, and now on the white length of his cigarette. He was careful not to touch his face. His clothes were a different story; he wiped his palms over his jeans. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Nearly everyone I know looked at me funny when I said I was droppin’ out. An’ y’know what? Not a one of ‘em cared what I was doin’ while I was failin’. Never said a damn thing. As soon as I say I’m droppin’ out then it’s suddenly a problem.”

He sighed, reaching up to close the hood. It shut with a bang. Not on purpose, of course, but there wasn’t a way to shut a car hood gently.

“Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “Just let me know when you want the oil changed, or anythin’.”