Author's Note: This could be seen as a companion piece to my story "Keep The Change", but it would make that story out of date since Tristan didn't exist when I wrote that piece. But the situations in both this piece and that one are identical.
I don't own Degrassi.
I.
One of the front door hinges had collapsed a few weeks ago. Instead of getting it fixed, his mom and brothers just either went out the kitchen side door or, if they absolutely had to use the front, lifted the door back up straight before opening it and stepping through, then holding it firmly in place when they shut the deadbolt. It kept the door up but still slightly askew, like something was beating at it against the inside and trying to knock it right out of the doorway.
There were times when Owen wished that locking doors worked both ways. You could lock doors from the inside to keep people from intruding, but for every door that opened to the world, it also had a lock that worked from the outside as well. Unlike a bedroom or bathroom lock, the one for the outside doors could go both ways. All you needed was the right key.
It could be useful, on days when Owen wished he could lock certain things in the house and not have to worry about them getting into his space. You could lock stupid family crap or whatever personal hissy fits you didn't want to deal with inside the walls of your house and not have to carry it with you all day long. You could be free from it, at least for a few hours.
That would probably defeat the purpose of a front door, though.
There was the squeak of the door and the heaving creak of lifting it up. He felt a cool hand touch the back of his neck, then ruffle his hair. He glanced up at his mother, dressed in her scrubs and already looking tired.
"Remember to turn the alarm on before you guys leave," she said to him.
"Wouldn't want someone to break in and steal the dryer," Owen replied. "That'd be a real tragedy."
His mother rolled her eyes. "Better that than the washer."
He watched her walk maneuver herself around the car door in that narrow, walled-in space that made it impossible to open the door all the way. There was nowhere else to put the car, though. The garage was still filled with unpacked boxes and things they didn't have room for anymore, like the exercise bike and broken skis and the bookcase from the old house. Since there was no space for them here, they just sat in the garage.
Most of what was too big to fit into the house belonged to his father, anyway. He'd left it behind after moving out, either forgetting to come back for it or just deciding it wasn't worth coming back for. Either way, what his father hadn't packed into the U-Haul, his mother had ended up dragging from the old house to the new one.
"What are we going to do with all of this?" She'd stood in the garage on the hottest afternoon of that August, facing her three sons and these boxes that created mountains that looked like they would topple at the slightest bump. All four of them had red faces and sunburnt necks, and none of them said a word. Even Tristan held off the complaining and commentary that normally came with anything household related, silenced by either the heat or the sheer effort of scattering their remains across this new house.
Noah, who was wearing an old workout shirt of Owen's that had dark yellow stains on the neckline and armpits, stood on top of a Rubbermaid marked XMAS ORNIMENTS in Tristan's loopy handwriting. "Throw them out," he offered.
Tristan rolled his eyes. "Great idea, genius. Except, oh wait, garbage men don't just throw entire exercise bikes and futons into the back of the truck."
"Do they?" his mother asked. She looked at Owen when she asked the question. She needed answers from someone these days.
Owen shrugged. "I don't know. We could try. If they leave them on the curb, then I guess we put an ad in the paper or something. Or see if Goodwill will take them. I don't know."
She nodded, hands on her hips, biting her lips and staring at the dirty garage floor. There weren't a lot of questions that offered absolutes these days.
"They'll take 'em, Ma," he told her. Sure. The garbage men would take the bike, the shelf, the ratty futon; the clock radio, the broken skis, the boogie boards from seaside summers when their dad always found something else to do other than teach the boys how to ride them.
She smiled. Everyone loved it when things were simple.
His mother honked her horn and waved at him before driving off; her window was rolled down and she yelled something before she pulled away, but he couldn't hear her from the stoop, so he just nodded and threw up his hand to acknowledge he'd heard her, and she left without any other explanation.
There was the clatter and heave of the door behind him, and footsteps. Owen wished again that he could lock the door from the front; keep people in instead of out.
"What did Mom say?" Tristan asked.
Owen shrugged one shoulder, staring at the street. "She said don't start talking about West Side Story with Dad or else she'll take away your computer for a week."
"Like I'll have anything better to do tonight," Tristan complained. "Tori and I were supposed to hang out at her house and do our latest vlog."
"Wow," Owen replied. "Wouldn't want to disappoint your fans."
"Of course not!" Tristan exclaimed, either totally missing the sarcasm or choosing to ignore it. Owen figured it was the latter. "Especially because it's West Drive's mid-season finale! It's going to be big news and we need to cover it ASAP."
"Where's Noah?" Owen asked.
"In his room. Why can't I talk about West Side Story, anyway? Or The Book Of Mormon? Or anything other than sports? Which, by the way, is all Dad ever talks about at dinner. Ever."
Owen threw his hands up. "What else is there to talk about."
"Anything," Tristan replied. "Other than sports."
Owen rubbed a hand over his eyes. Oh my god, Tris.
"Get Noah," was all he said. "Dad'll be here soon."
Tristan reached backward and cracked the front door open. Owen could hear it rattle on the loose hinges. "Noah! Come on!"
"I said go get him," Owen said, swatting his brother. "He's probably got his music on."
"You go get him," Tristan argued.
Owen glared at him.
"Fine," Tristan sighed, huffing and blowing his breath through his teeth in that way that drove Owen crazy. He stomped into the house, letting the door swing-slam behind him. Owen counted to five, got up, and lifted the door shut.
Locking from the outside. That would definitely be useful, especially now. Lock annoying little brothers inside the house, giving Owen a moment of peace. A break from Tristan's nonstop chatter about Lady Gaga, West Drive, anything Broadway, anything related to movies that weren't made before 1970. A break from Noah's intense, cold silences that always made everyone uncomfortable, and his obsession with hip hop beats, the spaces and pauses, the pattern of the drums and synthesizers. He was fixated on instrumentals. He never listened to the lyrics; just the beats. He'd stolen some of Owen's CDs a few times to listen to the backgrounds, until Big Brother threatened to pummel Noah's scrawny ass for going into his room without permission.
God, they were both so weird. So impossibly, idiotically, irredeemably weird. Why did both of his little brothers have to be so weird? Why couldn't they just be normal? Do stuff normal people do?
Owen often thought that he was the only normal one because he'd had the longest time with Dad. Funny how that was, though. He'd spent the most of his life with the old bastard who never failed to fuck everything up, and Owen was the only normal one.
Two doors down from Owen's front porch, he could hear the backbeat of a kid who was bouncing a basketball against the closed garage. The sound echoed with a clatter every time he banged it against the door, and every now and then he would take a shot at the basketball hoop nailed in the center. The net was old and made of metal, and whenever the kid sunk a shot the noise was like an angry xylophone, or laughing while trying to gargle at the same time.
The neighborhood here was nothing like their old place. Kids had always been outside there, playing street hockey in the cul-da-sacs, or riding bikes, and someone was always jogging no matter what time of day it was. Here, nobody went outside much. It was quiet, but still busy – engines hummed, doors down the block Owen could hear because their houses were so damn close together banged open and shut, radios blared, tires squealed, wind whistled. The scratched silence hummed like the world was one giant pause.
Their old house had had a sprawling front yard, with a neatly-mowed and fertilized lawn that never went cold, even in the dead of January, when it tumbled out bright and ready to meet the road like an over-eager neighbor. They'd also had a wraparound porch across the front of the house, one that looked from the street like it was inviting you to join the family for lemonade on the porch. It had flower beds their mother maintained and a wrought iron mailbox and a driveway that opened up instead of closed you in, and also had a backyard as big as a sunset. More than a few times, total strangers had come to their old house, saying they might be interested in buying it.
"I'm sorry," Owen had heard her say once, the first time this happened. She sounded confused. "This house is not for sale."
Then they'd hand her a card and ask her that if she ever did consider putting it up for sale, to give them a call. They had one of those houses that people wanted; the kind that had everything all tucked up and well-placed, like a perfectly set table or a drawing where everything stayed in the lines. It looked like something out of a catalog, and their house had actually been in a catalog once, for some real estate magazine. Their mother had kept a bunch of extra copies, and sent one to practically every relative they had.
The hollow sound of the ball slapping against the wooden door and the patter of the kid's shoes against the concrete reminded him of when he was little. His dad taking him to shoot hoops, on afternoons when he finally wasn't mowing the lawn or watching The Game or doing something else that involved avoiding spending time with his family on a Saturday. He saw his dad's face, etched with disappointment and boredom as Owen missed another basket, and the way he stood with his hands on his knees on the asphalt, looking too aggravated to hold himself upright while Owen tried to sink shot after shot, always chasing the ball to the farthest end of the court whenever it bounced off the backboard. That had happened three or four times, before his dad decided he always had something bigger going on at work, or another Game was on. The basketballs and footballs and hockey sticks his dad had given him were shelved in the old garage or the storage closet, along with boxes of outgrown winter clothes and old junky toys no one knew what to do with. Those games put aside for their dad's Game. The Game was always on at the Milligan house. The old house, anyway.
The three boys lined up neat as flowerbeds, trimmed and cleaned and bright for church service. Sitting side by side on the couch in the family room.
"Tell them," their mother said. She stood in her purple dress, the one mixed with grey that looked like an old bruise. "Look at them and tell them why you're leaving them."
"We need to go."
"Not until you tell them. Tell them now."
"I'm leaving your mother because I don't love her anymore. Can we go now?"
They moved into the smaller house before the divorce was finalized. The room was advertised as four bedrooms, three and a half baths, but really it was more like two bedrooms and two huge closets that could double as very small bedrooms. Owen gave the bigger room with the window to Noah and he took one of the two closets, ignoring Tristan's complaints about his own room size. Owen's room might have been small, but he had the pull-down staircase to the attic on his ceiling, which gave him access to the roof. It was the best place to go when he wanted to drink a beer or just get away from shit. Seemed like a fair trade – his little bro got the window that looked out to absolutely nothing other than the neighbor's driveway, while Owen got his own private rooftop haven. And the TV from their old house's family room, which now rested on his dresser.
It was oddly satisfying to Owen, having that TV. At their old house, since as long as Owen could remember, it had been the family room TV, but it had really been "Dad's TV". Where his father had sat in his chair (always His Chair) and watched The Game and Owen had sat next to him in silence, trying to figure out the rules and follow along as it unfolded play by play. He'd learning the language of blocks and passes and downs and tackles from his father's grunts, nods, and cheerful swears rather than his words; if Owen tried to ask him anything, he'd get a silencing hand waved in his face and a "go help your mother". That TV was the sight of every time their father couldn't have been bothered to throw the ball around, or eat dinner with them, or watch them open their presents on Christmas morning.
And now it was Owen's.
He took the chair, though, and Owen found that funny. If he had to pick what he thought the old man would have chosen to take, he would have said the TV. That, more than anything else Owen had ever seen, held his father's attention.
But he just took the chair, and asked Owen to help him lift it out to the U-Haul when he'd come for his things, the day he left and the day his mother had the repairman over to fix the broken dishwasher.
"Could you give me a hand with this?" he'd asked Owen. He was already bent down into a half-squat, grabbing one arm of the chair and resting another hand at its bottom base. He glanced up when he realized Owen wasn't doing the same; when the shadow of old obedience didn't help him carry the weight.
In the end, it had been the repairman who helped lift the chair. He'd done it just as he was finishing up his job, unaware of their domestic little drama, if there was any. He handed Owen's mother the bill and told her the machine "still had some use" and then helped his dad lift the chair out to the U-Haul. But he left the TV behind, blank and silent and twisting their reflections in the black glass panel.
When his mom sold the house, they'd still had an old swing-and-slide combo out back that had been installed years ago, when he and his brothers were little. He wondered, now, why they'd never bothered getting rid of it, when they'd outgrown it years before Dad left. But they'd left it behind, just like their dad had left the exercise bike and the clock and the futon and the skis and the bookshelf and the TV behind (but not the chair).
Maybe the new people who lived in the old house had kids, and they were using it, grateful for the free entertainment left behind by people who had long since discarded the colorful system; it was like any other toy, gently used and then retired without ceremony or regret. A remnant of childhood long since marked and put away like the XMAS ORNIMENTS. Or maybe they were trying to have kids and kept the thing around as a hopeful symbol for future rugrats. The way people tacked ads and magazine cut-outs of places they'd never been but wanted to go on the walls of their office cubicles, just to have that image of the Grand Canyon or Puerto Rico or Vegas in their minds as they pushed through the work day like any other. Just to imagine one day that their lives would be different. Out with the old, in with the new. All that good stuff.
"This isn't your fault. There's a lot more involved." Their mother telling that to Owen, Tristan, and Noah. The kitchen at the old house, while the giant clock that looked like a sundial clicked every second into its place, each moment that passed a cog in the machine that kept the days running, every day the same, uniform and unwavering. Mom looking small and tired and grey, Dad silent and staring at his hands, sitting at the table. The morning he said he was done.
Owen heard his brothers coming, finally. He could tell which footsteps were whose just by the way the feet fell on the hollow stairs; he could differentiate Tristan's pointed, toe-than-heel step, a parade jaunt at best and prance at worst, both of them on the same level of grating on Owen's last nerve. Noah, on the other hand, clattered down the stairs like something tossed from the top and rumbling step by step all the way down, banging and accidental, as if Noah had no idea why he was moving or where he would end up when he finally came to a stop.
Unlike Tristan, Noah was already starting to outgrow his swollen childhood face. He looked more like Owen than Tristan did, just younger and skinnier. Even though he was only eleven, his limbs were already flailing and gangly, all bones and knobs and stretched-out lines, shapeless and towering like an askew windmill. He was up to Owen's shoulder, and he hadn't even left Grade 5 yet. He couldn't throw or punt a football without looking like a bare tree branch at the mercy of a hard wind, unable to control its movements and snapping at the hardest brush. His movements hadn't been formed yet; he didn't have the sway of hips or the precision of steps that defined Tristan's motions.
Tristan always walked like that. Even when he was little, he'd walked like he was walking on stilts. Or heels. He would stand duck-footed, toes in and back rounded, and try to glide across the blue kitchen tile floor. He'd kept tripping over himself, though, and their mother, aggravated, would pick him up and set him inside the family room, where they had one of those baby gates strewn across the doorway to the kitchen, the kind that looked like dog fences or cow pens, so Tris couldn't get underfoot again.
He did that a lot, constantly get in the way.
"Are you REALLY going to wear that, Noah?" Owen heard Tristan saying. "It smells like Owen's hockey bag."
Noah grunted some non-response and sat on the stoop beside Owen. He hunched into himself, as if trying to make himself as small as possible. His bony elbows jabbed Owen, who nudged Noah out of his way. He could see the enormous headphones on Noah's head and hear Kid Cudi blasting through the speakers snugly wrapped around the shell of Noah's ears. Why did he always have to wear those dorky things? He couldn't just use earbuds like the rest of the world?
Tristan huffed. "You should at least put on pants that don't look like you're preparing for a flood."
"Dad never takes us anywhere nicer than Smitty's," Owen said, wishing Tristan would go in and change his own clothes. He was wearing that long trench coat and a black-and-white checkered fedora, and a scarf tossed around his neck Owen had half a mind to strangle his brother with. "He'll probably take us to Pizza Pizza again."
"Oh god," Tristan groaned. "Anywhere but that Mexican place he took us last time. Would it really be so much for him to take us out for some good sushi at least once? I know some great places near the city."
"We're not going out for sushi," Owen snapped. "We're gonna shut up and eat bad pizza."
"That stuff tastes like butt," Noah said. He'd somehow heard their conversation through the pound and beat banging in his ears.
"For once, he's right," Tristan replied. "It tastes vile and it's always cold. Why can't we just ask him to take us somewhere else?"
"Because that would involve actually talking to him," Owen said. "Which means the longer this dinner crap has to go on." He sighed. "We'll…order pizza later or something, I don't know."
Tristan leaned against the door frame, doing that bitchy face he did when he didn't get his way. Beside him, Noah was beating his freakishly large hands against his jeans. Owen caught a glimpse of them; they looked just like his own hands, except much bonier. But Noah's legs were nothing like his own; they were spindly and gangling, too long for his long body. It was weird, seeing something like him and so not like him at the same time.
Tristan pointed towards the top of the street. "Oh, joy," he mumbled.
The white Mazda with the dented fender came rolling towards their house. It stopped right in front, not parked at the edge of the curb. Their father honked the horn, his customary greeting every time he came to pick the boys up for these court-appointed visitation dinners.
Noah looked to Owen, who was staring at the Mazda, sputtering smoke at the bottom of the drive. He'd taught Owen to drive in that car.
Tristan got up with an aggravated sigh. "Shall we?" he said, rolling his eyes.
Owen didn't get up, though. He didn't get up because that was the car his father had taught him to drive in. He didn't get up because there was an exercise bike and a clock and a futon and a bookshelf and a pair of skis and XMAS ORNIMENTS that were sitting in a garage they weren't supposed to be in but still had a place in, as if they had always been here. He didn't get up because there was a TV in Owen's bedroom but he'd taken the chair, and expected his son to be an accomplice in erasing his old life from those rooms. Because their house was too small but it was still too big for them to fill with only themselves. It still felt empty and dark; too big to take over, imprint, create. Like they didn't really own their own home, with his father's things living in a place he'd never set foot in, and the rest of them were never quite able to fill the remaining space.
The clock hummed and the dishwasher was broken down, and there was one less coffee cup in the sink that morning. "It isn't your fault. There's a lot more involved". A U-Haul and a belief, still, in loyalty, in obedience, in the word father.
He stared at the little white car, as if that were enough to make his father hear him. Come here, Owen thought.
Their father beeped again, this time holding his hand on the horn for longer.
Come here and face us. Don't you just sit there and honk your damn horn. You get out of there and come take us.
Tristan glanced at Owen. "Should we go?" he asked without any irony.
"I'm sorry," his mother said, confused, "but this house is not for sale."
His dad beeped the horn again. Owen kept staring at the car. Noah stared at Owen. Tristan stared at all three of them, shifting his foot from side to side, as he looked from the car to his brother to back to the car and then back to them.
"I'm leaving your mother because I don't love her anymore. Can we go now?" He took the chair, though.
Tristan glanced down at Owen. "Are we going or what?"
Owen could see his father's silhouette from inside the windows. His dad was laying on the horn now, gesturing with his free hand and mouthing shouts at them. He didn't roll the windows down or turn off the engine, or get out of the car.
Owen stared right back at him.
Come out here, he thought. Be a man.
If you were a man, Tris would be one, too. And Noah.
One of their neighbors poked her head out of the front door. "The hell is he doing?" she shouted, to no one in particular and everyone.
His father finally took his hand off the horn, and there was a flash of movement that Owen figured was either the old man giving him the finger or maybe just tossing his hands up in resignation. Or maybe he was just fiddling with the radio.
Come out here and be a goddam man, you fucking coward.
Owen stood up, his legs creaking in protest after sitting still for so long. Without a word to his brothers, he turned his back on his father, opening the front door and going back inside the house. He didn't turn around at the sudden silence of his father's hand coming off the horn, nor did he stop to acknowledge the flash of white out of the corner of his eyes when the Mazda backed away from the curbside. He heard the dented car spit out one last spiteful puff of smoke before disappearing around the corner, and pretty soon Owen was back to the silence.
Tristan and Noah trailed behind him, silent and waiting. Owen went into the kitchen, reached under the sink, and pulled out the bottle of vodka their mother kept hidden behind the Comet and industrial cleaner, as if they couldn't find it.
"Come on," Owen said. He grabbed three squat, heavy glasses and poured a tiny bit into each one. "Take it."
"And listen to you laugh at me when I puke? No thank you." Tristan tried to sound flippant, but his voice sounded somewhere between uncertainty and awe, like he'd nearly missed a car accident or a step down the stairs.
Noah stared at the glass in his hand like it was under a microscope. He barely lifted it close enough to his face to sniff it, then wrinkled his nose. He made a face, then pinched his nostrils and took a sip, immediately coughing as he sputtered some of it back up.
Owen pounded him on the back. "That's not how you take a shot, man."
"See?" Tristan pointed out. He put his own drink down on the countertop. "Again, no thank you."
"Right," Owen mumbled. He tipped back his own drink. "God forbid you do something normal."
Before Tristan could say anything, Owen tossed back his own drink. He swallowed it down, eyes streaming and throat burning as it slid all the way through him.
He caught the way Tristan was staring at him, then the way his brother picked up the glass and stared into the clear liquid, like he was studying something in it. Then he watched out of the corner of one stinging, watery eye as Tristan took a breath and tossed back the drink, copying Owen's movements, then banged the glass down on the counter with a gag.
"Gross!" he gasped, coughing. "How do you drink this? It's like swallowing gasoline."
Owen thumped him between the shoulder blades. "Feel the burn, little bro."
Tristan glared at him.
"Can we order pizza now?" Noah asked him. His ear phones were around his neck, still blaring a beat.
Owen nodded. "Grab me the phone."
Tristan reached out and handed him the cordless, still coughing slightly. His face was redder than his hair and he poured himself some water, but kept shooting Owen looks from over the rim of his glass, just hanging there by the fridge like he didn't know what to do with himself. Noah slipped his headphones back over his ears and leaned against the island, drumming his fingers in time to the music.
Owen dialed the number for the pizza place, phone rested in the crook of his shoulder. A warm bloom of satisfaction was blooming in the pit of his stomach that had nothing to do with the liquor.
They followed me, he thought. They follow me, now.
Who's the man now, you son of a bitch.
II.
A few days later, their dad sent each of the three boys fifty dollars in the mail, cash.
Their mother pressed each of the three bills into their hands, eyes flat, biting her lip.
Owen took his, and went straight to the ravine. Picked up from a guy named Jesse, one of Bee's old contacts who was known for his especially good shit. It was barely enough for one joint, made out of the envelope his father sent the money in.
Owen flicked the lighter he'd taken from his dad's cross town apartment the one and only time he'd been there. It was black and heavy, and the warm, sure weight of it felt good in his hands. He burned the paper and lifted the joint to his lips, staring at the clear winter canopy over his head. Snow fell lightly on his shoulders as he sucked in, and when he felt the tickle of that burning, earthy scent in the back of his throat, he thanked his father then.