I.

There’s a man sat in the crook of the sofa. He stabs spent cigarettes into ashtrays and controls the television. It isn’t long before he tires of playing interim father figure to Tess. When she resists his advances, he tells her mother, “I do believe this girl needs to learn the hard way what life is all about.”

Her mom puts Tess out and locks the doors for plenty of days.

It’s long enough for Tess to meet Brick, the brother of her classmate Adam. Brick is older. She has heard stories. He takes her to a restaurant where she orders a grilled cheese and fries. Tess likes his boots and the way he talks without moving his mouth a lot. He tells her about the three times he’s been down. “That’s why I eat like this,” he says. One arm curves protectively around the plate, while the other lifts food halfway to his mouth. He moves his head down to meet each bite. She thinks, He’s nice.

He is her best option when he offers his bed.

Says he’ll sleep on the floor.

And he does.

Soon though he says, “It’s pretty cold down here all by myself.”

Tess moves to the floor.

 

II.

Later when she peels apart the mildewed pages of a National Geographic she’d found in a corner of his apartment in his mother’s basement, he tells Tess, “That’s old as shit. Ain’t been no seahorses in a hundred years.”

He’s sat with just enough room for him and a bottle cushioned where the back and one side of the chair come together. His hand twitches over the buttons and knobs of a controller synced to one of many gaming consoles.

“But I saw Asian people eating them on a travel show,” she argues. He swats the magazine to the floor.

“Why you always lying, Tess? Shit. Travel show. For what?”

Tess lifts the magazine from where it lies, pages broken apart, and puts it with the rest of the trash.

 

III.

He decided on his name, “’Cause with a Brick, that’s how I roll.”

Tess can’t say how no one says that’s how I roll or how literally everyone knows his name is actually Allan. Or other things. Like, she sometimes skips school and seeks patterns in the cracked ceiling above his brother’s bed.

With Brick she mostly keeps her head down. Mostly keeps her mouth shut.

But he takes her places.

 

IV.

They’re on the second floor of the city’s natural history museum. Small and free.

Tess presses her forehead to the wall of glass and her eyes follow the curve of shoreline on to the horizon.  Brick next to her is prying up the edges of a scab on his hairless head, varnishing his nails with rusty crusts of blood.

After a minute, Brick presses two of his fingers to the place on her neck where it meets her back and says, “Lookit. That’s Chicago.”

Tess’ lids quiver with the tension of almost but not quite closed. And there is a shadow, maybe an eyelash, but maybe what Brick says. Maybe she sees Chicago.

Brick pulls away a long strip of wallpaper from along the window frame.

“I see it,” Tess shouts and points like a fifteen-year-old-girl.

“Really? Where?” he says, dropping the curl of paper to the floor.

“Over here?” He puts his face to the window, eyes squinted. He smears the glass with oil and sweat from his nose. He pinches up a corner of his mouth, releasing a sound with his tongue and cheek like Velcro peeled apart. Brick shakes his head.

When she looks again, there is something until she blinks and now sees only her translucent reflection, floating in the blue, blue sky.

“That ain’t where it would be.” He moves his finger to a few inches east of the splotch he’d left.

“If it wasn’t so hazy over there. Right here.” He taps with his stained fingernail. Tess looks at the white toe of her canvas sneaker. Back to the window where she sees it isn’t hazy at all. Digs her shoe into the short-napped carpeting. Kicks at the snail of wallpaper. Checks the window again.

Her insides are icy and slick. Brick stops tapping. She lifts her face. His is close. “You ain’t seen shit.” He jabs a finger at the skin between her eyebrows. “Why you always lying? What are you thinking?”

Tess rubs the tender spot on her forehead as a quake and its intent threatens to work from her belly to her voice box, to fill her mouth with words, words to change her fate, to at least say she’s really late for school, but the tremor settles in her shoulders and instead of telling Brick it is her way to invent happiness with ignorance, to search and grab hold of a man, the truth, a skyscraper, to find any way out of this, she swallows hard and shrugs.