Midnight Oil

The girl remained on Fender’s mind for the rest of the week. Every time a customer, dark-eyed and caffeine deprived, shuffled in from the late winter darkness, carrying the scent of the dying season– dirty snow piles and stale road salt– a new question was planted in his head. What was she up to? Were her parents worried? Who was she waiting for?

As he washed his hands in the shop’s only operating bathroom one evening, he glanced around the well-defaced walls. It had been over five years since the owner had repainted, and gang tags, doodles, and drugged out epiphanies were scrawled from floor to ceiling of the sterile white walls, the single fluorescent bulb making it all blend together in a cool toned cacophony. “Gwen loves Tyler - 2012,” “Fuck landlords,” and “Sexy girl for fun: 216-531…” When Fender was especially exhausted, his body unable to fight evolution’s diurnal curse, the words, symbols, and drawings came together in an almost audible, choir-like collage. He tried not to go into the bathroom more than twice a shift, if he could help it.

As he pushed through the door to leave, one drawing caught his eye, nestled between the scuffed door jamb and the beige light switch. It was an ink drawing of a female face. Her two eyes were closed, and a third eye sat open in the middle of her forehead, gleaming beneath an arc of spider-like lashes. Typical “this is so deep, man,” stoner artwork. But the face looked familiar, and Fender leaned closer to get a better look. The face’s rounded chin, deep cupid's bow and sparse curved brows were nearly identical to the Rooibos girl. Beneath the face, in neat purple cursive, were the words, “one day they will see us.” Underneath that, in the same purple ink, but written in a different hand, was a line Fender could not read:

إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ‎

She came back the next Saturday, and Fender felt relieved to see her alive and well. She stood out against the dim shop, wearing a summer-colored knit sweater that was straight out of the 80’s. She had a backpack with her this time, and a dazed expression on her face. The shop was nearly empty that evening, the Mortal Kombat boys having wrapped up earlier than usual. Just two older women, their winter jackets laced with stale cigarette smoke, wrung their hands and talked in hushed tones in a booth by the front door.

The girl took her seat cautiously, like a ghost gliding through a wall. She met eyes with Fender and offered an upward nod of the head, her mouth pressed into a neutral line. She kept her arms glued to her sides, straight like an arrow in her seat.

“Hello again, my friend,” Fender said, approaching her. He could see now that her earl gray eyes were alert and wide, with swooshes of sallow lilac gathering beneath them. “How can I help you?”

“Rooibos again, please,” she said, her jaw working nervously when she stopped speaking. It was silent as Fender turned his back to complete the order. When he placed the tea in front of her, she didn’t reach for it. She was busy drilling holes into the bar top with her eyes.

“Everything alright tonight?” Fender asked, wiping a spill of syrup from the counter. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

She hesitated, and gave a small nod. “Yes, everything’s alright.”

They lapsed into silence for a few minutes until the girl tentatively took the warm cup into her hands.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, why did your boyfriend stop running track?” Fender asked, trying to engage. Last week, the subject of her boyfriend had made her beam, almost bubble out of her own skin with sunshine. She looked up at him in surprise and hesitated for a few beats. Outside, a car alarm pierced the quiet. She studied Fender’s face for a moment, as if looking at him for the first time.

She took a quick glance around the shop and cleared her throat. “They wouldn’t let him… run for the boys’ team. So he quit.”

Fender felt his brows unconsciously coming together in confusion. “Why not?”

She surveyed Fender’s reaction and folded her hands matter-of-factly.  “He used to run for the girls’ team. He was really good. Especially on relay. He was gonna try to get a scholarship to Ohio State for track, actually. There was a scout. She contacted him once after a meet…”

She seemed to brighten a bit talking about this, the light returning to her eyes as she elaborated some more on the scout, a possible visit to Columbus, a shoe-in state championship placement. Fender learned that her beloved’s name was Ali. She breathed the name with a delighted reverence often reserved for holy places. But her cheerful tone fractured when the matter of his switching teams came back up.

“He was just as fast as the other boys. He would’ve been an asset to the relay team. But they wouldn’t let him make the switch, so he quit.”

Fender nodded reflexively, but his brain was lagging behind a few beats. She watched him as he processed this story, connected some dots and nodded again. “Oh, well… that’s shitty.”

“He showed up at the boy’s practice once, and they let him run. You know, Title IX and all that shit says its legally required for them to let him try out. But the coach, and I think some stupid parents on the school board, had the final say. It was fucking bullshit. Our town is so medieval.”

As she spoke, Fender realized that the girl reminded him very much of his little sister. While they looked completely different– Nadia’s short, black curls and deep complexion in opposition to the blonde waves and ghostly face of the stranger– the way they enunciated, the way they made exaggerated expressions when speaking, and their adolescent confidence of swearing with adults, was eerily identical. While she sipped her tea as if pausing for air, Fender wondered when the last time he saw Nadia was. Christmas, 2013? Four years ago?

“Did his parents get involved at all?” Fender asked, and watched her face change once more, this time morphing into a vacant, deflated mask.

She responded with a solemn shake of the head. “His mom wanted him to keep running for the girls’ team. Well, his mom wants him to give up sports all together, really, and start meeting the men she has lined up for him to get engaged to after graduation. That’s why I’m always here in the middle of the night. She doesn't know about me.”

Fender inhaled. So, the girl was involved in a secret romance. “Why do you have to come here?”

She set the cup down and gave Fender a look that made her seem ten years his senior, not the other way around. A heaviness crowded behind her eyes, and her shoulders dropped. She placed her hands on the counter and leaned in, as if she were being spied on. “His mom wakes up around four in the morning for work, even on the weekends. A few months ago, it was easier to sneak around. But recently, she started checking on him in the middle of the night. She’ll turn the light on and come into his room, make sure he’s in there and not sneaking out. I think she suspects something, even though she’s never seen me. I used to hide in his closet, but she almost caught me once. I felt like I was gonna fucking faint, I was so scared. So, we decided it’s best that I sneak out before she wakes up, and that I come back once she leaves. I started coming here so I don’t have to sit in my car in the dark.”

“That’s complicated. You must really love the guy.”

She absorbed the word complicated as though it were a blessing. She closed her eyes and nodded serenely, as if Fender spoke her thoughts aloud. In that moment, she became the portrait on the bathroom wall, sans third eye.

“I do love him. Very, very much.”

Fender held his tongue from warning her against the perils of teenage devotion. He reserved himself from weaving a cautionary tale, about how he too, was once so devoted to someone that he was willing to escape across the country and leave behind his family in order to make things work, his decisions driven by nineteen-year-old hormones down the gravely tunnels of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex.

You don’t know what love is yet, Fender’s auntie had warned him, in a tone he now understood as lovingly.

Fender stopped himself from echoing the old woman. Those words did nothing but make Fender push everyone else away, and he expected this girl would have a similar reaction.

“What would happen if you got caught?” Fender asked, “Can’t you say you’re just a friend sleeping over?”

She shook her head immediately. It seemed this question had been asked before. “No. Ali’s mom doesn’t trust him to have sleepovers with girls. She caught him with an ex-girlfriend before. Sleepovers, even with friends, were off limits after that.”

An icy crust coated the words “ex-girlfriend.” Fender remembered with warmth what teenage jealousy felt like. He fought back a small grin.

`“She has a gun. He showed me once.”

In a short hum of silence, Fender felt the weight of her fear. Of her hopelessness. He also remembered what it felt like when devotion had to square up against a dead end, a violent hand.

She spoke again, after draining her cup and popping off the lid. She gazed into the bottom, as if trying to read the tea leaves. The vanilla and citrus notes floated up like a prayer, mingling with the cigarette smoke and burnt coffee smell that had staked its claim over the shop ages ago.

“I almost got caught again tonight,” she said, letting out a trembling sigh. “I had to hide in the linen closet like an intruder. I watched her footsteps pass by and stop outside the door. I was so afraid–” Her voice hitched now, and she quickly cleared her throat. “I was so afraid she could hear me breathing. I was so afraid of that door opening.”

A sudden buzz from below the bar brought both her and Fender back to the present. Fender realized he had been holding his breath. The girl sniffed wetly once and brought the phone to her ear. Her voice was suddenly transformed into hot butterscotch sauce.

“Hi, baby. Okay, love you.” She put down the phone. She smiled sheepishly up at Fender and dismounted from the barstool. “That was the all-clear.” Behind her, the clock hands signaled 4:27 am.

Fender frowned, “You be careful, now.” He sounded like an old man, and it startled him. “Your parents know about all of this?”

She simply shook her head, a matter-of-fact scaffold of a smile wavering on her lips. “Not about all of this.” The girl paused. “I’m Laine, by the way.”

Fender heaved a sigh, “Fender. Now, get outta here. Get some sleep.” 

Laine laughed and nodded, placing a five-dollar bill onto the counter and trotting out the back door, into the pupil-black of the night. Be safe. Fender thought.