The Movie of Darby Jane’s Life

Chapter Three

The worn leather hugs like home, its weathered arms enveloping Darby, welcoming him back. Ace doesn’t speak while Darby settles in, securing his bag between his feet and fastening his seatbelt, giving it a firm tug to check for stability. He waits, fingers tapping and head bobbing to an off radio. His eyes close at the crescendo of his steering wheel solo, and Darby chances a look, coveting the song Ace hears in his head.

The music ends with no warning, his brief trance broken, and Darby is unable to divert his gaze quickly enough. It might have been better to hold Ace’s eyes, refuse to acknowledge any wrong, but that idea, like the majority of those he’d label “Good”, comes with hindsight, once he’s already begun to test his X-ray vision on the glove compartment.

Confined to the Buick, quickly filling up with awkward pause, Darby realizes he’s too far ahead for any kind of plan. There must be something more expected of him; a next move he can’t fathom, let alone execute. He’d reached for the chunky handle, slid in as if he belonged, and then the lights flickered on; the glaring spotlight makes him all too aware of his sweaty palms and unwashed hair, of the wheeze in his nose from an outgoing cold and the rip at the neck of his shirt.

He wants to speak. His mouth opens and closes, at the ready but perpetually useless. He’s sure his tongue has doubled in size.

Ace’s chest swells with a deep inhale, and he releases the breath in a loud sigh, lips and cheeks puffing out dramatically.

Cutting back and forth between the faces of the two boys, the scene’s silence is bloated with close-ups of shifting eyes and cheeks sucked in, nervously being gnawed on.

“So…” Ace says, dragging out the syllable while fading out the sound.

Darby had been grasping for a first line, but here it was, handed to him, a gift of one word. Ace was leaving room for anything, urging Darby passed his cluttered half-phrases and memorized—but suddenly forgotten—small talk staples.

This, he recognizes, as his opening, the moment to get in.

“Yeah.”

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Never before had he found a word so vile. The awful way it echoes, ricocheting from forehead to crown, ping ponging from ear to ear in the space his brain had previously occupied. There had been room for anything, and, from that litany, he chose, “Yeah.”

So many times, he hears those four letters strung together.

Over and over, he’d give anything to stop the barrage, now coming as a question for his choice to speak it in the first place.

Yeah?

It stops sounding like a word.

Ace sighs, lighter this time. It’s not the kind Darby’s used to; he’s not resigning; he’s not exasperated and rolling his eyes; he’s not ready to quit “pulling teeth”, a comparison co-workers often invoke when referring to having a conversation with Darby.

Rumbling furiously beneath them, the Buick squeaks with concern as Ace presses on the brake and shifts to drive.

He doesn’t truly want out until they begin rolling away from the sidewalk, his chance at a smooth exit receding in the side-view mirror. Already, having emitted only one word, his resources are tapped, but he yearns for more to give to Ace. If he’d just said, “Actually, I think I’m going to walk,” and gotten out—or, at first questioning, a simple, “No, thanks.”—Ace would be able to keep whatever false notion he may have about him.

“I’m not smart,” Darby blurts, alarmed his brain-to-mouth filter allowed it to get out.

“What?”

“It’s just…if you’re looking for someone to—um—help you? At school? I’m really not that smart.”

Ace’s baby bull-snort of a laugh is oddly familiar.

“I don’t need a tutor. I do okay.” He looks away from the road, turning to Darby, eyes still brimming with the humor he finds in their exchange.

If Darby could, he’d laugh it off, too, joke his way to a new topic, but his face starts to flush, the heat spreading swiftly. He pulls every part of himself in close: knees lock together; arms clamp to his sides; his hands itch to be buried beneath his denimed thighs, the comforting weight of his body when he sits on them helps the shaking and reassures him that, Yes, you are here.

“S-Sorry. I didn’t mean it, like…I wasn’t trying to—“

Ace nods to the world ahead of him and shrugs his shoulders. “It’s cool.”

No matter what he says, it comes out smooth and slow. His own calm—or maybe the way driving at forty miles per hour with the windows down makes the weather feel perfect—lends itself to Darby, allowing him to unbind and to feel, for once, that it really is cool.

Aimlessly, Ace circles a residential neighborhood, easing up on the gas pedal in accordance with orange signs warning, “Caution! Children at play!” The Buick lets loose another squeal when it’s put to rest at a stop sign.

“Where to?”

“I’m…not sure, really.”

“Where were you planning to go? You bailed out of lunch pretty fucking fast.”

Darby can give merely a half-truth, saying, “I just needed to get out of there,” but holding back the part where he could barely stand with Ace looking at him like that.

He double-checks both directions of traffic before turning out of Greenlake Estates and on to Wicker Lane.

“I know how you feel.”

Despite the multitudes of people Darby’s had to resist screaming, “No, you fucking don’t!” at for relaying the same sentiment, he believes it when it comes from Ace. He doubts very much that they have the same reasons, but something clings to Ace’s voice, something heavy, and Darby knows he means it. He knows that Ace knows what it is to want to run, to avoid the faces and all the ways they push.

In a slow, almost imperceptible, motion, the corner of Darby’s mouth pulls itself up to imitate Ace’s semi-smirk. Nothing is particularly funny, but it spreads, threatening to become whole. He jerks his head casually toward the open window, shaking his hair free from behind his ear, using the curtain to cover his crooked expression.

Darby makes a silent pact with God to start believing—he’ll even, he swears, go to church every Sunday—if He can prevent Ace from looking over, from wondering, whether aloud or to himself, what the hell he’s smiling about. That lone prayer, his first, is answered, and he doesn’t mind entertaining the idea of someone out there listening.

“Do you want me to drop you off at home?”

Just as quickly, any faith in an Almighty disappears.

Getting out of the Buick fills him with a dread identical to getting in, like the golden doors separate different worlds, and he’s unsure of how to go back when he loses himself in one for too long.

“I kind of can’t,” Darby explains, pulling his backpack up to his lap. “My mom doesn’t expect me for another hour. Usually I just walk around to waste time until school’s actually over. You can drop me anywhere. It’s fine.”

It appears, the smirk, but now it nearly splits Ace’s face, and Darby wonders what the hell he’s smiling about. He lets him stare as they idle at a stoplight, the meeting of Wicker and Trotter’s Lane—the longest red light in town, the one everyone is sure has been broken for at least eleven years but no one bothers to fix—and the cuts jump again from face to face, from curiously amused to nervously confused, juxtaposing their reactions to the same happening.

Darby frequently has trouble discerning when he’s being “laughed with” and “laughed at.” The difference was never made very clear by his grade-school teachers, so he runs his recent speech three times through, and he’s absolute that nothing funny was said, surely making this an “at” moment.

The light turns green and both about-face, attention tuned back to the road. Free of scrutiny, Darby screws up enough courage to ask, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Ace replies, but he keeps huffing short laughs from his nose and shaking his head in that slow, bemused way as if in disbelief.

“No, seriously. What?” There’s no laughter when Darby repeats the question, punctuated with an unspoken accusation, minute flecks of anger trying to squeeze their ugly way into his quiet voice. The full force of it burns somewhere deep, a place he’s never dared reach, not to squelch it out nor to use it as a proper weapon.

“It’s really nothing. Promise. I was just surprised.”

“Surprised?”

“I mean, what was that? A solid four or five sentences? And no pauses. I was getting worried until you let that go.”

“Worried?” Darby, finding it impossible to chase whatever had spurred him on moments ago, can do nothing but repeat Ace’s words, phrasing them, instead, as questions.

“You were all mopey and shit, staring out the window. I didn’t know what to do. You pretty much had me convinced you were going to make a jump for it just to get away from me.”

“No!” but Darby is too loud, too insistent.

He tries again, bringing the bark down to prevent terrifying Ace. “No, that’s…not it. I always zone out in the car if there’s no music.” Which usually isn’t a lie, but he’s firmly rooted today.

He doesn’t know exactly when, but he’d discovered, recently, he could regale himself by lying to teachers, perfect strangers, and, most often, Gwen. She’d inquired about his girlfriend on the third day of school, and having no idea of where he was headed, told an elaborate fairy tale about a half-Japanese, half-Irish girl spending a year studying abroad in France.

His first—the relationship romantic comedies are made of with Sophia Huang—was the only to backfire. Of course Gwen had been to Paris and absolutely adored it, forcing Darby to spend forty minutes saying “yes” every time she asked if they went to that museum or this restaurant.

Since, his imaginary life has been significantly scaled down, but with this small deceit, he can feel drops of sweat building in his hairline, ready to rain down his forehead. As if Ace would scold him if he knew this tiny slice of untruth, as if he was even telling him anything of value.

Darby first admonishes himself before attempting to reopen his throat, parched and swollen shut, by adopting a supposed-to-be-soothing mantra: It doesn’t matter. But part of it does, part of it has to, or he could shake this. He pleads with his body to, please, just stop; that’s the word he screams at his limbs pumping much too much adrenaline.

Stop!

It can’t. Or won’t. The tiniest of transgressions, one that will never be found out, and he’s back to being six-years-old, ripping the remainder of his mother’s sunflowers from the garden after destroying a central patch with his first training wheel-free bike, hiding the beautiful dead bodies in a neighbors garbage can; when she asks what happened, Darby will try to convince her that she never planted any sunflowers.

Stop!

But he can’t. And he can’t ask God for any more favors. And he can’t use any of the tricks without looking like he’s having a seizure.

The intersection of Magnolia Terrace and River Run Road looms ahead, their first green light. Ready to shred into a million pieces, Darby tilts his head out the window, catching the rush in sizeable gulps. The Buick chugs steadily under the metal posts, the empty streets surprising him, just two-o-clock in the afternoon.

He’s infinitely grateful for their ghost town as Ace continues to unknowingly rewind yesterday’s path. Darby waits until the hand-painted sign—dark green wood with white lettering, the Ruth Goldman Memorial Park—comes into view. The park was what he’d been dreaming of since the Buick regressed to its original form, a stuffy, suffocating death trap, windows rolled down or not.

“What about the park?” Darby asks, head springing up from the window’s ledge, wanting the suggestion to seem spontaneous, but wary of overdoing it.

There’s another shock of guilt, albeit smaller, as it occurs to Darby that he’s told another—sort of—lie, but Ace smiles—sort of—and says, “Sure,” curving the hefty Buick into the vacant lot.

Remembering what he’s been told, Darby holds the door’s lock up with one hand and uses the remainder of his underwhelming strength to shove the door.

Darby knows the layout of this park almost as well as his own home. His mother brought him here nearly every day until he was seven and decided parks and swings and sandboxes were “not appropriate for older gentlemen.” Those, according to his mom, were his exact words; it’s one of those stories she brought up any time neighborhood parents engaged in a my-kid-is-smarter/cuter-than-your-kid conversations.

But this. This is not the same park. It was one place when Ace was loitering in the parking lot, the Nameless Intimidating Drug Dealer, but he’s standing next to Darby, not twenty-four hours later, preparing to enter his former—and rediscovered—sanctuary.

Everything is lifted here, lighter and more open, and Darby doesn’t know why he spent so much time away. His shoes align with Ace’s, and they stand, poised like prized ponies, bouncing with nervous, childhood excitement, ready for the gunshot.

Ready to fly out of the starting gate.

Ace raises and lowers his eyebrows in cartoon-ish, rapid succession.

“Race you to the swings?”

His face is aglow with the challenge—sensing a win—but Darby is hurtling toward the garish neon pink set without even answering. Darby is feet ahead, powering faster toward victory, before Ace can even move. So close, chased by, he’s sure this time, joking yells of, “You asshole!” and, “You cheater!”

Darby gets there first and flings on to the low-hanging seat. Ace trails by only a small margin but has to double over, hands on his knees, upon arrival. Not completely winded, but in need of a moment to catch the few breaths he missed and drain his face, strained pink.

“That was…” He trails off and pushes himself into the up-right position. “That was a lot farther than I remember.” He thuds into the adjacent swing, almost tipping back into the sandpit. Lazily, he rocks, feet firmly planted.

It’s his subtle sway that reminds Darby of how he used to love flying there. He grips the support chains, pulls the swing back a few steps, quickly lifts his feet from beneath him, and launches forward.

Low, when he still has to bend his legs at awkward angles to avoid scraping the ground and losing momentum, he feels the nostalgic splendor of truly being able to rocket somewhere far off. And so he kicks harder, trying to touch the sky.

But now, he’s too high.

He gets a fraction of a second to disappear into the clouds, and then is forced to reverse, his stomach climbing up to his chest with every backward sway.

Darby struggles to keep going, but the nausea is too much; his head is spinning and the hinges of his jaw tingle. He’s preparing for landing, bracing his legs for the pain of slamming the sand to stop the repellant ride, when Ace lifts off. There’s no gradual ascent. He was a stationary blur Darby whizzed by, and then they were even. Climbing to the sun, rushing down to earth, and up again in perfect unison.

Attempting to swallow his sickness, Darby works furiously to match Ace. The swings, deceptively ancient due to numerous coats of fresh paint, grouse with each pass, a sound that disturbs him; he exclusively envisions a snap in the rusted chain link securing them to the beam, followed by blood or a broken something.

He looks at Ace to make sure he hasn’t been thrown to his death by the relic, but he’s gliding peacefully, eyes closed and tilting his head back to show the sun his face. So quickly, again, Ace’s lids open and Darby is caught, but he doesn’t look away. Back and forth, up and down, neither breaks the hold, regardless of when they fall out of sync, Darby losing focus and pumping erratically as Ace stays steady.

In his eyes, there’s delight, but half his mouth quirks something wicked. He propels himself faster, higher and higher still, sweeping to heights Darby hadn’t braved since he’d unsuccessfully tried to be the first kid to swing over the bar they were tethered to.

Ace gives another challenging raise of his eyebrows. His calves, exposed at the frayed edges of his deep-pocket cargo shorts, seem to strain with the effort of achieving and maintaining such force. He swoops up, elevated more than Darby thought possible, and expels his body, pushing hard against the chains to throw himself as far as possible.

For an instant, he soars; a superhero that has only recently discovered his power, Darby thinks, with the way he flails, scissoring legs trying to run on air.

Ace’s knees hit first, and he puts his hands out to prevent a face-plant. Righting himself, he turns around to sit cross-legged and reclines slightly, his scraped palms used to support. If they carry any pain, it never flashes on his face.

“Your turn!” he yells from an impressive distance.

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

“You know you want to!”

And he isn’t wrong. Darby does want to jump, wants to take wing over this small part of town just as Ace did. But the inevitable crash landing. There’s that, too. After.

From behind, where his hands have been resting, Ace scoops a fistful of sand and throws it in Darby’s direction. “Fuck off! Just go!”

And he picks up speed without meaning to, but doesn’t stop when he regains control because he likes the casual way Ace can throw out words like that. Darby thinks them, often, but he rarely says them in front of other people. In his life, he’s told only one person to “fuck off”, but he’d meant it the way its intended, not harmlessly with laughter behind it as Ace had.

His private cheering section claps a steady beat. “Dar-by. Dar-by. Dar-by.” Each syllable exclaimed with the crack of skin smacking skin.

And, though it registers as vaguely pathetic to Darby, that’s all it takes.

Just like Ace, Darby waits until he rises as high as the ancient set will allow. And he sets himself free. He’s airborne briefly, enough to taste the lightness of flight, but the ground is hastening upwards to meet him and he wishes for a longer fall, for time to shut his eyes and delight in the sensation of holding on to nothing.

He lands, all too soon and none too graceful. His shoes touch down—fleetingly, he thinks of putting his arms straight up like a triumphant gymnast sticking the perfect dismount—but it’s only the tip-toes and he teeter-totters, almost finding balance, eventually losing the brief fight. The sand hurts as hard as any stone tile when he topples back, flat on his ass. A sharp sting sparks at his tailbone, snakes up his spine, and he tries to show no pain. His features fight to beat away the grimace they’ve pinched into.

“Very smooth,” says Ace, but Darby thinks he looks almost proud. And he can’t explain why, but it embarrasses him. He hadn’t thought there was anything to be gained by jumping, yet Ace seems to see something. It’s too close to a compliment, and Darby never knows what to do with those.

He lays back, the image of Ace rushing down to the edges of his eyes before he’s tilted completely out of view, and Darby can see nothing but the vast, sprawling blue. Flattening the lumps, a niche is dug with wiggles of his shoulders and hips.

“Comfy?”

“Oh, very,” Darby replies, emitting an extended “ahhhh” of a sigh, arms reaching to lock beneath his head.

They fall into silence, watching it stretch for a while, not pregnant but contented. Darby wonder if this, having nothing to say, is different than saying nothing. He’s reluctant to let it go, but there has already been a transformation. A thought only in its infancy grows, puffing like over-yeasted dough, a sludgy monster swelling to conquer their hush. With something to say, every moment feels heavy, roped and restrained with the forming words.

“You called me Darby.”

What had built around them is shattered.

“What else would I call you?”

“Digby?”

“Fuck, I was hoping you missed that,” Ace says, burying his head in his hands. “Gwen came up to me today, asking about Darby, and I was wondering who the hell that was. I felt like such an ass when I realized it was you.”

Darby doesn’t need him so apologetic; not feeling at all insulted, but rather satisfied that he’s gotten it right.

“Digby. Darby. I see how it could happen.” His voice is shockingly airy, testing out teasing.

“Digby sounds like an elf that bakes cookies, but Darby’s fuckin’ badass,” he says. “What’s your last name?”

“Jane.”

“Darby Jane. You gotta make sure you do something that fits that. I promise you there has never been an accountant named Darby Jane.”

Sitting up, Darby pretzels his legs to mimic Ace’s Indian style. He hunches forward and clutches his knees, a nervous bounce of energy fueling his lips, refusing to stop waggling.

“My mom grew up in California and would follow this band the Germs to all the punk dives. Darby Crash was their lead singer. She was obsessed. My dad looked just like him, and I probably wouldn’t be here if not for that. I don’t look like him. Well, either of them.”

He has never told that to anyone before.

“That’s a good history. I don’t know if my name has one,” Ace says, sounding the slightest bit disappointed.

“Yeah, well, he—Darby, not my dad—was an insane drug addict and killed himself when was twenty-two, so…I don’t know. Sometimes it’s weird. I mean, he made great music, but he’s not the ideal guy to name your kid after.”

He’s rambling, but Ace leans in, getting closer to the story.

“Are you kidding? That just makes it better!”

It doesn’t shame Darby to hear him so impressed. It brings him so close to pride other yarns are queuing up. The unshareable ones. He’d been ready to give away what was innocuous—the tragedies of his namesake having no effect on his own reality—but the dangerous secrets and prepping to spill.

The floodgates had opened only to drown him. The depth rose so slowly, Darby was falsely convinced he could swim. There’s no time to learn, glugging water when he means to gasp in the safety of oxygen.

Darby looks passed Ace, over his shoulder, wishing he had a watch to inspect, and says, “I should probably get home.”

Ace’s back straightens with surprise.

“Oh. Okay. Sure. Yeah.” He blinks away his confusion with the progression of each uttered affirmation, speaking the final one with an actual hint of conviction

There’s not a chance he could lay out his reasoning—it’s not that he wants to leave, but how else can he stop the brewing darkness—and it’s a relief when Ace is unquestioning, easily accepting that it’s time to go.

Mirrored images, they rise, pocketing their hands and slumping back to the Buick. Inside, Darby cranks the lever with expedition, re-lowering his window to stave off any of the claustrophobic malaise. The Buick roars, awakened from its afternoon nap and Darby waits for Ace to pull out. They remain stagnant, and, like when he’d been reading at lunch, Darby can sense the eyes on him. Ace had said nothing as they loped across the grass, but maybe he’d only been expecting Darby to gather his belongings. It wasn’t far, he could walk, had done so just yesterday.

Should he, he wondered, get out on his own or wait for Ace to evict him, impatient with the burden of such a clueless companion?

“Are you going to tell me where you live, or…?”

“Right. S-Sorry,” he says, damning the return of his stutter.

He guides Ace through the long way home, his on-foot shortcuts rendered useless; Fayette to Magnolia, a right on to Rock Haven, the first neighborhood on the left. And that’s all he says. Right. Right. Left.

Down and around, they wind the uninterrupted asphalt. The road dips and swerves, outwardly hectic, but outlining a simple circle. Edgewater, the town’s first suburban development, had apparently been mapped without care, but it’s not difficult to navigate; no sudden turns or numbered side streets. The only way out is the way you come in.

Dead-center at the circle’s back curve is the booming white house with the red, sore thumb of a door.

Darby says, “This is me,” pointing out the window.

The Buick halts and time is piling up, too many seconds, an unreasonable amount passing without any move toward the door. He’s ready to leave, but not to say goodbye.

“Thanks. Y’know, for today.”

“Any time, Darby,” Ace says, stressing his correct name.

Darby fiddles with the lock and climbs out, bending to the open window after he’s swung the door shut.

Just to try, just to see what it’s like, Darby says, “Bye, Ace,” relishing the taste, the first time he’s said his name aloud.

“See you tomorrow.”

Darby doesn’t ask when, despite his desperation to know the precise time he’ll see him again. “Tomorrow” is too general. It promises nothing.

He doesn’t ask, but steps back from the Buick, allowing Ace room to depart. On the driveway, he waits, listening to the Buick’s protestations. Darby merely listens, doesn’t watch him drive away, and the sounds are instantly recognizable after a day spent being jostled by every shift, acceleration, and pause.

There’s a second wide-shot of Darby towered over by the backdrop of his house, the noise of the Buick heard from out of frame, gradually dwindling, evaporating around an expansive bend.

He should’ve gone inside before he could be left alone.