By Thomas Kunz

After I failed my math test, Sister Nadine asked me if I had studied for it. I told her that I was looking for the Holy Spirit to guide me through the exam and felt that there was no need to study with God on my side; she didn’t appreciate my misplaced faith, quickly labeled me a troublemaker and sent me home with a note for my parents. Sister Nadine didn’t want to understand that I had many questions about God, about the world that didn’t make sense to me—the things I would hear and see on that October evening.

I played in my backyard, serene and quiet, on the swing set that my father had installed the summer before. My yard was a dreamlike world, a battlefield of imagination where no one could touch me. I was a rookie soldier in a cartoon war, hiding in piles of crunchy, brown leaves and fighting off the forces of evil from behind pine trees. The Heartson family lived next door and had a dog named Pickle. I really liked their dog. Sometimes I would go up to the fence that separated our backyards and listen to him on the other side, panting at me and wanting to play.

My father arrived home late from work, which had grown into a routine that year. He had been working long hours on the factory lines at a cosmetics plant in Piscataway, and each night when he walked through the door, my mother and I were greeted with the foul stench of mixed perfumes, damp and stained on his work boots, wet splashes darker near the toes. Over dinner we had talked about our days. I remembered when my Dad used to tease me and ask me about the adventures I had in the yard, but at some point over that previous summer, the conversations had stopped. I guess I didn’t pay it much attention at first, but eventually I started to catch on.

"Mom? Dad?" I asked. They both looked at me with cautious eyes.

"Yes?" my father replied.

"How come we all never talk anymore at the dinner table? You used to ask me about my day, and now we don’t even eat dinner until eight-thirty."

My father glanced at my mother, rolled his eyes and continued eating. My mother smiled and told me to go upstairs.

"I need to talk to Daddy," she faked the sincerity in her tone.

I left the dinner table and went upstairs without questioning her. Sister Nadine’s conduct note shifted in the back pocket of my jeans as I climbed the steps. I stopped at the foot of the stairs above the dining room, crouched down and hid from my parents while I listened. He was leaving her, someone else at the office he was interested in. At age eleven, I was unclear about the definition of an affair, but I was sure about the tone in my mother’s voice when she said the word. It felt like my fault, though I couldn’t say why. I ran to my room and hid in the closet. Sitting in the dark, the tops of my pants rested on the cold wire hangers and moved back and forth over my head. I couldn’t find the room to breathe, but I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t understand the world outside, where the behavior among adults didn’t make any sense. Angry voices frightened me, like the time Sister Nadine blamed me for pouring apple juice in the Holy Water.

Something snapped inside of me and I wanted to escape from being a child. A red duffel bag rested on the closet floor next to me. Although I couldn’t see it, the magnet handles had stuck to my left hand. I began to pack—nothing specific, just random clothes as I saw them. From downstairs I heard the front door slam and the loud roar of my father’s car engine. My mother had thrown the dishes into the sink and run downstairs to the living room to call my Aunt Lucy. While I tried to block out the sound of her crying, I grabbed my windbreaker from the hallway closet and walked down the stairs. 120 dollars rested on the china cabinet next to the dining table. I quickly pocketed the money and walked toward the front door. My mother’s sobbing grew louder in volume from downstairs. I reached for the door handle and stepped outside.

My next-door neighbors were on vacation. Their seventeen-year-old son, Michael, was having a party on the front porch, and I heard the lustful laughing of drunken high school girls, hysterical giggles that would later turn into the green lights of my teenage years—an invitation to meaningless drunken sex. One of the girls had noticed me standing outside my house. I had seen her before that night, usually in the late hours of an evening when I couldn’t sleep from the parties Michael would have; I used to look out my bedroom window that overlooked the Heartsons’ front porch and watch them smoking cigarettes and stacking cans of beer on the table. I would sometimes make funny noises from my window to try and get them to notice me, but I was always a silent, unseen observer that could never make contact with them. The girl lit up a cigarette.

"Hey there, li’l boy…" She ran over to me. Her blond frizzy hair stuck to her painted cheeks and tasteful jewelry. She wore a sliver necklace with a single diamond that dangled between her breasts. "What are you doing out here by yourself?" she said.

I made up some story about my mother meeting me at the train station because my father was late at work and that I was waiting for a taxi to take me there. Her name was Michelle, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her since she looked like the girls I had seen on cable in the late hours of the evening, a skinny pink tank top that revealed the shape of her nipples, small and pokey, and I kept looking at them when I talked to her, something she noticed right away, but she laughed and looked me over with a cute smirk.

"No need to wait for a taxi," she stuttered. "I’ll take you to the train station."

She smelled like my father’s boots, only more potent, but I accepted her offer, and we walked to her car. She staggered for a moment. With her eyes closed, she leaned up against the driver’s side door, car keys loosely in her hand. She stuck out her tongue and started rambling about trying to taste the air. We both got into the car and she drove away.

"Aren’t you supposed to stay in the white lines?" I said.

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. "What school do you go to, cutie?"

"Saint Katherine’s Elementary."

"Do you believe that good little boys and girls go to heaven when they die?"

I took a deep breath when she swerved into the oncoming traffic lane. "Sister Nadine seems to think so."

"Well, what do you think? You like people telling you what to think?"

My heart raced and I changed the subject. "The cafeteria at school is nice. Not like the public schools."

She talked to me the whole way there. I stared out the window and watched the trees that stood in the dark shadows; they reminded me of superheroes and action figures that my parents had bought for me at Christmas time. Michelle made me feel like a troublemaker. Maybe Sister Nadine was right, I thought. I tried to hide the tears, but the more I thought about the sound of those dishes hitting the sink and my father’s car engine, the glassier my eyes became, plus Michelle had smoked two cigarettes. It was the first time I had been in a car with a complete stranger, the first time I had left my house without permission, the first time I had felt like the cause of all of the misery in my parents’ world, the first time I was ever truly scared to keep my eyes open, and as much as I wanted to scream and cry, kick my feet and lean on Michelle’s bare, smooth shoulders, I sat like stone, tugging at the seat belt with my right hand and singing songs in my head to make the drive go faster—anything I could think of to feel safe again.

I arrived at the Matawan train station sometime after ten. My mom was probably still sobbing away on the phone to my aunt, unaware that I had left. The station had a few benches enclosed by a plastic glass that made the Jersey wind seem haunting. Only a few people were scattered along the tracks, mostly sitting by themselves in their own worlds. A deli in the distance was closing up where a woman argued with the owner about something. The owner kept shaking his head and locking up the front door. I remember asking myself if every adult in the world disagreed, if it was something that just happened when you got older, and that maybe I was overreacting to the things I had seen in my house that night, but I was already at the train station with no idea on where to go, and as much as I tried to convince myself to go home, I stayed.

A middle-age man sat on a bench along the railroad tracks, reading a copy of the New York Times. He sipped coffee from a foam cup and seemed like a kind man, but then again, I had watched too much cable and didn’t know what to expect. I approached him slowly as he tossed through the pages of the newspaper. He caught my presence out of the corner of his eye.

"Excuse me, sir?" I walked closer to him. "Where’s the next train going?"

"Are you lost, son?" It was the pleasant tone in his voice when he called me ‘son’ that made me weep inside. "Where are you trying to go?"

I looked down at his newspaper in search of an answer.

"New York," I said. "My mother is meeting me at the station, but I lost the train information on which train to take."

The man paused, curious, then continued. "Oh, don’t worry. All these trains go to New York City. They come every twenty minutes. I’m heading that way, too. The next one should be here in about five minutes or so."

I walked away from him because I feared he would pry into my business and ask me what a young boy was doing at a train station by himself at night. I sat on a bench that was close to the main road, hands and toes shaking; my windbreaker didn’t help. I shivered in my seat until the flashing red lights and the loud bells of the crossing barriers dropped down to block the cars from passing. Down the tracks I saw the front light on the train, only the size of a pinhead, flashing in double blips, but within a blink of an eye, the steps were in front of me along with the polished blue uniform of the train conductor, a short and hefty man.

"All aboard!" he screamed.

I grabbed my bag and sauntered up the steps into the first train car on the left, empty except for an old woman sleeping in the back and a longhaired teenager smoking a cigarette in the middle section. Newspapers clung to the tan, ripped leather seats, and fogged windows (absorbing the dim glow of the streetlights) looked like individual moons against a black sky. I sat near a window in the front and watched the Matawan sign disappear into the darkness during departure, each letter trying to stay with me as it vanished, but in a moment—gone.

About five minutes after the train had been moving, the longhaired teenager made his way to the front and sat down next to me. His eyes were bloodshot, and a potent smoky odor oozed from him. He wore a pair of ripped jeans and a black T-shirt with the words NO REST FOR THE WICKED. I remember feeling afraid, but when he spoke, there was something in his voice that calmed me.

"What’s up, little man?" he said. I didn’t answer him. He held a wrinkled dollar bill in his hand, which he used to wipe the sweat off his forehead. "You know about change, man."

"What do you mean?" I answered.

"Change, man. You know…dimes, quarters, pennies, nickels…change, man."

His name was Brian, and he told me there was a microchip in change that enabled a person to travel back in time to the year on the quarter, dime, or penny. He offered me a cigarette, but I refused. He didn’t scare me anymore, and as he made himself more comfortable next to me, he told me the strangest things. He said that there wasn’t really a Santa Claus and that the whole thing was a government cover-up. Half of the things he said, I simply didn’t understand, but I remember feeling like someone was around me that knew things other people didn’t know. I showed him my conduct note from Sister Nadine and he signed my father’s name. The conductor opened the door to our train car and walked toward us. Brian ran through the doors on the opposite side without saying goodbye to me. The conductor adjusted his belt clip that held the train tickets.

"Evening," he gripped his ticket puncher, "Where you headin’?"

"New York City," I said.

"Do you need a round trip or a single ticket?"

I hadn’t understood what he meant, but I told him I needed a round trip ticket, slipped him a twenty from my pants pocket and tried not to look too suspicious. He handed me back nine dollars in change: six one-dollar bills and three dollars in quarters. After he left the train continued to move throughout the night. I looked at the quarters, wondering about how much time I could buy away from home and fiddled with them to find the microchip Brian had talked about.

When the train arrived in Manhattan, I stepped into the corridor of Penn Station Plaza and loped through the sardine fitted hallway with ease. I was small and could make my way through any crowd. The smell of cigarettes and electricity clung to my nostrils as I walked up the steps to the outside. The stairs pasted my sneaker bottoms with the smell of stale urine. Graffiti walls enclosed my tiny body and reminded me of television land. I had never been to New York City before, but I had seen it on the tube a few times; I guess it looked the same. I approached a large circular-revolving doorway that led to the street and patiently waited for the right opportunity to catch a ride through it. Finally I stepped in and went around and around, at least four times until I heard the gunshot.

Hundreds of people froze in place and turned around to see what had happened. A man fell to his knees on the street, holding his bloody stomach together. Tire screeches pierced the lightning air. A crowd gathered. I pushed through them and watched the man squirm on the concrete, choking on his blood. He was a Spanish man with squinting dark, brown eyes that gazed up at me. The hum of the streetlights buzzed in his eyes as blood rushed out of him like an expensive wine, deep and red, flowing in slow motion. He reached out and grabbed a woman’s hand. No one helped. The life left his eyes, a cold and sorrowful stare that I couldn’t understand. I lost my balance and fell to the ground when someone in the crowd bumped into me. Another reached down and picked me up away from the crowd and the bleeding man. The quarters escaped from my pants pocket and scattered away in different directions, trying to find a destination.

I headed back into Penn Station. People walked in and out of the doors past the dead man, some looking at him, some walking past him carefree. The lights from police cars reflected off the billboards as I took the escalator to the ground level, but I never looked back. The monotone sounds of low-pitched voices rang through the intercom system, announcing track numbers and train information. I saw a group of people looking at a big sign and I walked over to them. Matawan was listed along with the other towns for the New Jersey Coastline. It was after midnight and I was worried. At the time I did not care about the man who I had seen bleeding to death in front of me, but I was concerned that I would be grounded for life.

I hopped on the next train back home and stared at Brian’s signature on my conduct note. When the train stopped in Matawan, it took me almost an hour to walk back to my house. I figured it was only a matter of time before a policeman picked me up, but it didn’t happen. My father’s car was still gone, but all of the lights were on, and I figured I would be in trouble. I slipped through the front door and downstairs into the living room. My mother, asleep on the couch, clutched the telephone receiver in her hand. She never knew I had left. I felt relieved and unappreciated at the same time. I peeled the telephone from her hands and gently placed it back on the table. I stood there for a few moments and then went upstairs to my room, curled myself in a ball under my bedspread, listening to the party that continued outside at the Heartsons’ house, and prayed for the morning to awaken me, a morning that would make everything normal again, scrambled eggs and orange juice, my backyard and a brightly-lit kaleidoscopic sun.

Thomas J. Kunz, a New Jersey native, joined the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2000. He has a story appearing in the forthcoming issue of Ellipsis. With a collection of short stories in progress, tentatively titled The World According to Numbers, Thomas is also working on a novel and seeking representation.