Junk

by Ivy Smyth

It was the most disappointing reflection of yourself you would see all day. The harsh fluorescent lighting and the thin layer of grime on the mirror gave everyone in line that fresh, recently-returned-from-the-dead look. Nobody really wanted to see themselves that way, but there wasn’t much else to look at apart from the multiple “cash only” signs. You had to pretend to be speaking to one of the three servers when you ordered, but really you were talking to your own dead self, mottled and vacantly hungry in the glass. Of course, there is a certain intimacy between those who die together. These regulars gathered in Little Mandarin to die at approximately 11:41am every weekday with a mixture of shame from being addicted to the cheapest Chinese food money could buy and fierce loyalty to the business that had saved them on so many broke and stoned occasions.

I call it dying, but it felt good. Like the depressed teenager who cuts himself, Little Mandarin addicts found a whole new world of comfort and sympathy through their practice. Yes, it was unhealthy and depressing and possessing of unearthly gelatinous qualities, but it was a ritual through which we could bask in our unfortunate nutritional situations. That’s right, I was one of them. A Little Mandarin addict.

But I wasn’t the only one, and that is where the majority of my satisfaction lay. There were the punks, then the truly scary punks, the ghetto kids, the preppy girl screw-ups, random hippie weirdoes, that one guy in a sweater vest who ate with a different girl every day, and Lucinda, or Lucy, the sexiest girl I’d ever seen in my life. Maybe she wasn’t even beautiful. When a girl is that hot, it’s hard to tell, and she always wore giant sunglasses. I bring her name up first not just because she had blonde hair and massive tits without being fat, but because she was on her own, like me. She sat at a table by herself every day, practically daring every man to speak to her. No one ever did. Hers was the only name I knew of all who were there the day that it happened.

I entered alone, as usual. I had $3.75 for my special and I was dreaming of hunting up another eighty-five cents from the bottom of my backpack for a soda. I thought the place was a bit more crowded than it should have been, considering I had arrived early. Lucy was there along with the most avid addicts, mostly those who came early and actually stayed within the restaurant to eat. Then I noticed what was really off: there was no one behind the counter. The food was not being served.

“That’s it! Close the fucking door and lock it this time.” The kid who was glaring at me was one I saw in line almost every day along with a wispy, dark-haired girl. He had to be one of the scariest guys I’d ever seen, even without the metal spikes that studded every item of clothing he ever wore and the arms bulging with muscle. It was his eyes—the intense angle of the brows and the way they flashed at every person he passed. I didn’t cower because I had the image of a tough-enough guy myself, but one of the preppy screw-ups got up from their usual table by the door and turned the lock.

“What’s going on?” I asked the collective group. Though I had never spoken a word to most of them, I felt I could ask the question because I was in my own community and it seemed threatened. Everyone looked unsure of how to answer and I got a feeling of relief at not being the only one in the dark. Lucy looked very bored at her table. It was one of a clump of four pissed-off-looking black guys in bright, baggy clothes that finally answered me. “We don’t know. Ain’t nobody here. I say we take our food and get out of here.”

At that moment, a redheaded girl came out of the doorway leading to the kitchen and answered my next question. “Nobody. There’s nobody anywhere. One door is locked and I think it’s a closet but I knocked anyway. There’s nobody.” We all stared at her silently for a few seconds waiting for more but she just blushed and hurried to join her few girlfriends at the preppy screw-up table. There were a few more moments of quiet and then the little room erupted in confused conversation. Everyone had someone to talk to. Everyone but Lucy and me.

I watched her out of the corner of my eye, partly for ideas on how to act when nobody is talking to you and partly for the reason I always watched her. She got up, pushed her way past everyone between her and the food, stepped behind the counter and reached for the chow mein. The guy with the flashing eyes was there in a second, grabbing her by the arm and yanking her back. She fixed him with what was obviously a cold stare, despite her sunglasses. “Careful. Don’t want to offend your girlfriend.” I guess a girl with giant tits can afford to turn every interaction into a sexual advance on her.

The girlfriend in question, who was hard to notice because she came off as the guy’s shadow more than anything else, said nothing.

“Sister!” hissed the spiky boy, and he forcibly removed Lucy from behind the counter.

Oddly enough, she didn’t look so icy anymore. Her cheeks were red as she asked him, “What’s the deal? And who are you anyway?”

“I’m Silas and I say nobody touches shit just yet.” He said this to everybody, though he still had not let go of Lucy. The whole room buzzed to an angry life the pitiful accommodations could barely contain.

“Just what the fuck you think you’re doin’,” one deep voice sounded above the collective whine and I looked to see the biggest of the ghetto kids shove Silas against the wall. Without a moment’s hesitation, the punk reached into his leather and drew a small handgun. He fired it twice, straight at the ceiling, several chunks of which crumbled to the floor.

The reaction was comical, in a way. I watched eight or so girls in skin-tight tops dive squealing under the wobbly tables. The big guy, who had pushed Silas a moment before, backed as far away as the cramped space would allow. The kid with the sweater vest made a break for the door, redhead in hand. He was fumbling with the lock when Silas called out, “STOP.”

Everybody froze to look at the boy with the gun. Little Mandarin had a new king. Silas. I had never been more jealous of anyone in my life.

“This is what’s going on. For today, and for today only, Eager Beaver and I will run the counter. For today, and for today only, you all must pay. I don’t know what’s going on here but I can’t imagine it’s going to last longer than the next hour. If there’s nobody here after school, same deal. Tomorrow, if nothing has changed, we’ll talk. Until that talk nobody tells anyone anything, nobody brings anyone else in here, make sense? If you don’t want to come back, don’t, but don’t go fucking shit up for all of us, got it? And nobody, including myself, with Blondie as my witness, touches this cash register unless it’s to put something in. Fair rules for all.”

Like most everyone that had been present for the lunch insanity, I made a point of casually walking by Little Mandarin after school just to see if anything had changed. I peered into the grimy window and saw the restaurant was empty apart from Silas and Lucy who were speaking animatedly to each other behind the counter. He looked cocky, she huffy. She had taken off her sunglasses and her boobs jiggled a little every time she made a hand gesture. Her back was curved like a banana. She had very tiny eyebrows. She had seen me.

She walked over to the door, unlocked it, and held it open for me. I was thrilled she recognized me but I was also noticing for the first time that they had turned the sign on the door so that it read CLOSED.

“You want something?” I wondered at how she always seemed so bored.

“Eggrolls.”

“Put a buck in the box.”

I did. Then I turned to Silas who was staring at me with murder written all over his face. “Nothing’s changed?” I asked.

“Nothing. Anybody been talking about it that you heard?” He didn’t sound angry or evil. I guess it was just the way his face looked.

“Nobody. All too scared.”

“Tomorrow we’ll make shifts. You know you’re the only one who didn’t flinch when that gun went off.”

I felt this weird flattery at him talking to me like that. Casually, like I was so much better than anybody else. Looking tough has its perks.

The next days meeting was much like the first in that not one person raised an objection to Silas’ rule. I thought of my ex-girlfriend’s heroin dealer. He had the junk, regardless of how random or unreasonable he chose to be. He still had the junk.

We signed up for shifts, one pair of workers for each day of the rest of the week, on a piece of line paper. That Wednesday I was to be served lunch by sweater vest boy. Thursday, the girl who had discovered the locked closet. Silas volunteered me for Friday when no one else wanted the job. “You can work with Seraphina,” he said, nodding towards his sister. Then later, in private, “You’re the only guy I’d ever let near my sister, I tell ya. Feel special.”

We (by which I mean King Silas) decided to have a password to get in, in addition to having to knock on the door and be recognized. Everyone wanted to pick it and yelled out their retarded ideas. A soon as I the word “junk” left my mouth, Silas gave me a thin-lipped smile. So junk it was.

Silas had found a set of keys in the kitchen, which locked up the place for those working. Still that one closet remained locked. We tried everything to open it, but none of the keys fit and it just wouldn’t budge. It didn’t matter though. We had all we needed for at least a weeks worth of food. The people on duty had to prepare the basics according to the laminated recipes tacked to the kitchen wall—chow mein, cow fun, fried rice, and lemon chicken. It wasn’t the same as it had been, but it contained the same amount of MSG.

Those couple days were one of the oddest times of my life. I looked forward to lunch so much, out of simple curiosity, I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of the world. Not only was it exhilarating to belong to this secret, but it was thrilling too. You see that closet, it started to smell pretty bad.

I was nervous about working Friday because of what Silas had said about guys and his sister. It got me thinking about her a certain way, I guess, before I’d ever taken a good look at her. Still, when the day came around, I left after second period in a state of great…elation? I was going to prove something today.

Little Serphi didn’t make any noise when she walked. That was the first thing I noticed, being alone with her. She wore boots with little heels on them but they did not click. Also, heels or not, she wasn’t as small as she seemed. She was just fragile-looking with delicate bones and slanted eyes.

We spoke little until the chow fun was sizzling in the wok. As I wondered aloud what could possibly be in the little packets of powder we added to the sauce, she began to talk too.

“Don’t be weirded out by anything my brother says about me. I don’t need looking after the way he thinks. He just needs something to pretend to care about.”

I nodded. I could really picture that, seeing how lovely Seraphina looked under fluorescents. She was a glittering insect. I’d never noticed before.

“Sometimes I get so sad. He thinks it’s all because of some guys I used to hang around, but it’s not only.”

I instinctively glanced at the inside of her arms, checking for lacerations. I’d dealt with some really screwed up girls in my time, but her skin was so clear you could practically see through it. “What is it, then?” I asked. I don’t want to say it was mysterious that she really interested me—it just seemed strange that this was the first I’d noticed it. Looking at her then, she seemed too ethereal for this world. Or at least for Little Mandarin.

“I guess at a certain point people just stopped listening to me. Silas says that’s the way high school works. He says girls like me don’t get to be anything on the inside, and he thinks I’m too soft for the scene I got into, so he drags me around everywhere with him.”

“I’m listening,” I told her, and it was the truth. “I don’t think you should hang with your brother so much. You sort of… disappear when you’re around him.”

She made a scoffing noise. “Only to those of you that practically worship him. He’s a real asshole, you know? What’s so great about that? Anyone can be like that.”

I thought about that a minute and I honestly felt ashamed for my admiration of Silas. What did I like about him so much? “He’s got charisma,” I said in an attempt to defend myself. It sounded dumb to me, even then.

“Yeah, he does. Not that anyone understands what that is. But apparently it makes it okay to hurt people.”

I thought of Lucy’s flushed cheeks. Hurt people. Serphi was soft. I watched her turn to drain the grease from the wok, and found it at last. A dark, purplish bruise starting at the back of her neck and disappearing beneath her blouse. Without thinking, I reached out and touched it.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

We talked straight through the two hours until lunch. When the gang showed up we were too busy serving and fetching more tubs of noodles from the back but we had the whole rest of the school day to ourselves once they left. Being behind the counter hadn’t been as exhilarating as I had imagined, and I found myself counting the minutes until the end of lunch. Serphi locked the door behind the last of them. I realized that I hadn’t bothered to look for Lucy.

Through conversation Serphi and I found we both loved to read and it was during a mutual praising of Paul Zindel’s The Pigman that she began to cry. It was a very sad book, I told her jokingly. She cried harder so I sat at one of the tables with her and just held her a while. It felt like if I squeezed her, she would crumble.

“I have to get out,” she was saying. “I have to get out of here. I have to get away from him.”

“From Silas?” I asked her.

She nodded. I told her the usual lies you tell girls that cry. That everything would be all right and whatnot. I think we stayed that way for hours. She had a bunch of my shirt clutched in her hand and sometimes I would press my closed mouth against the top of her head. What can I say? It’s sort of a reflex to take advantage of sad girls.

Eventually she went limp and stopped crying. “Serphi?” I said, but she didn’t answer. She breathed heavily like sleep so I tried to move her off of me and position her in a way where she wouldn’t fall over. It wasn’t easy and in the process something fell off of her person—out of one of her pockets, maybe. It clinked gently as it bounced on the floor. I looked down to see a small, shiny key.

This weird nagging feeling crept up inside me. It was probably her house key, I thought to myself. Of course it was. Everybody carried keys. But it didn’t matter. Once I’d gotten Serphi propped against the wall and picked the key up, all I could think about was that closet door and how many keys we had jammed in the knob. Of course I had to try.

I was relatively light-hearted as I slid the key into the slot because it was truly the twentieth time I had tried to get that door open. My whole body went numb when it slid gently, easily, all the way in. I was suddenly very aware of Serphi in the next room, of how I had taken this key from her. I felt eyes all over the back of me. What could I do, though? I turned it.

The door clicked open and the scene behind it smelled so much worse than I could possibly have imagined that I immediately vomited on the floor. Bodies. Three or four, I couldn’t even tell in the tangle of arms, legs, and black hair. They had been compressed and contorted to fit in the tiny space along with mops, brooms and chemicals in spray bottles. The smell. It was the same as what had been leaking out for days but it was so much worse than what I was used to, like I was inside it. Inside a pile of rotting guts and flesh, getting into my throat no matter how tight I sealed my lips. I gagged again.

“It was Silas.” Dark eyes sparkling, Serphi didn’t look so soft standing there. She looked like onyx, cold and unmoving.

“It was Silas… and you’ve been keeping the gate?”

“I had no choice. I still have no choice. You don’t know him. You—I mean we—can’t tell anyone. And most of all don’t tell him. He’d just as soon have you in there with them.”

There was a long pause. “It doesn’t make sense,” I finally told her.

Something in her face. Fear.

“He doesn’t know, does he? Serphi, does he know?”

“Come with me. Let’s get the hell out of here, please. Just come with me.” Her voice seemed eager, excited and more than a little desperate.

“I don’t believe it! You really did it. Jesus fucking Christ. How did you get away so long?” I actually found myself laughing. I wanted an eggroll.

Just then, a harsh knocking erupted from the front. Serphi stuck her head around back into the restaurant to check. “It’s him!” she hissed. “Close it and let’s run!”

“Let’s run…?” I said weakly. Let’s run? As if by letting this girl cry on me for a couple hours I was suddenly responsible for her actions. Strange, though, I really wanted to go. The knocking got louder.

“Lock that door and come out the back with me or I’m going to leave you here to tell my brother you’ve lost me. Come on.”

“You are? And take care of yourself?”

She made no reply. Still, I locked the door. I think I would have left with her through the back, but we both went rigid as the front door clicked open. Neither of us made a move as Silas’ footsteps came right for us. Apparently, he had his own key. I felt stupid then, for having ever thought he wouldn’t.

“What’s going on here? What has she done to you?”

It was amazing the effect those words had on me. Silas was here, Silas was on my side; it was easy to be behind him once again, though I was very conscious of my puddle of vomit on the floor.

Serphi’s lips trembled a bit. She was making a point not to glance at the closet door, but that smell still hung heavy in the air.

“He knows?’

She looked terrified.

“Jesus, kid, don’t look so scared, you think I wouldn’t have figured it out by now? What kind of brother do you think I am?”

Finally, she nodded. “He found the key…”

Silas turned to me then. “Look, I know this whole thing is twisted and all, but Serphi isn’t right in the head, okay?”

I really wanted an eggroll.

He continued, “I knew if I left anyone else in here with her they’d end up skipping the country or locked in a closet. But a guy needs a break every once in a while, you know?”

“Don’t listen to him!” Serphi spoke up suddenly. “You and me, we’ve got something special because you really listen. Take me out of here, please, don’t listen to him.”

“Oh please.” It was now hard to tell if they were talking to me, or each other. “She already has at least one playmate, huh kiddo?”

Serphi just kept shaking her head. She didn’t seem to have much left to say.

“I’ve seen the bruises on you. You get them overnight, huh? Tell the nice boy about your violent, bruising dreams. And I’ll be taking care of that guy just like I have to take care of the remains you left in there.” He nodded to the closet. He sounded so… smart. It’s hard to describe. I wondered at these siblings, the greatest masters of rhetoric I’d ever come across, each in their own way.

The intensity with which I now desired eggrolls was to the point where I could no longer keep my joints steady. I leaned weakly against the grey-smudged wall. I debated over whom to look pleadingly at. The decision was made for me when Serphi turned her face to the wall.

“You look like you could use an eggroll,” Silas told me. “Why don’t we sit down?”

I allowed myself to be steered into a seat back in the restaurant room. Silas plunked the metal bin containing leftover eggrolls in front of my. Eagerly, I shoved one between my lips.

“I’m just going to take a guess at what happened here,” Silas spoke mildly, quite inoffensive. “Serphi starts right in on you, huh? Looking cute and sad and talking about how nobody listens to her. Probably managed to slip my name into it too, right? Then she wants you to run away with her. God bless you if she cried.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just looked at him, and the look said it all.

“You aren’t the first. The kid is a pathological liar, a chronic masochist, unforgivingly violent and utterly sick in the head. But please, you can’t tell anyone about this. Tonight I’m going to take care of those bodies and that will be that. I’ll keep closer watch on her from now on.”

I think I believed him. And he wasn’t pulling his gun out on me. But it didn’t stop me from wanting Serphi, who was still moping around in the back somewhere. Part of me still wanted to go with her. Silas seemed to read my mind.

“You probably think you love her or something. It isn’t that. She’s just very interesting. The last boy she convinced to take her away to LA mysteriously ODed in a Motel 6 on the way there. Seriously. You’re stronger than this, I could always tell. Stick with the blond chick, the busty one. Luscious Lucy, is it? No danger there, just tits. You’ll have her soon enough, no problem.”

Serphi had wandered, trembling, into the room. I looked back and forth between them, trying to decide which held more attraction for me. I couldn’t. I took another eggroll.

“We aren’t going to get anywhere, are we?” There was true honesty in Silas’ hopelessness. I remembered what Serphi said about him being a real asshole, but now it just seemed like he acted that way to cover for her. I wasn’t sure what to think.

“Alright,” Serphi cried out into the uncomfortable silence. “I don’t want you to run away with me. Just do what we both want and keep quiet about this. We get rid of the bodies. Then we can keep this up as long as possible. You want your junk, chow mein, you name it, this is how it comes.”

“She’s right,” Silas said. “Really, it’s easy for you to help both of us. Just remember which one is sane.” He actually winked at me.

“What happens when we get found out? Or when the food runs out?” I needed to know.

They both shrugged.

I looked at them, horrified at the very thought.

Serphi tried to be soothing. “But you know they were planning on closing down before next week, don’t you? We’ll get it for longer this way.”

Silas bore no change in expression. He just looked at me like a friend does, only with far more intelligence.

I said, “Jesus, I’m in,” and packed the remaining eggrolls to go.