I Can't Hang

Hotel life was boring as hell.

I’m not even kidding you here. All we could do all day was sit around and watch the magic box with moving pictures, unless one of us initiated a halfassed game of “Rock Paper Scissors” or “Find the TV Remote.” Most of the time, those games ended up in arguments between me and Brady, while James just sat behind and tried to sink into obscurity, ignoring us.

I couldn’t blame the kid. Sometimes we got sort of loud. Especially with Brady being all loud and Italian in my face. I mean, I didn’t know for sure that the guy was Italian, since his last name was weird as hell and just sounded European in general, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that he had some in him.

And you’re probably callin’ me stupid and racist for just assuming it outta nowhere, yelling at me. Guess what? I don’t care. And I ended up being right, since I asked him once and for all two days after we got kicked out.

‘Cause it was one of those days where I woke up yelling at the guy since he was taking so long to shower, and then he ended up yelling right back at me for no reason. And this time, after I got outta the shower and after he yelled at me for yelling at him, I looked over at James and the kid was trying so hard not to laugh.

I shot a weird look at him and he pressed his lips into a thin line, straightening up. Brady reached behind him – they were both sitting on the same bed – and messed up his hair.

And just ‘cause it was bugging the crap out of me, I finally asked, “Brady, are you Italian?”

He knitted his eyebrows together. “What the heck kinda question is that? What if I asked you if you were Irish? Wouldn’t that offend you?”

“No. It wouldn’t,” I shook my head. “Just curious. And for the record, I’m mostly Scottish.”

Brady leaned back on his arms and smiled to himself, combing the hair out of his eyes. He kicked the floor softly as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “All you white kids look the same. You and James, you ain’t no different. At least I got culture, ‘cause I’m a mutt.”

“Hey, I’m mostly French,” James interjected.

“Eh. You’re still white,” Brady shrugged. “All of you white boys look all boyish and cute, without no intimidation in you. Italians, we got an edge, see? And plus I’m half-Hispanic, so that just makes me even better.”

I curled my upper lip. “Don’t ever imply that I’m cute. Ever.”

St. James said nothing. He just stared at the older dude with a look of quiet confusion.

“Aw, is wittle Kyle angwy at Bwady?” Brady teased, folding his hands together and making ridiculous baby faces at me. “Get over it, kid.” And then he put on that familiar straight face, that pissed-off expression that seemed to be his default one when he was in a stewed mood. Which was pretty much every waking moment since we set foot in this hotel.

I stepped forward and flicked the side of his forehead, sitting down on my bed next to his.

“No, but seriously, my mom was Italian, and her mom was Colombian and her dad was Italian, and my dad’s mom was Puerto Rican, but my dad’s dad was totally Italian,” Brady explained in a blur, his hands doing the talking. Then he did his crooked smile and scratched the back of his head.

We went quiet. It was a little bit predictable to me. I wasn’t expecting no noble adventure story, but it could’a been at least a little more…interesting.

“What’s goin’ on? Why’re you guys lookin’ at me like that?” he said, eyeing me and James, who were eyeing him.

James coughed and looked away, fiddling around with the sleeves of his shirt.

“That was the most boring and confusing family tree I ever heard of,” I stated bluntly.

He turned up his nose and crossed his arms. “I’d like to see you come up with somethin’ a little neater.”

And I was all fine and dandy to tell him my life story and all of my roots, but as soon as I opened my mouth, I realized that I’d just fall flat and look like a moron if I tried to talk.

Here: my parents are white people. My mom’s from Maine, my dad’s from Albany. They’re a mix of Scottish and British. That’s actually a thousand times more boring than Brady’s supposed bore-snore of a backstory, and I figured that one out about a millisecond before I told him.

So I just smiled sheepishly and said, “Yeah, I’m…mine’s not any better than yours…”

He stuck his tongue out at me. Then he whacked James on the knee and sucked him into the conversation I could tell he was eavesdropping on. (Though with Brady and his non-inside voice, it’d be hard to not hear it.) With an endearing grin, he asked, “What ‘bout you, Jim? I’m dyin’ to know your side’a the tree.”

James wrinkled his nose. “I just told you, I’m French…”

“Oh. Yeah.” Brady blinked, his face going blank. “Can you speak any?”

“That depends. Can you?” the younger man replied, not making much sense to me at first.

Brady said, “Nah.”

St. James smiled slightly and declared, “Alright, then, vous êtes un homme très beau.”

If words were arrows, that sentence would’ve flown right over Brady’s head. And if passed over mine, too, since I didn’t know any other language other than English. He stared at him for a moment with a look like his brain just broke in half.

“What?” Brady finally said, breaking that awkward silence. “You just cussed me out in French, didn’t you?”

James’s face fell and he scrambled to cover himself, shaking his hands to deny the accusation. “No, I didn’t. I promise I didn’t.” And for the first of many times in that hotel room, he turned bright red.

“Then what’d you say? Why’re you gettin’ so defensive?” I teased, poking fun at the boy. I turned to Brady, pointing a thumb at the teen. “The kid probably just confessed his love for you and you don’t even know it.”

James tried sending me a dirty look, but he only looked constipated.

Brady licked his lips. Straightening his posture, he nodded confidently and told him, “Well, in that case, voglio inserire la mia asta nel vostro portale.”

Now it was James’s turn to look up at him funny. “…What?”

“Now he probably just did it back to you. I don’t know. Speak English.” I turned the TV off. “I could swear I heard him say something that sounded like ‘insert,’ though.”

“Ah, you’re hearin’ crap,” Brady laughed. “I said I wanted to kick him off a cliff.”

“No you didn’t. You said something else, I know it,” St. James denied, scooting back. “I don’t know what you said, but I think you said something bad.”

“I like how you completely ignore how he just said how he wanted to push you off a cliff,” I said loudly.

Spitting his tongue at me again, Brady boasted, “My parents taught me a little Italian before they kicked the bucket. Then my grandma taught me some.”

“You should teach us. Maybe it’ll kill time,” I suggested.

“No, I wanna learn French so I can figure out what Jimmy boy said to me.” He whipped his head to the younger boy and smirked.

James muttered under his breath, “You’ll never know.” I caught it, though, and snickered silently.

I leaned back and sighed, folding my hands behind my head and lying on the uncomfortable-yet-comfy bed underneath me. It was gonna be a slow day, I could already tell, and starting it off by yakking about foreign languages wasn’t real nice with me.

But Brady nodded to me and had to bring something up. “Hey, what ‘bout you? You learn any Scottish or anything from your folks?”

“No,” I said immediately. I left it at that.

“…That’s it? No epic stories or nothin’? C’mon, Kyle. We got all day. You got a sob story, we wanna hear it.” He kept on insisting like that for a few more minutes. I managed to tune him out for the majority of that time until he decided to plonk his butt right down on my bed, poking me in the shoulder and rambling on, “C’mon. Tell me.”

“I’m a white kid who lived in New York. What’s so interesting about that?!” I finally snapped, sitting up. “Good God.”

He clapped his hands together. “Now we’re gettin’ somewhere!”

I looked at him funny.

“Go on,” he said expectantly. “Tell us ‘bout your folks. I know you wanna.”

“Well, I wasn’t real…close with ‘em, so I dunno what to say about ‘em…” I trailed off, feeling my skin itch up with that yucky feeling of my boundaries being intruded upon. On a day to day basis, when I was alive, I said maybe a few sentences to my parents and then they let me be independent. I liked it. But I didn’t want some stranger judging me about it.

He cocked his head. “How’re you not close with your parents?”

I shrugged, wanting to get him off my back. “I just wasn’t.”

“Not even when you were even littler than you already are?”

“Well, duh, they’re the people who raised me, so there’s your answer,” I sneered. “I couldn’t change my own diapers. What kinda stupid question was that?”

He tossed his hands up. His eyes got all wide and the greasy black hair he maintained fell in his eyes. “Wasn’t a stupid question! Kid, I’d have killed to have parents when I was your age.”

“Good for you. And I don’t wanna hear your sob story, so can we drop the subject?” I insisted, grumbling the words with gritted teeth.

He contorted his mouth at me and gave me a nasty look. “Touchy.”

And he didn’t officially come out and say it, but we did drop the subject. Which was nice. I didn’t like people asking me about my parents. Not like I had a rough childhood or anything, matter of fact I had a pretty dang good one, but they just weren’t a real big part of my life. And even though I thought about my folks every day a lot and how I didn’t get to tell ‘em I loved ‘em before I got hit by that car, I still didn’t wanna say a lot about them, especially to a couple of people I knew for a whopping couple of days.

So it was actually kind of nice of Brady to actually shut the hell up and let me be.

I turned the TV back on and we drowned in commercials for useless products with people barking in fake accents about magic brooms and lifesaving ovens. The more I watched it, the more fed up I began to feel, always wondering if this was actually Hell and God knew it when he booted us out.

I mean, yeah, Earth kinda sucked when you were staring at it from a foggy hotel window, and I didn’t really know a lot about Hell, but sitting there seemed kinda Hellish.

I tossed the remote at Brady’s back and he kindly ignored it, still staring gaga-eyed at the idiot box. His face was all glazed over. I couldn’t tell if he was just bored to the point of being numb, lost in thought, or half-asleep.

So I threw a brief glance over at James, who was slumped back with his arms crossed over his puny chest. His eyes were closed and it looked like he was about to fall asleep again, despite it being, like, noon. And I only took one little look at him, but I did a double-take when I saw the sleeve on his shirt ride up to show a reddish blob of patchy skin on his upper arm. He never took off the red collared shirt that he wore over that unstained white tee, so when I saw it, it teased my curiosity and I kinda wanted to know about it.

“Dude, what’s with your arm?” I asked, pointing.

St. James jolted awake and immediately pulled down his sleeve, careful to cover up the blotch. Then he coughed and squeaked, “What?”

“Your arm,” I insisted. “It’s all…red.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s wearin’ a red shirt, moron,” Brady rolled his eyes.

I was still pointing, no matter how rude it probably was. “But…your skin…”

Both me and Brady were staring at him weird, making the poor kid even more flustered than he already was on a daily basis.

“Um…” James started, clutching his forearm.

“Oh! I get it. You got scars?” Brady realized, gasping a little bit and smiling knowingly at the younger kid.

He nodded slowly, sucking in his lips like it was painful to do it.

Brady turned to me and shook his head. “We all got scars. Apparently you ain’t seen none on another angel. For the record, it’s kinda rude to point ‘em out.”

I scoffed.

But completely going against what he’d just said, Brady insisted on following in my nosy footsteps and scooted closer to James, reaching for his arm. “But really. You got scars too? From what?”

James pulled his arm back, trying to keep it from his grasp. “They were blisters, back off!” His teeth were gritted, but nothing in his face intimidated us. He just looked like a little kid trying to hide a secret.

“C’mon, there ain’t gonna be no secrets between us. I got nasty cuts all over me, too,” he bargained, shrugging. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Go in the bathroom if you’re gonna do that,” I grimaced.

Neither of them acknowledged my sentence and instead engaged in an intense stare-off. Brady was smirking, but James looked like he was trying to kill him. Which wasn’t even possible, seeing as how Brady was twice his height.

“Please? Pretty please with sugar on top? I like learnin’ about scars. They’re cool to me.” Brady folded his hands together and pleaded with his eyes.

“Well, they’re not to me,” James muttered, glancing at the arm I had recently taken notice of.

Brady threw his arms up, but he didn’t give up. “It’s neat to learn the backstory to all of ‘em. It reminds us that we’re all immortal and crap. Like, you see all those cancer angels with their stitches and stuff from the surgeries, and stuff like that. It’s cool.”

James shuffled silently, averting his eyes.

He gently slapped the youth’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “So spill it.”

He furrowed his brow and scooted back as far as he could, stopping when he hit the headboard. “Why the heck do you want to know?”

“He wants something to fantasize about at night,” I casually said under my breath.

“’Cause I wanna,” Brady replied. Then he unbuttoned his own shirt, which made James and I flinch at the speed which he ripped it off (even though James was technically legal, it was still a little creepy to see a grown man take off his shirt for two kids), but to our relief he was wearing a tanktop underneath it. “Look, see?” He pointed at his own shoulder. “See this? That’s where the metal sliced into my skin.”

James looked a mixture of horrified and downright terrified. I can’t say I didn’t look the same. Really. Who the hell does that?

Brady’s upper arm was graced with a nasty looking line of puckered skin that looked old and worn. It went up over his shoulder and crossed down into his back, which we saw when he turned around and went on narrating his epic scar stories. Then he held up the hair out of his face, the hair that swooped over his right eye, and right at the hairline, there was another little cut where his forehead ended.

He turned around, throwing a little hesitant smirk at the two of us. “I got another big one on my chest, but I figure you don’t wanna see me flash you.”

“Those are from the crash?” I asked.

“Yup. And I was at a window seat, so I hit my head on the glass and the plastic crap that covered the inside was all up in my body and everything. It was nasty as heck. I wanted to puke when I saw my body as a free soul,” he explained. Whipping his head back to James, he shoved a finger in his face. “Now. I showed you mine, now show me yours. We need some entertainment up in this place.”

“I’m not stripping,” James spoke, his voice shaking.

“Then don’t. Please, God, don’t,” I told him.

But the younger man sighed and pursed his lips at the sky. Then he peeled off his overshirt, the one he never ever took off, and with his face as red as his scars, sat there silently.

On both of his forearms, there were big red areas of crimson skin where the short sleeves of his white shirt ended. They looked gross, frankly; they were like patches of poison ivy reactions even though he’d already said they were blisters.

“How’d you get ‘em?” Brady asked quietly.

James opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself, starting again a second later. “I was allergic to the shots they gave me.”

I didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t care about how he died, and I sure as hell didn’t want to know how he kicked the bucket. If Brady said it was rude to point out scars, then I didn’t want to make things worse for the kid by asking how he died. And even though I still wondered later on, I told myself to shut up.

“I have a bunch of these,” James muttered grudgingly, looking down at his arms. “All over my legs and body, too. They’re nasty.”

“They’re not nasty,” Brady denied.

With a little quiver in my voice, I spoke up. “I got a nasty bruise from where I got hit, still. It’s all purple and blue. That’s nasty.”

“Don’t show us. I don’t wanna get busted for pedophilia here,” Brady grinned slightly at me.

I nodded toward James. “He’s still a kid.”

“He’s legal,” Brady shrugged.

James snickered quietly, the red in his face going away some.

“No, but really, it’s not gross,” the older one assured. “It’s…they’re sorta beautiful to me, actually. Angel scars, I mean.” His voice was quiet and timid, such a contrast to his usual one.

Okay, weird. I know. I was a little creeped out by it when he said it, and all I could do was look at him funny. James was doing the same, and for a second we exchanged an expression of confusion. But Brady still looked genuine, not paying attention to the awkwardness of the atmosphere he’d just created.

There was a deafening silence between the three of us for a long time, until Brady got up. With shifty eyes and his teeth digging into his lip, he said, “I, uh…gotta pee.”

The bathroom door shut behind him and James and I were stuck smirking slightly as if we’d known each other all our lives.

“That was kinda weird,” I whispered.

He said, “Yeah,” in agreement, his smile growing.

“So what did you say to Brady in French?” I cocked my head in puzzlement. It was a little blunt, but I did wanna know.

James turned bright red for the umpteenth time and coughed into his fist. “Oh, um…n-nothing.”

“Right.” I could tell he was lying, but I didn’t really give a flying crap.