Collect Call

We were just at camp last week. Joking. Laughing. I turned the phone over in my hand as if it had betrayed me, trying to make sense of it.

I was lying in a hammock listening to the far-off keening of my dad’s lawnmower as he painstakingly cut the grass. The weather was warm and sticky, but I was determined to work on my tan. I’d been at camp for two weeks and had terrible tan lines from wearing shorts.

Every so often a bee hovered nearby and I focused all my energy on staying perfectly still until it moved along.

Then the cat jumped into the hammock beside me.

I didn’t even like cats, but I’d found this one half-blind beneath the bleachers at one of my brother’s baseball games, its eyes crusted shut with infection. I brought him home and named him Crusty.

The afternoon was easy and quiet and boring in the way teenagers cannot tolerate.

Then the phone rang.

Lazily, I grabbed at the cordless telephone nestled by my hip and pressed the “talk” button. Before I could even say “hello” a recording blared through the speaker.

“You have received a collect call from [curtis] at Haywood County Jail, using envision telecom. Press 1. to accept the charg…” I quickly hung up the phone and bolted upright.

We were just at camp last week. Joking. Laughing. I turned the phone over in my hand as if it had betrayed me, trying to make sense of it.

What?

The phone suddenly rang again startling me. I dropped it, and then quickly picked it up to check the caller ID. I knew the number this time.

“Hello?”

“Hi April. It’s Mr. Allen. Curtis got into some trouble. I’m going with his grandma to visit him tomorrow. Would you be able to come? I think he will listen to you.”

Mr. Allen was my geometry teacher. He was tan, with shiny blond hair and blue eyes that placed him firmly in every high school girl’s “hot teacher” category. To me, he was just Mr. Allen. The guy who yelled at Curtis from the other room and made hilarious jokes at our expense. He was also one of the only stable figures in Curtis’s life. I agreed to go to his house and ride with him as a favor.

After I hung up the phone, I called my best friend Juan Carlos, or as I called him JC. He was short and fluffy with a goatee, and always making fun of his weight. He was sweet and fun. He answered on the first ring.

“Wassup, April.”

“JC…Curtis is in jail!”

“Yeah. I know. He had a gun and stole a car, man. He tried to get me to go. He said if we got caught he would just say he kidnapped me. I told him, ‘Jose, they will take one look at me and one look at you and then arrest us both for being stupid.’”

The next day I buckled myself in Mr. Allen’s white Ford Taurus. We made small talk about the upcoming school year, and camp. Finally, Mr. Allen told me why I had been recruited. I was supposed to convince him to go to a group home. No one said his name. For the purposes of the car ride Curtis became he or him. We treated Curtis as if he was Beetlejuice and we didn’t dare say his name.

When we arrived it made no difference. He didn’t want to see me. He would call me multiple times every day after. My dad became so frustrated that he would accept the charges just to yell at him. Eventually, he stopped calling. That’s when the letters started coming. Long, frantic, lonely letters. Then, he began sending drawings. Self portraits, and wildlife. Later on, he would sketch what he imagined our kids looked like.

Mr. Allen would update me. Never at school though. I would take his calls in the hammock until winter finally crept in and Crusty couldn’t take the cold. Curtis was released sometime after I graduated. By then, I no longer spoke to Mr. Allen on the phone, and I had no reason to visit his house. The drawings had long stopped coming in the mail. It was a distant memory.

Late summer after I began college, my dorm phone rang. I had been at my desk pecking away and eating a raisin every now and then.

“Hello”

“Hey.” An unfamiliar girl said softly. “You, uh, you don’t know me. We have a mutual friend and he wanted me to call you. He wants to know if he can talk to you. His name is Curtis.”

I quickly hung up, and dropped the phone with a clatter.

What?

The next day I driven to the East Laport Park and pulled off the road because I dropped my phone. I fished around the floorboard as I sat on the shoulder until I located it. As I sat up a car slowly passed by and caught my eye. I would have known that face anywhere.

Curtis?

I immediately called my dad and explained the turn of events. I was trying to sort out in real time what it meant, but dad interrupted my thoughts.

“I can call him and see if he wants me to teach him how to wear his ass for a hat.”

Just like that, I was a teenager in a hammock again with my questionably sighted feline sidekick. Laughing in that easy way I did because my parents were always a little absurd. I remembered the sun on my skin and the smell of grass. The comfort of knowing boring days were the best days, even when I complained about them.