They Owned the Night

chapter three: "what's wrong, princess"

The next day, after my morning classes, I got a ride to the auto-shop from my friend Jeremy. Even though I knew August said he wasn't going to be there, I couldn't help but be nervous. Part of me was relieved at the prospect of never seeing him again, while the other half of me was bothered. I didn't like unsolved mysteries.

Randall was at the shop when I went in to pick up my van, watching a soap opera on a little TV monitor. He was fiddling with the antennas, angling them just so. The picture was still fuzzy. On the screen, the characters were in a heated lovers quarrel. 

"I hope August didn't give you too hard of a time yesterday," Randall said, eyes glued to the show. "I know he can be a bit rough on the edges, but he's got a good heart deep in there." Randall paused. "Deep, deep in there."

Bullshit, I wanted to say. The characters on the soap opera had started screaming. "Is everything I know just one big lie? Has there ever been any truth to anything you told me?"

"I did it to keep you safe," the other character said, "Everything was to keep you safe."

I noticed that the wall behind him was decorated with pictures of employees. Nestled among the photographs of people standing in front of cars or smiling with their arms looped around the necks of another, was a picture of August. The photographer must've caught him off guard.

In the photo, he  was leaning against a door frame. He had on a white t-shirt with the sleeves cuffed, and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. His lips were slightly parted as though he was talking, and his hand a blur, trying to wave the camera away. But his dark eyes bore right at me, and he looked so angry. And tired. Almost like his exhaustion was the source of his internalized fury. It was a gaze that could make a person unravel.

Randall looked up at me as though he wanted to say something, then thought against it. He seemed like the type of person who saw through everything and everyone. I wanted to ask him what I was missing; it felt like there was some important clue right out of my line of sight. 

The characters on the soap opera had began having loud sex on the kitchen counter. Randal scrambled to turn the volume. I took that as a sign to just pay and hurry out, feeling like maybe it would be best to heed Ian's warning after all. 

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The van was running smoother than ever. To celebrate, I took Alicia for a ride to get milkshakes later that evening, which was a real treat, considering she often vowed to never step foot in the vehicle due to sheer embarrassment. 

"I'm trying to establish myself as an icon," Alicia liked to say, "And this van of yours simply does not make the cut."

"Well I suppose that just makes me the town fool," I would say, "The jester. The local idiot."

"Correct."

However, it wasn't until I was driving back from work a day after picking it up that I noticed that something was off. It was nothing mechanical. It was more so... the vibe. 

The purity of this disgraced van felt dirtied somehow. I glanced at the backseat, unable to place my finger on what exactly didn't look right. When I got to the parking lot of my apartment, I decided to investigate, going around to the back and heaving open the doors with a familiar shriek of metal. 

After scrambling inside, I immediately noticed dirt and shoe impressions all over the ground. August, that piece of shit. No wonder the Yelp reviews for Randall's Repairs had been so poor; he didn't even bother to clean after himself. 

 I moved to start brushing away the dirt when I was startled by the way the floor felt. I ran my hands over it again, feeling out a bumpy layer that had never been there before— it almost felt like a layer of bricks. The carpeting had came loose in the corner, and I peeled it back, annoyed at whatever August had gone ahead and done to the flooring of my van.