One More Time (With Feeling)

2

The night is humid and heavy and weighs every part of your body down. Your clothes soak it up, sticking hot and damp to your skin. The streetlights beam against the heavy blackness overhead.

Chayton told you to meet him under the Harlem Green Line stop, so here you are, in the tiny train station beside the turnstiles. The little convenience store is closed, or you'd buy yourself a cup of coffee.

Oak Park is small and quiet and pretty and there aren't a large number of flat places where he could paint or wheatpaste or whatever he does, unless he's thinking of the side of the old bookstore that closed down a few years back and never got bought up again. But it's full of windows and right in view of the street, and even though it's past eleven, Chicago and its surrounding towns never truly go to sleep. There are always people out somewhere.

You jump at the sudden pressure of hands dropping on your shoulders. Your heart leaps into your mouth and you pull away and whirl around to see a bright, amused grin on Chayton's face.

"Jumpy?"

"I think getting grabbed in the middle of the night is a good reason to jump," you huff. You hadn't even heard him come up behind you. He adjusts the backpack strap thrown over his right shoulder and says, "You brought gloves, yeah?"

You pull a pair of black gloves out of your pocket.

"Good," he says. "Put them on and follow me."

He pushes out the station door and makes a sharp left toward the street. So he's not going toward the old bookstore. He dances you around to you don't know where, and it strikes you: if he were to try to murder you, you wouldn't know where to run. But that's crazy. Come on, March, you think, be serious here.

"Where are we going?" Your voice is a low whisper. A light suddenly comes on down the street and he pulls you into a little nook between two buildings. You freeze, holding your breath until the car drives by and goes through the stoplight.

"Originally I was going to be in the city," Chayton says, "but when you asked to come along I figured we'd relocate here because it's quiet and safe and there's not much activity this late. The only places around here around here are the little shopping areas and the Frank Lloyd Wright houses --"

"You can't --"

"Oh, God no," he interrupts. "I'd never dream of painting up one of them. They're fucking art. We're hitting the back of the Starbucks plaza."

He pulls you out of the little niche and leads you around the corner. His hands are also gloved and burning hot in yours. Your palms sweat. The hair at the base of your skull sticks to your neck and your heart pounds deep and primal in your chest like a bass drum.

He takes you past the Starbucks and down about ten feet, an approximation of the space between the Whole Foods and the shoe store. His backpack clatters in the quiet night when he drops it to the pavement and crouches down to dig through it. He shoves a rolled up poster into your hands and you stand there dumbly, holding it and staring while he digs out a large paintbrush and a container of homemade wheatpaste.

"Unroll it," he says. He finally looks up at you, amusement sparkling in his dark autumn eyes. You do. It's about the size of two pieces of standard printer paper, a plain brown background with a pink tentacle-y alien creature with dozens of eyes looking in every direction.

The wheatpaste brush clatters when he drops it back into the container and he snatches the poster out of your hands. He slaps it up and smoothes it down expertly. His movements are so clean, precise, calculated down to the most minute detail of where his hands need to be and when. He paints another layer of paste over it and pulls out a box cutter, then slices the poster diagonally six times in each direction.