The Lives of the RiffRaff: Vergil Cho-Far From Home
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The library's open on Saturdays from ten until three, but IT only runs on Monday through Friday. Saturdays belong to me and Tracy, and Saturdays are usually spent taking our weekly checks out into Stonesville for a movie followed by Dave and Buster's.
By the 4th of July weekend, Tracy and I had seen all of the summer blockbusters worth seeing: Avengers: Endgame, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Aladdin, MIB: International, and Toy Story 4, and now all that was left before Crawl was Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Having had my fill of Disney by this point in the summer, I was excited for another superhero flick. I never cared for Disney, but supported Tracy's love of it. She's the kind of fan that dresses up in Disneybound to see every movie. She wants me to dress up with her, but I'm just not creative enough.
Spider-Man Saturday is special for two reasons: the first is that it's on the long 4th of July weekend, which begins for me and Tracy on the holiday itself and ends the following Monday. The second is that it falls on Anna Ming's birthday. Anna and her husband, Mamoru, are the biggest movie buffs I know, and superhero flicks are their favorites after monster movies.
We're doing something a little different than Dave and Buster's tonight. Tracy and I go out to Party Fair and come back with Spider-Man partyware and three shiny Mylar balloons—one blue, one “Happy Birthday,” and one with Spider-Man's face. We stop at the Costco to get a cake, and spend the hour and a half before the five-thirty show setting up a nice little spread in the kitchen. And even though it isn't technically a Disney movie, Tracy dons her Spider-Man costume tee with her red beanie in honor of the occasion.
When we meet up with Anna and Mamoru at their place, neither one of us says anything about what we have planned. For me, this is easy, since I don't normally say anything at all. In Tanager, remaining silent means you think you're too good to talk to people, or else you've got something to hide. In the eyes of the Others, both of these applied to me. But those who knew me just knew how bad I was at coming up with anything to say. I'm more of a thinker than a talker, and right now I'm thinking about Spider-Man and birthday surprises, chocolate cake with Oreos on top, and Tracy's two long braids hanging down from her red beanie.
Far From Home wasn't the best Spider-Man movie I'd ever seen, but it definitely wasn't the worst either.
On the way back to the house, Mamoru, Anna, and Tracy chatter on about the original Spider-Man trilogy, while I focus on driving and ruminate in a private corner of my mind about how Marvel might incorporate the new Venom into the Spider-Man films. My thoughts are interrupted when Anna announces that she and Mamoru have big news. “The biggest news,” she adds on, “the best news.”
“What is it?” Tracy asks immediately.
“You'll see,” Anna says with a smug grin, which is the only answer I could ever expect out of Anna Ming. She likes to bust balls.
I forget about Spider-Man and Venom for a second and come up with all sorts of speculations: maybe Mamoru got promoted to foreman at the electrician's firm, maybe they're going on some amazing vacation to Hawaii or the Carribbean or somewhere else exotic, maybe someone dropped a monumental birthday gift. For just a second, a spooky feeling crosses my mind that they might be moving away, but I dismiss it almost instantly; Tanager was a hick town at the best of times and a total shitshow at the worst, but it was home. The RiffRaff were home, and you didn't just go and leave them behind.
When we get to the house, the first thing Tracy says is, “Okay, so what's your big news?”
Mamoru and Anna exchange smug grins. I fold my arms and give them my best “I'm waiting” look.
“We'll tell you,” Mamoru says with a smirk, “when we're good and ready.”
Tracy stands in front of the front door. “I'm not lettin' you in till you tell.”
“Oh gosh!” Anna laughs. There's no way out. She nudges Mamoru with an elbow. “You tell them, Mamoru.”
“You do it,” Mamoru says. “It's more your news than mine.”
“We need a table, you guys,” Anna tells us. “We gotta armwrestle for it. Sorry, Trace, but you gotta let us in.”
“You guys are the worst,” Tracy says lightheartedly, but she opens the door. “We'll go to the kitchen,” she says, shooting me a conspiratorial little smile that I return. She damn well knows that she's just as much of a ball-buster as the two of them are.
When we get to the kitchen and they find our set-up, with the chocolate-Oreo birthday cake right in the center, Anna says, “Oh gosh!” again. “You guys...” She looks at me and Tracy, then pulls us both into hugs, which we both return.
Tracy orders pizza from Castellano's, Mamoru and I set up 7 Wonders, and Tracy asks again, “So, what's your news?”
Mamoru and Anna look at eachother again, silently exchanging the big secret between their smiles. Then Anna says, “All right, we'll quit trolling and tell you now. Mamoru and I are going to have a baby.”
Holy crap! This is more than I ever could have expected.
“Oh! Oh my gosh!” Tracy practically dives at the both of them with her hugs. “Oh, congratulations! This is awesome!” As usual, I have no idea what to say, but I hug them too. “Congratulations,” I tell them. Really, what else can I say?
“When did you guys find out?” Tracy asks, her eyes glittering with the excitement of it all.
“Just before the 4th,” Anna says, “but we wanted to keep the announcement intimate. We'd rather gradually spread the word around than shout it to a whole party full of people.”
I ask Mamoru, “Do you think you're ready now?” For a while, I had doubts that Mamoru would ever be ready for a kid. His reluctance had gotten him in trouble with his ex-wife.
“Well...” Mamoru fiddles with his 7 Wonders cards. “Between Anna and little Gojira himself, I'm going to have one hell of a team on my side. This is gonna be an adventure for all three of us. Yeah, I think I'm ready.”
Tracy laughs. “Are you really going to name him Gojira?”
“Oh, no!” Anna says, laughing too. “Gojira's just what we're calling it until we know if it's a boy or a girl. If it's a boy, his name will be Raleigh Mamoru Hayagawa.”
“And if it's a girl,” Mamoru says, “she'll be Mako Anna Hayagawa.”
Pacific Rim names. The two of them join hands and exchange another secret between their grins. They must be thinking about their wedding nearly three years ago, which had been four days before Halloween. They'd gotten married dressed in Pacific Rim suits. I had been a groomsman, and Tracy was a bridesmaid.
As we start up the game, I expect Tracy to be full of chatter—exchanging fantasies of babysitting and all of the games she plans to teach them, and all of future birthday parties and Christmas presents. But she's surprisingly silent. I figure that she must've gotten all of the excitement out of her system and so she has to wait while a new batch of it generates. Anyway, nobody's talking about the baby anymore. We're talking about the cards we draft and the structures we build. But Tracy isn't talking about anything at all, and that's disturbingly out of character for her.
I give her a little nudge. “Tracy? You all right?”
“'Course I'm all right,” Tracy says, “why wouldn't I be all right?”
“You're awfully quiet,” I point out.
“I'm just thinking, Verg,” she says, and she doesn't say anything else. I leave her to it, though I can't say it doesn't concern me. It concerns me so much more when the pizza gets here and she walks out the door.
“Tracy?” I ask. “Where are you going?”
“I'm gonna go get us some sodas,” she says, and shuts the door behind her before I can ask if she wants me to come with.
Within the span of a few minutes, something has changed Tracy Kwan. It scares me because I don't know what it is.
Anna completes the game's frirst wonder, we're all on our second and third slices of pizza, and there's still no sign of Tracy. The sun's gone down now except for a tiny sliver, and the cicadas that wouldn't shut up all day have finally gone mute. She didn't go out to get sodas...
My first instinct is to get up and go after her, but I don't. She isn't the nerdy little girl I have to protect from the mean girls at school anymore. Besides, out here all we have are the Whisperers and the Hecklers. The Whisperers are easy as hell to just ignore, and the Hecklers are just kids. There's Talia Santiago, but she doesn't go after RiffRaff.
Still, it doesn't feel right without Tracy around, without knowing where she is. It's even worse knowing that something secret is bothering her. All of our lives, Tracy has never kept a secret from me. Her joy was my joy, her pain my pain, her triumphs my triumphs, and vice-versa. If something was eating at her I was always the first one to know.
I can't lie and say we've never spent any time away from one-another. We've been apart for what amounted to much more than slipping out of the house. But we always kept tabs on one-another. I could be gone all day, but Tracy would always know where I am, and vice-versa. To go out on some secret nightly mission with some flimsy alibi like “going to get sodas” was something we just didn't do. Nobody took thirty-five minutes to get sodas in a place like this.
A spooky ass feeling settles over me. I know Tracy doesn't need to be protected, but not knowing where she is is beginning to make me feel like something awful is about to happen, or already did. I can't focus on the game anymore. There's just too many questions. Where did you go for real, Trace? Are you close by or are you far away? How far from home are you? Far from home—what an ironic choice of words.
“Vergil,” Mamoru says, breaking into my thoughts, “it's your turn.”
“Mhm.” I play a resource card. What's going on with you, Tracy? I know you're not all right. This isn't “all right” for you. Just tell me what it is...
Anna asks, “Is something up?”
I look at the clock on the cable box. It's been forty minutes. The sun is just about all the way down. It seems much darker than it is.
I get up. “I'm going out to find Tracy.”
They don't stop me. They know they can't. With Tracy far from home, so am I. Tracy is home.
When Tracy doesn't answer my call or my texts, my worst suspicions are all but confirmed. She went out on foot, so I'll stay on foot too. It would feel a little bit invasive to go chasing her down in a car.
I don't call out for her. I just make my way into the night, watching for a Spider-Man t-shirt and a bright red beanie. I pass by Paige's place, Ramona's, Jager's, and John's. Paige and John are home. Should I go and ask them if they've seen her? No, Vergil, you dope, of course they've seen her. She had to pass by here to go out to the stores.
The stores. She'd said she was going out to the stores, and though I know now it was just a front, there's no reason she couldn't be out near there. I send her another text, “Are you at the Sun-Mart? Or the 7-11?” When I reach the end of the next block, passing by Kammie's lit-up house, she still hasn't answered.
That nasty feeling is close to overpowering me. I'm not a guy who cries, but I feel like I might start up now. At the heart of everything, Tracy is all I have. If something were to happen to her, I don't know what the hell I'd do. The truth is that without Tracy, I don't feel like Vergil. My earliest memories are of the two of us in the summer that we were three and four years old, sipping grape juice out of sippy cups and dribbling it down our astronaut and dinosaur t-shirts. We started preschool that September and walked in holding eachother's hands, scared of the strange new world ahead of us. I've known Tracy longer than I've known how to read.
My heart starts to race. Without thinking about it, I'm making my way up Kammie's front porch steps. I ring the bell. I feel a cold sweat as I wait for her to answer. Maybe she's not home, she just left her lights on...
“Vergil?” Kammie looks surprised to see me at her door. “What's up, man?”
I swallow back a burst of air. “Kammie,” I say, trying my damnedest to keep my cool, “did Tracy come by here a while ago? Did you see her?”
“I haven't seen her,” Kammie says. “Why? Did she go off somewhere?” Her concern is the best possible comfort. RiffRaff look out for one-another.
“She stepped out about forty-five minutes ago to 'get sodas,'” I say, trying and failing to keep the frenzy out of my voice. “We were in the middle of a game with Anna and Mamoru. She won't answer her phone, she won't answer her texts...” I'm starting to shake. Between that and my frantic, raving voice, Kammie can't stay uninvolved. “We'll drive around,” she says. “Hang on.” Yes, we'll drive around. It's become necessary. Tracy wouldn't be ghosting me unless something really happened. I text Mamoru, “Going with Kammie Redrun to look for Tracy. Will be back. Sorry.” I feel like a jackass for leaving them alone in my house on Anna's birthday. But Mamoru understands, as RiffRaff do. He texts back, “OK.” It means Tracy's been ghosting them too, and that she still hasn't come back...
There's no sign of Tracy at any of the stores.
Kammie pulls into the parking lot of the closed deli, and we check the 7-11, the Sun-Mart, and then hop a few blocks over to where the grocery store sits beside Castellano's and the China Wok. No Tracy. We get back in the car and head out to the library, which is also closed by now on a Saturday. I walk around the entryway garden, check the reading benches situated along the sides of the building, and go around to the back to search the smoking area and lounge. Tracy isn't there. A woman—an Other—calls to me from her safe place on the block across the grass. “Young man, what are you doing scuttling around back there?” Young man. I'm twenty-fucking-five. I don't give her an answer, just make my way back to the car.
“Do I have to call the police?” she hollers after me.
Yeah, go ahead and call them. They won't find anything when they get here. Still, I don't answer her. It finally hits me that I should ask her if she's seen Tracy. I turn back around, but she's already off on her way. She doesn't care about Tracy anyway. If she had seen her or not, her answer would be the same: And why are you chasing that woman around town? The Others pretend to know what they're talking about. In actuality, they know jack shit.
I climb back into Kammie's car and I'm about to suggest McEvoy's, if anything because there's likely to be a strong RiffRaff presence there. I didn't want to leave our familiar haunts and end up in territory that belonged entirely to the Others. The Others would want to know what I'm doing running around looking for her. They'd want to know what motivated a woman to take off into the middle of the night and not come back. They'd start up about how we were a man and woman living together unmarried—a cardinal sin, for sure—and then they'd hyper-focus on that and only that, before making up their own stupid explanations for her disappearance that they'd take as the only fact. I'm not about to put up with that shit right now. Oh, Tracy. I sink down into the naugahyde seat. You see what I have to deal with when you go and leave me alone like this? I must look like a sight, because Kammie eyes me for a good long while. I definitely don't look, or feel, like Vergil Cho.
Kammie puts her arm around me and pats my back. “Let's check the park,” she says.
Of course. The park. It's Tracy's favorite place in town, and why didn't I think to check there before? Because I'm not thinking at all, that's why. That spooky feeling that had me before comes back even stronger now that I remember that the only people who come out to the park at night are the junkies and the boozers. Sometimes we hold our games of manhunt out there just after dusk, but it was getting late even for those. Oh, please, I plead, please let Bex or Ramona or anybody be out there playing manhunt right now.
“Vergil!” Kammie nudges me and points. “Look, Vergil!”
She's pointing at a cherry tree in one of the roadside gardens leading out to Cricket Road, an Others street. She shines her headlights on it. There it is, the form of red and blue perched up there on a middle branch like Spider-Man himself.
“Pull over!” I cry, and Kammie does.
I nearly fly out of the car door, and I have to remember that I can't climb for shit to stop myself from scrambling up that tree. Tracy doesn't look at me. She's looking out towards the distant mountains and doesn't even see that I'm here.
I call out, “Tracy!”
“Vergil?” Tracy looks down and finds me standing there at the base of the tree. “You came out all this way?”
“I had help,” I say. “Kammie's here. What are you doing up there?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Thinking.”
“About?”
“Things.”
“You had to come all the way down to Cricket Road and climb up in a tree to think about things?” I try to hold back the edge in my voice. I'm scared, not mad. “Trace, why don't you come on down now?” I hold out my arms for her. “Come on. Come down.”
She makes her way down, and I scoop her up the moment she touches ground. In that moment, Tracy Grace Kwan is the single most precious human being alive. Tracy. My Tracy. Without thinking about it, I give her a swift little kiss. She pulls back in surprise My god, I've crossed a line...
“Vergil...”
“Tracy, I'm...” I look down at the ground and her red Converse sneakers.
“Vergil, you're crying.” She catches me by my shoulders. Her dark eyes look so big behind her hipster glasses.
“I am?” I put a finger to my cheek. It's wet with tears. I'm as shocked as she is.
“It's okay, Verg.” Now it's Tracy's turn to take me up in her arms. “I'm all right. I'm so sorry, Vergil.”
“Why'd you take off, kid?” I ask, without letting her go.
“I'm sorry,” Tracy says again. “I know I shouldn't have. But I guess...well...I needed to think, Vergil.”
“Think about what?” I ask.
“The kid,” Tracy says, finally releasing me, “little Gojira—Anna and Mamoru becoming a mom and a dad. Vergil, what happens when RiffRaff have a kid?”
“Anthony has Melinda,” I remind her. “And Kane has Mara. I know they're both grown, but...”
“It's different,” Tracy says. “They weren't born into it, Vergil.”
She's right. “But this kid will be,” I say.
“It's never happened before,” Tracy says.
“If a kid is born to RiffRaff,” I go on, “is the kid already RiffRaff, or do they have to earn it, like Melinda?” Knowing the Others, I feel like I already know the answer.
Tracy sighs, and turns away for a second. “Little Gojira will be born into a world of Others,” she says. It's a depressing thought. I think about all of the crap we've had to put up with from the Others in our past four years as RiffRaff; the whispers and the heckles, the rumors treated as gospel by people who can't keep their mouths shut, the isolation of a little hamlet where people come up with their own reasons why you'll never really belong. But all the same...
“He'll also be born into a world of RiffRaff,” I say. “He'll have one hell of a team.”
She turns to me. “Like we do,” she says.
“Exactly.” My hand makes its way into hers, and without any sort of thought behind it, I kiss her again. This time she doesn't move. I pat the top of that red beanie. “Kammie's taking us home, kid. Let's go.”
“We left Anna and Mamoru...” Tracy says uncertainly.
“They're fine,” I say. I reach for my phone and shoot Mamoru a text right now: “We found her. She's all right. So am I.”
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