Chapter Fifty-Five
FIFTY-FIVE
Disappointment is a powerful thing. Used correctly, it is stronger than fear, more terrible than physical pain, if you see it in the eyes of the one you love, you’ll do almost anything to make it stop.
“The army ought to find a way to use disappointment as a weapon,” Joar says up on the roof.
He bites his lip and digs in his pockets.
“Damn, I don’t have any cigarettes…,” he mumbles.
“I do!” Louisa says, and reaches for her backpack.
“No, no, don’t worry. I’ve stopped smoking, I just forget that sometimes,” he says.
“You’re very strange,” Louisa informs him.
“I’ve heard that once or twice,” he answers.
She dangles her feet over the edge of the roof and looks at all the houses she can live in now that she’s going to be rich. She’d imagined it would feel different, because her dream was always to be rich with Fish. Now it’s just frightening to own anything, because everything she’s ever had, she’s lost.
“It wasn’t your fault, that thing with the competition…,” she tries to say encouragingly.
But of course she can see in Joar’s eyes that everything is his fault. Everyone was his responsibility. He sighs:
“Do you know what the worst thing was? That when Kimkim realized there wasn’t a competition, he didn’t look disappointed at all. Not even sad. Just relieved. That’s when I realized that I had to drive him away from this fucking town, any way that I could. Because if he had been given a single chance to stay here, he would have stayed forever.”
The night comes padding in from all directions, dusk stuffs the town in a sack, lights go on in the houses down the hill like bullet holes in the darkness.
“So what did you do?” Louisa asks.
“I stole my dad’s car again,” Joar smiles.
Then he tells her about their very last adventure. Their last really big act of stupidity. He waited until it was dark, then he gathered all his friends and told them to come with him. He forced them to wait in the car while he climbed into Ted’s basement to fetch something, then put it in the trunk and drove off. It was the middle of the night, so the friends couldn’t see where they were going, didn’t realize where they were until they were standing outside the museum again.
Joar took a large package out of the trunk of the car, balanced it above his head, and ran around to the back of the building, by the time his friends caught up to him he had already broken a window and slithered inside. The others slithered in after him, but a little too quickly, and landed in a shrieking heap on the floor with someone’s feet in someone’s hair and someone’s knee in someone’s stomach and someone’s backside in someone’s face.
“Iiidiiiooots,” Joar groaned. “Are you trying to set the alarm off or what?”
“ You were the one who broke in!” Ted said, before looking around and realizing that unfortunately he was definitely an accomplice now.
Ali muttered that it smelled funny, and Joar muttered back that maybe she smelled funny, and she hit him on the arm and he yelped and Ted hushed them both.
The only one standing completely silently was Kimkim. He was just staring at the white walls that seemed to reach hundreds of miles up to the ceiling, his head leaned back, gasping for air. When his eyes wandered from painting to painting, he looked like someone feeling sand between their toes for the first time, or making their first snow angel.
Then Joar carefully unwrapped the package he had collected from Ted’s basement and took out Kimkim’s own painting, with its driftwood frame. Only then did Ali and Ted understand what Joar’s plan had been the whole time, so they helped him to carefully take another painting down from the wall and hang Kimkim’s painting there instead. Then all four friends just stood there in the middle of the big room, lightheaded with happiness, and perhaps that was the first time Kimkim saw what the others had always known.
“Screw that competition. I just want you to get it into your head that your art belongs in a place like this. And that you belong here… too,” Joar said.
Kimkim cried then. Ali stood next to Joar and held his hand and mumbled:
“This is actually your best idea ever. You idiot.”
Up on the roof, Joar coughs, as if his body refuses to forget that it actually belongs to a smoker.
“It was a good plan. Really was. I just hadn’t really thought through what we would do if a security guard showed up.”
“What happened?” Louisa wonders.
“Well, a security guard showed up,” Joar informs her.
“I get that! I’m not stupid! But what happened ?”
Joar sighs.
“Well, we ran. And we were seriously damn good at running. We were damn bad at a lot of damn things, but running? We could do that. So when the alarm in the museum went off and that security guard arrived, we could have run away from him without any trouble. He was slow and really old. Well… yeah… now in hindsight, maybe he was like thirty-seven or something. But that was old to us at the time! Either way: he would never have caught us. No chance! The problem was just, well, that he didn’t have to catch up with any of us, he just needed to catch up with the painting. We were really good at running, but we were pretty bad at carrying…”
Then he tells her that the alarm went off when Ali was looking for a light switch. So she would always tell everyone afterward that it was all her fault. All they heard was a low beeping sound from a different room of the gallery, they didn’t even understand that they had triggered an alarm until they saw bright lights through a window and realized they were the headlights of a car. The security guard came running in, insanely old, but that didn’t matter at all.
Joar and Ali tried to run with the painting between them, but Ali was taller than Joar, just tall enough for him to have to stand on tiptoe to kiss her. Highly impractical if you had to carry something together. So they stumbled and lost their grip, the stone floor was like ice, so the teenagers slid in one direction and the painting in the other. Ted and Kimkim tried to run in different directions, but of course they picked the wrong directions and collided.
The guard came rushing after them, or maybe “rushing” is a bit of an exaggeration, but he arrived with some degree of speed. He was doing his best. As he stopped breathlessly beside the painting, obviously he jumped to the only logical conclusion: the teenagers had broken in to steal it.
“And then everything got seriously confused,” Joar explains to Louisa. “Because when the guard picked up the painting, we all came running back, and he couldn’t understand what was going on, because, you know, thieves usually run in the other direction. So Ted stepped forward and said: ‘Sorry we broke in! You don’t have to call the police! We’ll go now, we’ll just take that with us…’ and then we all pointed at the painting the guard was holding. And then of course the guard looked at us and said: ‘Are you completely out of your minds? I can’t give you the painting you were trying to steal!’ And then I said: ‘We weren’t fucking trying to steal the damn thing, it’s ours!’ And then the guard started rolling his eyes and said: ‘Yeah, that’s really logical! You brought your own painting with you when you broke into a museum?’ And then I said: ‘YOU can be logical, you asshole!’ And then Kimkim said…”
Joar falls silent for a moment. Coughs again, like he’s looking for his voice.
“Then Kimkim said what?” Louisa asks impatiently.
Joar collects himself.
“Then he said to the guard: ‘You must see that that painting doesn’t belong here. It’s not nearly as good as all the others.’ And the guard hesitated and said: ‘I think it’s… nice. But I don’t know anything about art.’ And then I said: ‘So give it here, then! It’s worth millions!’ And sure, that really wasn’t super smart, because that’s when the guard said he was going to call the police. So then Ali cried out that surely he could see that it was us in the painting? But the guard looked at the painting and at first he didn’t see anyone at all. He could only see the sea. So we had to show him, and then he brightened up and thought it was wonderful. He had tears in his eyes, I swear to God. But then he said that the kids there on the pier, they could be any kids at all. And then Ali said: ‘We aren’t kids anymore.’ And then… hell… it was as if all the air went out of us all. And we probably looked so sad that the guard said: ‘Okay. If you get out of here now, I won’t call the police.’ But obviously we couldn’t leave without the painting. So it ended up becoming the world’s weirdest hostage situation. So then the guard sighed: ‘All right. Can you maybe call an adult who can come and confirm that the painting is yours?’?”
The four friends had stood there thinking that that was nice of the guard, to give them that chance, but above all to think that they had an adult they could call. Joar’s mom was at the hospital, Ted’s mom was at work, Ali’s dad was at a party, Kimkim’s mom was passed out in her apartment on sleeping pills, and his dad was sitting in the darkness drinking whiskey in his. But that was when the artist who would one day be known as C. Jat suddenly raised his head and ran off a series of numbers from memory. The others didn’t understand a thing until he blurted out: “I’ve got one! I’ve got an adult we can call!”
Joar peers over the edge of the roof. There’s a car driving slowly up the hill, along the winding road between the run-down houses.
“Who was it? Who did you call?” Louisa asks impatiently.
“Here she comes now,” Joar answers.