I don’t know his real name. He told me to call him Daggers, so I did. When I moved into our dorm, he let me know he had three blades hidden throughout the 200-square-foot brick room. I must have looked concerned because he dug one out of a shoebox at the foot of his twin bed and showed it to me, laying the blade, silver with a skull attached at the base of its handle, across his pasty palm.
“See, since the point doesn’t extend past the tip of my middle finger, I can legally have it on campus,” he said, turning the blade back and forth as if it were a prize to be won on a game show.
“What if your hands were smaller?” I replied, and he scratched his patchy chin stubble.
While most students at Lakes Community College were there to make something of themselves, I needed a place to stay. After high school, I got a job at the Kum & Go gas station near the northside McDonald’s and spent the next fifteen years living in people’s peripheral vision. No real friends. No real family. Just customers who asked how I was doing in that noncommittal retail way.
Why had I stayed for so long?
Even though I was on the outside looking in, I guess I got used to it, got used to being stuck in the corner of your eye.
Then corporate decided to close that location. I got laid off and, already a month behind on rent, was kicked out of my apartment. So, not wanting to be homeless, I filed my FAFSA, picked the first program Lakes had to offer (Accounting Specialist), and moved into the dorms. Figured the semester bought me enough time to plan my next steps.
“If anyone messes with you, let me know,” Daggers said that first night in the dining center.
He was also enrolled at the college for something other than an education. He’d taken out the maximum amount on his student loans to use the leftover cash after his classes were paid for to try to contact extraterrestrials, space aliens. How? I assumed the equipment required to be heard among the stars was expensive.
A week later, I came home from my Principles of Accounting class to Daggers rushing around our dorm room, stuffing random electronic devices into a backpack. He told me that tonight was the night, that we were headed outside the city limits. I grabbed the keys to my rusted-out Sebring, and we left. I wasn’t about to argue with a man who possessed hidden blades.
“Why do you want to talk to aliens anyway?” I said as we drove down a dark, gravel country road, Daggers studying a metallic box with a red light blinking atop it. “What if they show up and wipe us out?”
“I’m not scared of ‘what ifs,’” Daggers said, endless cornstalks and soybeans zooming past. “Do you ever wonder if you’re meant for something, like a destiny? Good or bad, this is my destiny.”
I thought about my former job at Kum & Go, about the customers who stopped in to get gas, a snack, use the restroom, whatever, before continuing their lives. I thought about myself, standing behind the counter and ringing them up, living mine right there.
Daggers raised his hand. I pulled onto the shoulder. We exited the car, and he instructed me to wait there. Then he ran into a barren field. As he emptied his backpack, I looked up at the sky, expecting to see a flying saucer, a bright light, something, but nada. An hour went by, two, and still nada.
“Hey man, I have Statistics in the morning,” I shouted at Daggers through cupped hands as he held what looked like an old television rabbit ear antenna above his head.
“You have your destiny. I have mine. Go, I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
He didn’t answer, but I swore I saw him nodding. So I got in my car and drove away. During the drive back to campus, I kept glancing at the sky just in case. In the morning, Daggers still wasn’t back, and when I walked into our dorm room after my Statistics class, all his stuff was gone. I asked the RA what happened to him and was told, “He’s not coming back. That’s all I can say on the matter.”
That night, I climbed the fire escape to the dorm’s roof. Sitting on a quiet air-conditioning unit, I searched the clouds for Daggers’ hidden blades, for his destiny. I hoped to see him looking down at me from an intergalactic spaceship before blasting off to explore the universe. I stayed up there for a long time, the temperature dropping, shivering. I would have stayed up there way longer than fifteen years if I had to because if Daggers could do it, why couldn’t I?
