“Hello, Matthew,” she said as she smiled at me. “Would you like to go to Houston Woods this weekend?”
I couldn’t comprehend her question, so I just quickly ducked into the classroom. I needed distance and solitude to process what was going on inside my head, and I couldn’t think about anything but the potential for a tardy slip.
Considering the start to the day, I didn’t last long at school. About halfway through third period, there was a fire drill. It was just too much—too much difference. The school usually has fire drills after lunch, and third period is too early.
Travis had to come back to take me home. He didn’t really say much on the way other than to tell me he wasn’t going to argue about me taking the Valium he knew I still had in the bathroom upstairs. It had been prescribed for me after Mom died, but I had only taken it a couple of times. It always made me fall asleep when it wasn’t time for sleep.
“You need the extra rest,” Travis said. “Reset your system a little, okay? I’ll stick around your house tonight until your normal bedtime.”
I gave up. I didn’t really mind him being there. He was in “no bullshit mode,” and arguing with him was pointless. Once we were back at my house, Travis nuked a box of macaroni and cheese and then stared at me with his arms crossed over his chest until I swallowed the damn pill.
Today was one giant lose.
Chapter 5—What I Will Do for Cake
Groggy and disoriented, it took me a few minutes to even figure out I was on my couch, and it was the middle of the afternoon. It took a little longer to get my bearings because I could hear voices coming from the dining room.
“…hasn’t been that bad for a while,” Travis was saying. “The dude loves his routines, you know? You can’t really get in the way of them and expect decent results.”
“I didn’t know…” It was Mayra’s voice that responded to my uncle. “I just…I mean…I thought we kind of connected yesterday, right? No one ever asks him to go anywhere with us, and I thought I would ask him to go to Houston Woods this weekend. I didn’t think…”
“I have to admit you gave me a bit of a shock,” Travis said. “I suppose most uncles in my position would worry about walking in and finding their nephew on the couch with some chick. Honestly, I never dreamed it would happen.”
I heard him laugh quietly.
“Don’t get all embarrassed on me,” he said. “You have to know what that looked like.”
“We weren’t—”
“I know,” Travis said, interrupting her. “He told me. I’m also not an idiot, and I’m not a kid. I’ve seen enough of my wife’s DVDs to know that he’s a good-looking, well-built kid. I also know it would be damn easy to take advantage of him. If that happens, I’m not going to be particularly friendly.”
Travis’s tone had dropped low.
“So why don’t you tell me just what the fuck is going on here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your family has lived in this town as long as I can remember. I’m pretty sure you’ve been in Matthew’s class since kindergarten. Why the interest now? And don’t you even tell me you’re not interested, because I’ll call bullshit.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, then blinked a couple of times. My eyes were all blurry and itchy, but I could still see the image of my uncle and Mayra sitting across from each other at the dining room table.
“What are you insinuating?” Mayra’s voice sounded like a snarl. “That I want something from Matthew? What do you think I’m trying to do, steal his virtue or something?”
“You’re gonna wake him up,” Travis said in a deadpan tone.
I wanted to respond, but Valium always made my tongue feel weird. I couldn’t manage to get any words out. Mayra dropped her voice down.
“You’re implying that I’m out to get him.”
“I have no idea what you’re doing,” Travis said. I could see his blurry shape lean forward with his elbows on the table. “But he’s like a son to me, and I’m all he’s got. Don’t fucking mess with him. He can’t take it, and between both parents and his sister being taken from him in the past year, he’s been through enough.”
“I wouldn’t,” Mayra said.
“So you tell me why”—Travis’s voice dropped again and almost sounded like a growl—“after all the years you’ve been in the same class, why are you suddenly coming to his house to check on him?”
Mayra went silent for a minute, and then she finally let out a sigh before answering.
“I never paid any attention to him before,” she said. “I remember trying to say hello to him when we were younger, but he never answered, so I stopped. When Jones said he had to sit next to me, he actually said ‘hi’ back when I greeted him. He’d never done that before. Of course, I heard about his parents—”
“It’s a small town,” Travis said.
“Yeah, exactly,” Mayra said. “But I didn’t even know he had a sister.”
“She doesn’t get out much.”
“Yeah, he told me,” Mayra replied. “I just started watching him a little then. I could tell certain things bothered him, but I wasn’t sure exactly what or why. I was…curious at first.”
“Curious? What, he’s your science project now?”
“No!” Mayra said. “Not at all! I just…wanted to figure him out. We connected yesterday. I know we did.”
“Connected to the point where he had to hit the bag,” Travis said with a snort. “That’s some connection.”
“It was after that,” she said.
“After you saw him naked.”
“He wasn’t naked!”
“Half, then.” Travis let out a long sigh. “And what are you planning now?”
“I’m planning,” Mayra said through clenched teeth, “to get our project finished and maybe see if we can’t be friends or something. Are you going to be a total dick about it the whole time?”
“Maybe.” Travis laughed. “I’m protective of him, so you better just get used to that.”
“Fabulous.” Mayra sneered back at him.
“And here’s where I have to go against my instincts,” Travis said, “because my instincts tell me to throw you the fuck out. There is no way in hell this shit is going to work even if you are sincere about it. Matthew’s fucking awesome, and I love him, but he’s about as high-maintenance as it gets. I just don’t see some seventeen-year-old—”
“I’m eighteen,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, that makes all the difference!” Travis stood up. “Now let me finish!”
He took a deep breath and ran his hands up and down his cheeks.
“I’m going against what makes sense,” he said, “because this feels right. You really do seem to give a shit about him, and he’s never talked to anyone else about his folks except his therapist and me. He doesn’t even talk to my wife about that shit, and we’ve been married six years.”
“Were you shitty to her when she first met Matthew?” Mayra snapped.
“Actually, yeah,” Travis replied. He had been, too.
“Well, I guess it’s good he has someone looking out for him,” she said, “but you don’t have to protect him from me.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s so.”
I heard Travis huff out a short breath.
“Don’t you hurt him,” Travis said, “because if you do, I will hunt you down, Trevino. I was always taught not to hit a girl, so I’d probably have to resort to letting all the air out of your tires instead, but don’t think that won’t be as annoying as dog shit on your shoes after the fifteenth time.”
“I won’t,” Mayra said as she shook her head back and forth. “I promise.”
“Yeah, you will,” Travis muttered, “but I don’t think it will be intentional.”
I moved myself into a sitting position and waited for the dizziness to pass.
“Hey there, sleeping beauty!” Travis called out. “You been listening?”
“Yes,” I r
eplied. “Leave her tires alone.”
Travis laughed.
I couldn’t just lie there anymore, so I pushed myself up and joined them at the table.
Very little was said as Travis ordered a pizza for us all, and we chowed down. Mayra and Travis kept looking at each other, but I wasn’t in any condition to try to figure out what the looks meant. Even on a good day, I wasn’t all that adept at reading body language.
“I’m heading out,” Travis said as he finished dipping his crust in garlic butter, effectively finishing off the last of the pizza. “Bethany will be back tomorrow, and we’ll have to figure out what to do with the car. We’ll work it out, though. I can always drive her to work, and you can use hers until your car is fixed, all right?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I can drive Matthew to school,” Mayra said. She glanced over at me from behind her half-eaten piece of pizza. “I mean, if that would be okay with you. I don’t mind, and it’s not really out of the way.”
I looked down at my empty plate and thought about that for a minute.
“You’ve been in my car before,” Mayra said, reminding me.
“You went the speed limit,” I recalled.
“Yes, I did,” Mayra said with a tight lipped smile. “I would again, too.”
I picked up my plate and went to wash it in the sink. When I grabbed for a dishtowel, Mayra was standing next to me and holding one up in her hand.
“I can dry, if you want.”
Looking at the towel in her hand, I wondered if she could get all the water marks off the plate. Travis wasn’t too bad at that, and Mayra was pretty careful about such things. I could always wash and dry them again when she was gone.
“Okay,” I said, and I handed her the plate.
“Dude,” Travis called out from across the kitchen, “if you’ll let her dry dishes, you gotta let her drive you.”
He laughed, and I smiled a little. He had a point. Well, sort of. Driving and drying weren’t the same thing, but they did have five letters in common. Maybe that would be close enough.
“What do you think?” Mayra asked. She sounded hopeful.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I still need to get Bethany’s car from school since Travis drove me home this morning.”
“How about I take you to school to get the car?” Mayra suggested. “It would be kind of a trial run for the next time.”
A trial run sounded pretty good, really. It would be like going to school, but I wouldn’t be worried about being late to class, so I agreed. Travis wiped the back of his hand across his face and grumbled about eating too much, and then he came over and leaned against the counter.
“I’m off,” he said. “You all right if I go?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Travis said as he pushed away. He wiggled his eyebrows at Mayra. “You two be good!”
Mayra and I finished washing the plates and glasses after Travis left. She did a really good job of drying everything completely. I showed her which cabinets they went in and how the plates and glasses needed to line up with the pattern on the cabinet’s lining paper. When we were done, I rode in Mayra’s Porsche to pick up Bethany’s car, and then she followed me back to my house so we could do some work on our project. We made some progress and then sat back down on the couch in the living room when we were done—Mayra on one side and me on the other.
“Matthew,” she said, “I’m really sorry about this morning. I just didn’t realize how you would react, and I’m going to punch Carmen Klug myself if she ever says anything like that to you again. I didn’t think they would do that.”
I twisted my fingers around themselves and wondered how much more successful I would be at the act if all my fingers were the same length. That way, they could curl around my knuckles the same way on each finger and not be lopsided.
“Can I ask you something?” Mayra said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Do you remember what happened in the hallway?”
“I fixed the stuff in my locker.”
“Anything else?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
“Usually you remember things pretty well, though, don’t you?”
“If I read something, I usually remember it. Also if I write something down—I think my fingers remember what I write.”
I glanced over and smiled a lopsided grin at her.
“That’s weird, huh?”
“No,” she said, “it’s not. I remember things better if I write them down, too. Then I read over it again, just to be sure.”
“I do that.”
“Well, then,” Mayra said with a smile, “we have something in common, don’t we?”
“I guess so.”
Mayra scooted over a little closer to me.
“Is this okay?” she asked quietly when she was sitting right next to me.
I thought about it and decided it was, so I nodded.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Okay.”
“Sometimes things do change, right?” she said. “I mean, I know you don’t like it—lots of people don’t like change—but sometimes it has to, like driving a different car to school.”
I nodded again.
“So how do you cope with that?”
“I think about it beforehand,” I told her. “If I get upset just thinking about it, I usually don’t do it, but if thinking about it is okay, I think about it some more. I imagine in my head what it would look like. Then when it happens, I’m not taken off guard as much.”
“Hmm,” Mayra murmured. She sat quietly for a minute before turning her body toward mine. “So, if you took some time before school starts to think about me coming up to you at your locker to say hello, would that be okay?”
I froze as I wandered through the scenario in my head. This morning was awful, but I had been blindsided. I thought about what it would look like to glance over my shoulder and see Mayra standing next to my locker with me. That led to wondering who else would be there in the hallway, looking at us.
“Would you have other people with you?” I asked.
“It would be better if it was just me, huh?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Just me, then.”
“Okay.” I rubbed the tips of my fingers over my thighs, feeling the rough denim texture of my jeans. I went over various versions of Mayra coming up to me at school and saying hello. Sometimes she just said “Hey” or “Hi.” In my mind, I echoed her back. It felt all right.
“Do you want to watch TV?” Mayra asked.
“Okay,” I said.
“What do you like to watch?”
“Top Gear,” I told her. “I like history shows, too. And MythBusters.”
“I love MythBusters!” Mayra said with a smile.
We went to sit in the reclining loveseat in the family room where the TV was. I picked up the remote and flipped through the guide, but MythBusters wasn’t on. We settled on Big Bang Theory.
“You’re kind of like Sheldon, you know,” Mayra said.
“Yeah, Bethany says that, too. She keeps telling me I should go to school for physics. I don’t want to be like him though. He’s mean to people.”
“I think he’s cute,” she said, then tried to hold back a smile. Her cheeks turned pink, and I narrowed my eyes at her.
“What do you mean?”
“Just some of the things he does. He’s so precise about everything. He thinks about things in a different way from everyone else.”
“I guess so.”
The show ended and the local news started up. Mayra’s finger touched the edge of my hand.
“Thinking differently is okay, you know.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “Travis tells me that all the time.”
“Aimee always felt different when we were younger,” Mayra said. “She had a lot of trouble in class because she couldn’t focus on what the teacher was saying. They thought she was learning disabled, but she was
n’t. She just learns differently than other people.”
“I get lost in my head,” I said quietly.
“Aimee says that too.” Mayra gripped my hand.
I glanced at her eyes for a second, and she smiled at me before I looked away again. Aimee was Mayra’s best friend, the co-captain of the soccer team, and likely the valedictorian of our class. I hadn’t considered that I might have something in common with her.
“Hey! They’re still looking for the lotto winner,” Mayra said as she nodded at the television. “The ticket was sold in Millville at the gas station next to the drive-through right on Highway 27, but no one has claimed it yet.”
I didn’t really have anything to add, so I just nodded. Mayra looked over at me, and her expression changed somewhat. She narrowed her eyes a little, and her brow got all creased up.
“You don’t want to go to Houston Woods with a group of people, do you?”
“No,” I said as I shook my head quickly.
Mayra’s fingers grazed the edge of my hand again.
“I should probably go,” she said. “It’s getting late.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, give me your cell number,” Mayra suddenly said. She grabbed an iPhone out of her pocket and unlocked the screen.
“I only have a prepaid phone for emergencies.”
“Oh…um…well, let me write down my number, then.”
I gave her a little pad of paper that sat next to the phone in the kitchen, and she wrote ten numbers right underneath her name on the paper.
“This way you can give me a call if your car gets done early or something,” she said as she gathered up her school stuff and slung her book bag over her shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.” A weird feeling came over me, and I didn’t know what to make of it. My stomach felt like I had eaten too much or something.
“Matthew?”
“Yeah?”
“I really am sorry about this morning.”
I looked down at my feet and wondered if I was supposed to say something. I had the feeling I was, but I wasn’t sure what. Instead of replying, I just went through, in my head, various ways of accepting an apology.