"How do you use your sister's cars without your parents finding out?"
She sighs as if disappointed and stretches, yawning, throwing her head back, flinging her arms up into the air and arching her back. I can't help it—I steal a lingering image with my eyes: graceful neck, slim waist, baggy black shirt fluttering in the breeze like a dark cloud, hiding everything. She shakes herself, conjures her cigarettes, and lights up.
"I told you," she says, blowing a stream of smoke my way, "my mother's out of the picture."
"No, you didn't. You told me your parents weren't divorced."
"They're not. My mother's dead. The Big C. Lung cancer."
Oh. Oh. What do I say here? What do you say? I don't know anyone whose parents are dead. I don't know anyone like this. What do you say?
"Yeah, good ol' adenocarcinoma," she says sarcastically. "It's the up-and-coming thing in lung cancer these days. I mean, it used to be that squamous cell lung cancer was the big one, but these days, if you want to get lung cancer in the U.S., you go with adenocarcinoma. That's the one all the cool kids are getting."
Oh my God. Yesterday. Yesterday, when she offered me a cigarette—
"It's all these little cube- and column-shaped cells," she goes on, not looking at me now, adding clouds of smoke to the ones in the sky, "and they just cluster and grow in your lungs, around the edges mostly. It spreads fast and they usually can't even operate."
—she offered me a cigarette yesterday and I said, "I have an allergic reaction to lung cancer. Gives me tumors." Oh my God, how could I have done that? I'm slime. I'm such a piece of slime.
"You—" I can't get the words out. I have to apologize. I didn't understand. I didn't know. I have to tell her all of this, but I'm trying to do it all at once. "You, your cigarettes—"
She misunderstands. She snorts and turns to me. "Oh, yeah, here I am smoking, isn't it ironic, whatever, get off my back."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"My mom wasn't even the smoker. I mean, if you want to talk about irony, there it is for you. My dad was a friggin' three-pack-a-day man. You know how I know? When I was a kid, I used to empty the ashtrays and I would count the butts. I didn't even know why. I just did it to occupy my mind while I was emptying the ashtrays. It was like a game. Like a game." Her voice catches and she drags harder on the cigarette, then exhales an aggressive fog bank of nicotine and tar and tobacco. "But Mom never smoked. How's that for irony? Dad's healthy as a horse, can run a mile. Mom croaked. Women are more likely to get lung cancer. Did you know that?"
I shake my head. I want to tell her to stop smoking because I've just learned that women are more likely to get lung cancer.
"So Mom dies and Dad decides to stop smoking, which is a real bitch, let me tell you, because a lot of places card you these days, so it's tough for me to find my smokes."
"What about..." God, where do I go from here? She's huffing and puffing on her cigarette, rocking back and forth a little bit. "What about your sister? Does she—"
"Look, let's just..." She's inhaled that cigarette down to the butt in record time. She stares at it like she's seeing it for the first time, then flicks it away. She draws in a deep breath. "Let's drop it. I don't want to talk about it."
"That's fine. We don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about."
"Oh, please. That kind of—that kind of shit sounds like the crap my therapist says."
Therapist. Right. Now what do I say? I don't know anyone who goes to a therapist. Or at least, I didn't until just now. Mom wanted me to see a child therapist when the divorce happened, but I wouldn't go.
"Therapist, huh?" Oh, that was smooth. I'm as subtle as a fart.
"Yeah. I have to go once a week."
Time to play the empathy card, I guess. "My mom wanted me to go to one a while back. But I didn't."
"Yeah, well..." She lies back in the grass again. "I don't have a choice."
"There's always a choice." I'm Mr. Empowerment.
"No. The court makes me go."
The—? What?
"Court? Why?" Mistake. As soon as I say it, I realize it's a mistake. I've gone over the line, crossed the Rubicon, left Dagobah too early.
She sits up, tucking her knees up toward her chest again, resting her cheek on them so that she can look at me. Her eyes aren't brown, I notice—they're hazel. Glimmering sienna-gold. What? What am I saying? I don't know. It's like messed-up poetry, like e. e. cummings. She's so pale. It can't just be powder, can it? It's like there's something missing from her skin, like she's an albino. She grins the magic grin. That ring in her lip ... God, suddenly I want to kiss it. I want to brush my lips against it. Black-smudged lips.
"It's OK," she says. "You can ask. I don't mind." She fiddles with the leather bands around her wrists and slips them off, then holds both hands out to me, palms up, so that I can see the crisscrossing pattern on each wrist. The scar tissue is white, a dead white, almost a match for the hue of her skin. If she hadn't shoved it in my face and if it weren't for the fact that the scars are raised from her otherwise flawless flesh, I wouldn't even have noticed them.
"Oh." My shyness and my curiosity fix bayonets and go to war—I want to pretend I never said or saw anything, but I also want to touch her wrists. They're like a topographical map: raised ridges representing mountain ranges built through trauma and age. What would they feel like under my fingertips? I think of the scar tissue on my knee, memento of my mad dash up the stairs when Dad's old coat goosed my imagination; it's senseless, a dead zone on my body where I can feel nothing.
Could I feel her pulse through her scars, or are they too thick? Would it be like reading the pulse of someone who's dead?
"I'm sorry," I say. It's what adults say all the time when they're actually not apologizing. When someone dies or is injured. When something bad happens. They say it so easily then, when there's nothing really at stake for them. I say it to her, meaning it the same way, but somehow when it comes out, I'm apologizing for asking the question, apologizing for looking, apologizing for not having been there, even though I only just met her.
"It doesn't matter." She straps the bands on, covering up the scars, as if they never were.
Chapter Eighteen
SILENCE. SILENCE FOR A LONG TIME. It bothers me until I decide that it's not a big deal, that someone doesn't always have to be talking. And then the silence just becomes relaxing, and we're just two people lying on the grass together, watching the sun as it starts to dip beneath the horizon.
"It's like I said before," she says at last. "People suck. Period. They're stupid and clueless and when you tell them that they're stupid and clueless, they just get pissed off because they know it's the truth and they can't be bothered to change it. I mean, it's like Mrs. Sawyer, in history. Do you have her?"
"Last year."
"You had her as a freshman?"
I shrug. I skipped most of the usual freshman classes and went straight into sophomore-level classes.
"Anyway, she's so stupid that she doesn't even know she's stupid. Someone made up some story about turtles or something and she believed it—"
"The Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight of 1928?"
"Don't interrupt me. But, yeah. The tortoise thing. Someone made it up and she believed it, and even when she found out it was a lie, she still goes around telling people about it, telling people how she got fooled! I mean, how stupid is that? It's like advertising that you're a moron."
"I made that up."
She sits upright and leans over me. I smell grass and tobacco and something sweet. Perfume? Her eyes dance and the ring in her lip jiggles as she grins. "You made it up? Really? You're not shitting me?"
"No. It was me."
The Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight of 1928
In U.S. History last year, Mrs. Sawyer asked us for "the single cause of the Great Depression," the question asked to a room of silence and gazes suddenly cast down onto notebooks. I can't speak for any
one else, but I didn't raise my hand simply because there was no "single cause" of the Great Depression. We'd just read a chapter that pretty much spelled that out.
After a few moments of painful silence, I tried to clarify the issue: "Mrs. Sawyer, there really wasn't a single— "
"I want," she said, cutting me off, "the single cause, the one thing that caused the Great Depression."
I couldn't believe it. I was dumbstruck by the stupidity and the temerity. I don't know why I did what I did next, but somehow all of the contempt and creativity bubbling in my head boiled over in that moment and I found myself raising my hand. When Mrs. Sawyer called on me, I said, "The sea turtles."
If possible, the room grew even more silent. A roomful of sophomores, plus Cal and a couple of stray juniors, looked at me, wondering, What the hell is he up to?
"The sea turtles?" Mrs. Sawyer asked, narrowing her eyes.
"Specifically, large sea turtles. The ones that live off the Galápagos Islands." I don't know where it was coming from. I was making it up on the spot. Some leftover, random data from a Travel Channel special, maybe. I don't know. "They died. That caused the Great Depression."
I think that if a student had laughed, Mrs. Sawyer probably would have either laughed, too, and then went on, or would have thrown me out of class. But no one moved. No one spoke. No one breathed. So she just looked at me. Maybe she thought I'd run out of steam.
Not a chance. "It's famous," I went on. "In 1928, there was a massive kill off the Galápagos Islands. Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles died."
"And this caused the Great Depression how?"
"The British imported a lot of sea turtles back then," I went on. I had it all linked up now. It all made sense. I could do this. "They made turtle soup and they used the skin to make leather—belts, shoes, boots, stuff like that." She was nodding a little bit. Why not—that part was plausible. "When the turtles died off, the British stopped importing, but it had a ripple effect on their economy. It messed up their trade policy. No one in South America would trade with them because they'd wrecked the Ecuadorian economy. So the British were losing money and trading partners. They had to stabilize their economy, so they did it the quickest way possible: They stopped payment on their World War I debts to the United States."
Mrs. Sawyer's eyebrows arched.
"When they did that, the ripple effect hit here. The U.S. was suddenly losing a big chunk of expected revenue. The government started to work out a new payment plan with England, but word had already filtered to Wall Street, where investors got nervous. Within a year, the stock market crashed, which caused the run on the banks, which led to the Depression."
Still, silence. No one said a word. A single giggle would have ruined it.
"Really?" she asked.
"Yes."
"And where did you learn this?" She hefted the history text.
"I saw it on the History channel," I told her.
Silence. A lie like this works for one reason: because people think, Why the hell would he lie about something like this?
"He's right," cal said suddenly. "I saw that show, too."
I blinked. Someone I didn't know—a junior, someone on a sports team with cal—raised his hand. "Yeah, I saw that one. It was a couple months ago. They did a whole thing on the turtles."
Maybe half a dozen heads nodded in unison. I couldn't believe it. I had to put the cap on it.
"It was the Great Ecuadorian Tortoise Blight of 1928," I told her. "The single cause of the Great Depression."
Mrs. Sawyer's eyes widened, and, much to my surprise, I could tell that she actually believed me. It was the crowning achievement of my high school career, and it came in my freshman year.
Chapter Nineteen
"YOU MADE THAT UP." Kyra laughs. "Oh, man! That's awesome. You're my hero!"
Her hero. God, I'm glad it's getting dark out, so that she can't see the look on my face. Mainly because I'm not sure what the look on my face is.
"I overheard her saying to someone later that she felt bad that she didn't know about the turtles." I laugh, too, remembering. "Eventually, she figured out the truth. I figured she'd be pissed at me, but instead she said it was very creative—no kid-ding!—and asked me to write it up for her. I didn't know she was telling people about it."
"See, that's what I meant before. People who are so stupid that they don't mind telling you that they're stupid."
"Not everyone's like that." I can't believe I've met someone who hates people more than I do.
She sits there for a minute, quiet. She lights up a cigarette, the flame bright in the darkness. Then she looks at me. "No, not everyone."
I can't read her in the dark. She's all highlights—the lip ring, the stud in her nose, the sharp relief of her eyebrows against her colorless skin. It's too dark.
Too dark.
I look at my watch. It's eight-thirty.
"Got a hot date?" she asks, gesturing at my watch.
"No. I, uh..." I don't want to tell her that I told Mom I'd be home at eight. It's not like I'm a little kid. What's the big deal?
"Do you have to get home?"
"I told my mom eight..." There I go again, not lying.
"Want to leave? Are you gonna get in trouble?"
I can't imagine why. It's not like I'm out at two in the morning carjacking people. It's not even completely dark out yet, and I'm just sitting here, not hurting anyone.
"We can hang a little while longer."
She sighs. "Good."
I sit and watch her while she gazes at the muddy park-that-never-was. I consider working up the courage to put my arm around her, maybe kiss her on the cheek, but who am I kidding?
Chapter Twenty
A LITTLE WHILE LATER, we climb back into the car and head out onto Route 54. We need the headlights now, and the road is busy with mall traffic. Never did kiss her, of course, but that's OK.
A minivan buzzes past us. I catch a glimpse of the rear bumper, and the sticker there.
"I hate that."
"What?" Kyra asks.
I didn't realize I'd said it out loud.
"Come on, you can tell me."
"No, no, it's nothing."
"It's something. You've got your arms crossed over your chest and you're looking all pissed. Was it the minivan? I hate those things, too."
"Just let it rest."
"Nah. I don't let things rest. Get real. What was it?"
"You'll think it's stupid."
She hums a bit to herself as we drive. "Probably. But tell me anyway."
I sink down in my seat a little bit. Arms still crossed. I'm aware of how childishly defensive I must look, but I can't seem to help it. "It's stupid. It was the bumper sticker."
"Bumper sticker?" I wait, but no laughter is forthcoming.
"Yeah, the bumper sticker. It was one of those ones that says 'My kid can beat up—'"
"'—your honor student,'" she finishes. "Yeah, I've seen 'em. They're stupid. Why do you let it get to you? Just because you're an honor student? Hate to break it you, but their kid probably can beat you up."
"That's not it." And then, even though I don't intend to, I let it go. All of it. How for years I watched cars with bumper stickers shouting the praises of idiot football players and jackass soccer players, the same people who have made my life miserable since I was old enough to understand the word miserable (which was younger than you'd think). Seeing them and their ilk feted and toasted everywhere—on TV, in school, in books, in conversations, at picnics. It's like no one else in the world matters. Then, one day, someone decides to throw a little attention and a little validation in the direction of people like me, people who have one thing going for them in this world—their brains.
"I mean," I tell her, "we live in a country that hates smart people. There's this absolutely virulent strain of anti-intellectualism that runs through America like a—"
"Absolutely what of what?"
"Never mind. It's just that it did my hea
rt good the first time I saw one of those bumper stickers that says, 'My child is an honor student at South Brook High.' It was like the antidote to all of the sports bumper stickers. No one gives you high-fives or cheers for being smart, but at least it was something.
"But of course we couldn't let the brainy kids feel good about themselves for five minutes, right? We couldn't let the smart kids have something as small and insignificant as a bumper sticker. So all those Jock Jerks and their parents had to go out and get those new bumper stickers. Just putting the uppity brains back in their place. 'It doesn't matter how smart you are. We can still beat you up.'" And yeah, I remember the way I felt when I saw one of those "beat up" stickers. It was like, "Why do people I don't even know hate me? Just for being smart? What sin is that?"
I sit up straight in my seat, memory fading to the present as Kyra guns the engine. "What are you doing?"
She doesn't answer, but there's a grim set to her lips, and she's leaning forward as if her slim frame's weight could somehow urge the car faster. She's almost brutally intent, her lips curled into a snarl, her eyes straining.
"What are you doing? " We're zipping by the other cars on the road; the engine growls and the road noise jumps. She dodges from one lane to another, then back again after passing an SuV, and I realize what she's doing.
"No! Kyra! Don't!" We're closing on the minivan with the "My kid can beat up your honor student" bumper sticker. "Don't ram her!"
"Chill out, girly girl. We've got air bags."
"Christ! Kyra! There could be little kids in that—"
"So what? They'll just grow up into more Jock Jerks. A new generation. Who cares? Anyone who would put a dumb-ass bumper sticker like that on their car needs to be yanked outta the gene pool."
"Is it worth totaling your car?" I'm desperate—it's not her car, after all, but maybe her sister won't appreciate the damage, if she notices between bouts of depression-induced Cheetos eating.
Her fingers loosen a little bit on the steering wheel, but she's still got the gas pedal jammed against the floor. "Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. I thought you wanted people like this dead. Thought we agreed on stuff like that."