“Sorry, Jason,” my mother said after Jeremy and Dad left for Six Flags Great Adventure, which was really odd, because there wasn’t any reason for her to be sorry for me. I didn’t want to go. Unless she was really sorry for herself, which happens sometimes, but she’d never say that. She probably didn’t like staying in our beach house playing Scrabble anymore. My mother isn’t as good at Scrabble as I am.
She might be sorry about that.
“So how about you and I go out to a special restaurant?” my mother asked me.
We were in our rented house, but we had some stuff from home. We had our own sheets and pillows and blankets. Of course we brought our own Scrabble set. My mom also packed for me a plate, a glass, and silverware, so then Jeremy wanted his own from home too. Mom didn’t want to, but Dad said we could make room in the car. But Mom was mad about it. I couldn’t tell from her face, but she did shut the door really hard. So she could be sorry about that.
“So how ’bout it, Jason? Just you and me. Like old times,” my mother said.
“Just like old times,” I said.
It was easy sometimes to just say the last words I had heard when I knew she wanted me to say something. I knew my mother wanted something from me.
I knew every time, but there was nothing I could do. So sometimes she would cry. Sometimes she would just close her fists very tightly, squeeze her eyes shut, and that’s when I could look at her. My mother’s face is very beautiful, like hills of softness, and careful arches of tiny hair, and moving lips, white teeth.
We went to the Channel Marker restaurant, just me and my mother. Just like old times. My mother asked for a table in the farthest corner like we always do. But there was a wait. We had to wait.
Weight.
“We can wait, can’t we, Jason?” my mother said. “Relax your face, Jason. Take out your book.”
We sat down on a hard wooden bench and I started to read.
“Relax your face, Jason,” my mother said. She put two fingers on the side of my head. We still waited. And I read my book that my mom always brings for me.
“Jason, I have to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back. Stay here. Okay, Jason? Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I nodded again. I kept my eyes on my book, even though it was hard to concentrate.
It was noisy in the restaurant. Every time the door opened, I could hear cars driving on the road. I heard a dog bark outside, and I heard the wood floor creak when someone walked by the doorway to the kitchen.
My occupational therapist was teaching me how to try and block out all these sounds. She taught me to hear them one by one and then send them away.
Hear them. Hold them. And let them go.
Until, finally, all I saw were the words on the page and all I heard was my own breathing. And I knew I was calm.
I could wait.
I kept reading. I knew I was calm, and I was proud of myself. My mother would come back from the bathroom, and I would not be blinking or flapping or rocking. I would be reading, and no one would know any different. No one would have to see me.
I heard two pairs of feet come close. And then girls’ voices.
“Ask him. Come on, ask him.”
“No. You ask him.”
I kept my head down, but I let my eyes leave my book to the shoes. The girls’ shoes on the floor. Two girls. And then a hand. A girl’s hand.
It waved at me.
At me?
I could look up and then down again. It was a girl, her mouth turned up, her teeth showing. Her eyes were directed right at me. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to say, but I knew she wanted something.
Did I know her?
Was this someone I was supposed to know?
Sometimes I have trouble recognizing people I am supposed to know. Especially if there is nothing for me to use as a clue, like a particular kind of hair, very long or very straight or very black, in combination with something else, like a beard or glasses or being very fat, or braces on their teeth. Or where they are when I see them, like the doctor’s office or the gas station or the library.
Sometimes someone’s voice, a hat they always wear, who they are with, or their perfume can help.
I wished my mother would come back. She would know who these girls were. She would talk to them. I looked in the direction she walked away. There were so many people, so many legs, and so much noise.
What am I supposed to do?
“You think he’s cute—you ask him.”
“Katie!”
“He didn’t hear me. Ask him.”
I did hear them. I heard them and then I understood. But it was too late. I tried to think of everything I was supposed to do. But it was too late. The button of my jeans was poking me in the stomach, and the collar of my shirt was rubbing on my neck. The lights from the ceiling were hurting my eyes. There was a horrible smell coming from a tray that went by.
I knew.
The girl was waving at me, I thought. She wants to be my friend. She thinks I am cute.
Cute. No one had ever called me cute before, other than my mother. No one. I knew what it meant now.
But it was too late.
“Why is he doing that?”
Doing what? What was I doing? I know what I am doing. I can feel it but I can’t stop. It’s too late.
“Ew, Katie. Look.”
“Is he smiling at you?”
“Ew, no. It’s just his face. Let’s go.”
They stood up. The girls’ shoes and the girls’ voices. The voices were whispers now, but they were louder. I could hear them. The shoes were moving away.
“Ew, gross. He’s so weird. Move, Katie. Well, move faster.”
A couple of days later it occurred to me what had happened, and what it meant and what it would mean to me forever.
I thought then, my mother was wrong about me and girls, and growing up and having a normal life. About finding someone who thinks I’m different special.
About having a girlfriend.
Until just now.
Until I got an e-mail from PhoenixBird.
Who’s definitely a girl.
Chapter Seven
PhoenixBird wrote a story, and she asked me to read it before she posts it. I read it, but I don’t answer her right away. I know she can’t tell if I’ve received her e-mail or read her story. There is no way to check status on this website. Maybe she will think I am away on vacation and can’t get to my computer. Or our power was out. There are many reasons a person hasn’t checked their favorite website. It could be anything.
It makes me feel a little bit like I am lying, but I need more time.
PhoenixBird’s story is set in the future, but it isn’t science fiction. You can just tell it isn’t science fiction. It’s something different.
There are basically two types of fiction, literary and genre. Science fiction would be one type of genre fiction, but there are so many, like mysteries, western novels, crime novels, fantasy. And romance.
Genre is kind of like how you know what is going to happen in a particular kind of book. In a crime story you know you are going to learn who the bad guy is, but he may or may not get caught. In a mystery you want the mystery to be solved. In fantasy there has to be magic, maybe even vampires or werewolves.
Romance goes like this:
Boy gets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy gets girl again.
The end.
It can’t be any other way.
PhoenixBird’s story doesn’t seem to fit into any of these categories. It is about a world where every single person lives in their own apartment—everyone, every man and woman and even the children. The children seem to come into the world pretty much self-sufficient, so they can already walk and talk and take care of themselves. This saves a lot of time and money. It’s not that the people are all the same in this world, but they are all equal. No one has to rely or lean or depend on anyone else.
In PhoenixBird’s s
tory everybody has food and clothing. No one is ever cold or hungry or homeless. All illness has been cured. No one ever gets sick and needs a doctor. Nobody needs any help doing anything. And she doesn’t write this, but I am guessing that no one feels left out, because no one is left out.
In the story the world is perfect: Nobody needs anybody else.
Adjudicate.
That’s the word that came into my mind this morning. I think I know what it means, or I can figure it out. Usually you can figure out a word by its place in a sentence or by breaking it down. I see the word “judge” in “adjudicate.”
“Adjudicate.”
I watch my mouth in the mirror.
I wonder if I am pronouncing it correctly.
I don’t know where this word came from, but I will carry it with me today. It’s Saturday. My parents’ date night is tonight.
“Chicken nuggets are all ready on the tray, Suzy,” my mother says.
I know Suzy has already seen the chicken nuggets on top of the stove. I watched her turn on the oven to three hundred fifty degrees, so she knows.
“Just turn on the oven for a couple of minutes before you want to cook them,” my mother says. She has lipstick on, and she straightened her curly hair. The first time she did that, I cried when I saw her. And then I ran over and tried to pull her hair from her head. It didn’t look like her, and I got scared. Now I am used to it, even though I think it looks like she is wearing a wig.
“Jeremy needs to be in bed by nine. He has to brush his teeth, and he can read one book. Then it’s lights out,” my mother is saying. Then she turns to me.
My mother used to put me to bed every night. She used to lie right next to me under my covers and tell me a story. She would lie with me until I fell asleep. I could smell her hair and feel the heat that came off her body. Let your arms go, my mother would say. Let your hands be still. Let your face rest. Let your feet rest. One body part at a time, and I would close my eyes and know she was not going to leave me, so I could fall asleep.
But then she said I got too old. I needed to go to bed by myself.
“Jason can . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence.
“We will be fine, Mrs. Blake,” Suzy said. “You two get going. It’s late.”
“Jason can take care of himself now,” my mother went on. My dad is standing by the door. He has his coat on, which means he is ready to leave. His hands are in his pockets, and I can hear his car keys jingling, which means he is worried about being late.
“I’m here to help, Mrs. Blake. Jason and I go back a long way,” Suzy says. She is waving my parents toward the door with her hands.
Suzy has never made me feel stupid. She never seems uncomfortable around me. She has been babysitting for us since I was very little, since just after Jeremy was born. Her kids are all grown, she told me. When Suzy talks, she uses her hands a lot. I can look at her hands, and they say more than her words.
Right now Suzy’s hands are saying: I like Jason.
Still, when my mom and dad head to the door, my brain starts to buzz. It fills up and lifts off my body. When I was little, I think I believed it really did lift off my body, or at least I didn’t know it hadn’t. Now I know better. I want to reach up and touch my head, because even though my brain knows my head is still attached, my body has stopped believing me.
I have to remember that I am breathing. In and out. Listen to the sound it makes in my nose and my ears. My chest goes up with the sound. I am supposed to notice this. It is supposed to help connect my head back to my body before my hands can fly away. My mother doesn’t like it when my hands fly away.
I keep my eyes away from the door and my mom and dad and the feeling I will have when they leave. Suzy has told me it is homesickness, even though I am home. Suzy says it means I love my parents very much and I don’t want them to leave.
I have to breathe.
My dad comes over and kisses the top of my head. “Have fun with Suzy,” my dad says. “We will be home before you know it.”
I know what he means. He doesn’t want me to feel scared.
My dad smells like the cologne that I bought him for Father’s Day last year. That makes me feel good, like we are connected. I try to slow down my breathing. I can feel the heaviness of his head on the top of my head when he kisses me, so even though I don’t watch him walk back to the door, I can still feel it, and we are connected.
I hear the door open.
“Good-bye, Jason. Be good,” my mom is calling out. I hear Jeremy running up to the door.
“Bye, Mom. Bye, Dad,” Jeremy says. His voice sounds muffled, because he probably has his face stuffed into my dad’s coat. I don’t know how he can do that. That makes it harder to breathe.
“I love you,” he says.
The music on the television. The refrigerator ice maker shuts off. My dad’s keys get louder. Jeremy’s voice. He is upset about something. Something about cookies. The sounds from outside. A car. The door must be open.
I have to breathe. I know they will be back, because I am breathing.
If PhoenixBird’s story were real, I am thinking, I would live alone and so I could not ever be homesick. That would be good. My head wouldn’t be buzzing. I could breathe easily.
I know my mother worries that I won’t be able to live alone. Not now, she says, but someday, she says, someday you will want to. But I don’t. So it would be good if PhoenixBird’s story were real. If I lived in her story.
But it wouldn’t be good, because I love my mother and father, and that is why I am homesick even while I am home.
If I lived in the story, I wouldn’t need my mother. I wouldn’t be homesick when she goes out. And she’d be happy.
“I know. I know, Carl.” It’s my mother’s voice, which is outside the door and the door is still open. She is not happy now. She wants me to act like Jeremy does when he is homesick. He runs up and smothers his face, but I couldn’t breathe if I did that. That’s what she wants. I know that.
But I wouldn’t be able to breathe.
A car drives by. My mother’s shoes are on the wooden steps and now on the pavement. My dad coughs.
“Stop it, Liz. Jason loves you very much. You know he does,” my dad says. His hand is on the metal door handle.
“If you say so,” my mother says.
The door swings shut.
But if we lived in PhoenixBird’s story, my mother wouldn’t be so sad.
I know PhoenixBird is waiting to hear what I think of her story, but I am afraid. When I was little, I used to think that there was actually someone watching me when I typed into the computer, because it responded so quickly. Or that someone was actually inside. The first time I got an instant message, I ran to the window to see who was there, who could know I was at my computer.
Who could know what I was doing?
And even though I know better now, a part of me still worries. I still worry that someone is there. That if I type into my computer, if I answer PhoenixBird, she will be able to see me.
Tonight I write back to PhoenixBird.
I have a few comments. There were little mistakes and a place I thought she could “show more” and not just “tell.” I tell her it was like watching a television show, and you wouldn’t want to just have a blank screen with a narrator telling you the story. Like that long, boring beginning of Star Wars with all the words moving across the screen. You want to see pictures.
It’s really good, PhoenixBird, I write in my message to her.
I tell her I can hardly wait to read the ending.
Chapter Eight
Before I go to bed, I always get an hour of computer time. I have only seven minutes left tonight.
“Well, I’ll be in to say good night,” Suzy tells me. She stands in my doorway. “You’re really good on that computer, aren’t you?”
I look up at the ceiling of my room, where my dad has stenciled letters, the whole alphabet.
My dad painted my ceiling when I was fou
r years old, when I first started spelling. I could spell anything then, anything I saw on a shampoo bottle, a road sign, a grocery bag. At first my mom and dad thought I was just copying the letters. And they thought it was great that I could form my letters in a straight line. Then they realized I could spell anything, not just copy. Anything I had seen, even once. They thought I was some kind of a genius.
So they told anybody and everybody who would listen.
At least my mom did.
I may have only been in nursery school, but I knew what was going on.
It was the old bait and switch routine.
“No, he isn’t hard of hearing. Look, watch how he can write his letters. Jason can write his name and all our names, anything. And he’s only four years old. Just turned four.”
I had a blue plastic writing board with a magnetic pen that erased clean when you lifted it over your head and shook it back and forth.
“Of course he talks when he wants to. And he can spell.”
MCDONALD’S
TARGET
CLOSED
UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
KITCHENAID
VOLKSWAGEN
AITORO’S APPLIANCE STORE
“Why is he writing all those meaningless words?” my grandmother said, my genius apparently lost on her.
“Well, anyone can talk,” my mother countered. “Just listen to Bobby’s kid. He just won’t shut up, will he?”
Bobby is my mother’s brother, Uncle Bobby, and his “kid” is named Seth Zimmerman.
My dad is pretty quiet too. He talks, but most of the time he listens. But that day I remember exactly what he said to my grandmother. And to my mother.
“It’s not meaningless to Jason,” my dad said.
“What? What’s not meaningless?” My mother’s face red and her eyes wet, even though she wasn’t crying. She was hurting, even I could see that.
“I never said—,” my grandmother started, but my dad interrupted her.
“The words. And the letters. Just because you don’t understand their meaning doesn’t mean they don’t have one.”