Thanks for the Trouble

  “Baby,” Tyler says, just before he’s slapped hard enough across the face to earn an admiring chorus of “ooooohs” from the crowd.

  “Get off him!” the pink-pigtailed girl shouts, and pulls Alana away from Tyler. And now the two girls have grabbed hold of each other’s hair, yanking this way and that, screaming warrior screams of anger-pain. Tyler is just watching, unsure what his role here is, and you know you’ve got to do something.

  You climb across the counter and try to get between the two girls, only they’re locked up tight. You scoot around behind Alana and grab her waist, pulling her backward. Zelda is next to you, trying to defuse the whole situation with words. It is at this moment that Tyler seems to wake up, and now he’s coming over to help, but the girls twist violently around, slipping in the cherry Icee that is now all over the tile floor, and you’re tossed hard right at him, your elbow going straight into his stomach. He straightens up with a wince, and this is the moment you would explain that it was just an accident, if you could talk. But you can’t talk, can you?

  The shock comes first. It’s not pain so much as blunt force. A faraway part of you registers that you’ve just been punched in the face, but there’s no narrative yet. Nobody has been assigned the role of puncher: there’s only the punch. And it comes with a bright light, just like people talk about, only it’s not stars—more like a single bright white flash, a gunshot going off inside your head. Then you’re moving backward and downward, toward the sopping-sticky tile. You land with a squish. That’s when the pain starts, radiating outward from your cheek in hot waves. Blood is already dripping from your nose, an impossibly bright streak of red when you wipe it off on your arm, as if something truly vital were seeping out of you. Or that could be cherry Icee—it’s pretty hard to tell right now. For the first time, it occurs to you to look up. And there’s Tyler, face looming above you like the frozen scowl of a totem pole, shaking the bruise out of his knuckles. You see cherry-red rage, and you’re only seconds away from jumping back up to your feet and ripping out his throat when you notice that Zelda has managed to slip around behind him, and then she slams his head into the glass wall of the popcorn popper, which shatters. And now it’s all five of you down there in a dog pile behind the snack counter of the multiplex, and there’s blood and Icee everywhere, and the wrestling match goes on for another minute or so before enough adults with name tags and serious expressions show up to pull you apart, and you’re all dragged roughly through a door and into a small office.

  And that’s what you do at a goddamn movie theater.

  AN ARRANGEMENT

  THE MANAGER OF THE MULTIPLEX was a chubby guy with a terrible comb-over and a weirdly high-pitched voice. His name tag said PIREZ.

  “I’ll have to call the police, you know,” he said. “That’s the rule when there’s a violent altercation. And property damage.”

  “Mr. Pirez?” Zelda said.

  “And of course they’ll be informing your parents, who will be responsible for paying for those damages, but God only knows if they’ll actually pony up.”

  “Mr. Pirez?”

  “And on a personal level,” the manager went on, “I just hope you know how damaging this kind of behavior is. I don’t have a lot of job security, and when things like this happen, everything gets blamed on me, which hardly seems fair—”

  “Mr. Pirez,” Zelda said, a little more loudly this time.

  “What?”

  “I was only going to ask how much damage you think we did.”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “Estimate, if you would.”

  “Well, that popcorn popper’s gonna be at least a few hundred to fix. And I had to give free passes to everyone who witnessed that—that brawl. And then there are the cleaning fees, of course.”

  “Would six hundred dollars cover it?”

  “Well, uh, that’s hard to say—”

  “Let’s say seven.” Zelda opened up her purse and removed the wad.

  “Damn,” Tyler said, impressed.

  Zelda counted out the bills. “One, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.” She handed them to Pirez. “That’s that. Now, may we be excused?”

  The manager looked flummoxed. I’m sure he didn’t want to get the police involved any more than the rest of us did, but the alternative here was being bought off by a teenage girl.

  “I still have to call your parents,” he said. “I can’t just let you loose to start fighting all over again.”

  Zelda sighed theatrically. “Very well. But my parents are both dead, so I’m afraid you’re out of luck with me.”

  “Really?” the manager said. “So who’s your guardian?”

  “I guard myself. Now please get on with it.”

  So the manager called up our parents one by one. And while he was able to get someone on the line for Alana, Tyler, and the pink-pigtailed girl, my mom proved unreachable.

  “What about your dad?” Pirez asked.

  “His father is also dead,” Zelda said.

  “Oh yeah? Isn’t that convenient.”

  “No,” Zelda answered, stone-faced. “Quite the opposite.”

  So Pirez called my mom back and left a message. Then we all just sat there, in silence, waiting. The manager occasionally left the office to do his job, but he never stayed away for long enough to make running away a viable option. I had Kleenex stuck up my nose to stanch the bleeding, Tyler was holding a washcloth to where the popcorn popper had sliced open his forehead, and both Alana and the pink-pigtailed girl had scratches on their cheeks and fork-in-a-toaster hair. Only Zelda had come out of the melee relatively unscathed.

  S-o-r-r-y, I signed to her.

  “Don’t be,” she said, and smiled. “I can’t remember the last time I was involved in an honest-to-goodness fight.”

  An hour later the pink-pigtailed girl got picked up by a mother who also happened to be wearing way too much green eye shadow. Alana went next, escorted out by an older sister who clearly didn’t give half a shit about what had happened.

  “You drove yourself, right?” she asked Alana.

  “Yep.”

  “Cool. I’ll meet you at home.”

  A few wordless minutes after Alana left, Tyler coughed in a preparatory sort of way. “Hey, Parker,” he said. “I’m sorry I punched you.”

  “I’m not sorry I put your head through the popcorn popper,” Zelda said.

  I-t-s o-k, I finger spelled.

  “What did he say?” Tyler asked.

  “He said it’s okay,” Zelda translated. “Because he’s a very generous boy.”

  “Oh. Cool. Thanks, man.”

  Tyler’s mom was a tiny little blond woman who didn’t look capable of getting angry with anyone about anything.

  “What happened?” she asked, then peeled the washcloth off her son’s forehead to get a look at the cut. “This is deep,” she said to Pirez. “He probably needs stitches.”

  “Not my job,” Pirez said. “And your son is fired, by the way.”

  Finally it was down to just Zelda and me. Pirez checked his watch. “Jesus,” he said. Time passed. He checked it again. “Jesus,” he said again. Time passed. He checked it again.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Zelda said. “I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but perhaps there’s a mutually advantageous end to this story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve left a message for Parker’s mother, so she’ll certainly find out about what happened here today. Maybe it’s time you let us go.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that. I’m a parent myself, you know.”

  “Then perhaps you were a little bit conservative with your estimate of the damages to your property. Say by two hundred dollars or so?”

  “Yeah,” Pirez said, smiling a little. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  A few minutes later we were released back onto the San Francisco streets. Zelda was $900 poorer, and apparently I was starting to develop a pretty serious bla
ck eye.

  “It’s turning the same color as that sunset,” Zelda told me, pointing out where the blue sky was bruising with nightfall. And I started to laugh, because it was funny how good that black eye suddenly felt, in spite of how much it hurt. It felt like living.

  We walked for a while, back in the general direction of my house, enjoying the squeaky San Francisco trolley-car symphony. Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang.

  “Get home now,” my mom said, then immediately hung up.

  DINNERTIME DEBACLE

  ZELDA HADN’T WANTED TO COME with me. She told me she had enough experience with parents and kids to know that she’d be walking into a firefight. But I insisted. At this stage, I couldn’t afford to leave her alone with her phone; she must have been wondering why that call from the hospital hadn’t come in yet, and it wouldn’t take long for her to notice the little “Do Not Disturb” symbol in the corner of her home screen. I had to provide nonstop entertainment, even if that entertainment involved my getting torn a new one by my mom.

  She was standing in the kitchen when we came in, holding a mostly empty glass of wine. Her eyes were already rimmed with red.

  “Hello, Zelda,” she said.

  “Hello, Ms. Santé.”

  “Thank you for escorting my son home, but I’d like to speak to him alone.”

  No, I signed. She’s staying.

  “Excuse me?”

  She’s staying.

  My mom took a moment to absorb this, then laughed one of those little joyless laughs that are a parent’s way of saying, Oh, is that what you think is going to happen?

  “Fine. What do I care?” She refilled her wineglass. “So you got in a fight today. At a movie theater. Care to explain?”

  I was helping a friend, I signed.

  Another fake laugh, only this time it meant, Oh, is that what you’re going to say happened?

  “I don’t see how putting a boy’s head through a popcorn popper could possibly be helping anyone.”

  “Actually, I was the one who put the boy’s head through the popcorn popper,” Zelda said.

  My mom turned her death glare away from me for a moment. “Zelda, has Parker told you that this wasn’t his first fight? Did you know that he spent most of middle school doing this kind of shit?”

  “That’s really neither here nor—”

  “In eighth grade, some boy was making fun of him, so Parker shoved him into the street and a car ran over his leg. Broke it in three places. He could’ve been killed.”

  Okay. So you may remember I mentioned this in passing a while back (page 52, if you wanna check up on me), and I said I’d eventually give you the details. Well, here we are.

  Even though everything my mom said was technically true, it also wasn’t the whole story. I hadn’t tried to hurt anyone on purpose, and that kid—Trevor Jaffe was his name—had been tormenting me all year. And it wasn’t just “making fun of” me. He would push me too, and punch me, and trip me, and kick me—basically the whole bullying playbook. So yeah, I pushed him back one time, and I wasn’t paying attention to where we were (waiting for the bus), and this one car was driving way too close to the sidewalk, and so yeah, he ended up getting hit. Trevor’s parents pressed charges, and maybe because he was white and I wasn’t, I got this minor version of assault put on my record. I was suspended from school for a month after that, and it ended up setting me back in all my classes, and in some ways I never really found my feet again. So there you go. That’s the story. Do with it what you will.

  “I don’t know anything about the past, Ms. Santé,” Zelda said. “But as for today, it really wasn’t Parker’s fault.”

  “I don’t want to hear it. I really don’t. This”—she pointed at me, then all around her—“has been my life for years now, ever since Marco passed away. It’s been unending. Parker acts as if he’s the only one who lost something. He gets to screw up over and over again and I’m supposed to hold everything together.” Her eyes were filling with tears, the way they always did when she so much as mentioned my dad. “You have no idea how many excuses I’ve heard.”

  Zelda looked at me, as if asking my permission for something, though I didn’t know what. (And if I had known, I probably wouldn’t have given it.)

  “And what’s your excuse?” she said.

  My mom was so sunk into her own emotional meltdown, she didn’t fully register the question. “What?”

  “I asked you what your excuse was.”

  “My excuse? For what?”

  “For this show you’re putting on. For the perpetual pity party you appear to be throwing yourself. Can’t you see what a terrible example you’re providing?”

  “Young lady, you’re in my house right now—”

  “Exactly!” Zelda said. “And let’s take a look at this house of yours, shall we?” She marched through the kitchen and on into the living room, to the photograph mounted over the television. It had been taken in Mexico, I think, or somewhere with a beach, anyway—my mom and my dad, looking a lot younger than I’d ever known them to be, a little younger than it seemed they ever could have been. Kids, basically. They were too close to the camera, which my dad was holding (a selfie before the age of the selfie), and smiling like the world was a deck full of aces. Perfect happiness.

  “Look at that, Ms. Santé. Right in the middle of the room. And you wonder why your son is utterly arrested?”

  “Because I have photographs of my late husband? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Parker could get better, but he doesn’t want to. And that’s because you could get better and you don’t want to. You surround yourself with these so you won’t ever let go, and that’s what you’ve taught your son is normal. It’s shameful, Ms. Santé. I’m sorry, but it’s absolutely shameful.”

  “I will not stand here and be lectured about grief by a girl.”

  “But you expect your son to stand here and be lectured about self-control by an alcoholic?”

  For the first time in the conversation, my mom was stunned into silence. In an instant, my mind flashed through a hundred different micro-memories: bottles piled up in the recycling bin, cranky mornings and sleepy evenings, the smell on her breath. They had a rule at Delta that you couldn’t have anything to drink for twelve hours before a flight, and I knew my mom had never broken it. But I also knew that she made a big deal about not breaking it, and sometimes she’d pour herself a big Bloody Mary early in the morning, if she had an all-nighter coming up. Did that mean what Zelda said was true? And why hadn’t I ever noticed?

  Finally my mom found her voice again. “Get out,” she said.

  “With pleasure.”

  Zelda slammed the door behind her. In thirty seconds she’d stripped my mom of all parental authority. Now we were just two fucked-up people standing in a dirty kitchen with no idea what to say to each other. My mom lowered her wineglass to the counter with a shaky hand. I headed for the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Wherever she’s going, I signed.

  IN THE SHAKESPEARE GARDEN

  I RAN TO CATCH UP with Zelda, and together we walked north, back into Golden Gate Park. It was after eight, and the park was mostly empty, though there were still a few health nuts running the trails in their Lycra shirts and shorts, iPod shuffles stuck to their arms like multicolored Nicorette patches. Streetlights glowed orange on the major roads, but there was no light on the trail Zelda was taking, toward a locked gate and a metal sign that read shakespeare garden.

  “Come on,” she said, and climbed over the gate.

  I’d been in the Shakespeare Garden before, but it felt totally different in the dark, almost like a cemetery. A path ran between two rows of stone benches to a kind of altar, on which was posed a bust of the big man himself, with his balding head and his ruffled cravat and a look on his face like Aren’t I just the smartest fucker in the whole world? I put my hand on his wide, naked forehead. It was cold to the touch.

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry that had to happen,” Zelda said. I figured that was about the biggest non-apology there was in the world, but it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t looking for an apology. In fact, I felt grateful for what had just gone down, though I wasn’t completely sure why. “Your mother . . . it’s like she has an ice cube in her mouth and she thinks she knows what it’s like to freeze to death. Do you know how many people I’ve had to say goodbye to over the years?”

  I realized Zelda was referring to her supposed immortality again.

  “I was married right here,” she said. “The second time, I mean. To Nathaniel. I had all sorts of fake documentation to make it, well, as legal as was possible. The only people here were his sister and the minister we’d hired. It rained all over my dress, but neither of us cared. It was silly to wear white anyway. Do you know why brides wear white?”

  I nodded. We’d talked about that in the same Life Skills class where we learned why Super Mario owed a debt to the perpetually kidnapped Princess Peach. White was a sign of purity.

  “I was very far from a virgin that night,” Zelda said, then laughed. “But there were ways in which I felt like one. Which I realize sounds terribly sentimental, but so what? Some people just . . . renew you.”

  I had a thought, and it seemed important enough to merit writing down. It was dark in the garden, though, so I pulled out my phone and wrote it into a text message: Maybe love is the exception to your whole law-of-diminishing-returns thing.

  Zelda took the phone and read it. “What a beautiful sentiment, Parker. I think I’d like that for an epitaph: Love is the exception to the law of diminishing returns.” She started typing something, but it was a few seconds before I understood why, and by then, it was too late. “I’m sending this to myself,” she said, and handed the phone back to me. Then she pulled her own phone out of her purse. She waited for the text to pop up, unaware that I’d sabotaged her connection. Bold action was required.

  I moved across the dark distance between us and put my arms around her waist, pulling her into a kiss. I felt the clunk of her phone dropping to the grass. A moment later we were on the ground too. She rolled on top of me, pinning my arms behind my head, pushing against me in a way that made me forget every single problem I’d ever had or probably ever would have.