100 Sideways Miles

by Andrew Smith

  My father and I drank coffee together outside on our patio every Saturday morning, even during winter storms.

  It was what we did.

  A cup of coffee with my dad usually lasted about forty thousand miles, maybe fewer this Saturday since Mom was hurriedly finishing the family’s New York packing job.

  Dad stared and stared at me.

  It wasn’t the way Cade Hernandez stared. There was no messing-with-you intent from my father. I knew what it was.

  Dad was afraid that, like my real mother, one day I would be gone.

  Poof!

  “Laika stinks,” he said.

  My dog sat up in front of my bare feet, beneath the metal table where Dad and I drank our Saturday coffee.

  I sipped and nodded. “I shall prepare the tub of horror.”

  Laika, knowing the phrase, clenched herself into a tightened armadillo.

  Laika’s tub of horror was a plastic toddler’s wading pool, blue, and decorated with a frieze of press-formed dolphins, starfish, and bubbles dancing around its outer wall.

  Such horror.

  Dad leaned toward me and said, “It looks like it’s about time you started shaving.”

  For some reason, that was embarrassing. I could talk in specific detail with the bullfighter about how condoms are used, but the minute my father started noticing the effects of puberty on me I began to choke and sweat.

  I felt myself turning red.

  “Shaving what?” I said.

  Dad tilted his head. “I can see something.”

  “Maybe I need to wash my face.”

  I was one-point-seven million miles away, two months, from my seventeenth birthday, and if I weren’t so tall, I could probably pass for a sixth-grader.

  Dad relaxed. Then he recited his laundry list of instructions: where he’d left the contact information for his hotel, where I could find money if I needed it, not to forget to charge my phone and have it with me at all times, that trash day was Wednesday, and not to get into Cade Hernandez’s truck if Cade was drinking alcohol.

  “We don’t drink, Dad.”

  That was almost fifty percent of the truth.

  Well, not really so much as that.

  “Finn. I was sixteen once too.”

  “That was about fourteen billion miles back that way,” I argued.

  Distance was more important than time to my father, too. That was why he was so afraid that I would go away someday.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  Then I said this: “Dad, I’ve been bothered about something somebody said to me a few days ago.”

  “Something somebody said,” my father repeated, making sure to stress each “some.”

  Dad did not appreciate the vagueness of teenage communication.

  “It was a girl.”

  “A girl?” Dad was positively enthusiastic.

  “A carrier of twin X chromosomes,” I affirmed.

  “Well?”

  I took another sip from my coffee and said, “She said this: ‘I’m not flirting with you, you know.’ ”

  My father nodded thoughtfully.

  “What does that even mean, Dad?” I asked.

  “She was flirting with you, Finn. Definitely.”

  “That’s what I thought too.”

  I loved my father more than anything.

  • • •

  Cade was just coming out of the bedroom when I got upstairs.

  He rubbed his eyes and yawned while he clutched one hand over his crotch. Cade went into the bathroom and peed loudly. I’d noticed the protrusion below his lip that meant he was already chewing tobacco too.

  Breakfast of champions.

  And from inside my bathroom, Cade announced, “Peeing with a boner is so fucking ridiculous, man.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Just . . . wow.”

  I shook my head.

  “Really,” Cade said.

  He pulled the door open, then turned and dropped a stringy brown glob of spit into the unflushed toilet.

  I pointed at my friend’s mouth. “Dude. You’ll have to get rid of that shit. My parents are still here.”

  Cade said, “Oh.”

  He extracted a black wad of tobacco from his lower lip and—splash!—dropped it into his stew of piss and saliva in the toilet.

  Then Cade looked at me with a serious eye and said, “And, Finn: Don’t try to tell me you didn’t know that peeing with a boner is a painful fucking nightmare.”

  I shook my head.

  Cade flushed the toilet.

  He said, “It’s ridiculous. I should ask Mr. Nossik about it.”

  Cade Hernandez was going to kill that man.

  • • •

  After the Jeep was packed, we stood barefoot in the driveway and said our good-byes.

  Mom and Nadia kissed me. They waved and smiled at Cade. I believed they both actually wanted to kiss Cade Hernandez, because all girls seemed to want to kiss him, but that would have been far too much for my father to handle.

  So Mom and Nadia got into the Jeep and waited for my dad.

  Dad reissued his usual string of father-to-teenage-son admonitions about what Cade and I should not do while he was gone. And, as was his usual custom just before getting into the Jeep and driving off, he held my shoulders and looked directly into my eyes, plumbing the depths of the stuff that was back there as though he could see whether or not a seizure was coming anytime soon.

  “I love you, son.”

  “Love you, Dad.”

  And, dutifully, I bent down so he could kiss my forehead.

  That was how it always went.

  • • •

  We would eventually end up at Blake Grunwald’s house that night.

  Blake Grunwald was having a party.

  It was a night of the moon in perigee, and it was the night when I finally got to talk to Julia Bishop, the girl who lived a half mile up the canyon from my home.

  I had a seizure that night too.

  It was a ridiculous night, as Cade Hernandez might say, because we would not normally have been welcomed at Blake Grunwald’s party. Blake Grunwald hated us both. To be honest, Blake hated me more, but he hated Cade by association since we were best friends.

  Blake only asked us in because we had girls with us.

  The politics of teenage grudges are very complex.

  MY NEIGHBOR JULIA

  Cade and I spent the afternoon swimming in my pool.

  We lay stretched out like lazy seals on wet towels to sun ourselves on the deck while we drank Mountain Dew. When Cade finished, he used his empty bottle as a spittoon.

  It was like we owned the place and could do whatever we wanted to do, which in Cade’s case involved chewing tobacco all day long, at least until he had to report to work at Flat Face Pizza.

  “Monica Fassbinder’s split-finger grip,” Cade announced.

  “Huh?”

  Cade Hernandez poked his index finger into the center of my back.

  “Oh. Uh. Good one. You’re really gross, Win-Win,” I said.

  Cade spit. The green plastic bottle was one-third full of black goo.

  “She’s got talented hands,” Cade said.

  “I never noticed.”

  “It pays for my habit, Finn.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t think I’d ever have the guts to let someone give me a hand job in a custodian’s shed during school.”

  Cade spit again. “She did it to me other places too. In my truck. One time she did it to me in the dugout at Pioneer Field.”

  I groaned. “Dude. In your truck? Where I sit? And I sit in that dugout, too.”

  Cade shrugged. “We all do.”

  Cade tried to talk me into hanging out at Flat Face Pizza and waiting for him while he worked. He said it would be fun.

  I told him that it sure sounded like fun but I’d rather pull all my toenails out
with red-hot needle-nose pliers.

  Fun.

  “I’m okay. It’s not like I’m afraid of being home alone,” I said.

  So Cade took a shower upstairs and changed into his Flat Face Pizza delivery-boy uniform, which was just a T-shirt with the childish Flat Face logo and a pair of blue jeans. He promised to bring back some pizza for dinner when he was off work, which wouldn’t be until eleven.

  Late supper.

  We could do whatever we wanted for nearly an entire week. Well, to be honest, five days is almost nine million miles.

  But almost as soon as Cade pulled his truck out from our driveway, I smelled it.

  The flowers had come back for another unexpected visit.

  It was ridiculous.

  I stood there in front of my house, wearing nothing but a pair of white swim trunks, and as soon as the smell hit me, I knew what was about to happen.

  So I desperately tried to trap all the words inside my head. Cade drove off.

  It was a helpless situation.

  I did not want to suffer the embarrassment of blanking out in broad daylight, nearly naked as I was, on the grass of my front yard.

  I spun around and stumbled toward the door, but despite my will it felt as though everything of Finn from the knees down had already begun to fizzle away.

  Atoms will drift apart and get rearranged in the great knackery of the universe.

  House.

  Door.

  Latch.

  Steps.

  Caballito.

  All those words.

  Poof!

  I fell through the doorway and into another universe that was not my home. But I saw this: Across the room, on the raised step leading toward our kitchen, stood two little girls. Blond-white hair cut in perfect bowls at the bottoms of their earlobes. One of them was maybe seven, and the other, five—little dresses, and white socks pulled up and folded just below their knees.

  I dimly remember propping myself up, horselike on all fours, staring down at the swirling patterns in the cool wood of the living room floor. Swirling and swirling. And what is this? And what is this?

  Then everything was suddenly gone. All the words poured out of me, a supernova of nouns and verbs, the containers of everything, now nameless, now just there.

  This is the universe at twenty miles per second.

  It is a very beautiful thing.

  I pissed myself.

  I’d left the door wide open and it was night.

  I knew only those three things when the words started to trickle back: I pissed myself, it was dark, and I was staring out at the rest of the world on the other side of an open door.

  Goddamn, the words come back at their own speed, and some of them manage to get very far away from Finn Easton.

  Piss.

  Floor.

  Door.

  Night.

  My entire body shook, like the epileptic boy was attached to live electrodes.

  Nothing was connected. I had to wait until the words sluggishly came back, till I could smell the ammonia stink of the urine puddled around me on the floor, feel the stinging burn in my crotch, staring and staring out the door until all things reclaimed their names and I knew where I was.

  Then I became so angry.

  Anyone at all could simply have walked into my house, done whatever they wanted to do. But who would want to do anything in a house where some twitching zombie kid is lying facedown in a pool of his piss?

  There was something on my right arm.

  The atoms in my nerves reconnected, and I could feel Laika pressed against me. My dog always did that when I blanked out. She must have found a dry spot on the shores of Lake Finn where she could keep an eye on me.

  I was mad.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” I snapped.

  Laika curled up, dejected, and shivered away from me to a corner of the living room, watching, watching.

  Later I would feel bad about such things, but when I came back from blanking out, I acted so horribly. I swore at people, even if I loved them.

  I hated that about myself.

  I can’t say how long I stayed there on the floor trying to decide if I should shut the door first, or wipe up my piss, or get out of my goddamned swim trunks and rinse myself off beneath a shower. That’s how things always were: I could not make those connector places in my brain tell me what to do.

  I may have been there for no more than a hundred sideways miles, or it may have been a hundred thousand.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  I was so disgusted with myself.

  And I knew my parents and sister were not there, but I couldn’t remember what had happened to them.

  Imagine that.

  I hadn’t moved at all, just kept my eyes pinned to the light/dark band of roadway that eventually became named San Francisquito Canyon.

  And from somewhere down near my disconnected feet, there came this: “Are you okay? Did you take drugs or something? Can you hear me?”

  I pivoted my chin along the floor so I could see where the voice came from.

  Julia Bishop sat on the floor beside my feet, cross-legged along the shores of Lake Finn. She held a phone in her hand.

  “I was about to call nine-one-one. Are you okay?” she said.

  “I—no. Fuck no!”

  I had such a foul mouth at these times.

  I could have died from embarrassment. This was the worst possible situation.

  It was so ridiculous.

  “What are you fucking doing here?” I demanded.

  What an idiot I was! Not only was I lying there practically naked in my own piss, but I was acting like a complete asshole to the most beautiful girl in the universe. And, worst of all, I had a very stiff hard-on.

  Julia Bishop was obviously embarrassed. I had managed to pass some of my shit off onto her.

  What a hero.

  “Look,” I said. “I. Uh. Don’t look at me. Don’t pay attention to me. I apologize for swearing. This happens to me. I can’t control what I say or do sometimes. I’m a fucking epileptic.”

  The words choked in my throat.

  I wanted to die.

  “I’m sorry,” Julia said. “I was just walking past. I heard your dog howling, and the door was wide open. I’m so sorry. I tried to see if there was someone here.”

  “Fuck this,” I said.

  “Do you want me to call someone?”

  “No.”

  I realized she must have been looking at me.

  She had to have seen everything.

  It was terrible. I was wearing nothing more than thin, wet swim trunks, lying face down on top of a painfully rigid erection. That was something that frequently happened when I blanked out.

  Who would guess death was such an endless turn-on?

  “Can I help you? You’re shivering,” she said.

  “You can shut my fucking door.”

  And as soon as Julia Bishop stood and moved toward the front door, I forced myself up, dizzy and dripping, my shaking hands covering my stiff penis, and I ran upstairs to the shower.

  Ridiculous.

  PIZZA-DELIVERY BOY

  Julia Bishop stayed in my house and waited while I took a shower.

  I felt terrible for how I’d acted.

  • • •

  After I get mad about my blanking out, I get depressed. I can’t help it. It happens every time.

  The depression can be pretty bad sometimes too. I was particularly sad that night after Julia Bishop walked in and found me lying on my living room floor.

  But I never tell anyone about feeling this way, because I am so good at just being fine.

  Most times when I’d feel mopey after coming back from a seizure, I would find myself trying to remember my mother, thinking about how that dead horse fell one hundred sideways miles to land—thud!—directly on top of us.

  I generally considered how nice it would be if I could simply stop myself from hurtling through space so fa
st, if only for a few seconds at a time.

  If I could have done such a thing, that horse would have been halfway to Sacramento by the time it landed.

  Was I sorry for what happened? Sure I was, but that was billions of miles away from here. And if there is one thing I am certain of, it is this: When we think about all those miles in back of us, it’s easy to feel regret—sometimes because of things we didn’t do, sometimes for the things we did.

  Or we feel regret because of what happened to us, since we’re all so goddamned innocent and undeserving.

  And when we think about the miles ahead, we worry about something that probably isn’t ever going to happen anyway.

  Imagine that.

  Worry and regret are both useless weights that provide no drag. They never did anything to slow down the planet for one goddamned second.

  My atoms have been around for fourteen billion years. I know beyond any doubt they have seen far worse things than a dead horse falling out of the sky.

  It doesn’t mean I don’t cry about it once in a while.

  That’s okay, right?

  • • •

  I didn’t bring any clean clothes into the bathroom to put on.

  My wet swim trunks hung across the top of the shower door. I was terrified to step into the openness of the house, and I wanted to sleep.

  So I sat on the toilet, wrapped in a towel. My head ached, and I was terribly sad.

  I put my face in my hands. My wet hair hung down, drip-drip-dripping onto my lap.

  Hair grows about half an inch per month, the same amount of time it takes us to fly fifty million miles through space.

  I’ll admit this: I think about ways to kill myself.

  Do I need to be specific?

  Everybody thinks about it, right?

  I am not afraid to contemplate such things, but I am afraid of what suicide would do to my dad, to Cade, or Mom and Nadia.

  They are the anchors that keep me from knackering my fourteen-billion-year-old atoms back out into the universe where they came from, where they belong.

  Dad would be so mad at me if he ever found out what happened.

  I don’t know how long I sat there with my face in my hands—maybe ten thousand miles—until I finally gave up on the idea of hiding away in my bathroom forever.