by Andrew Smith
FINN: I’m sorry, Dad. I’ll straighten up. Just give me a few minutes. Like, four thousand miles or so.
MIKE: Okay. Happy birthday.
FINN: Sure thing.
MIKE leans over and kisses the top of FINN’s head. FINN lies down, rolls over, and faces the wall again. MIKE shuts the door as he leaves the bedroom.
(Curtain.)
It was ridiculous.
• • •
For my birthday, Cade Hernandez gave me a belt made from an old fire hose, and a brass statue of a bullfighter.
He’d had the base of the statue engraved with the following:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LITTLE BITCH
Mom and Dad didn’t get it. They had horrified looks on their faces. They were appropriately embarrassed at the likelihood of my little sister, Nadia, seeing the inscription.
This was Cade Hernandez in perfect form.
“How thoughtful of you to remember my bullfighter name,” I said.
Cade Hernandez, who’d given me the socks with the sharks on them—the ones I wore the day Julia Bishop first noticed me at Burnt Mill Creek High School—had a knack for choosing the coolest gifts.
And throughout the evening of my birthday, Cade kept looking from me to Julia with the eye of an interrogating detective, no doubt trying to determine what might have happened between us the night before.
Eventually, I did tell my friend the entire embarrassing truth.
THE LAKE THAT ISN’T A LAKE
The Perseid Meteor shower commonly peaks in early August. The spectacle, created by the slow disintegration of the comet Swift-Tuttle, is named for the constellation Perseus, the Greek hero who killed Medusa.
Just a bit more than two weeks, around twenty-four million miles, after my seventeenth birthday, the Perseids scattered brilliant torrents of blazing dust all across the nighttime sky.
The knackery put on a real show.
Although I’d asked her a number of times, Julia continued to insist she did not know how her shadow story might end, and that we would have to see what happened in the miles ahead of us.
I was desperately in love with Julia Bishop.
I suppose love, which makes atoms sticky, is also in many ways a prison.
• • •
Mom and Dad were less than enthusiastic about allowing their epileptic son to leave for an overnight campout adventure in the desert with Cade Hernandez and Julia Bishop. But in the end they decided to loosen the grip they had on their seventeen-year-old boy.
Cade and I were road-tripping for our visit to Dunston University the following week, so I suppose I was testing my limits with my parents and trying to spend as much time as possible with Julia before going away.
I promised to take Laika along as chaperone to restrain any potential recklessness on our part.
Mysteriously, as was so frequently the case with her, Julia Bishop said she wanted to tell me something. I supposed I knew what it was—that she would tell me the end of the shadow story, if the boy was ever able to get away from the book—but I also recognized my very poor record at guessing what Julia Bishop actually had in mind. So I tried to push all those assumptions about escape and sex and stars and planets out of my head.
We were going out for a night, just to have fun, to watch the Perseids from a place where there was no pollution from the light that escaped furnaces like Burnt Mill Creek and Los Angeles.
After the awkward but inevitable argument with Cade Hernandez, it was decided before we left Julia Bishop’s house that I had to sit in the backseat with Laika and that Julia would ride up front with our driver.
What else could I do?
Besides, I’d been feeling sorry for Cade’s loneliness since the end of the school year and the absence of Monica Fassbinder.
Cade drove us north through San Francisquito Canyon, and then east into the middle of the Mojave Desert, following a grid of arrow-straight two-lane highways to a place where Cade Hernandez would sometimes come to ride dirt bikes. He had frequently invited me along, but I had no desire to have my back broken again.
Mom and Dad were always completely opposed to the idea of ever allowing me on one of Cade Hernandez’s motorcycles. This time, there was no motorcycle in the bed of Cade’s truck; only our tent and camping supplies, coolers of food, and undoubtedly plenty of chewing tobacco and beer.
Cade steered with his knee. In one hand, he held a paper cup from Flat Face Pizza. It was his road spittoon. The other hand rested lazily at the twelve o’clock position on the steering wheel, pointing one finger up the road at an old splintered sign.
“This is where we’re going,” Cade said. “Aberdeen Lake.”
“Aberdeen Lake” sounds romantic and mysterious, like it might be located somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, as opposed to an abandoned outpost at the edge of Death Valley.
The sign was hardly readable. It leaned badly and was pocked with bullet holes peppering its surface. Cade pulled the truck off the highway, and we all got out to stand there in the blazing heat of the desert while Julia Bishop snapped photographs of us. Cade and I posed like brave explorers beneath the sign.
The billboard said this:
TURN HERE! VISIT BEAUTIFUL ABERDEEN
LAKE—A RESORT OASIS IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT!
MODELS NOW OPEN!
The sign showed a woman in a light blue one-piece bathing suit, apparently grasping a towline from a speeding motorboat. She was sailing along on a pair of water skis that fanned rooster tails beyond the edge of the sign. The skiing woman, blond and pale skinned, the iconic model of postmodern femininity, was smiling and wearing sunglasses.
I guess the exclamation points said it all.
Excitement.
The turn you would take, if you obeyed the sign, led down a rock-strewn road that transformed into an angry river during desert flash floods. And that was exactly the road Cade Hernandez drove us on to get to his secret camping spot near a forgotten place called Aberdeen Lake.
By evening, we had set up our camp along the edge of an enormous crater—a hollowed-out earthen swimming pool half a mile across that would have been the lake for Aberdeen Lake. It had probably been designed by a self-taught civil engineer, which may have accounted for the absence of all those expected molecules of water.
Our camp consisted primarily of a dome tent that was large enough to stand up in. We all had sleeping bags too. I felt nervous about the sleeping arrangements, though, and doing things such as dressing and undressing, or going to the bathroom.
As usual, the epileptic kid was thinking too much.
At night, we sat outside on folding chairs and watched the light show in the sky above us. Cade was very drunk and chewing tobacco, too. He tried to talk us into joining him, but neither Julia nor I would drink, and we certainly weren’t going to chew tobacco. Julia and I sat close enough that we could hold hands as we watched all the stars that tumbled out of and into the black overhead.
“What if every one of those is a Lazarus Door?” Julia asked.
“Then we’ll be eaten by the ones that don’t end up on shitholes,” I answered.
“Not you. Not if they see your back,” Julia said.
Look: It may spoil the ending, but in my father’s book all the incomers except for one—a boy—end up being killed by determined human mobs.
The atoms of the unwelcome visitors were freed.
The boy-alien’s name happened to be Finn.
Imagine that.
It could have been true. Who could say otherwise?
And at the end of the book, which is the biggest reason why people had been hounding my father to write more, doors and doors fall like the scatterings of the comet Swift-Tuttle all over the planet of humans and dogs, while Finn—the alien-boy, not me—tries his hardest to simply fit in and become human and eat regular stuff like cheeseburgers and pizza instead of his classmates.
So the book offered a sad ending for Finn—the alien-boy, not me—who only wanted to feel like
a regular human teenage boy and do regular human teenage-boy things, like chew tobacco, maybe, or get hand jobs in a custodian’s shed from well-funded German foreign exchange students.
You know, stuff like that.
In any event, my father told me throughout my life that he only named the incomer boy after me (and the Mark Twain character); that the Finn in his book was never supposed to actually be me.
I suppose that sometimes books imitate life.
And sometimes books imitate lives that imitate books.
Maybe that’s why Julia Bishop could not tell me if her shadow Finn could escape from her shadow book. Because despite my father’s constant assurances, it was me—this Finn and not the incomer one—who just couldn’t feel like a regular kid, like I belonged here.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
Cade spit and drank, spit and drank.
Laika snored lightly from inside Sputnik 2.
Cade Hernandez got up and walked to the edge of the empty crater. He stood there and peed into Aberdeen Lake.
• • •
We dragged our sleeping bags out from the tent so we could lie on our backs and watch the atoms being freed in the knackery above us until we fell asleep.
Cade, predictably, was the first one out of his clothes. He stripped down to his underwear and then lay there on top of his bag with an open beer beside his pillow and a fresh wad of chewing tobacco tucked into his lower lip.
Self-conscious, as always, I sat down on my sleeping bag and slipped off my shoes and socks.
“There’s no scorpions or shit like that out here, are there?” I said.
“Mmm. Probably are,” Cade said.
So I put my shoes on top of my camp chair. Then I took off my shorts and T-shirt and wriggled into my sleeping bag.
I was so disappointed. Somehow, I’d managed to miss seeing Julia Bishop undress. I had no idea what she’d done to prepare herself for sleep. It was like magic. Before I knew it, she had slid into her sleeping bag and was lying right beside me.
Julia Bishop was like an undressing, sleeping-bag ninja.
And I’ll admit this: I was so turned on thinking about lying in my underwear next to Julia Bishop, even if Cade Hernandez was bound to ruin it—which he did in about two hundred miles, ten seconds. Still, he didn’t seem to notice when Julia slipped over and snuggled against me inside my sleeping bag.
We kissed.
It was the most perfect sensation I had ever felt—Julia Bishop’s long, smooth legs tangled with mine while we kissed. I put my arms around her, and she held on to me.
If my heart jumped out of my chest, it would take off through space faster than the earth itself. Of course Julia had to have been aware of exactly how aroused I was. There was nothing I could do to hide it, and I was embarrassed, but only a little.
Everything about the moment felt too good.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
Then Cade sat up and said, “Have you two ever had sex yet?”
I groaned.
“Shut up, Cade,” I said. “I told you already. No. I am too young and too stupid for something like that.”
Cade took a long drink. He sat in his briefs, cross-legged on top of his sleeping bag, watching us. He turned away and spit a big blob of tobacco.
Splat!
“Well, I have,” Cade announced. “I’m no virgin.”
“I know,” I said. “You told me. You’re drunk. Remember? Iris Boskovitch.”
Julia whispered to me, “The girl with the round head ?”
I nodded a confirmation.
Cade took another drink. He crawled on his hands and knees toward the coolers. At first, he attempted to get a beer from Laika’s Sputnik 2, then he laughed and said, “Shit.”
Pfft!
Cade Hernandez opened a beer.
Wobbling, he stood over us. “Not just with Iris Boskovitch. I also . . . Hey! Are you two in bed together?”
“Shut up, Cade. We’re just lying down. I promise we are not going to have sex,” I said. “Why don’t you go back to bed and watch the meteors?”
“Shit, Finn. That kind of gives me a boner.”
“Um.”
Cade sighed and went back to his sleeping bag. He sat down heavily and took another drink.
He said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to a sperm bank to try and sell my sperm?”
I cleared my throat and shifted nervously. I was getting hot and was afraid I would sweat on Julia, which was kind of disgusting—getting all that moisture on her.
I said, “Uh. No.”
“Well, I did. You know how much a guy can make selling sperm? You can make, like, three hundred bucks a week. Dude. I have an endless supply. I could break that fucking bank. I’d never have to work a day in my life.”
Cade Hernandez tilted his head back and guzzled beer. His eyes gleamed with pride and horniness.
“But they told me I had to wait until I was eighteen. Dude, do you realize how much money’s worth of sperm I’m going to be wasting between now and next April?”
Cade Hernandez was an Aries.
“I imagine less than you suspect, now that Monica Fassbinder is about six thousand miles away,” I theorized.
Cade went on. “Shit. I can’t stop it. Who can? I’m a fucking fountain of expensive sperm. But anyway, I didn’t only have sex with Iris Boskovitch. You know who else I had sex with? Just try and guess.”
I didn’t need to say anything. When Cade Hernandez was in this particular form, I knew he was certainly going to answer his own question.
So he did.
Cade Hernandez said, “Mrs. Shoemaker.”
Julia laughed—a gasping, startled kind of giggle.
I said, “You had sex with our substitute teacher? What is wrong with you, Cade?”
Like a lot of boys I knew, I often wished that some of Cade Hernandez’s wrong magic would rub off on me. But Mrs. Shoemaker wasn’t only a substitute teacher, the one who’d taken over for Mr. Nossik after his unfortunate aneurysm, she’d also been Monica Fassbinder’s host mother.
“Well,” Cade explained, “it wasn’t at school or anything weird like that. Um. In fact, it was during summer vacation, so that makes her technically not a substitute.”
“I guess you’re off the hook, then,” I said.
Cade said, “It happened on the day we drove Monica to the airport to go back to Germany. After we dropped her off. When we got home, Mr. Shoemaker volunteered to go out to get us hamburgers. Mr. Shoemaker is such a nice guy, isn’t he? As soon as he left, Mrs. Shoemaker grabbed my hand and led me into her bedroom. She was looking at me weird the whole day. I kind of knew what she was thinking. You know how you can tell, it’s so obvious when someone’s looking at you like they want to have sex with you?”
I will admit it: I did not know what someone looked like when they wanted to have sex with you.
I said, “Um. No, Cade. What does it look like?”
And Cade said, “Look at me.”
I looked at Cade Hernandez. He was staring into my eyes and had a very contented, almost half-smiling expression. It creeped me out, and I had to look away.
“Uh,” I said.
“It looks like that, dumbass. Anyway, I felt guilty about having sex with Mrs. Shoemaker. And the hamburgers were really good. I’m probably going to go to hell for that shit, aren’t I?”
Julia laughed. “No doubt you’re going to hell, Cade.”
“Or you are going to get an infection inside your urethra that will spread like a slow-burning fire into your testicles, and then your penis is going to fall off,” I added.
Cade thought for a while and said, “That would be way worse than going to hell.”
I had to agree.
It would be worse than going to hell.
“Well, I hope you had the good sense to use a condom,” I said.
Cade took another drink. “I did. Uh. But they
were expired. Remember those ones I had in my glove box that day at the driving range? When you asked if you could borrow some condoms from me and then you saw they were a couple months out of date? Well, it was one of those I had in my wallet that day with Mrs. Shoemaker. Well, two of them, actually. We did it twice before Mr. Shoe came back with the hamburgers.”
Cade Hernandez was obviously not a good student in health class. Here was the trifecta of condom errors: glove compartment, wallet, expired.
The whole married-woman thing was a matter for ethics, which they do not teach teenage boys at Burnt Mill Creek High School.
“Um.”
Julia turned onto her side. Her face rested on my bare shoulder, and her hand lay flat on my chest.
She said, “Why did you ask Cade for some condoms?”
“Don’t worry,” Cade said, “Finn and I went to 7-Eleven and bought some fresh ones.”
“Uh.” I desperately wanted to change the subject. “Why would you call anyone you had sex with ‘Mrs.’? Mrs. Shoemaker?”
“I think it’s kind of hot,” Cade said. “ ‘Mrs. Shoemaker.’ Don’t you think that’s hot?”
I was so confused and agitated. My atoms swirled and vibrated at Julia’s touch. She pressed against me, waiting for me to tell her the entire dumb story about the day Cade Hernandez and I went shopping for “fresh” condoms together at 7-Eleven. And I thought about Mrs. Shoemaker, our substitute teacher, so I answered my friend with the following: “No. No, I do not think calling someone you had sex with ‘Mrs. Shoemaker’ is hot, Cade.”
“Cade,” Julia said, “tell me about the time you and Finn went to 7-Eleven to buy condoms. That sounds like a good story.”
“It’s not,” I grumbled.
It was ridiculous.
And it was too late. While we lay there, watching the fragments of Swift-Tuttle burning and fizzing across the black of the desert night, I had to endure the entire humiliating tale. And then I had to confess to Julia how stupid and immature I had been on those days leading up to my birthday.
To make matters worse, for the second time that evening in front of Cade Hernandez, I had to reassert my belief that I was too young and too stupid to have sex with anyone.
I hoped it would all be forgotten, considering how drunk my friend was, so I urged him to have another beer.