“Why is Sarah-Beth here?”
He started patting his knees again. I tried to make him stop the patting and his knees just got crazier and moved more and his hands got louder. I told him to stop it and he made a noise that was very different from any noise I’d ever heard him make before. That was when Pearl opened the door and said I had to go. Marxy got up and took a deep breath.
“Sarah-Beth is my new girlfriend,” he said, so fast that I did not even have time to understand what he was saying properly.
“What do you mean?”
“We are boyfriend and girlfriend,” Marxy said. “You and I are broken up and now I am Sarah-Beth’s boyfriend. You were a shit-heel to me in the hotel, and I feel good enough about myself to say no, Zelda. I don’t want to have mean people in my life.”
* * *
Fuck Marxy. I have never said that before in my life, but that was what I thought. I was a Berserker when I got home. AK47 wanted to stay but I told her that I wanted to be alone. My head-veins pumped blood and my heart shouted. Inside I wanted to break something, so I punched the lamp standing in the corner. The lamp fell over very slow and boring. I thought it would break but it didn’t. It just fell in a stupid way.
I went to the bathroom and when I came back I stood it back up, since the lamp hadn’t done anything to me, and because it was in the way how it was sitting on the ground.
In Viking legends when people died they were put on boats and pushed off into the middle of a lake, or to the sea or ocean. The boat would be set on fire and the dead person’s body burned until it was ashes and the boat would burn and sink too.
I thought that the best way to forget him would be to do what Vikings do: I would burn him.
When dead Vikings got put on their boats, the things that they used in life were put with them, like swords or armor or magical charms or toys. Sometimes their wives and girlfriends were burned alive too.
I had drawings Marxy had made me. Plus the love letters he wrote. I decided I would make my own boat for them.
Vikings burn things in order to show that they are dead. Since Marxy and I were broken up for good, I wanted to make a funeral fire for him.
“You are dead to me” is one of the things AK47 said to Gert when they got into the big fight that broke them up the first time.
“You are dead to me,” I told the drawing Marxy had made for my birthday.
Since I didn’t have a real boat, I had to make one. I ran the bathtub, filling it with water. Then I found a plastic bowl that we made salad in. I put all of the things that were going to be made into ashes into the bowl. Gert had a lighter in one of the drawers for candles, in case the power went out in the building and we didn’t have electricity.
“Good-bye,” I said to Marxy. And then I read the words in Viking: Góða nótt, which means “good night.”
The bowl floated in the bathtub. The fire inside of it didn’t go crazy. It wasn’t very big. When enough of Marxy had burned, I tipped the bowl over and all the paper floated on the water for a while, until it got wet. Then it fell apart and made the water gray.
chapter twenty-three
Before my appointment with Dr. Laird, I wrote Dr. Kepple a letter. I was still so angry that I made lots of spelling mistakes and had to type the letter out twice.
Dear Dr. Kepple,
My boyfriend Marxy is now in love with another person named Sarah-Beth, who chews on her hair. I believe that this makes them both villains, because he has betrayed our true love, and she has stolen him. I have burned a picture of him to show the gods how angry I am with him.
Are there any other ways to make it clear to the gods that we are no longer together anymore? Also, are there any special Viking ways to curse their union?
Zelda
I clicked SEND and waited until Gert knocked on the door to tell me it was time to go to see Dr. Laird.
I clicked REFRESH one more time before turning off my computer.
During the drive to the meeting, Gert tried to get me to talk, but I was too angry, and at our meeting, Dr. Laird wanted to talk to me alone, not with Gert there.
“For now, I want to understand how you feel,” said Dr. Laird.
“Marxy is dead to me,” I said.
Dr. Laird put down his notebook. He said, “Just start with the hotel. And go from there.”
I went over all the things that happened in the hotel room, including how Marxy was not good with the condom, and how I had accidentally laughed at him.
“I didn’t mean to laugh at him. He just looked so funny.” I grabbed the stress ball and started squeezing it. “But I was wearing sexy underwear, and he didn’t notice. And I did sexy poses, and he didn’t find them sexy.”
“I can see how that would be frustrating,” Dr. Laird said.
“And he got angry with me and his mother came in.” I squeezed the ball until it almost popped. “Why does she have to do everything for him all the time?”
“What kind of future did you imagine with him?”
I asked what he meant by asking that question.
“You know,” he said, moving his hands around. “In five years, what does your life with Marxy look like? Are you married?” He told me it might help to close my eyes and imagine a picture of it. “Just take a picture of the future and tell me what it looks like.”
I closed my eyes and tried to do what he said. In my mind we had a big house, kind of like the one Marxy lived in with his mother. “But not with his mother,” I said to Dr. Laird.
“So you live together independently. Not with her.”
“Correct.”
“Is Gert there?”
I went back to the house I was imagining. He was washing his car in the driveway, using a plastic bucket and a yellow sponge.
“He’s there.”
“So you and Marxy and Gert would live together.”
I opened my eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”
Dr. Laird spun his ballpoint pen around in his fingers. “Do you think Marxy and Gert would get along?”
“Well. Maybe we don’t live with Gert. But for sure no Pearl.”
“Earlier you mentioned that you think she bosses him around too much.”
“All the time,” I said, and then I went over all the different ways she controlled his life.
“You use the word control,” Dr. Laird said. “I’m interested in that, because there’s another possibility.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Which is that he actually needs someone like her to help him. That he’s not as independent as you are.”
“He can do more than people think,” I said, and found myself getting angry.
Dr. Laird put his pen down gently on the notebook in front of him. “I guess what I’m trying to relay to you is that, while I know it sucks that you guys broke up, it might actually be for the best.”
It was one of the only times I got very mad at Dr. Laird. I threw the stress ball at him. It hit him in the stomach and rolled onto the floor. We watched the ball roll down his stomach and onto the ground.
“Okay,” Dr. Laird said. “Can we talk about that?”
I decided I would give him a powerful Silent Treatment to show how angry I was. We sat quietly for another two minutes until the buzzer rang.
I stood up and did not shake Dr. Laird’s hand.
“He is who he is, Zelda,” he said. “And that’s okay. But that means he might not be right for you, either.”
“Screw you,” I said, opening the door and walking out.
* * *
I did not do well at working in the library that day because I was upset about Marxy. I was not excited to help people find books or to take books out. I made mistakes twice. Once I put a book that a patron had returned back in the shelves before telling the computer that it was back, and once Carol found me putting books about war in the section for Sports.
Carol knew that I was upset and I told her I didn’t want to talk about it.
“We
ll, tough. Because if you keep moping around all the time, you’re going to start making more mistakes and this whole freaking place will start crumbling to the ground. So spill.” When I did not spill, she said, “Is it guy trouble?”
“Nevermind,” I said.
We were standing at the front desk of the library, where I worked a lot, since I had gotten so good with the computers. Carol made her fingernails tap on the desk. I pretended I did not notice her head right by my head. She did that whenever she wanted to get my attention without making noise.
“Hmmmmm?” she said and poked me in the shoulder with her finger.
“Stop it,” I said.
Someone came to take their books out. I scanned the books and Carol took the receipt and slipped it into the top book.
“Is it that boy who came around? Mark? Marco? What was his name?”
“Marxy,” I said.
“Ah.”
She was not going away, not even when I gave her THE LOOK. All she said was, “Please, that’s not going to work, so you might as well tell me.”
I took a deep breath. “We broke up. Marxy and me.”
“That’s a shame.” She stopped floating her head near me and passed over a book to put into the system. “Breakups are rough.”
After scanning the book into the system I put it on the cart behind me. “And he’s got a new girlfriend.”
“Already?” Carol whistled.
Carol did not have a husband or a boyfriend, but she had a daughter that hated her guts. Carol did not want to talk about why her daughter hated her. She did like to talk about how good her daughter was doing in school.
“She is a wizard when it comes to calculus. Math, all that stuff. She doesn’t even have to try. I’m terrible at it, but she can tell you all the digits of pi to the fifteenth number.”
“Whoa. I know it has three.”
Carol laughed. “Right about my level.” She sighed. “She’s a wild one, like I was when I was her age. Her father was out of the picture before the pin dropped.”
“My dad too.”
Carol was actually like my mother and didn’t get married and had to raise her daughter by herself. But she did not drink alcohol while she was pregnant with Nancy, who she called Nance for short.
“Speaking of man-whores,” Carol said quietly, and when I looked I saw who she was talking about. “Brace for impact,” she said.
Before I could tell her to shut up, Hendo was standing in front of me.
“Hey, Lucky,” he said.
Carol went to put some other books into the library catalog, but I could tell she kept watching, even though she acted like she wasn’t.
“It’s not Sunday,” I said. “I thought you came on Sundays.”
“I have a reading emergency that can’t wait,” Hendo said. “I was wondering if you could help me find a book, since you’re an expert and everything.” He said he wanted a book for Artem about trains. “He’s crazy about them. This weird cartoon has them, and I don’t even think he’s old enough to even know what I’m talking about. But it’s good to read to kids that age, they say.”
“Picture books, we got a new one that’s a doozy,” Carol said, beeping another book under the scanner. “Zelda can show you.” She wrote down the call number and gave it to me.
I said to Hendo, “I can show you.”
We went to the section of the library on Picture Books. While we walked I could smell him, and he smelled nice and once his hand touched mine and I didn’t know if it was on purpose or not. My brain exploded a bit but I made sure inside I counted to ten, not on the outside, because I didn’t want Hendo to think I was being weird.
“Here are our best books on trains,” I said, and showed him my three favorites.
The one Carol was talking about made train noises while you read. You pressed a button and the book said “CHOO CHOO” and made the sound of screeching on metal train tracks. He pressed one of the buttons and rubbed his chin.
“This is perfect,” Hendo said. “Nice work.”
We dabbed. Instead of taking the book to the front desk, he sat down at one of the tables. While he flipped the pages he said I could sit down, if I wanted.
“I mean, I don’t want to keep you from doing work.”
Carol was scanning books and the library wasn’t busy, so I told him I could sit and talk for a bit. Hendo asked me what was new with me.
“Fine,” I said. “He’s in night classes and will be back next semester.”
“Do you always think about him first?”
“What do you mean?”
“Instead of saying what was up with you, you started talking about Gert.” He pressed a button on the train book to make the conductor go “ALL ABOARD.”
“Oh.” I looked at my hands and wondered how much I should tell Hendo. “My boyfriend broke up with me,” I said.
Hendo closed the book. “Seriously? Fuck that.”
Carol heard him swear and made a noise with her throat. He waved and said sorry.
“Man. It’s his loss, though. A girl like you?” He made a spitting noise with his mouth and shook his head again. “He doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
I did not know what to say. He held up the train book. “I guess we should check this out.”
We walked to the front desk and I went around behind it, to the computer. Carol turned and kept watching us.
“Card?” I asked.
He patted his pockets. “Shit. Forgot my wallet in the car. Can you hold on while I get it?”
“I can search for your account by phone number,” I said.
He smiled and told me his phone number. I put it into the computer and his name came up with his phone number and address. Once I gave him the receipt he thanked me, and when he left Carol came beside me and said, “He looks like a goddamn swan in a cemetery.”
When I asked her what she meant, Carol said that it was something her mother had told her about boys who were trouble. “Beautiful creatures to look at, but in an ugly, ugly place.”
chapter twenty-four
Hendo came to the library more after that, which helped me forget about Marxy, who hung out with Sarah-Beth at the Community Center and held her hand and sometimes kissed her.
Every time I saw them I acted like I did not care. He was not my boyfriend anymore. Sarah-Beth ate her hair and her jokes were dumb and she could not figure out how to cash a check at the bank. Hendo was smarter than Marxy, and I thought about kissing him instead.
Hendo liked to read books about war and even Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings. He asked me what my favorite book was and I told him it was Kepple’s.
He knew all the Viking words right away, unlike Marxy, who was always getting things like góðan dag wrong. He even liked my Words of Today, and whenever we talked at the library he would use them. For example, one day we were talking about Bruce Lee, a famous kung fu fighter, and Hendo said, “He was pretty indefatigable in battle,” and indefatigable was my Word of Today and even though I had only mentioned it to Hendo once, he remembered the word and how to use it and also put it in a sentence.
Carol had started calling Hendo “the Swan,” even though I hated when she called him that.
In legends this is the most boring part, where everyone is happy. Sometimes when I forgot about Marxy I was so happy, especially being around Hendo, though alone in my bedroom I would cry and think about Marxy.
When Hendo and I hung out we did not go to his house or my house. We mostly were at the library, or McDonald’s, or the coffee shop across the street from the library. He asked me about Vikings a lot, and about Gert and Mom and AK47. He reminded me of Dr. Laird, who was not very good-looking like Hendo but always asked lots of questions.
Gert and AK47 noticed I wasn’t so sad. Gert said I wasn’t moping around. AK47 asked me if there was someone new in my life. I told them I was just happy that they were together, and that we were a tribe and I had a job and Gert was going to go back to school.
&
nbsp; One day Hendo told me that he and Gert did not get along. “We’re both alpha dogs.” That meant that both Hendo and Gert thought they were the most impressive warriors. “But we can still be friends,” he said. “Right?”
I told him we could.
* * *
Hendo was my secret who belonged to nobody else, and he made me happy. When you are too happy the villains strike because your guard is down. In the Saga of Beowulf, for example, which is the most famous legend, Hrothgar and his wife, Wealhtheow, and all of the Vikings are happy and singing, which makes Grendel, the villain of the legend, very angry, because he is not happy and is jealous. Hrothgar and the other Vikings forget that even when everything is peaceful, a Viking must be “vigilant” (Word of Today) and constantly on the lookout for villains, who like to attack during peacetime, especially when people are sleeping and cannot defend themselves. The worst part about Grendel is that he actually eats people while they are asleep.
The villains came while I slept, just like when Grendel came for Hrothgar and the other Vikings.
I woke up because they were using loud swearwords and smoking, something that was not allowed in the apartment. The voices did not belong to Gert or AK47, which meant that we were being invaded, just like Grendel invaded the hall where Hrothgar and his wife and Vikings were celebrating. A shameful thing is being a coward. When the voices woke me up, I felt very afraid and pretended to sleep, which is something a coward does.
Then I understood that I had to protect my tribe from whoever was in the apartment.
“You can do this,” I heard the voice of Odin saying in my brain, and then I heard my mother’s voice agreeing with Odin. “Protect the hearth,” her voice said to me. In my brain I told them I would not let them down.
I took my alarm clock from beside my bed and prepared to throw it. Normally a Viking would take out his sword when it came time to protect the home, but my sword was under my bed and I did not want to risk alerting the enemy by getting it out.
I opened my bedroom door carefully and stuck my head around the corner. The voices continued talking. The hallway floor was louder than the floor in my bedroom to step on, so I had to move very slowly, one toe at a time, in order to stay quiet and sneaky. I also pressed my back against the wall in the hallway as I moved to be invisible, combining my Viking skills with the skills of a ninja, since I wanted to have the element of surprise.
When We Were Vikings Page 20