“Sure.” Eddie didn’t sound convinced, or at least he seemed to be saying that it wasn’t that fun for him. Well, tough. Alex didn’t know what school was like for Eddie before, but CUE was where he was now, so he’d better get used to it.
But, as his first day turned into his first week, and started moving toward his first month, Eddie didn’t get used to it. Or, anyway, he only got used to part of it. He always had his homework complete, and he aced the first history test even though he’d missed the first week of the unit. Eddie was pretty much a study machine. Every day when they got home at about four-thirty, he would quietly watch CNN or ESPN for an hour, study until dinner, eat, and then go to their room and study. Eddie started his individual marketing project on ESPN before Alex had even really picked a company. Alex actually took his time picking a company, because the deadline seemed a long way away. This, of course, got the FA-CUE faculty into full FA-CUE mode, and Lewis talked to Harrison, Harrison took Alex aside, and then, two days later, called Mom and Dad, which meant no PlayStation until he got his work done. Alex spent the whole night typing up a proposal and asked Lewis the next day if he could do a product launch instead of a new company, and could he do his project on the PlayStation?
“Ah, a subject with which I am guessing you have a certain amount of familiarity. Indeed, if your advisor is to be believed, perhaps a little too much familiarity.” Lewis smiled and approved the project, but Alex was pissed. Harrison had obviously reported back what Dad had said about PlayStation, and it wasn’t like that was so private, but it was just incredibly annoying to have every adult in his life up in his business all the time.
Meanwhile, Eddie just kept on coming home every night, and watching exactly sixty minutes of television (Alex started looking at his watch and noticing that if Eddie started watching at 4:27, he turned the TV off at exactly 5:27). That seemed a little what Dad would call anal-retentive, but then again, if you looked at Eddie’s grades, Alex guessed you couldn’t really argue with the results.
Alex would start studying eventually, but not until he had thought about Hanh for a while, thought about Jennifer from his English class, thought about Marie also from English and history classes, played his daily thirty-minute allotment of PS2, watched his daily hour of television, and called at least two of his friends.
When they were at home, Eddie mostly studied, and even though he and Alex would talk, Alex didn’t really feel like they were friends or anything. At least, not like Kelvin and Savon were. At school, Eddie didn’t seem like he was still mad, but he also didn’t fit in. He would study in advisory, just like Kenisha, and, like Kenisha, he was mostly left out of all the stuff that went on in advisory before Harrison got there, which was the number two reason for getting out of bed as far as Alex was concerned. (Number one was still seeing which girls would be pushing the boundaries of professional attire.) Everyone, even the girls, referred to him as Left Eye, and Eddie mostly ignored them when they did this, not understanding that they were trying to include him, not exclude him. He was excluding himself. Alex went back and forth between being angry at Eddie for what he saw as his stubbornness, and feeling bad for him. But what could he do?
Finally, after dinner one night, Alex’s mom and dad cornered him after Eddie had gone to do his homework.
“So,” Dad said, “how’s Eddie doing at school?”
“Well, jeez, look at how much he studies! He’s doing great! He aced the history test last week, and of course he’s never lost any privileges around here. I gotta say I’m a little nervous for when progress reports come home, ’cause the kid is definitely going to make me look bad, and let me tell you that I have some mixed feelings about that.”
“Yeah, he obviously studies a lot,” Dad said, “but that’s not what we’re talking about.”
“Which I’m sure you know,” Mom said, starting the parental tag-team maneuver. Alex hated it when they ran the tag team on him. He kind of wished he and Eddie were in trouble together, so that he could tag-team his parents for once, but Eddie did not look much like he was going to get in trouble, and this friendly-family-chat-while-we-clean-up-from-dinner was suddenly smelling a lot like Alex Gets Yelled At.
“It’s just,” Mom said, “this has to be difficult for him, socially, not knowing anybody here, and we’re just concerned that you’re not doing—”
“That,” Dad continued, making sure Alex couldn’t get a word in while Mom paused for breath, “you’re afraid of looking like a dork in front of your friends, and that you’re not doing all you should be to include him.”
Now Alex was mad. “I am too doing everything I can! I can’t make the kid be social! He comes in to advisory every day and puts his nose in a book! He doesn’t talk to anybody in class except for the teacher! What am I supposed to do? If he doesn’t want to talk I can’t really make him. Hell, he barely talks to me! You guys are always trying to make him go grocery shopping or go with you to get the oil changed or whatever. Does he talk to you?”
“Yes, he does,” said Mom, who apparently was Good Cop tonight, “but, as you are well aware, it’s important for him to talk to his peers, too. We know that you can’t make him talk to anyone, but you could try to include him in your activities.”
“Look, you scared him out of going to Melville’s with me, I can never find him at lunch anyway, and, I gotta be honest here, the kid is not a ton of fun to hang out with! It’s impossible to talk to him without making him mad and turning his ears red, so it’s not like you can have a normal conversation when he’s around.”
“If he’s feeling awkward, that’s understandable,” Dad said. “But you have a responsibility to him that we feel you’re not fulfilling. Mom and I are providing the house and the food and the stable adult presences and we’re doing everything we can to include him socially in all of our family activities, but we can’t do anything about his peer group, and that is something that you have a familial obligation to help him with.”
Alex slammed down a dish and surprised himself by yelling, “The kid is fifteen years old! I can’t make him talk to anybody, which I already told you if you were listening, which you weren’t, as usual! I can’t make somebody popular, okay? I swear to God this is so unfair! You don’t have any idea what goes on at school, and you accuse me of not trying. You know what, forget it, I’m a horrible person, so go ahead and punish me or whatever, but right now I’m going to go study.” And with that, he walked out.
Parents were so stupid. Like he could do anything for Eddie when Eddie wouldn’t do anything for himself. Honestly. Alex glared at Eddie, hunched over his history book, when he got into the room, but Eddie didn’t even notice.
Alex went to bed angry without saying good night to his parents or Eddie. To hell with all of them.
The next day in advisory, Alex kind of stepped outside himself for a minute and noticed that he was spending all his time talking to people besides Eddie. And yeah, Eddie wasn’t very social, but Alex realized guiltily that he had given up on him—he had basically stopped trying to talk to him in advisory after about the second day. So maybe there was more he could do, and that pissed him off, because while Mom and Dad were being so unfair, they were also kind of right.
7
After his disastrous first day, Eddie decided to just keep his head down and his grades up and not pay attention to anything else. He knew that Alex’s friends were still calling him Left Eye, but it stopped bothering him. He would just concentrate on schoolwork until Mom got out of rehab. That wouldn’t be so long, and even though he didn’t have any friends, he had to admit that his life here was actually a little better than it had been at home.
For one thing, school went until four, so he didn’t have to sign up for a lot of activities to keep busy. Which was good, because CUE didn’t really have any activities. Also, it was okay to be smart here, which was certainly a new experience for Eddie. There wasn’t the constant danger that somebody was going to beat you up for messing up the curve or whatever.
And being one of the few white kids turned out to be no problem at all outside of the 212 advisory. If anything, it seemed to give most people an extra reason to leave him alone. He didn’t ever really feel like he stuck out—he just felt like he was basically invisible. And this suited him fine.
Of course, Aunt Lily and Uncle Brian were always trying to get him to talk about it. They would invite him along on some errand or something, and he never felt like he could say no, even though who the hell wanted to go to the art supply store with Uncle Brian and buy canvas? And things would always be fine. Aunt Lily was nice, and Uncle Brian was really funny—you could tell that he was a lot like Alex but had to try to behave for Aunt Lily, so he was actually a lot of fun when he was by himself. But then they always spoiled it. At some point they would be like “So, how are you doing?” or “Have you heard anything from your mom?” or “You seem to be coping really well, you’re a tough kid,” and it was all Eddie could do to stop himself from yelling that they’d just ruined a perfectly good shopping trip or whatever.
And then there was the therapy. The therapist was this guy Don with curly graying hair and a big bushy graving mustache, and Eddie thought he was nice enough, but he couldn’t see the point. He would talk, because otherwise you just had to sit there for an hour, which was uncomfortable, and then he would end up crying, and after he’d cried for most of the hour, he would usually feel worse than he felt before he went in. And then he’d feel like crap all night, and while on Tuesday night he would be thinking about ESPN and reading some article about their commercials, on Wednesday night after therapy it was practically impossible to get any work done because he felt like he’d been beaten up. He didn’t get how this was supposed to be helping him.
Still, Aunt Lily and Uncle Brian picked out and paid for the groceries, and Eddie only had to clean up one night out of every three, and he didn’t have to take care of the whole house like he used to. Aunt Lily even did his laundry for him. He literally almost cried the first time he found a pile of his clothes all folded up on his bed, but he thought that crying about laundry was just too wussy, so he stopped. He had thought that doing everything for himself was kind of an adventure at first, but now that he didn’t have to do it and could act as much like a normal teenager as a kid with a dead dad and druggie mom could, he found that he felt a lot lighter and he slept a lot better.
So Eddie was doing okay, which was all he ever told Aunt Lily and Uncle Brian whenever they asked him annoying questions. He did wish he had some friends, or even a girlfriend, or, let’s face it, any fun at all, but he had decided long ago that that kind of stuff would probably have to wait until college, when he’d get a scholarship to someplace far away and meet girls and go to parties and live in apartments in the summer and work at a bookstore on campus and never have to see his mom again.
But college was still a long way off. Right around the corner, though, was a “half” day, which meant that school got out at a normal time instead of four o’clock, and Eddie didn’t know what he would do. This was the problem with not having any life outside of school. Eddie didn’t even want to think about spring break coming up in March, and how he would possibly fill his time without school when that rolled around. He wondered if normal kids dreaded vacation. He didn’t think so. But Eddie was not a normal kid, and it was pointless to dwell on it.
Of course, knowing it was pointless didn’t stop him from thinking about it all the time.
In some way, he wished Alex had done more to include him, or had been somebody he really liked hanging out with. Eddie tried to imagine a life where he had two parents who were alive and not obviously addicted to anything, and a bunch of friends he could laugh with all the time, and whether he’d want to risk losing his popularity if his study-buddy cousin showed up. He knew how that worked. Everybody knew if they invited you, you were going to have to bring the kid who was no fun, and pretty soon they stopped inviting you. At least, that was how it worked on TV. He didn’t think he would take that hit for the team if he were in Alex’s shoes, so he couldn’t really blame Alex too much.
So Eddie was shocked on the way to the bus on the morning of the half day when Alex said, “Uh, I’m going over to Kelvin’s after school. He’s got the new Madden. You wanna come?”
Eddie thought about it. Madden. Madden was what he used to play with his dad, and the game he’d played more than any other in the two years since Dad died. He would spend days at a time taking some scrub team to the Super Bowl. So it reminded him of Dad, which was good, but of course also bad, but it also reminded him of the last year when Mom went from bad to worse, and that was just bad without being good at all. Not to mention the fact that all of Alex’s friends obviously thought he was this white geek and they would probably be picking on him all afternoon.
But he was ahead in all his homework, and he hated the book they were reading in English. What else did he have to do? Maybe they’d even get to like him because they could pick on him. That happened on TV and in movies sometimes.
Of course, he had heard the big fight Alex had with his parents the other night, because the walls that Uncle Brian had famously framed up were really not that great for keeping the sound out. So he knew that Aunt Lily and Uncle Brian were concerned about him, which he thought was nice but also annoying, and now they had guilted Alex into inviting him to something. That made him mad because he thought Alex had been right that he was fifteen and could take care of himself; after all, he had basically been his own parent for at least a year and a half. It also made him mad that he was somebody that people took pity on, like he was some lost puppy or something. He knew he kind of was a lost puppy, and that made him mad, too.
But he thought about how he took the Cincinnati Bengals to the Super Bowl on Madden 2002, and he thought about sitting alone in the loft all afternoon, and he decided, what the hell. He wished he weren’t a pathetic puppy, but he was, so there was no point in wishing things could be different.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, and he saw Alex’s shoulders slump down and relax.
Eddie’s first half day at FA-CUE (which he always called it in his mind, because he did think it was pretty funny) was another in a long list of surprises about this weird school. Half days at OHS were a total joke—they had a movie in English class, a game in math, a movie in history, and that was usually it.
Here, though, they just acted like it was a regular day—his history teacher’s lecture gave him four pages of notes, they had an in-class essay in English, and they started a new unit in math. Weird.
Finally Mr. Paulson, the “CEO,” came over the P.A. system: “Greetings! As your supervisor, it is my pleasure to announce that the free afternoon for first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year associates begins now.” Eddie waited for the loud whooping that would always accompany such an announcement at OHS, but none came. People just started quietly folding up their books and notebooks. “All partners”—this was FA-CUE speak for teachers—“will convene in Conference Room 315. Thank you for your attention, and have a productive afternoon.” Productive. Like it would kill the guy to say “nice.”
Eddie wandered into the hall, hoping he didn’t have to stand there for twenty minutes feeling more and more like a loser until it became clear that Alex had ditched him.
As it turned out, it didn’t happen that way, because as he was walking down the hall, a hand grabbed his elbow and spun him around. His first thought was that this was where the new kid has to get into a fight, which was a pretty common scene at OHS.
He felt silly immediately when he saw Savon smiling at him. “See, now you can’t be loitering around on an early release day. You just got to get out as soon as possible. Think of it like a fire drill. Come on,” Savon said, pulling Eddie toward the front doors.
“But, uh, why? I mean, what happens if you take five minutes to go to the bathroom and stuff?”
“Okay, it’s like this,” Savon said as he pulled Eddie into the stairwell so they could avoid the wait for the o
ne elevator, which already had twenty people clustered around it. “You want to spend an afternoon listening to Paulson?”
Eddie thought about that. Paulson was nice enough, but even hanging out by himself all afternoon would be better than listening to Paulson go on and on about the best school in the world, blah blah blah.
“Uh, no,” Eddie said.
“See, now neither do the teachers. And you’ve heard Paulson talking about ‘Helping students is always our number one priority.’ So a teacher sees you after school on a half day, they know you’re a higher priority than the meeting, so all the sudden it’s ‘Why don’t you make up that test you missed,’ or ‘I’m concerned about you, you need some extra help,’ or ‘Let’s talk about your college choices,’ or any damn thing they can think of so they can kill an hour with you instead of listening to Paulson. That’s why you gotta be careful after school, man. Them teachers are desperate to get out of those meetings. They’re like vultures, so you gotta move quick before they grab you.”
If Eddie’d known that it was an option to stay after school and talk to a teacher instead of going to some probably dangerous neighborhood to get made fun of, he might just have done that. But oh well. Savon, anyway, was being nice to him today Maybe, he thought, it was the fact that they were both short and they both studied and got good grades. It was kind of funny, because he actually had more in common with Savon than he did with Alex, if he thought about it.
They emerged in the lobby and found Alex and Kelvin waiting. “All right, finally!” Kelvin said. “Alex, man, you gotta tell Left Eye to move on a half day! Family gotta look out for each other. Homeboy could have been stuck with Mr. Weiskopf all afternoon!”
Mr. Weiskopf was the Spanish teacher. Mr. Ramirez was teaching them about Germany in World War I. Nobody but Eddie seemed to think this was odd.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Alex said. “Sorry, dawg,” he said to Eddie, and Eddie thought it was weird the way Alex tried to talk half-black or something when he was at school, but not at home. But he did appreciate it. This was the most anybody at school had talked to him in weeks.
How Ya Like Me Now Page 4