“So,” Harrison said. “What do you think I want to talk to you about?”
Alex rolled his eyes and said in a bored voice, “My grades, how I’m not working up to my potential, stuff like that?”
Harrison looked stern, which was kind of weird, since he was usually so nice and friendly. “Are you bored with this conversation, Alex? Because I gotta be honest with you, I am, too. We talked around report card time, and you gave me some story about changes at your house, and how you were going to turn it around this quarter, and I’m getting the same e-mails from all your teachers that I always get—he’s so smart, why doesn’t he do better work?”
Alex looked at his shoes. Harrison’s voice softened. “Look. I know you’re tired of hearing this, but you’re closing doors for yourself. You know what I mean? You can think of every C you get as another college that won’t even look at you because of your GPA. You’ve just gotta start taking this stuff more seriously.”
“Well, my dad failed a bunch of stuff in high school, and he had to do two years at community college before he could get into art school, and he did fine.”
“Well, maybe you should ask him what he thinks. Because, I have to tell you, your dad is the one who always calls and e-mails me. He’s worried about you, too. Maybe he wants you to have more choices than he did.”
Alex didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Girls are more interesting than history? Hell, Harry was a guy, he probably knew that. Should Alex admit that he never really felt like anything interested him? That answer never got you anything but “too bad” here at FA-CUE, which was suddenly what Alex felt like the whole school was saying to him.
The rest of the day went by as usual, though Alex was only dimly aware of anything that was happening because he was alternating between being mad at Harrison and, especially, Dad, and trying to figure out whether it would seem too desperate for him to call Hanh tonight, and what he should say if he did call her. The only other thing that did catch his attention was marketing class. “Well, up to now,” Mr. Lewis said, “I’ve been laughably, indeed, almost negligently easy on you. I hope that my easy grading on the individual part of your project has not made you overconfident”—and Lewis was joking here, but if he thought he was going to get a smile out of Alex after he’d just gotten the lecture about why did you get a C–, he was completely insane—“for the group part of the project, which begins today.”
Alex felt sick as the assignment sheet landed on his desk. It explained how each group would be expected to create a new product or service from the ground up, and that they had to submit a detailed business plan explaining who their potential customers were (this part had to be backed up by research) and how they would make money (this part required detailed forecasts of start-up costs, as well as a pricing plan). This wasn’t even the marketing part yet. Once they had designed the product, they had to create the entire marketing strategy and make the ads. Of course, Lewis expected all materials to be of professional quality.
“Thus,” Lewis said, “if, for example, you are an amateur videographer, and you believe that your marketing materials should involve your handsome and hilarious self preening in front of a bedsheet with the name of your product scrawled on it in Magic Marker, you should not expect a passing grade. My former colleagues at Jamison Creative have generously offered training and the use of their facilities during certain preapproved hours, so there is no excuse for producing anything less than professional-quality marketing materials.”
Alex had thought he’d be able to spend the next month getting closer to Hanh, but he saw both of their lives sucked into Lewis’s project, which he’d somehow forgotten about, despite the fact that Lewis had explained all this when he’d first assigned the individual project. Ugh. Well, at least Dad and Harrison didn’t know he’d forgotten all about the most important project of the year.
“Now,” Lewis continued, “as teamwork is an essential part of a successful project, you will be working in groups based on the four advisories represented in this class. It is my sincere hope that you have already gotten to know one another, that you understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and that the relationships you’ve developed in advisory will help you to form a cohesive team quickly and without rancor.”
Alex thought about all the bickering that went on in 212, and it was all he could do not to laugh. He looked around the room and found that he would be working with Savon and Eddie, who would definitely pull their weight and then some, hopefully including his; Tanya, who was a pain in the ass; and Kenisha, who was even more studious than Eddie or Savon. It wasn’t a fun feeling to realize that, except maybe for Tanya, he was pretty much the weak link in this group. Then again, Savon, Eddie, and Kenisha probably wouldn’t be expecting too much from him, and that might give him some time for Hanh.
Yes, he thought, this could actually work out. Now how long should he wait before he called Hanh?
13
The following Monday, Eddie wandered from room to room inside FA-CUE looking for Alex. Where was he? They were supposed to have their first group meeting that day after school because they had to present preliminary notes to Lewis in the morning, and Eddie figured he’d probably be the one typing them up. Well, him or Kenisha or Savon, but definitely not Tanya and definitely not Alex, which was why it was such a pain in the butt that he was holding them all up.
He figured he would have to go to Human Resources and ask to use the office phone to call Alex, which would be okay, but, according to Kelvin, could lead to long lectures from whoever was there about how there was a pay phone in the lobby, and how one had to be responsible for making sure one was prepared to make phone calls. Eddie figured he’d probably get a much milder version of any lecture than Kelvin got, but still, he didn’t want to listen to a lecture any more than he wanted to troop all the way down to the lobby to try to use a phone that was out of order half the time anyway.
He didn’t think Alex would have gone to Melville’s now that Sheila was gone, but he didn’t seem to be in school, so Eddie figured he should check there. He pushed open the heavy glass door to the lobby and hit the elevator button. After standing there for what seemed like forever, Eddie decided to take the stairs. He flung open the door to the stairwell extra hard, and he heard the unmistakable sound of Alex’s voice saying “Ow! Damn!” as the door hit him.
Eddie was just about ready to yell at him—come on, Alex, what the hell are you doing, everybody’s waiting for you—but he stopped short when he saw Alex and Hanh untangling themselves from each other’s arms as he walked into the stairwell.
They both looked embarrassed, and Alex tried weakly to play it off with “Uh, yeah, so read up to chapter seven I think is the homework.”
“Yeah, okay, thanks, Alex,” Hanh answered, and ran back into the hallway.
Alex looked sheepish, and though Eddie wanted to yell at him for being late, he figured if he had the chance, he’d rather kiss a girl than go to a meeting, too. Still, he had to give Alex a hard time. “Right, Hanh is asking you for the homework. That’s believable. Can you just imagine if Kelvin had been the one to open the door? Neither one of you would ever hear the end of it.”
Alex straightened himself up, regained his composure, and said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t Kelvin. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I’m looking for the slacker from my group so we can start our marketing meeting!” Eddie said, trying his best to sound annoyed but finding that he was only amused and jealous.
“Oh, crap, is that now?” Alex said, grinning, and Eddie couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “Okay then, let’s go,” he continued. “We can’t stand here all day. You know, it would be a lot easier if Hanh’s dad let her out of his sight, but whatever. I mean, if I told Mom and Dad the truth, they’d probably let me go out at night as long as my homework was done, or anyway copied off of yours, but Hanh has a very hard time getting away, you know, so our time together is somewhat limited.”
“What are you t
alking about? You’ve been on the phone with her for like two hours for the last three nights!”
“Yeah, yeah, on the phone, fine, but that’s not the same as the, uh, face-to-face time,” and he grinned broadly again.
“Speaking of which, Tanya has to work at six, so we really need to get this meeting done, and you are not going to be popular.”
They made their way into 212, where the rest of their group was waiting for them, looking impatient. Kelvin and Gisela’s group was meeting in another corner of the room, and all of them, including Hanh, were hard at work, heads bent down over notebooks, which was almost impossible to believe given that the group had Kelvin in it. Eddie supposed Gisela was “keeping him in check,” and wondered who was going to keep Alex in check before realizing, sadly, that it was probably him.
Tanya looked up at them and said, “Well, it’s about damn time. See, I gotta work in an hour, and I do not have time to be sitting here waiting for your lazy self to get found. You’re just lucky that your cousin is in this group, because if I had found you—”
Eddie figured Alex could probably get out of this himself, but he decided to step in anyway, mostly so he could have an excuse to say something to Tanya. “Uh, Tanya, I don’t think you’re allowed to go where I found him, and I really don’t think you would have liked the smell.”
Alex played right along, clutching his stomach and saying, “Do not get that spicy chicken wrap from downstairs. I’m just saying.”
This led to choruses of “Aw, that’s nasty” from the rest of the group. Alex and Eddie sat down and got out their notebooks. Eddie lent Alex a pen, and they were ready to begin.
“All right, people,” Savon began. “I know y’all have been thinking about phase two of the project ever since phase one, so let’s hear your ideas.”
“Something with hair,” Tanya said. “Like, I don’t know, a new dye or relaxer or something.”
“You want to research the chemistry behind that stuff?” Alex asked. “Because you know Lewis is going to ask us how our product is chemically different from the other brands on the market, and what makes it better.”
“Mmm” was all Tanya said.
The group threw bad ideas around, and Eddie was too nervous to chime in because he was afraid that his idea would sound silly, even though he’d been thinking about it since his first day here. He told himself he should just say it. After all, it couldn’t be any worse than Alex’s suggestion—a directory rating which coffee shops had the cutest baristas—an idea he’d probably thought of between the stairwell and 212.
Finally Tanya looked at him—Tanya! Looked at him! Usually he just looked at her while drooling, as Savon had noticed. She said, “Okay, Left Eye, what do you got? Because nobody else has anything good, and I am not doing any of these stupid ideas, especially Alex’s, which he obviously thought up while he was sitting on the toilet for two minutes.”
“Well, um, promise not to laugh, okay”
Everybody rolled their eyes and Tanya said, “Not only will I not laugh, I will personally kiss you if you can get me out of this meeting so I can go do something that actually makes me some money.”
Eddie hoped that his ears weren’t turning red, though he knew they were, and decided he had to start talking before his mind tied itself in knots. He knew she was joking about the kiss, but still, a girl wouldn’t say that to a guy she wouldn’t really consider kissing. Would she?
“Um, well, okay, you guys remember how Kelvin was late to advisory the other day?”
At this Kelvin called out from the other side of the room, “Who’s saying my name? You got beef, Left Eye? Ow!” The last part came as Gisela dope-slapped him on the back of his head and told him to get back to work.
“Well, every morning at home they listen to the radio and there are always these traffic reports, you know, ‘Tobin Bridge is backed up to the tolls,’ ‘Expressway heavy and slow from the split,’ this kind of thing, and I thought maybe it would be great to have some kind of traffic report that kids who live in the city could use, like, so you’d know before you left the house if somebody in Codfish Square—” There were snickers at this, and Savon chimed in with “Codman, Left Eye.” Eddie continued, “Right. Anyway, if there was a problem there or something, you’d have the information and you could take another bus or whatever.”
No one said anything, and Eddie felt like he had to fill the silence. “So, yeah, probably it’s a dumb idea.”
“I don’t think it’s dumb,” Kenisha said.
“Me neither,” Tanya said. “Shoot, I’d love to know to stay out of Forest Hills when my ex-boyfriend’s fool crew is there looking to start something.” Ex-boyfriend?
“Yeah,” Savon added.
They debated how this service would be delivered, without reaching any conclusions. Still, they all agreed that they had enough for Eddie to type up something respectable for the preliminary notes. They gathered up their stuff to go, and Tanya was already at the door by the time everybody else had their notebooks in their bags.
Alex yelled out, “Hey, Tanya, don’t you owe my boy here a kiss? He ended the meeting!”
“Yeah, some other time,” she said, and was gone. Eddie knew it was never going to happen, but he was still disappointed, because he did kind of wish he could at least get to feel Tanya’s lips on his cheek. On the other hand, he couldn’t wait till he and Alex were alone so he could punch him, or at least remind him that, as the only other person who knew about him and Hanh, he had the power to make Alex’s life hell.
That night, Eddie sat at the computer trying to organize everybody’s ideas that he had scribbled in his notebook. He had expected this, and it was good for two reasons. One was that he preferred doing it himself to having his grade riding on something Alex might produce, and the other was that if he was really busy with schoolwork, that took up a huge slice of the pie chart of his mind, and Tanya, with her thing about kissing him, was taking up another big slice of his mind, which shrank the Mom slice down to a quite manageable size.
But then Alex started bugging him.
“So, uh, Eddie, what do you say to a little excursion?”
“Alex, I have to type our proposal, and it’s already eight.”
“Yeah, I know, but Hanh gets a break at nine and she wants me to meet her for bubble tea.”
“So go meet her! I’m trying to get this done so we can get a good grade!”
“Aw, I don’t think Mom and Dad would really go for that. “You know, Dad’s been talking to Harrison, and my home-work’s not exactly done, and there is no way they’re gonna let me go out and have fun until all my homework is done, and I’ve got at least another hour here. But then I thought, you know, if you were like a little upset, we could go for a walk or something …”
“Alex …” Eddie found himself too angry to speak. This was his life, his real life, and Alex wanted him to use it as a cover story just so Alex could get out of finishing his homework and meet up with a girl while Eddie sat there feeling like an idiot! Plus, he had been pleasantly thinking about school and Tanya, and Alex had ruined everything by reminding him of Mom. In his imagination, he wheeled around and punched Alex in the nose in one smooth motion, and Alex, blood running down his face, said, “Oh, man, I’m sorry, I’m a total asshole.”
But in reality all he could manage to do was grit his teeth and say, “You are a really selfish kid.”
Alex stood there with his mouth hanging open like an idiot, like it had never occurred to him that he was selfish. Eddie started typing again, even though the screen was a little blurry at first. Finally, Alex walked out without saying anything else.
Eddie did get the proposal done, and, checking to make sure Alex wasn’t back or lurking outside the door, he took Mom’s letter out from under the bed and read it again. He didn’t really want to, but he was already thinking about her, thanks to Alex. It had been a few days, and he knew he should write back because that’s what the good guys do, right? They say, “All is
forgiven, Mom. I love you, too. Get better and come back.”
But he couldn’t do that. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see his mom again. And he didn’t know if he could forgive her. He did hope she would get better, but he was pretty sure he never ever wanted to go back to Oldham. He really liked this new life. Most of the time he could kind of forget that it had actually been him who lived in Oldham, he could just look at it like it was somebody else’s life, somebody dead. But Mom kept popping up like some zombie from the past, still out there, staggering down the street and going, “Edddddiiee … I’m coming baaaaaaaack …”
He laughed at that idea, mostly to stop himself from crying.
And he got out a piece of paper and tried for the third time to write his mom back.
Dear Mom,
How are you?
Stupid. He ripped out the paper and tore it up. Then he tried again.
Dear Mom,
I got your letter.
Weak. He crumpled this one and threw it in the direction of the trash can. He knew he had to write what he really wanted to say. And then maybe he’d produce a clean version to actually send to her later. But he couldn’t write something nice to her before he wrote what he really felt.
Dear Mom,
I’m glad you’re getting better. It’s good that you are sorry for the bad stuff you did, but I don’t want to hear about it all, and I damn sure don’t want to read ten pages where you talk about every stupid thing you did that I am trying my best to forget because you need to apologize. See, you’re still really only thinking of yourself. Selfish, just like Alex. Maybe I don’t need to hear about it right now! Did that ever occur to you or any of the geniuses at the Hotel Rehab? I guess not. I wish I could say I forgive you and it’s okay and I’m not mad, but I’m still really really mad at you for not being a regular mom. I know you said thinking about me is what’s getting you better, but, I mean, isn’t it kind of late for that? You never thought about me before you needed me to get you better! So Eddie has to take care of everything again! Because Eddie is so mature for his age! I hate you, Mom. Never write me again.
How Ya Like Me Now Page 8