Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  I hadn’t discussed my interview thing with many people apart from my sister and Ed. Ed viewed it with a kind of strained forbearance. Zip didn’t care to discuss it. I wasn’t sure what Willow would think, but suddenly I really wanted to know.

  I handed the recorder to her, and she raised an eyebrow before pushing the playback button. “Marianne Rosa Fiore DeLuca. Born April second, 1932, in Austin, Texas,” it said before she pushed stop. “Are you interviewing her? Like for school?”

  It struck me as kind of funny that everyone assumed my interviews were for school. Like no one would want to talk to these people otherwise.

  “I’m interviewing her, but not for school. It’s just a thing I do.”

  “Interviewing people?” she said, handing me the recorder, which I put in my pocket.

  I nodded and went back to sweeping.

  “What kinds of questions do you ask? Like, about their jobs or something?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “I didn’t know you were the valedictorian.”

  “I didn’t agree to be interviewed,” she said, throwing out several bags full of wilted lettuce. “And I’m only a junior.”

  “But you want to be?”

  She took a paper plate out, peeked under the tinfoil that was covering it, and shuddered before throwing the whole thing in the trash bag. “Sure. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Lots of people.”

  “Lots of people are stupid.”

  I snorted.

  She said, “I like having options. That’s all. So I study.”

  “Options to do what? What’s your favorite class?”

  She smirked. “I hope your interview questions are better than this.”

  “I have to work up to the good questions.”

  “Fine. What’s your favorite class?” She cinched up the trash bag and closed the refrigerator. “The fridge is done.”

  I thought about her question while I finished sweeping the flotsam and jetsam on the floor into the dustpan. “Whichever one has the best teacher.”

  “Okay. What if all the teachers are equivalent?”

  “They never are.”

  “Humor me.”

  “I thought I was. Ask something else.”

  “Fine. You’re trapped on a desert island, and you can only have one other person with you. Who do you pick?”

  “Ed Park,” I said. “Who would you pick?”

  Her mouth twisted sideways. “Someone who knows how to build a boat. How many more questions do I get?”

  “As many as you want.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “Not to me.” I emptied the dustpan into the trash can, then pulled the bag out and set it by the door. The floor still needed to be mopped, but it was an improvement.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. You can only read one book, over and over, for the rest of your life. Pick one.”

  “Um,” I said. “Hmm. Something long. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have a favorite book?”

  “Not really.”

  “You must,” she said. “Everyone has a favorite book.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Give me an example. What’s your favorite book?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Depends on the genre.”

  “No, no, you just said everyone had one absolute favorite.”

  She fiddled with the knobs on the stove. “Forget it. Who was your first kiss?”

  “You.”

  Her mouth fell open, but it fell open into a smile. “Me? I didn’t know that.”

  “I figured you guessed. It was pretty amateur-hour.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Fine,” I said. I actually didn’t remember it being bad at all. Mildly fumbling, but good apart from that. It’d been enough to make me want another one, which I guess is the definition of a good kiss. “Who was your best kiss?”

  She laughed. “I’m not answering that. Anyway, it’s not like I’ve ranked them.”

  “Okay. Who was your worst?”

  “Oh, that I can answer. Aiden Shaughnessy. Post–chili dog.” She made a face. “Who was your worst?”

  “Julia Braun. She bit my lip and then called me by the wrong name.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “On both counts.”

  The timer beeped. I was aware that I was dragging this kitchen cleaning out longer than necessary because I wanted to keep talking to Willow, even though Mrs. DeLuca was waiting for me in the other room.

  I poured Mrs. DeLuca’s tea into a cup I’d just washed and carried it back to the living room, Willow hovering uncertainly behind my left shoulder.

  “Oh no,” I sighed. Mrs. DeLuca had fallen asleep in her chair while I’d been flirting-slash-cleaning.

  “Is she really asleep?” Willow asked. “She’s not…you know.”

  “She’s just asleep,” I said. Mrs. DeLuca was breathing softly, but she was clearly breathing. I set the cup of tea down on the end table next to her, far enough away that she couldn’t accidentally knock it over. I hoped it would still be warm when she woke up. Then I took the afghan from the back of the couch and carefully draped it over her.

  Willow was watching me do all these things. “She’s always cold,” I explained.

  Willow nodded. “My grandmother was like that, too. When she got really old. She was cold all the time.”

  It occurred to me then that it wasn’t me who was making Willow nervous, or even Mrs. DeLuca. It was old people in general.

  It’s something I’ve noticed about a lot of people, that the elderly make them uncomfortable. I’m not sure if it’s because old people remind everyone else that they, too, will get old and decamp this earth someday. Or if it’s because old people tend to be excellent bullshit detectors. Since no one’s willing to admit to it, it’s hard to figure out the reason behind it.

  Willow said, “I should probably take out the trash. Before I go.”

  I didn’t really want to stop talking to Willow. I wanted to know which books she liked and what she meant when she said she liked having options. But she had the look of someone who really wanted to be someplace else, so I gathered up my stuff, wrote Mrs. DeLuca a note with my phone number, and left.

  I shouldn’t have bothered hoping that Wolf was going to improve the situation.

  That night, there were twice as many people at the party as there had been earlier in the week. Many of them looked older. A sea of guys in hipster glasses and wifebeaters bobbed in time with the music. Wolf’s friends, I assumed, home from college, or perhaps they were high school friends who had failed to launch. They were too old—and too self-consciously cool—to be Rex’s cohorts.

  I called Ed around eleven. In lieu of a greeting, I held the phone up to the window so he could hear the apocalyptic bass.

  “Well,” he said. “Damn.”

  Damn was right. We’d spent a crap-ton of money on the hack for the speakers, and now they were right back at it.

  I picked up the remnants of the stale babka and bounced it against the counter, where it flew apart like a grenade. There was a hot fury simmering in my gut; I just couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I had to do something.

  I thought of the text I’d had from my dad earlier in the day: a photo of the pathetic breakfast buffet at his hotel. They had two different kinds of bagels and a coffeepot with a sign that said LIMIT TWO CUPS.

  The accompanying text said, The poppy seed bagels are actually pretty fresh.

  I’d typed three different responses before realizing I had no idea what to say to a man when the high point of his day consisted of two free cups of coffee and a not-quite-stale bagel.

  I had to fix this.

  I breathed out through my nose. “It’s too bad we can’t just cut the power to the house,” I said. “Like, rig a circuit breaker to trip if the volume goes up too high.”

  I heard the sounds of Ed opening and closing kitchen cabinets through the phone. “You could ju
st sneak over there and pull the main breaker on the outside of the house.”

  There was a pause. Then I said, “I’m pretty sure Wolf knows how to reset a breaker.”

  “Sure. But first he’d have to find the breaker on a strange house in the dark.”

  A long silence hung in the air. “Why didn’t we think of this last night?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s hardly epic. It’s not much of a prank, really.”

  “I don’t need it to be epic. I just need it to work long enough for all these people to decide to go party someplace else before Dad gets back.”

  “Do you even know where the breaker is over there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I tripped it last fall using a plug-in leaf blower in the yard. It’s on the back of the house, under the deck.”

  “And how do you figure you’ll get there with three hundred people in the yard?”

  “I’ll have to improvise,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

  “Godspeed, Grendel,” he said, and I hung up.

  I stared out the kitchen window and scowled. I couldn’t just walk over there. Probably three-quarters of the people at the party had no idea who I was, but all it’d take would be one to recognize me and I’d be swimming in the lake again.

  On the other hand, everyone was drunk. I wouldn’t need much of a disguise.

  I pawed through to the back of my dad’s closet until I found the aloha shirt he’d worn to Florida when I was eight. It wasn’t something I’d usually wear, but it was the kind of thing that begged to be looked at. I dropped it on the floor and decided to go for one of Dad’s white undershirts instead.

  In truth, I am far too skinny to ever be seen in public in a tank top. But I was going for anonymity, so I found an old plastic pair of sunglasses and popped the lenses out, and then raided Zip’s room for a ball cap that advertised some five-year-old indie band no one had ever heard of.

  Then I crossed the street and ran back past Mrs. Lee’s house, doubling back so no one could see which direction I’d come from. People were streaming in and out of the side gate, so I followed them through.

  The music was better than what they’d been playing the other nights, and I saw that this was because the party now had an actual DJ instead of Rex’s phone hooked up to the speakers. The DJ manned a table twenty feet from the deck, surrounded by dancing girls. I was ten feet away before I got a good enough look to see that it was none other than Wolf Gates. And he had a direct sight line to the circuit breaker, which had a dartboard hanging over it.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  I doubted Wolf would recognize me. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, and even then, he had no use for me, seeing as I was (a) younger, (b) not remotely cool, and (c) nothing he wanted to get into bed.

  As luck would have it, he walked away from the table just as I was walking past with my hands shoved into my pockets. He grabbed a beer from the cooler behind the table—higher quality than whatever was in the keg, I expected—and edged toward me. I contemplated running for it but figured that would probably make things worse, so I stood rooted to the spot.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “Could you handle the music for a few? I need the can.”

  I said, “Wait,” but he gave me a push in the direction of the table and went in the house. “When the song ends, just put on a new one,” he called.

  I tried to figure out the setup. It seemed like it was mostly automated, but there was some skill involved in fading out of one song and into the next, and I had no idea how to do that. So when the song ended, I started directly into another track I’d picked at random. Thankfully, the second song had almost the same beat as the first, so people danced right through the transition.

  Wolf appeared again a minute later. “Nice,” he said. “You’ve done this before?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve played music before.”

  “You haven’t DJed?”

  I didn’t think that picking out a track and hitting play counted as DJing, but I shook my head.

  “It’s an art,” he said. “Once you lose the groove, you don’t get it back. Then the party’s over.”

  I thought of “Wonderful Christmastime” and smiled.

  “Hey, you want a beer or something?”

  “I. Uh. Sure,” I said.

  He handed me one of the good ones out of the cooler. “Since you’re the DJ now, right?” he said. “The keg’s for the drones.”

  I cracked it open. It smelled about the same as the bad beer from the other night, to be honest. Ed probably could have told me the difference. Maybe the expensive one had more hops or whatever went into expensive beer. Better yeast? I didn’t know.

  But it also occurred to me that Wolf seemed kind of…normal. He wasn’t a thick-necked troll like Rex. I tried to mentally frame a conversation about moving the party back inside.

  Then he said, “Any chance you have a condom?”

  My imaginary conversation stalled inside my head. “Um,” I said, and then, “Just one?”

  He laughed like hell. “One would be a good start,” he said. He gave me a very practiced smirk.

  “I’m fresh out,” I said, as if I had used up my vast supply only minutes before.

  He sighed dramatically. “This is not my night,” he groaned, then elbowed me in the side. “Dude, check it.” He waved in the direction of the dancing girls. “At least half those girls are a sure thing. And I’ve got nothing. Nothing. It’s tragic.”

  I wasn’t sure how you knew that another person was a Sure Thing. Maybe they handed out business cards. “How can you tell?”

  “That one,” he said, pointing, “I had in high school. That one, I did winter break of sophomore year, and that one”— he looked at his watch—“four hours ago. See? Sure thing.”

  I watched the girls dancing and singing along to the music, all smiling at Wolf or coyly ignoring him. He smiled with all his teeth and waved.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone sleeping with this guy and coming back for seconds, but what did I know. I really wanted, at that point, not to be having this conversation anymore. “Maybe they have condoms,” I offered.

  “Eh,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “Maybe some of them do, but what if I pick the wrong one? I don’t know, man.”

  “You don’t have a preference?”

  He shrugged. “Between those three? They’re like interchangeable cogs, man. Girl widgets, you get what I’m saying?”

  I got it. I think I threw up in my mouth a little. I side-eyed the dartboard that hung over the main breaker for the house. One flip, I thought, and this all goes away. It was a public service, really. I’d be saving those girls from the Mayor of Girl Widget Town.

  “God, I don’t even care anymore.” He shook his head, lit a cigarette, and then stomped it out without taking a drag. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” Then he leaned around me and looked directly at my house.

  He pointed in the general direction of my driveway. “Now, there,” he said. “There was a girl worth doing more than once.”

  I choked on my own spit, and I hoped to God he just meant that he’d seen my sister in passing. Once. From across the street. Or a few blocks down.

  He stared longingly at my house for a few seconds, then shrugged and turned back toward the sound equipment.

  As soon as he turned around, I backed into the breaker, moving the dartboard out of my way. I slid my hand inside the breaker door, feeling for the main switch, watching to make sure no one was looking at me.

  My hand found the switch. I pulled it.

  Instantly it was dark like the far side of the moon. Dark like the forest of purgatory. Dark like the inside of a black hole.

  First there was silence. And then there was screaming. In hindsight, I hadn’t really expected it to get quite that dark. But the waning moon gave hardly any light, and the trees were blocking it anyway, and of course my neighborhood has no streetlights. I was bumped by three different people and groped by
one.

  Finally, I heard someone—I’m pretty sure it was Wolf—say, “Idiots,” and then I saw the light of his iPhone, a lonely star in a sea of drunk morons. After a minute, everyone else’s phones began to wink on, too, until it was a party full of electronic fireflies.

  “Rex,” he shouted, “where’s the breaker?”

  Which meant, of course, that he hadn’t seen it. I smiled to myself in the dark as I edged away, feeling with my hands and feet to make sure I didn’t bump into anyone else. I figured people would wait about ten minutes for Wolf to get the power back on before they gave up and moved on. I waited until I was a good thirty feet from the breaker before I turned my own phone on.

  I watched at my kitchen window as cars began to stream away from the house about twelve minutes later.

  Twenty-seven minutes after that, the lights came back on.

  I smiled at the silence as I fell asleep, listening only to the sounds of the cicadas outside and the drippy pipe in my bathroom.

  When I was about thirteen, four years post-Mom, I was really big into the Boy Scouts. I think it was the uniform, honestly. It seemed like the kid version of whatever my dad was doing: getting dressed up in a uniform and sleeping in a tent and learning to tie six kinds of knots. I was so proud every time I got a new badge and my grandmother sewed it onto my shirt. I was actually the most highly decorated Scout in our troop. Which was only twenty other kids, but still.

  The best part was that no matter what my dad had going on—barring deployment, of course—he was always there for every trip. Camping was something we both really got, like sleeping outside was something in our blood from our ancestral wanderings around the Sinai or whatever.

  My dad was a month out from a fifteen-month deployment, and we were in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lying a few hundred feet from the tents where the other Scouts and their dads were already sleeping. I was mapping constellations with my finger while my dad watched and generally enjoyed our Norman Rockwell moment.

  I’d just finished mapping Pisces when I dropped my arm and rolled on my side. “Dad,” I said. “Do you ever wish you’d done something else? Besides joining the army?”