“Andy Rowen!”
Midge Brenner: freshman and sophomore English teacher, and one of Andy’s many faculty nemeses. Clearly, she missed having him in class, where she’d reamed him out on the daily for his controversial stance on homework (namely, that it represented a blatant transgression of every man’s God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). Now the only way she could get her authoritative jollies was by killing his buzz outside the classroom.
“Yeah?”
“As a senior, I would have expected you to know that skateboarding is not allowed on campus.”
“Totes forgot, Ms. Brenner. That’s my bad.”
Andy did a little ollie in place before hopping off and kicking the board up into his hand, earning an extra-strength frown from Midge. Not that there was anything she could do about it. You couldn’t get sent to the principal’s office when you’d already been sent to the principal’s office. That shit was called double jeopardy.
“Thank you, Andy.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Actually, even though he’d been sent there, Andy wasn’t going to the principal’s office. Last year he and Mr. Jester had come to an agreement. Andy’s infractions were frequent but minor, and the principal didn’t have the time or energy to deal with every single one. Instead, whenever Andy got in trouble, he was to report to Suzie O, the student counselor.
In other words, he’d been outsourced.
Suzie O’s office was located on the second floor of the library, far from the fascist administrators who worked out of Bliss Hall. It was quiet there, because nobody hung out in the library if they could help it. That is, no one other than the librarians, toddling about behind the desk and in the circulation room, begrudgingly lending out their precious books. They seemed to see students primarily as things to be shushed; you could have a whole conversation with one of them that consisted of nothing but shushing sounds. Andy gave a fancy salute to the librarian behind the front desk as he walked up the stairs and out of her jurisdiction.
As he reached the second floor, he saw Anita Graves come out of Suzie’s office, wiping at her eyes. Anita was pretty much the most clean-cut, put-together girl in the whole school. Her family had crazy money, and she was crazy smart—word was she’d already received her early decision acceptance from Princeton. So what the hell was she doing crying at Suzie O?
The counselor gave Anita a quick hug. “You think about what I said, okay?”
“I will.” Anita sniffled, then shook her head with a single violent snap. Suddenly all the sadness was gone. She looked her usual self—sharp, focused, unflappable.
“Hey, Andy,” she said, even smiling as she passed.
“Hey.”
He turned to watch her go. Cute, in the way of certain high-strung girls, like a perfect pile of raked leaves you just wanted to dive into and scatter back over the lawn. He called out after her, “Yo, whatever it is, it’s not worth it.”
She didn’t look back, but she did break her stride for half a second, which was really the most you could hope for with a girl like that.
“Eyes over here, Rowen.” Suzie was leaning against the door frame. “I’m gonna guess you’re not here in the middle of fourth period because you missed me.”
Andy grinned. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss you.”
“Come on in.”
Suzie’s office was actually pretty sweet, for an office. There was a fluffy brown couch long enough to lie out on, a mini-fridge stocked with soda, and a big basket with a layer of fruit hiding a secret stash of real snacks—what Suzie called her “childhood obesity facilitators.” Best of all was the television in the corner, available for the occasional midday movie screening, if Suzie was in a good mood.
To say they were friends might have been a stretch, but they got along pretty well for a high school senior with “behavioral issues” and an overweight counselor in her forties. Andy could talk to her about anything: drinking, drugs, girls, his shit parents, whatever. It hadn’t come straightaway, of course. The first few times he’d been forced to meet with her, he didn’t say a word, just sat there staring at the wall until the bell rang. But Suzie was smart. One day, instead of trying to talk to him, she put on the first season of Game of Thrones. And as if that weren’t enough right there, she’d started to recite the words along with the characters. It was too much. How could you hate someone who had memorized entire episodes of Game of Thrones?
“And to what do I owe the pleasure today, Mr. Rowen?”
“Same old. I was too funny for Ms. Holland. She got jealous.”
“I should’ve known. You want something to eat?”
“Oreo me, dawg.”
Suzie tossed him one of the blue packets of cookies. “So, only five months left. You psyched?”
“About getting out of this shithole? You know it.”
“And what’s your plan after graduation?”
Andy didn’t like talking about stuff like plans. Why were adults always so obsessed with the future? It was like the present wasn’t even happening. “I don’t know. Get a job. Move into an apartment with Bobo. Skate. Smoke. Enjoy life.”
“Sounds nice. Any thoughts about college?”
“You know, I totally forgot to apply. That’s on me.”
“What about Seattle Central? You could take a few classes, see how you feel.” Andy made a face, and Suzie raised her hands, like a criminal caught in the act. “I’m just being real with you. A high school diploma used to be enough in this country. Now you’ll be lucky to make minimum wage with it.”
“I don’t care about money.”
“It’s not about money. I’m glad you don’t care about money. I’m talking about boredom. You think school is bad? A minimum-wage job makes school look like freaking Burning Man. Unless you have some kind of fetish for doing the same rote physical task eight million times a day.”
“Maybe I do.”
Suzie laughed. “Yeah, I know you probably get this all the time from your parents—”
“I don’t,” Andy said. “They don’t give half a shit.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Believe what you want, man.”
“What I believe is that you shouldn’t waste your potential flipping burgers.”
Andy unscrewed an Oreo and licked the creamy center. “Suzie, no offense, but you are stressing my shit out today.”
“That’s my job.”
“I thought your job was to help people deal with the stress they already have.”
“Strung-out people need to be chilled out. But chilled-out people maybe could use a good kick in the ass.” She mimed a kind of seated kung-fu ass kicking.
“Stressed people like Anita Graves? What was she doing here, anyway?”
“Everyone’s got their troubles.”
“I’d trade mine for hers.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Why don’t you do me a real favor?” Andy said, popping the last Oreo into his mouth and talking while he chewed. “Teach me how to get laid. Bobo calls me Mary now, like the Virgin Mary. It’s humiliating.”
“All right. Lesson one, don’t talk with your mouth full. It’s gross. Lesson two, go to college. Girls like guys with plans.”
“Oh yeah? Well, you’ve got a job and shit, and I don’t see the dudes beating down your door, do I?”
He’d only meant it as an observation, but as soon as he said it, the vibe in the room turned cold. Suzie wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’re a good kid,” she said, “but you’ve got a mean streak in you.”
Andy wanted to apologize, but he didn’t know how to put it into words. Just the thought of trying exhausted him. “Whatever,” he said, standing up. He pushed Suzie’s door out of the way like it was somebody trying to hassle him.
After school,
Andy found Bobo already waiting for him in the parking lot, flicking the top of his lighter open and shut. He was wearing tight black jeans and a black Operation Ivy hoodie—both of them studded with patches and rips and safety pins.
“Mary!” he said, pulling a pair of headphones as big as coconut halves off his ears. “You made it! I was afraid we’d lost you for good when you got kicked out of Holland’s class.”
“I’m a survivor. So what’s on tap today?”
“Same old. We hang out here till we get bored, then we leave. I told everybody we’d meet them at the Crocodile at seven. The Tuesdays are playing.” Bobo pulled a rumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his hoodie, lit two, and handed one to Andy.
“You sure you don’t wanna rehearse a little?” Andy asked.
“You know I don’t believe in that shit. We gotta book a show first anyway.”
“Never hurts to be prepared.”
Bobo shook his head. “Don’t be a bitch, yo. Let’s just skate.”
Together, they prowled over the Hamilton campus, hopping up on rails and jumping benches and sideswiping trash cans, until the sun started to go down and Hamilton’s athletes slumped sweaty and worn-out from the gym. Then they hopped into Andy’s station wagon, picked up some McDonald’s, and headed downtown.
The Crocodile was an all-ages club with a decent sound system and a delightfully scuzzy clientele. By seven, the heavy, distorted belch of the Bloody Tuesdays was already blasting out of the place like a weapon of mass destruction. Andy and Bobo ordered a couple of Cokes (improved immeasurably by the flask of rum Bobo kept in his back pocket) and sat down at a table. Halfway through the set, the rest of the crew showed up: Jess, Kevin, and Misery, Bobo’s girlfriend. She’d dyed her hair green last week, and it looked good.
They buried themselves deep in the moshing crowd and danced, though for Bobo and Misery, that basically meant grinding and making out. Somehow Andy could hear the click of their tongue rings even over the music. He did his best to tune it out.
Andy had met Misery on the very first day of junior year and had a crush on her pretty much right away. She was a freshman, but already confident and cool and unapologetically punk rock. Unfortunately, before he could make a move, she met Bobo. Within hours, they were a couple. It had pissed Andy off at first, but what was he gonna do? Bobo had always been the alpha dog in their little pack—funnier, crazier, more willing to get in trouble. He’d been suspended from school twice already; it’d be a miracle if he made it to graduation.
The set ended and they all went back to their table, soaked in their own sweat and the sweat of strangers.
“So when is Perineum gonna play again?” Misery asked.
“When this dude writes some new songs,” Bobo said, punching Andy in the shoulder.
Perineum was their two-man punk rock/death metal band. They’d opened for the Bloody Tuesdays a couple of times over the summer but hadn’t performed since. Andy had actually written a lot of songs in the past few months, but none of them were right for a lead singer who thought that music:eardrums = boxer:punching bag.
“Let’s go outside,” Misery said. “I wanna smoke.”
The lead singer of the Tuesdays, a big ginger guy who called himself Bleeder, was already out there with his bassist. They were both staring up at the sky.
“That’s some crazy-ass shit,” Bleeder said.
Andy looked up. The star was bright blue, like the center of the flame off a chemistry-class Bunsen burner.
“What is it?” he asked. “Like, a comet?”
“It’s probably a satellite,” Bleeder said.
Jess shook his head. “Satellites move.”
“Not always.”
The door of the club opened, disgorging a wave of beer smell and feedback. Andy noticed her even before he recognized her—Eliza Olivi, on the arm of some blond dude with a ridiculous Afro. He was way older than her, and totally shitfaced.
“Eliza!”
“Hey, Andy.”
She seemed eager to get away, but when he pointed out the icy blue star, she stared at it for a long time. Then she walked off without even saying good-bye.
“You’re so into that,” Bobo said.
“Shut up.”
“Come on, it’s inevitable. You’re the biggest virgin at Hamilton, and she’s the biggest slut. You’re just working the odds.”
“Dude!”
It was a stupid point, anyway. Of course he had a thing for Eliza. Everybody did. The only difference was that he’d liked her from the beginning, back when she was just a quiet presence in the back row of classrooms. But everything changed after she hooked up with Misery’s older brother, the basketball player. Story was they’d been having sex in the photo studio for, like, six months before his girlfriend caught on. Andy had always figured the rumors about Eliza’s promiscuity were mostly made up, but then what was she doing going off with some rando from the Crocodile on a weeknight?
Sometimes Andy wondered if he understood anything about anyone. Like, he’d thought his parents were totally fine right up until the moment they split. And though he still saw Bobo as a kind of brother, stuff between them had been totally fucked up since Andy had “broken the pact” last year. They never talked about it, but it hung over them like one of those sky-wide Seattle clouds that just drizzled down on you for days and days. Only in this case, it wasn’t rain that Andy had to put up with, but a constant stream of insults, dead legs, and general disdain.
“Mary,” Bobo said, snapping his fingers. “You’re thinking pretty hard over there. Should I call an ambulance?”
Andy breathed out a stream of smoke and tried to release all his anxiety along with it. So what if Bobo was still pissed off at him? So what if Suzie O thought he was a dick? So what if Eliza was giving it up to some loser with an Afro when Andy probably wouldn’t get laid until he was thirty? None of it really mattered. Today was just another shit day in a life that sometimes felt like a factory specializing in the construction of shit days.
“Life sucks,” Andy said. A cliché, sure, but that didn’t make it any less true.
Bobo nodded. “Blame it on the blue star,” he said, purposely misquoting Radiohead.
Andy figured it was as good a scapegoat as any. He raised his middle finger toward the sky.
“Fuck you, star.”
Anita
IT WAS A BOLD PLAN. even as Anita passed old Steve at the Broadmoor gatehouse, she hadn’t decided if she would really go through with it. She clicked a button on the Escalade’s sun visor to open the private gate that led to her house. The driveway was long and straight, lined on either side with oak trees. They’d recently been pollarded, which made their upper halves look grotesque—the arboreal equivalent of the Venus de Milo, with dozens of severed limbs instead of just two. Better be careful, they seemed to say, or you’ll end up like us.
Anita shut the front door behind her. The housekeeper, Luisa, was ferrying a huge pile of linens toward the laundry room.
“Hola, Anita.”
“Hey, Luisa.”
“¡En español!” Luisa insisted.
Anita was studying Spanish at Hamilton, and Luisa occasionally gave her lessons on the subtle mysteries of the subjunctive mood, the differences between ser and estar, and, when no one else was around, a smattering of never-to-be-repeated slang terms “straight from the streets of Bogotá.”
“Hola, Luisa. ¿Cómo estás?”
“Not so bad. I am going to clean out the guesthouse now your grandparents are gone back to Los Angeles. Not that there’s much to do. They are so clean!”
“Yo sé.”
“My grandparents are coming like a hurricane,” Luisa said. “But yours, I am hardly telling that they are there.”
“Si. Son locos.”
“ Están locos.”
“Right. Lo sie
nto, Luisa, but I’m a little distracted. Have you seen my father?”
“En la oficina.”
“Gracias.”
Her father’s office had all the warmth of a refrigerator. Basically, he’d built a corporate boardroom in his house, complete with a wide glass desk and an expensive space-age chair behind it. A dozen metal filing cabinets topped with gray plastic binders were lined up against the walls. The only object in the room with any life in it (both literally and figuratively) was a large dome-top cage of stainless steel. Inside, Bernoulli, the world’s saddest hyacinth macaw, jumped from perch to perch, squawking and pooping and gazing longingly (or so it looked to Anita) out the window.
When she came into the office, her father was reading that weird pink newspaper that only people whose lives revolved around money bothered with. She thought it was funny that a paper like that would be pink, of all colors. Better khaki, or plaid, or whatever color a good power tie was. Seeing her father reading from those pink pages made her think of Barbie dolls and Hello Kitty backpacks and Claire’s. Of course, she kept this observation to herself.
“You’re back early,” he said, folding the paper up and placing it on his desk.
“Student council. There isn’t much on the agenda this time of year.”
“I’m sure you could’ve found something to work on, if you’d really applied yourself. Hamilton is hardly perfect.”
Funny, it was just one more droplet of negativity in the vast ocean of criticism she’d been drowning in since birth, but it was one droplet too many. Suzie O was right: Something had to change.
“I got a C,” she blurted out. Then, watching the anger rush into her father’s face like an invading army, she hastened to explain. “It was just one calculus test, so my overall grade will still be fine as long as I keep everything else up. Even Mrs. Barinoff said it was a rare misstep. That’s what she called it: ‘a rare misstep.’”
When her father finally spoke, he had the quiet gravitas of a faraway mushroom cloud. “Anita, do you understand what a conditional acceptance is?”
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