The Boomerang Effect

by Gordon Jack

  “Yup.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You still there?” I asked.

  “Yup,” Eddie said.

  “Let’s talk more in Yearbook,” I said, and hung up. “Thanks for that bit of information, Spencer. You’ve made one male cheerleader very happy.”

  Spencer didn’t acknowledge the compliment. He was too busy trying to figure out how to fit the new backpack in his rollaway bag.

  “Don’t worry about the backpack,” I said, taking it off his hands. “I can return it.”

  Eddie and I spent most of Yearbook doing a close reading of Dawn’s Facebook page. She had 3,050 friends, not an exclusive group by any means. There were some powerful names in her circle, including a couple of Steve Jobs’s kids and a Coppola. Dad would be happy if I were included in this network. I made a mental note to have Eddie help me with a friend request.

  “Her relationship status changed to ‘it’s complicated’ two days ago,” Eddie said.

  “She sure posts a lot of Bible verses,” I said, scrolling through her feed.

  “She’s very devout,” Eddie said. “Like an angel.”

  “If she’s so religious, why was she with an asshole like Jerry?”

  “What’s this about Jerry?” Crystal asked, appearing out of nowhere. Seriously, the girl has mad ninja skills. And that’s not racist, because it’s a compliment. I wish I could be as sneaky and aggressive. Okay, now that I hear it, it does sound kind of racist. I don’t like Crystal very much, to be honest.

  “He and Dawn broke up,” I said.

  “I knew that,” Crystal said.

  “We don’t know it for sure,” Eddie clarified. “Dawn hasn’t said anything at practice. This seems like the kind of thing she’d bring up for discussion.”

  “I’m sure Jerry dumped her and she’s, like, totally embarrassed,” Crystal said.

  “Jerry dump Dawn,” Eddie scoffed. “I don’t think so.”

  “Jerry could have any girl in the school he wanted. Why waste his time on a Goody Two-shoes like Dawn Bronson.”

  “Just because someone is good doesn’t make them a Goody Two-shoes,” Eddie said, rushing to Dawn’s defense.

  “Dawn’s a future trophy wife,” Crystal said. “She might as well be gold plated.”

  “You take that back!” Eddie said.

  “Why? Do you love her?”

  “Dawn does more for this school than anyone. She’ll be remembered more than you.”

  “The yearbook decides who gets remembered and who doesn’t, and who’s in charge of the yearbook? Oh, that’s right. I am.”

  “Come on, Eddie,” I said. “Let’s go work on our clubs pages.”

  We were halfway to our workstation when Crystal repeated the line she always says when she’s looking to motivate people. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past!”

  When I got home that afternoon, my dad’s Porsche was parked in the garage. This was unusual for four o’clock, so I checked our family website on my phone to see if there was a business trip I had forgotten about, but the week was clear. Mom had a few more author appearances and then she was scheduled to come home this weekend.

  “Dad?” I yelled, entering our home. “You here?”

  “In the kitchen,” he said.

  I found him sitting at the table with a venti-size Starbucks cup and his laptop. Estrella hovered nearby, nervously wiping a spotless counter.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Your mom’s had an accident,” Dad said. “Sit down.”

  I threw my backpack on the floor and slumped into the first available seat. This was all my fault. I didn’t even know what happened and I blamed myself. I had made that stupid, phony video and it probably caused Mom to have a heart attack or something. God, I was such an asshole. Why couldn’t I just do the things my parents asked me to do?

  “Your mom broke her hip,” Dad said.

  “What? How?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t paying attention and walked in front of a cab,” Dad said.

  “Was she on her phone?”

  Dad shrugged. “Probably,” he said. “Isn’t she always?”

  I pictured her watching my video on a busy Manhattan street, mesmerized by the emotional confession I had bullshitted. What if she had been hit by a bus? Or fallen down a manhole?

  “I want to see her,” I said.

  “That’s nice, Lawrence, but now’s not the time. She’s scheduled for surgery tomorrow. After that, she’ll be recuperating at Aunt Lucy’s on Long Island.”

  “How long?”

  “Don’t know. It depends on her recovery. The doctors say she can’t get on a plane for at least three weeks.”

  “She’s going to be at Aunt Lucy’s for three weeks?” I asked. Mom had avoided her sister’s house during her visit because she had only three bedrooms and four out-of-control kids.

  “She’s going to need help with her physical therapy, and Lucy’s a nurse. There was really no way out of it.”

  “When can I see her?”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea? The school year’s just started, and you’ve already gotten in trouble. You were nearly suspended.”

  Expulsed, I wanted to correct him, but didn’t think that was an actual word.

  “I don’t want you missing classes and falling behind. This year’s too important. You’ve got to turn things around if you’re going to have any hope of getting into a good college.”

  “But she needs us. Doesn’t she?”

  “She’s not dying, Lawrence. She’s going to be fine. How about we do a Skype session after surgery? Mom would love that.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “In the meantime, why don’t you post a get-well-soon video for her to see when she wakes up? I know she’d appreciate that.”

  I picked up my backpack and trudged upstairs to my room. I would make Mom’s video in a little bit, after I had calmed down. Right now, all I wanted to do was sit at my desk and get lost in some extreme origami. I took out a dollar bill and started working on a cockroach. It represented how I felt right about now. Maybe after I was done, I could crush it with my fist.

  EIGHT

  Mom’s accident only fueled her drive to spread the gospel of virtual parenting. After being offline for three days during her surgery and recovery, she returned to our family site with a vengeance, bombarding me with videos, blog posts, messages, and surveys. “This is the best thing that could have happened to me,” she said in a video post from Aunt Lucy’s place. “I’m doing a conference call with the president of VirtueTech next week. He thinks our family website can serve as the prototype for something much bigger. Can you imagine? Our site could be the next Facebook.” Mom’s enthusiasm was extinguished by the appearance of my cousin, who stuck her jelly-smeared face in the frame and waved hello. In the background, I heard Lucy scream, “Juniper! Leave your aunt alone! She’s working!”

  If Mom’s website went global, I’d be the most hated guy on the planet. I’d have to go completely off the grid, which was the virtual equivalent of running away from home. Spencer managed to live without a cell phone, but he had only one friend so it was easy for him. If I went offline, I’d be depriving thousands of friends and followers of my daily tweets. Still, it might be worth sacrificing these relationships if I could get away from my parents’ surveillance. Better to be an orphan than to be parented by Big Mother.

  Speaking of Spencer, our breakfast meetings were quickly becoming a nice routine. Unlike my parents, I actually made an effort to be physically present for our morning meal. The hardest part was getting out of bed at 6:30 a.m., but I solved that problem by buying Estrella a bullhorn and giving her explicit instructions to use it as my alarm clock. She was so invested in seeing me become a good person that she sneaked into my room every morning and blasted my eardrums with the thing. I had become so fearful of the sonic boom that now the sound of her tiptoeing across my carpet was
enough to get me out of bed and into the shower.

  Sometimes Spencer and I worked on our homework, but most of the time we just hung out. I would explain to him why American high school students don’t say the word “dubiously” and he would predict the future. Seriously, I was beginning to think my mentee might have superpowers. In the past two weeks alone, he accurately predicted that:

  • Stone would object to my T-shirt of a gun-toting panda.

  • I would get sick if I ate the jelly doughnut I found in the back of my car.

  • The party at Sally McGovern’s house would be canceled because her parents would not be taking their vacation to Aruba. (He figured this one out by monitoring the stock price of Mr. McGovern’s biotech company.)

  In addition to keeping me in good standing with Stone, our meetings also helped me break my wake-and-bake routine of years past. Between breakfast with Spencer and lunch with Eddie, I managed to be drug free for two whole weeks, a personal record. It was painful at times, what with the dull headaches, excessive sweating, and rubber-cement balls of phlegm coming out of my mouth, but every day the craving for the lotus plant lessened. Unfortunately, this decrease in smoking was accompanied by a decrease in communication with Will, Adam, and the two Nates. They still responded to my texts, but they rarely initiated conversation anymore. I figured this was a temporary glitch in our relationship. Once they saw how much I had achieved through sobriety, I was sure they would want to join me on the wagon. Or was it off the wagon? I never understood the connection between partying and horse-drawn carriages, to be honest.

  In the meantime, I enjoyed working on my two projects: making Spencer a cooler person and helping Eddie figure out a way to ask Dawn to homecoming. My two mentees couldn’t be more opposite. Spencer was all logic and analysis, super smart in everything except what comes most naturally to people. He could cite the average annual rainfall in the Amazon but not have a clue about how to acknowledge someone in the hallway. Eddie, on the other hand, was all emotion. He’d write pages and pages of love poems to Dawn but never consider how this might lead to a restraining order. Given their respective handicaps, the best thing I could do for Spencer and Eddie was bring them together. I was like a neurosurgeon, uniting the right and left side of the brain to make a complete whole.

  “Seriously, I think Spencer could help us,” I told Eddie in Yearbook. “He’s like Professor Xavier in X-Men.”

  “What does he know about girls, though?”

  “Tons!” I said, although to be honest, I wasn’t sure Spencer knew girls existed, except as sentient beings who move a bow against a violin. But I was desperate. Homecoming was two weeks away and we weren’t any closer to getting Eddie a date with Dawn for the dance.

  After the bell rang, we went to the cafeteria, hoping to find Spencer sitting at our usual table. When he wasn’t there, I suggested we go to the only safe place for nerdy kids hoping to avoid seeing the bottom of a trash can: the library. Sure enough, we found him at a table, reading some French book.

  “What’s this?” I asked, tipping the book up so I could read the cover.

  “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Spencer said.

  “I didn’t know you were taking French.”

  “I’m already fluent,” he said. “This is one of the few French language texts in the library.”

  “Interesting,” I said, trying to put an end to the conversation. “Look, we need your help with something.”

  I explained Eddie’s situation to Spencer, who nodded in his typical fashion. His neutral expression was oddly reassuring. Most other people would laugh in Eddie’s face upon hearing his desire to take the most popular girl to homecoming, but Spencer appeared calm and thoughtful, like he was intimately acquainted with such problems.

  “It appears that in his attempt to become close to Miss Bronson . . .”

  “Call her Dawn, Spencer.” Spencer had an annoying habit of referring to girls by their last names. It was a verbal tic I had been trying to break for the past few days.

  “In his attempt to become close to Dawn, Eddie has made himself invisible to her. Like the water a fish cannot see because he’s surrounded by it, Eddie has become unrecognizable from the many other admirers in Dawn’s entourage.”

  “He’s right,” Eddie said. “Yesterday at practice she called me Amanda.”

  “Ouch.”

  “What he lacks right now is mystery. He needs to surprise her into seeing him again for the first time. Like Cyrano.” Spencer held up the book and I instantly recognized the face on the cover.

  “The dude with the big nose!” I said. When Eddie looked at me funny, I explained. “Steve Martin played him in an old movie. Cyrano’s this ugly fireman who’s got the hots for Roxanne, who’s like a mermaid or something. Actually, I think that might be a different movie. Anyway, he knows she’s way out of his league, so he puts the moves on her through his good-looking friend.”

  “That sounds like an adaptation . . .”

  “So, I’m the good-looking friend?” Eddie asked.

  “No, you’re Cyrano. The ugly one,” I said.

  “I don’t get it,” Eddie said.

  “What Spencer’s saying is that your cheerleading costume’s like a big nose to Dawn. She’ll never see how awesome you are as long as you wear it. So what you need to do is find a sneakier way of hitting on her.”

  “Actually, that’s not what I was suggesting . . .”

  “I could be the mascot,” Eddie suggested.

  “That’s perfect!” I said. “You can hide behind the mascot’s mask and tell her how you feel. After she’s fallen in love with you, you reveal yourself and ask her to the dance. Ba-bam!”

  “Won’t Dawn be pissed that I tricked her?” Eddie asked.

  “Trust me, dude. Ladies are willing to overlook a little dishonesty when romance is involved.” I learned this through my viewing of Secretos Subterráneos, but I wasn’t going to admit that to these guys.

  “This could work,” Eddie said.

  “It’s perfect! What do you think, Spencer?” I asked.

  “Perhaps if you simply compose a letter telling Dawn how you really feel . . .” he began.

  “Fuck that,” I said. “You’ll look desperate.” Clearly Spencer didn’t know anything about the art of seduction.

  A roar of laughter interrupted our planning. Across the room, I saw Will and Adam going crazy over something on Chester McFarlane’s phone. The librarian walked over to where they were sitting and removed the device from Chester’s hand. After she returned to her station, Will, Adam, and Chester pulled out another phone and continued viewing whatever hilarious YouTube video had just gotten them into trouble.

  I panicked. Had they seen me with Eddie and Spencer? If so, I could expect a fair amount of hazing about my new “friends.” What if they weren’t watching a video but filming us huddled around some French play excitedly planning Eddie’s seduction of Dawn? I had to get out of here. This place was way too public to be seen doing something that wasn’t official mentoring business.

  “Let’s go talk to Coach Harkness about the mascot,” I said. “We’ve got thirty minutes left before lunch. Spencer, you in?”

  “I am not.”

  “Okay, see you later then.”

  I grabbed Eddie and headed toward the door. On my way, I picked up an issue of Rolling Stone from one of the tables and hid behind it so Adam and the guys wouldn’t see me exit the building.

  NINE

  We spent the rest of the period convincing Coach Harkness to let us revive the old Viking. He seemed to like our idea of keeping the identity of the performer a secret as a way to build interest in what already looked like another dismal football season. We hadn’t won any of our three games, not even against the School of Dramatic Arts, the team whose theme song was “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie.

  “You’ll have to fix the head first,” Harkness said, leading us into the storage closet and removing the large, bearded costume head, split at the he
lmet. The sight of the gash was a bit unsettling. I remembered the bloodthirsty cheers that erupted from the stands when our Viking went down, clubbed to death by a mascot that looked like one of the seven dwarves. The harness encasing the actual human’s head was a good six inches away from the wound, but the sight of a sharp, spearlike object puncturing the costume was enough to traumatize Jenny Doyle, our previous mascot, for life. I hear she only attends mock trial competitions now.

  Getting the Viking head from Harkness’s office to my car without anyone noticing would be tricky. In just a few minutes, the halls, quad, and student parking lot would be filled with kids on their way to lunch. If we wanted to avoid any uncomfortable questions, we had to hurry. Eddie draped a Go Vikings! banner over the head, stuffed the rest of the costume in a garbage bag, and the two of us ran to my car. If only Mrs. Coolidge had stayed pregnant and not deprived me of a prime parking space, this would have been a whole lot easier.

  The head was the size of one of Mr. Lunley’s yoga balls and blocked my vision when I held it in front of me. As we approached the parking lot, the banner slid off and I came face-to-face with the Viking, its empty eye sockets staring at me like some Nordic zombie. I hadn’t felt such a premonition of doom since I opened my PSAT test packet and saw the word “ruination” staring back at me. Maybe Spencer’s hesitation to fully endorse our plan was worth considering more deeply.

  “Dude, come on,” Eddie said, pulling me back to reality.

  We reached my car, popped the trunk, and threw the head in. The bell rang, releasing students to lunch. Rather than get our things from Yearbook, we decided to head to Starbucks and continue planning. As we worked out the details of our seduction plan, we could also come up with an excuse to give Mr. Koran for why we weren’t in class all period.

  It’s amazing what a couple of venti triple-shot caramel macchiatos will do to lift your mood and improve your work ethic. After Eddie and I consumed the appropriate quantities of sugar and caffeine, we felt no cheerleading captain/student body president/future centerfold of Playboy’s “Women in Congress” issue was out of our grasp.