Faster, Faster, Faster

by Jonah Black

  Anyway, Thorne and I hung out after school today. It was just like old times. We went down to the Dune. Thorne was smoking clove cigarettes. He said they were imported from India. Man, if I lived in India and there were cigarettes like this there, I’d want to send them out of the country, too. They smell like a perfumed, dead animal. I told Thorne that and he said I just didn’t appreciate the finer things.

  “If the finer things smell like roadkill,” I said, “I think I can skip them.”

  “Jonah, dude,” said Thorne, taking a big suck on his clove cigarette and sending the smoke rings sailing out toward the ocean. “You’re not thinking positively.”

  “What’s positive about nasty cigarettes?” I said.

  “Chicks love them,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but they probably give you worse cancer than regular cigarettes.”

  Thorne just shook his head. “You don’t get cancer when you’re eighteen,” he said.

  Stupidity of this kind pisses me off, but I decided not to bother getting mad at him. If you want to be friends with Thorne, you just sort of take him as a package. So I just kicked at the sand and didn’t say anything.

  “So what’s up with you and that girl Molly?” Thorne said. “Elanor Brubaker says she’s a couple astronauts short of a shuttle mission.”

  “Elanor’s wrong,” I said. “She’s a genius.”

  Thorne shook his head. “Just because she’s a genius doesn’t mean she isn’t stupid, dude. Hell, look at your sister. A prime example of what I call Negative Intelligence.”

  “Negative Intelligence?” I said. I knew I was about to hear one of Thorne’s stupid, made-up theories. I don’t think Thorne even believes what he says half the time. But he says it anyway.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You see, Jonahman, there’s two kinds of smart: There’s smart-smart and there’s stupid-smart. Smart-smart is like Einstein or Thomas Edison. Then there’s stupid-smart. Like your sister, Honey, or Molly Beale, or, say, Bill Clinton. Man, there’s a prime example. You score a million points on your SAT, but you can’t take a dump without it landing on your foot. In fact, for a lot of people, the more they study, the dumber they get. It’s like in school, where you go into a class thinking you understand something, and an hour later you leave the room and you realize you don’t have a clue. You actually leave the class stupider than you went in. I think most people’s intelligence peaks at age fourteen. From there, it’s all downhill.”

  I smiled. “So what makes people stupid?”

  “Education, man,” said Thorne, stubbing out his cigarette in the sand and leaning back on his elbows. He surveyed the sea. “Education is the number one cause of stupidity.”

  “So what does this have to do with Molly?” I said.

  Thorne reached into his backpack and got the package of clove cigarettes and shook another one out. “She’s a textbook case,” he said, lighting up.

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause you immediately said she was smart, which means her smartness is getting in the way of everything else. Like, you didn’t say she has a great ass, or she kisses like a professional,” Thorne said.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re not really smoking another one of those fart cigarettes, are you?”

  “Why, you want one?” he said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on, dude.” Thorne stuck one in my mouth and lit it. It was awful, and I hadn’t even inhaled it. “You can’t get into college unless you can smoke these,” he said.

  “Is that right?” I said. “Maybe I’ll just join the army.”

  “You gotta smoke there, too. For pretty much anything you do, you have to know how to smoke.”

  I held the cigarette and watched the ocean. The wind was blowing Thorne’s hair around. I hated to admit it, but with the clove cigarette in one hand, he really did look like the world’s coolest dude. Until you smelled him, anyway.

  I took a puff on the clove cigarette and started coughing. It felt like someone had pointed a blowtorch at my lungs.

  “Suave, Jonah,” Thorne said. “Real suave.”

  “Shut up.” I coughed again.

  “Hey, I told my Dad you’re ready to start working on the Scrod,” Thorne said. “Now that you aren’t working at First Amendment anymore.”

  “I told you before, I’m not working on the Scrod, okay?” I said. “I don’t want to clean fish with your dad.”

  “You and me both,” Thorne said, and for just a second, he kind of dropped his whole cool-dude routine. I thought about how crummy his house was, and how Thorne hustled and schemed to make extra cash. I felt bad.

  “Anyway, who says I’m not working at First Amendment anymore?” I said.

  “You don’t have a bicycle, do you? Since Molly the Genius ran over it with her car?” he said.

  “No.”

  “And you’ve failed your driving test, uh—how many times now?” Thorne reminded me.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Uh-huh. So how are you delivering pizzas and videos again?”

  “I’m going to get another bike,” I told him.

  “Okay,” said Thorne. “But you don’t even need a bike to work for my Dad.”

  “Thorne,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “Okay. Whatever,” said Thorne.

  He lay on his back and blew smoke up into the air. I stubbed my cigarette out and buried it deep in the sand. My mouth tasted awful. I don’t think I’ll ever eat enough Cocoa Puffs to get rid of that taste.

  “Hey, Jonah,” said Thorne. “After you break up with Molly? You think I could try her out?”

  I couldn’t believe he’d said that. He wasn’t kidding, either. He made it sound like Molly was a car he wanted to test-drive or something.

  “I’m not breaking up with her, all right?” I said, defensively.

  “Okay,” Thorne said.

  “I thought you said she was stupid-smart, anyway.”

  “I did,” Thorne said. “But I know how to fix that.”

  “How?”

  “A week of intense one-on-one instruction with the esteemed Thorne Wood, and you know what happens?” he said.

  “What?” I asked, although I didn’t really care what the answer was.

  “She gets stupid-stupid.”

  “And that’s good?” I said.

  Thorne lifted his head and grinned at me. “That’s real good,” he said.

  I had to laugh, I couldn’t help it. Thorne cracks me up.

  Jan. 18

  Awesome news!!! The cast came off today. The doctor who was checking it said it had healed nicely. Now I have to do these exercises to strengthen my arm. It feels kind of numb and weak, but it’s definitely good to have the cast off.

  Anyway, the way he removed it was kind of funny. The doctor had this little saw that went right through the plaster. It was scary, like some kind of horror movie where he was going to cut my arm off. He sawed right down the middle where it says MARRY ME, JONAH, and the cast broke into two big pieces. The air was filled with plaster dust. It was cool.

  I got to take the pieces home, and now they’re sitting on top of my dresser.

  I’m supposed to do these little bicep curls while holding a small can of niblet corn. Once I get good at that I’m supposed to use a can of peaches. Then a large can of crushed tomatoes. I’ve got all the cans lined up on my desk.

  Too bad I’ve missed the rest of diving season, which totally sucks. The thing that drives me crazy most of all is that we have one last meet against Ely High this weekend, and I would have loved to compete against Lamar Jameson one last time and smoked his ass on the high board. It would have been nice for Posie to see me do that.

  Jan. 23, 9:30 P.M.

  Today was the swim meet against Ely, which I watched from the bleachers with Posie, Caitlin (her little sister), and Thorne. Ely totally wasted us! I’d like to say that this was partly because I wasn’t out there diving for the team, but even if I’d been there, it wou
ldn’t have been enough to turn it around. The Ely guys have definitely been practicing. And Lamar is better than ever. It’s like his muscles have muscles. It’s sick.

  Posie watched Lamar do this one dive, and she didn’t say anything. He did a triple somersault in reverse, absolutely perfectly. Posie just sat there and watched him do the dive, and afterward Kassandra—who was sitting with the Ely fans—started squealing and shouting, “You got it, baby!” Lamar surfaced and looked at her and smiled, and the next thing I knew, Posie was up and on her way out of the stands.

  I turned to Thorne and Caitlin and found that they were kissing, and I don’t mean just kissing, I mean they were like, spelunking in each other’s mouths. I wondered if maybe it was a mirage that was going to vanish and I was just imagining the whole thing. But no, Caitlin Hoff and Thorne were seriously going at it. I couldn’t believe it.

  I kind of have a bad attitude about Posie’s little sister anyway, because she always acts like she hates me and she thinks I’m stupid-stupid. But I was also pretty annoyed that Thorne hadn’t said anything about Caitlin the other day when the two of us were sitting on the sand dune smoking those fart cigarettes and talking about Molly. I guess sometimes I get tired of the way Thorne never really talks to me about stuff. I mean, are he and Caitlin a big secret? It didn’t look like it. Then I realized maybe one reason he hadn’t said anything is he didn’t even know he was going to hook up with her. I mean, he may not have known he was going to hook up with Caitlin Hoff until five minutes after he’d already started doing it.

  Anyway, I kind of cleared my throat, and they came up for air. Thorne looked at me and said with this big shit-eating grin, “Whoa, Caitie. Don’t look now but Jonah’s just figured something out.”

  Caitlin kind of glared at me. She looks a lot like Posie, but she definitely doesn’t act like her. Posie got all the sun and she got all the rain. “Jonah who?” she said, in this kind of bored way.

  “Posie just left, in case you guys didn’t notice,” I said. “She looked upset.”

  “Duh,” said Caitlin. It was such a tenth-grade thing to say. She kind of flicked her hair behind her ear in this snooty-bitch way and I looked at Thorne as if to say, Dude, what are you thinking?

  “Well, Jonah?” Caitlin said. “Aren’t you going to go running after her, like you always do?”

  She said it like doing this was an incredibly stupid idea, but then she said, “Oh, never mind. I’ll do it.” She got up and headed out in the same direction Posie had gone. I guess going after Posie was only a stupid idea if I did it.

  The competition was almost over. There were only two more sucky Don Shula divers left. I couldn’t even bear to watch.

  “You know what, Thorne,” I said. “I don’t think your girlfriend likes me.”

  “Yeah. To be honest,” Thorne said, “she hates you, dude.”

  I think maybe I’d had two conversations with Caitlin in my life. “Why does she hate me?” I asked.

  Thorne yawned. “She thinks you screwed with Posie’s head.”

  “Oh, and you didn’t?” I challenged.

  “Not like you did,” Thorne said.

  “So what’s up with you and her, anyway? You couldn’t find anybody who wasn’t in elementary school?”

  “Believe me, she’s mature for her age,” Thorne said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Unlike you.”

  At that second I saw the girl who I’d only seen before from the high dive, the girl I always call Watches Boys Dive because she looks American Indian and comes to all the diving meets. I even thought she might be Northgirl. She was sitting all the way across the bleachers, but I had never been this close to her before.

  I almost told Thorne, but then I had this thought, like Watches Boys Dive is mine. I didn’t want him to even know about her. So I just got up and went out to the aisle and walked five steps up to her level, and then I started saying excuse me to everybody, trying to get to where she was sitting. There was even a free spot on the bench next to her and I thought, Yes, I am finally going to meet her!

  Suddenly she looked up at me, and there was a look of total panic on her face. She leaped to her feet and grabbed her bag and almost stepped on about twelve people in her hurry to get out of there. Then she ran down the steps on the other side of the bleachers. I said “excuse me” some more, and I got to the aisle and started running after her. When I got out in the hallway, I could hear the echoing sound of everybody applauding and cheering after somebody’s dive. Way ahead of me was Watches Boys Dive, running around a corner. Her bag was trailing behind her like the tail on a kite. I ran after her and followed her outside.

  Suddenly her bag fell onto the blacktop and all the stuff inside it spilled out. I started walking toward her while she was on her knees, picking up stuff. When she heard me, she got up and started to run off across the parking lot.

  “Wait!” I yelled at her. “I have to talk to you!”

  I ran after her, but soon I was standing on the highway, with the Intercoastal Waterway across the street and no sign of her anywhere. It was kind of creepy. She had totally vanished!

  The mystery was not solved. If anything, it had become more confusing than ever.

  I walked back toward Don Shula High and there in the middle of the parking lot, right where she’d dropped her bag, were three things she hadn’t picked up. The first was a tube of lipstick—the color was called Baby Kiss. It looked like one of those lipsticks girls use to make it look like they’re not wearing any lipstick. Sophie always wears those.

  The second was a pack of matches from something called The Fur Room. Underneath that it said POMPANO BEACH, but I’d never heard of a bar called The Fur Room in Pompano before. It sounded pretty sketchy. There was no address.

  And the third thing was a picture of me. It was the photo that had appeared in the school paper back at the beginning of the diving season. It looked like she’d carried it around in her purse for a long time. Yikes.

  Jan. 24, 5:30 P.M.

  It’s after school and I’m sitting here looking at this huge pile of homework and I’m just not in the mood. German sucks.

  Sophie sent me another letter today. Here it is:

  Dear Jonah,

  Sorry about the hummingbird. You probably think I’m completely insane. But I found it during “outside time” yesterday, this poor little dead bird, and I thought, this is me, and then I thought, you know, Jonah is the only person who would understand what I mean. So I sent it to you, but now you must think I’m totally sick.

  I’ve been reading this book about Amelia Earhart. You know who she is, right? She was this pilot in the 1920s and she was trying to become the first woman to circle the globe in a plane. Supposedly her plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean, but they never found the wreck, and some people think maybe her plane didn’t really crash at all. I was thinking if I ever get out of here, I’d like to travel to the islands in the Pacific Ocean and try to find her. If she’s alive now, she’d be like 95 years old or something, but maybe she’d tell her story if you asked her in the right way. Doesn’t that sound possible, that she just pretended to disappear, then lived on some island for 80 years drinking coconut milk and weaving palm leaves?

  Anyway, sorry if I weirded you out with the bird. I’m doing better, I think, but I’m lonely. Sometimes I think I’m the loneliest girl in the world. I guess Amelia must be pretty lonely, too.

  Love,

  Sophie

  What’s funny is that this letter did get through to me, in a way. I mean, what she said about the bird and everything. I do know what she means.

  I don’t know much about Amelia Earhart, but I asked Mom and she got all excited, telling me what a great heroine she was.

  “She was so brave!” Mom said, her eyes tearing up.

  Later, Posie called me and I asked her about Amelia Earhart.

  “She was like, the first woman to rock the globe, you know what I mean?” Posie said breathlessly. “Sometimes when I surf I thin
k about her. I think about how I want to just keep going. But I always wind up back on the beach. Amelia—she just kept going.”

  I can’t believe all these women think Amelia Earhart is so incredibly important. Neither Mom nor Posie could tell me the name of the woman who actually did first circle the globe successfully in a plane—but they all knew the story about Amelia Earhart like she was their own grandmother.

  I called Thorne later and asked him if he knew anything about her, and of course he didn’t have a clue.

  “Amelia Earhart?” he said. I could hear him, thinking hard. “She go to St. Winnifred’s? What’s she look like?”

  Anyway, now I can’t stop thinking about Amelia Earhart. Mom even has a book about her, and there’s pictures of her in it. She was actually pretty cute. But the thing that interests me most about her is what a hero she is, even though she actually died trying to do the thing she set out to do. I mean, she never actually achieved her goal, but that isn’t what mattered. I guess the lesson of Amelia Earhart is that it’s not the getting there that’s important, it’s the journey, and having the guts to set off on the journey in the first place.

  Maybe I should go up to Pennsylvania with Honey after all. Even if it ends in disaster.

  Jan. 25

  I’ve been canceling my appointments, but I finally met with Dr. LaRue today. I’m still mad at him from when I called him from Orlando and heard him peeing while he was talking to me. I don’t know why this bothered me so much, but it just seems like he could have excused himself. I wasn’t going anywhere. And it’s not just that he was peeing, but that he thought I’d be dumb enough not to recognize the sound of him peeing when I heard it coming over the phone. He even flushed, which is a pretty unmistakable sound. I think my shrink needs to learn how to be more sensitive to people’s feelings.