Breakfast with Neruda

by Laura Moe

“Yeah. She used to hang with a group of rich bitch country club preps, but most of them dropped her. The only one I know for sure who sort of hung in there as a friend is Maggie Alter."

  “Shelly never mentions anyone,” I say.

  “Maybe other kids’ parents forbid them to hang with Shelly.”

  “She seems friendly enough with you.”

  “Hell, man. I don’t judge her,” Jeff says. “Who are any of us to judge? Aren’t we all freaks under the skin? Even the most normal person has some shadow lurking under the bed.”

  I remember how I used to scare him and Annie by telling him there were shadow monsters under the bed. Because I was the eldest they always believed me. To a point. Eventually they figured out I was full of shit.

  “How do I get Shelly to talk to me about it? How do I let her know I don’t care what she did?”

  “Just say that. Say, ‘Shelly, I don’t care why you got arrested. We’re here, and this is now, and whatever you did before is history.’”

  I nod. “Yeah. That makes sense. But what about the rumor she meant to kill herself behind the wheel? How do I approach that?”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t get a suicidal vibe from her. I mean yeah, occasional sadness, but . . . Rick said she was really high.”

  “Yeah, maybe. People do weird shit when they’re high. Stuff they wouldn’t normally do.”

  I watch cornfields and soybean fields whooshing by. “Why wouldn’t she be upfront about this?”

  “Why would she, dude? First off, she probably thinks you already know. Everyone else does.” Jeff hangs his arm out the window as he drives. “Does it matter?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does it matter why she got busted? I mean, you knew she had some trouble. So did you. So if you like her, does it matter why she’s in trouble?”

  I sit back and let the wind blow over my face and close my eyes. “I guess not.”

  “Did you share your troubles?”

  “She already knew about me. She calls me the Unabomber.”

  He laughs. I open my eyes and look at my brother. “And she knows I live in my car.”

  “Holy shit,” he says. “That’s big.”

  “She doesn’t know why, though. I told her Mom threw me out after the Rick debacle.”

  “What did she tell you about why she’s working at school all summer?”

  “She said she got busted for smoking.”

  Jeff laughs. “That’s sort of true. She got five days out for smoking in the girls’ restroom.”

  Jeff and I are quiet for a while. The rumble of the tires on pavement soothes me.

  “So do you like her?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I like her a lot.”

  “More than Ashley?”

  “A whole lot more. I hate to admit this, but Rick’s right. He and Ashley are better suited for one another. They both have that artsy music thing going on.”

  “What do you like best about Shelly?”

  “She’s brave,” I say. “And generous and funny, and she kicks my ass.”

  “Good for her.”

  “But there’s this wall around her.”

  “Don’t you think it’s because she’s been burned?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Now that I know what she was up against.”

  “So what are you going to do next?” Jeff asks.

  I lean back against the headrest. Sometimes it’s a relief to let someone else take the wheel. I am suddenly tired from worrying about my mother, my sister, Shelly’s secrets, and my own crappy life. “Sleep.”

  When Jeff pulls in front of his house, Paul is in the front yard dangling his son Danny by his feet. The six-year-old squeaks in delight and tries to wriggle away. Jeff won the lotto with dads.

  Dee Dee comes to the door and says, “Clean up guys, it’s dinnertime.” She spears me with a look, and I know I’m not invited to stay. She has to accept Jeff, but I’m not Paul’s son. There is something off about me. Sometimes I don’t want to be near me.

  Paul tries to insist I stay and eat, but I claim I have to work. I get back in my car and notice Jeff has left a $10 bill on the dashboard. Good thing, since we used up most of my gas. I wave the ten at my brother and yell thanks.

  I forage for some donuts behind Dan’s and find two jelly-filled and a chocolate cake. After I eat, I go to Graham Park and sit on a bench and read from a battered copy of The Call of the Wild, one of the books Earl let me keep from locker cleanup. At first I think I’ll pass on it because the main character is a dog and it’s usually assigned in middle school, but I quickly get into the book. Near the end of chapter two I recognize myself in Buck, the dog.

  “This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. . . . his development (or regression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible, and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it into the. . . toughest and stoutest of tissues.”

  I flip the book over to the back cover and study the author’s picture. A handsome young guy wearing a leather bomber jacket. He died when he was only forty, in 1916. I wonder why he died so young. My mother’s age. I make a note to check on it in the library at school tomorrow.

  By the time I’m beginning chapter five, it grows too dark to read, so I drive around to find a place to sleep tonight. Since Earl is suspicious now, I park in front of my mom’s again. I set my alarm for 6:15 so I can run. Training season for cross-country begins in a couple weeks and I want to be ready. I’m hoping Coach Baker takes me back on the team, even with my criminal record.

  I try to sleep, but my mind buzzes with too much information. I almost wish my life were like that guy’s in Memento, where every day he wakes up and doesn’t recall yesterday. But my life is not a movie.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Hey, you,” Shelly says. She climbs into my car next to me and we kiss.

  “Hey you yourself.” She is wearing a pink top and blue shorts and barely resembles the Goth creature I first met. She still has the black hair, but there is something else different about her, and I can’t figure it out. Maybe it’s the sandals.

  “God, you smell good,” she says. After a morning run, I showered and dabbed another cologne sample all over myself. “What is that you’re wearing?”

  “Montblanc Legend.”

  “That’s like seventy dollars a bottle,” she says. “How can a homeless guy afford it?”

  “Maybe I’m only pretending to be homeless,” I say. “Maybe I’m just an actor researching a role for a film.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. “Seriously?”

  I sigh. “Unfortunately, no. I am truly a resident of anywhere I can find a safe parking spot.”

  “How do you always manage to smell good? Even before I gave you that bottle of Blue, you never smelled like a vagabond.”

  I laugh. “Esquire, Sports Illustrated, People,” I say.

  “Reading makes you smell good?”

  “Every time I find magazines or check one out of the library, I steal the cologne sample pages.”

  “Very resourceful,” she says. “You should write a book called How to Be Homeless, Yet Live Like a Rich Guy.”

  I laugh. “It helps to have friends whose fathers bleed money.” It must be her earrings. That’s what’s different. They’re small, gold buds, not the dangly ones she usually wears.

  “Have you asked your mom any more about your dad?” she asks.

  “No. She gets mad every time I bring it up.” I glance at Shell
y again, trying to figure out what’s new. Her eyes seem bigger, but it’s not her makeup.

  “Well, we know you’re not Asian or black since you have Caucasian features and hair,” she says. She squints at me. “You could be Greek or Middle Eastern. You do have that beaky nose.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I study her face. “Bangs! You got bangs.”

  “Took you long enough to notice, Neruda.”

  “I noticed. I mean, I knew something was different, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

  She feigns a British accent. “So what do you think? Do you like my fringe?”

  “It’s hot,” I say. “Very hot.” I’d like to blow off our day at school and go make out with her somewhere. I wrap an arm around her, and she rests against me. I like the feel of a soft, warm girl against my chest. For a second I remember what it was like to have Ashley in my arms. She was affectionate, yet I don’t pine for her anymore. Shelly is so not Ashley. Ash would never have dared to use a fake ID to get booze in Kroger or have taken me on a fake birthday adventure.

  Maybe Rick is right; maybe I never loved Ashley. Casting me aside for Rick was no doubt hard for her. She never liked hurting anyone’s feelings. Once at her house last fall, early in our relationship, while watching a movie in her basement, Ashley noticed a huge wood spider crawling across the floor. Kind of a mean-looking creature, big, black, and hairy. I stood up, ready to flatten it with my boot, and Ashley said, “Oh, don’t kill it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s scoop it up and set it free. Let it take its chances outside.” She handed me a People magazine. My instinct was to roll up the magazine and whack the ugly creature, but I let the eight-legged thing crawl onboard and rushed it to the family room door before it had a chance to crawl up my arm. I flung the magazine and the spider into her backyard in the pouring rain.

  “Now wasn’t it better to save it rather than squish it?”

  I shrugged. “I guess. But I killed your magazine.”

  “That’s okay.”

  As gentle and lovely as Ashley was, I never told her about my mother’s hoarding obsession. I told her I wasn’t allowed to bring friends home because my mother worked a lot of nights and needed rest. Not a total lie. Sometimes Mom does work swing shifts, but she sleeps with a box fan on high that drowns out most of the noise. My sister and I just agree not to let anyone in on our living conditions. Children’s Services would have a field day.

  Ashley didn’t know I started living in my car, so in a way, besides my immediate family, Shelly is the person who knows the most about me. But even Shelly doesn’t know all of it.

  My memories of Ashley are blurry now. To think I almost landed in jail over a girl who can’t measure up. I kiss the top of Shelly’s head and hug her tighter. Whatever the truth about her is, I like her a lot.

  “I’m glad I met you,” I tell her.

  She nods. “Yeah. I am pretty amazing.” She pulls out a fresh twenty. “Let’s go eat.”

  We make it back to school in time, but Shelly wants to smoke a quick cigarette before we go in the building. “It’s too nice to be indoors today.”

  “Too bad we can’t blow off this place and go for a drive,” I say. “Crash another family reunion.”

  Earl and Hess are laughing in the staff lounge where a plate of snickerdoodles sits. Earl looks up. “Enjoy your smoke?” he asks.

  Shelly plops down and grabs a cookie. “We did. It’s way too nice outside to make us work. We should get a good weather day today.”

  Earl laughs. “Nice try, kid.”

  “We could have them pull weeds out front if they want to be outside,” Hess says. “It’s supposed to rain the next couple days, so today might be the only day to do it.”

  Earl raises an eyebrow and looks us over. “Yeah. You could be right.”

  Shelly and I wheel a trash tub out to the school’s entrance. Each of us carries gardening gloves and these tiny shovels. “Do you know how to pull weeds?” I ask.

  She laughs. “It’s not that hard.”

  “But how do I know which are weeds and which are supposed to be plants?”

  She shakes her head. “You really are . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “Just follow my lead.”

  “You were going to call me an idiot, weren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Listen, I can’t help it that I wasn’t born with platinum or silver dangling out of my butt. There’s a lot of shit I don’t know.” I toss my gloves and shovel to the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re right. I can sometimes be a condescending bitch.”

  “You think?”

  She kneels in front of the flowerbeds and waves me down next to her. “We’ll start here,” she says. “See these spiny-looking things?” I nod. “Those are thistles. They’re weeds. So we need to take our spades and loosen the soil, then grab them and pull them up by their roots and toss them in the can. Also, we need to pull up dandelions. You do know what dandelions look like, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” I grab for a thistle and draw my hand back. “Ow! That stings.”

  “That’s why we have gloves.” She waves mine at me, and I glower at her before I slide them on.

  She and I sit side by side, pulling thistles and dandelions. This side of the building is hotter because we are in the sun, but it still feels good to be outside. Shelly tells me not to move too fast. “We don’t want Earl and Hess to find more work for us to do.”

  That’s kind of the way she and I have worked this summer anyway. In fact, Earl and Hess never seem to hurry. Earl told me once summertime was his favorite season to work. “I don’t have all you kids and teachers messing up my work right after I’m done fixing or scrubbing something,” he said.

  “I feel bad about the other day,” Shelly says.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what she means.

  “You know, when we were kissing and I . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I say. I wave a gloved hand at her. “We don’t have to rush into anything. What do I have to offer you, anyway? A thirty-year-old station wagon and lots of laundry.”

  She stops and looks at me. “I like you a lot, Michael Flynn Neruda, no matter where you live. And I think it’s time you heard my story, the real story, and not the fiction that’s being spread around town about me.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Shelly stabs at the soil. “It was last summer,” she says. “The first thing I did was dye my hair black.”

  “Why?”

  “I had suddenly become a new person, and I needed to look different.”

  “Why black?”

  “I don’t know. At a slumber party in middle school I once colored it dark, and I liked it. Besides, it made me look older.”

  “Why did you need to look older,” I ask.

  She studies me for a second, and says, “Because of Theo.”

  “Who is Theo?”

  “He’s part of why I left. But we’re getting ahead of the story.” I raise my hands in an apologetic gesture, and she continues. “So I dyed my hair.”

  “What did your parents say about it?”

  She glares at me, and says evenly. “They didn’t know.”

  “Okay. I won’t interrupt anymore.”

  She grins at me. “Yes you will. Anyway, nobody was home that day. My parents were golfing at the country club and my brother and his girlfriend had driven to Kings Island. They all knew I wouldn’t be home when they got back because I lied and said I was spending the night at Amelia Preston’s house.”

  “But you had already left. Where did you go?”

  “I’ll get to that,” she says. “I had to pack light, so I crammed a couple pairs of jeans and some shorts and tops and underwear in a tote bag, along with a carton of unfiltered Camels.”

  “But you smoke Marlboros,” I say.

  She tosses a weed in the trash bin. “I was changing everything about myself, erasing the
ditzy blonde cheerleader, including what I smoked.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” I say. “How did you get away with smoking as a cheerleader? Most athletes don’t smoke.”

  She laughs. “First of all, most people don’t consider cheerleaders athletes, even though it requires strength and agility. Second, cheerleaders get away with a lot. Parents and teachers would be shocked to learn several of Rooster High’s varsity cheerleading squad smoke things a lot stronger than cigarettes on a regular basis.” She scoops up a bunch of weeds and dumps them in the canister.

  “So what else did you pack?”

  She sits back down, and starts digging again. “Well, I couldn’t take my phone or Kindle because Big Brother knows who you’re talking to and what you’re reading. But I had planned ahead and bought a TracFone with tons of minutes and took about three thousand bucks out of my savings.”

  “You had three thousand dollars in savings?”

  “Actually, I had more, but I didn’t want the bank to alert my dad if I took it all out.” She glances at me, detecting my envy. “I’m not going to apologize for having rich parents,” she says. “It’s the card I was dealt.”

  I yank a large thistle out of the ground and slam it into the trashcan. “I know. Sorry. I just wonder how with everything you have you’d want to run away.”

  She is quiet for a couple minutes, and I wonder if I’ve pissed her off. Then she says, “I’ve always felt I was playacting the role of Michelle Miller, the prep princess cheerleader who got decent grades and never caused trouble. But deep inside I knew this was a myth, and if you flayed me open, the feral beast would emerge. But how do you break out of your fictional shell and become who you want to be in Rooster, Ohio? Especially if you don’t know who that is?” She smooths the soil over the hole I left in the ground where the thistle had been. “I blame it all on Mrs. Silver.”

  “The English teacher?”

  “Yeah. Before Sophomore CP English I wasn’t much of a reader. But the first book she assigned was The Catcher in the Rye. Most of my friends hated it, but I related to Holden Caulfield.

  I nod. “He’s kind of a raggedy guy.” I had read the book and thought Holden was kind of a jerk, but I don’t want to spoil her memory of it.