by Tim Federle
I clear my throat. “Um.”
“Just write down five celebrities,” she says.
You have to see Mommie Dearest, by the way. Oh my God. Put it on the list.
“On the pieces of paper,” she continues. “One celebrity for each paper.” She holds out a pen and looks at me like I’m a dangerous alien in neutral clothes. Which, let’s be honest.
Carly’s kicking off her sandals. “Okay, does everybody have their celebrities?”
Somebody volunteers his Pirates hat to be used as the “bowl” for us to put our slips of paper into, and that’s when Faye Dunaway says, louder than you’d believe: “Wait. The cute kid hasn’t written down his names yet.”
I mean, at least she thinks I’m cute.
“Oh, you can go without me,” I say, but a tipsy guy from the Pittsburgh team goes, “No way. It has to be even numbers! It has to be.” As if party games are known for their fairness. As if that’s the chief quality that gets people hooked on the party game circuit.
Geoff and I lock eyes, and he breaks into the biggest “I’m sorry” grin I’ve seen since the time in elementary school he let it slip to the other boys that I’d “borrowed” two of Carly’s Barbies after a sleepover; he’s clearly remembering, only now, how completely out of the loop I am about current pop culture.
“Bro, just think of five famous people,” a guy from my team says, and so I take the pen from Faye Dunaway and like a magic wand it supplies me with insight: I’ll use my practically genetic aversion to being ordinary to my advantage.
1. Hitchcock. 2. Kubrick. 3. Mankiewicz. 4. Preminger. And, for the modern crowd: 5. Tarantino. Yes. Yes. Filmmaker celebrities for the ages.
I’m writing so fast that somebody actually goes: “The kid’s on fire!” and I fold my sheets of paper in half and drop them in the Pirates hat. Carly claps her hands together. It’s all good.
“Okay, anyone who hasn’t played before: It’s like, I don’t know, verbal charades, and your team has to guess who you’re acting out—”
“And you only get a minute each, no cheating,” Geoff goes. He cracks his knuckles and punches his fist into his hand, acting all mock competitive. It makes me laugh. This is going to be fine.
“First round!” Carly goes, grabbing the hat. “My house, my rules. Devon, you’re up.”
Somebody offers to time the rounds on their phone, and we’re off.
“Okay,” Devon says, looking at her first slip of paper and bouncing up and down a little. “Wait, can I, like, pass?”
“Fifty seconds left!” the timer from the other team says. I dare myself to glance at Amir. He is the only person on our team looking at Devon with a small smile on his face—a face that’s distinguished by this jawline you could open a manila envelope with. Anyway, whatever. His little smile. It is the sweetest thing. Everybody else is teasing Devon for being so stuck on the first round. But Amir is smiling, smiling. The kind of smile you have to name twice.
“Time!” the timekeeper calls, and Devon slaps her hands down and goes, “I didn’t even know who it was! It was like a long Russian name or something!” She shows the paper to us and somebody from the other team kicks her in the butt and says, “No cheating!” and she falls onto the floor and puts her feet against the aquarium and sighs.
“Let’s go in order of birthdays,” someone suggests. “Like, whoever’s birthday is next should just go.”
A Pittsburgh guy goes, “My birthday’s on Tuesday!” and a bunch of girls go, “Aww, Josh!” like he just admitted he’s not actually a human guy but in fact fifteen puppies in a tank top. Josh gets up and takes the hat and suddenly the game gets serious, though I’m not really thinking about that. I’m thinking about the fact that my birthday is this coming Sunday.
“Go.”
Josh grabs the first celebrity. “Okay, he owns like a million buildings and has crazy hair that looks like a frittata!”
“Donald Trump!”
Josh doesn’t even say yes; he just throws the clue down and we non-natives moan but also secretly love that now we’re all about something, together.
LIFE HACK: That’s all anyone ever wants.
“Okay,” Josh goes, “he used to be, like, the biggest movie star ever when our parents were our age, but then he went crazy.”
“Tom Cruise!”
“No!”
“John Travolta!”
“Yes!”
Ugh. Biggest movie star ever? Marlon Brando much?
Whatever. Next. Josh twists a piece of hair between his fingers, and he’s starting to sweat, and this is the most cardio-intense party game I’ve ever seen. “Okay,” Josh goes, “You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car.”
The Pittsburghers erupt into laughter and everybody shouts, “Oprah!”—even my team does—and oh my God wait till they get to one of my names and are blown away that the cute kid is actually a mature man.
“Okay,” Josh goes, trying not to laugh, “I think he was, like, a famous mime.”
“Time!” Carly calls out. She’s boogying around and eating some of the hummus that I brought. Nobody seems to mind the fact that I brought “another hummus” now. Life can be so weird.
“Who’s up? Who’s up?” somebody goes, and since I don’t have a phone to pretend I’m getting a text, I fake a big yawn.
“Quinny, your birthday’s on Sunday, right?”
I am going to kill Geoff.
“Birthday boy! Birthday boy!” He attempts to start a chant. Fail.
I get up and wonder how sweaty my butt looks in my shorts and if I’ll recognize a single celebrity name, and I pray pray pray I pick one of my own. I know just how to act out Hitchcock. Please: Crouch like birds are attacking, shriek like you’re being stabbed in a shower, easy.
“Okay, time,” Carly says, for the first time not sounding excited but rather cautious. Can’t blame her there. I literally have no idea who the first celebrity is.
“Oh, jeez.”
See, this is why I like everything written out beforehand. I am trying to star in my life story, not appear as the unbilled comic sidekick.
“Say something,” a girl from my team says. “Say anything.”
Amir and I catch eyes and dammit I look away.
“Is it a man or a woman?” says Faye Dunaway.
“I think a man.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“I mean—sorry—definitely a guy.”
“Thirty seconds!” Carly says.
“Okay,” I say, “his last name is, like, French.”
“Gérard Depardieu!” a teammate says, and I appreciate, at least, the relatively obscure movie star reference.
“No, but really good guess.”
“Thanks. I don’t need positive reinforcement, I need clues.”
Yikes.
“Guys, back off,” Carly goes, but oh God: I don’t want to be that kid who everyone has to be nice to because their parents got a handout at the beginning of the year saying their child would be sharing the classroom with “someone exceptional.”
“Oh!” I say. I swing my arms so wide that it knocks an entire liter of Fanta into a bowl of corn chips. Worth it. “His last name is like Pepé Le Pew. You know, the, like, possum cartoon thing.”
“He was a skunk,” a girl says, wiping Fanta from her leg. You could say it kind of splashed “everywhere.”
“And his first name is Italian!” I go.
“Time!” Carly hollers. Big hoots from the Pittsburgh team, who are up three-nothing. Josh is literally still getting high-fives for the John Travolta/Oprah sequence.
“Pepé Le Pew was a skunk,” that girl says again, in case I didn’t hear her, which I did.
“Well, who was it?” asks my “hot as balls” teammate, who never even tried to guess during my round, not even once.
“I thought we weren’t showing clues,” I say, but now nobody puts up a fight, and so I hold up the celebrity for him to see.
“Mario Lemieux?” he goes. “You do
n’t know who Mario Lemieux is?”
“One of the most legendary Penguins of all time,” somebody else adds.
Ugh. A hockey reference. The clue might as well have been written upside down, in Arabic.
“Jesus, you call yourself a Pittsburgher?”
“No.” I sit down. “I’m from Cleveland.”
The “hot as balls” guy leans forward. Now I see what he’s doing. He’s impressing this girl next to him. “You could have literally just said, ‘This guy’s first name was one of the most iconic Nintendo characters of all time.’ ”
I try not to scrunch my eyebrows at him, but whoops.
“Super Mario Brothers,” he goes. “Hello? Are you secretly ninety?”
The girl next to him giggles and whaps his shoulder in a “You big lug” kind of way. They are definitely doing it later tonight.
I hug my knees. I am the last American virgin.
“So, whose birthday is next?” Carly tries to say, but it’s as if the soundman forgot to turn on her microphone; that’s the effect her prompt has. Nothing.
I get up to take the ruined corn chips to the kitchen—also to launch an investigation into whether my face is incredibly hot or incredibly cold (it’s one or the other)—and as I set the bowl in the sink, a spider crawls out from beneath the windowsill and startles me enough that I back up, hard, into somebody.
“Sorry,” I say. With my luck, it’s probably the girl whose bright white jeans were splashed with Fanta.
Nope. It’s worse.
“No problem.”
It’s Amir. We made actual physical contact and I didn’t even have the benefit of experiencing it face-to-face.
I mumble something and duck my head down, sidestepping out of the kitchen, taking great notice of the floor, of exquisite dust bunnies and a fascinating paper clip, of anything but up.
“We should go,” Geoff says, when I nearly crash into him, too. “First shift at Loco Mocha.”
But that’s not what he’s saying, or what he’s meaning, anyway. “The minute we got your air conditioner today,” is what he’s really saying, “we should have just gone back to install it and never let you leave home again.”
That’s the one dangerous thing about having a best friend. You can always tell when they’re glad not to be you.
CHAPTER SEVEN
We have to pull off of I-79 because Geoff’s Corolla is running super low on gas. Usually he just fills it up for free at his dad’s dealership—did you know car dealerships have their own on-site gas stations? I didn’t—so tonight Geoff is in his version of a pissy mood because he actually has to pay to refill his tank.
Geoff’s version of pissy is still pretty optimistic.
“Hey, Quinny,” he says, sticking his head through the driver’s window from outside. “Can you pump for a second? I actually really have to take a leak.”
Sure. I unbuckle and walk around and take the nozzle from him, and when he stumbles away a little bit, I go, “Are you, like, sober enough to drive?” and he goes, “Now you ask me,” which isn’t exactly an answer.
It’s been a while since I’ve pumped gas. Annabeth drove our only car, that day. We haven’t gotten it replaced.
“Holy shit, Quinn Roberts,” I hear. Even though the pump clicks off at that very moment, my hand reflexively turns back into a fist, clamping it back on. Auto-fists are what auto-happen whenever I hear Blake Thompson’s voice.
“Hey, Blake,” I go, unclenching my hand.
“Hey,” he goes.
I turn to see which kind of face he’s making at me. It’s always a face with Blake Thompson, but it’s his arms that I zero in on. They’re overflowing with snack foods—Utz chips and Mountain Dews, you get the idea.
“You want one of these?” he goes. Apparently I’m staring at a Clark Bar.
“No, it’s cool,” I go, and then Geoff’s flip-flops are s-lapping back across the parking lot. He gets in front of me like he’s a mother lioness.
“Need something, Thompson?” Geoff goes. I slink away and open the passenger-side door and just stand behind it as if it’s a shield.
“No, we’re good,” Blake says. He turns abruptly toward his truck, and as he does a Sierra Mist falls out of his arms. It rolls onto Geoff’s foot. Geoff tosses it into Blake’s pickup truck window for him, and Blake takes off without saying anything else, his truck belching smoke, one of his rear taillights blinking like a carnival.
We’re pulling out of the gas station and are a full one minute back into the trip before Geoff goes, “Buckle up”—my mom was always strangely lax about making us buckle up—and then, “That was weird back there.”
I know what he means but I don’t, either. “Yeah,” I say.
“Did Blake give you shit when I was inside?”
“No,” I say, opening Geoff’s glove compartment for a Jolly Rancher. He’s out of my favorite flavor, but I’ll persevere. “No, he didn’t give me shit at all. He was oddly nice.”
“Well, that’s cool,” Geoff goes, turning onto my driveway without using the turn signal. Thank God. It was beginning to bother me how conscientious Geoff has been seeming.
“Yeah,” I say, but I’m not thinking it was cool. I’m thinking I wish Blake had been a total jagoff to me, back in the Marathon Gas parking lot off I-79, because then we’d be back to how life was before December twentieth. Blake Thompson being nice to anybody means they are permanently in the leper category—officially not worth picking on.
I am now the guy people pity. Don’t pity me, people! Make fun of my haircut. My dad’s cologne, even. Treat me like you treat everybody.
“You wanna get out?” Geoff says, because I guess I’m just sitting here in the driveway, buckled up, looking at the birch tree where Annabeth and I tied the stray dog we were so excited to find, which Dad didn’t let us keep.
• • •
I’ve got a Hefty bag out and I’m filling it with three expired Healthy Choices at a time. Then I’m on my knees, twisting open jars of cinnamon applesauce and trying to figure out if anything in the fridge is still edible. QUESTION: Can jelly grow mold? (ANSWER: It can!)
I’m not being that quiet about any of this, either. Mom’s upstairs in her room watching her stories on full blast, so I should be good.
Ten minutes and two full Hefty bags later I’ve moved on to confronting our pantry, which is also where Dad kept this big animal-cracker barrel for loose coins. It’s the most unlikely thing ever, sitting there on the top shelf. In order to put your spare change into it, you have to get out the step stool—which is missing its top ladder rung—and balance on the top without falling and dying. And so we never do.
If this isn’t a metaphor for the Roberts family’s approach to “savings,” I don’t know what is.
Oops, never mind about me not disturbing Mom. I hear her door swing open upstairs and these gravelly voices from her police procedurals filling the stairwell. It’s actually nice to have a man’s voice in the house again.
Surprise: Here she comes.
“Hi, Mama,” I say when she steps off the stairwell, the bun in her hair blocking the fake stained-glass moon in the window above our front door.
“Babe, what’re you up to in here?”
“Just clearing stuff out, Ma. I’ve decided we have to start eating better.”
She negotiates walking quickly into the kitchen, which you’d think would sound like a thunderstorm but is instead something even more ominous—the low groan of a boiler about to explode. That was the original ending of The Shining, by the way: In the novel, the boiler explodes and kills them all. Obviously vastly different from the movie. Spoiler alert.
“Quinny,” Mom says, her forehead in a twist. “Why would you throw away all this good food?”
I pull a Cocoa Krispies box out of the Hefty bag and shake it. There is a delayed response from inside, the cereal ca-chunking against the box like it’s been awakened from the terrible reality of being, well, Cocoa Krispies.
&nbs
p; “I don’t know if we can call this food ‘good,’ Mama.”
“But that was her favorite.”
I lower the box. I stick my head into the Hefty. She’s right. I’ve just completely disrupted the museum that was Annabeth’s life. Shit.
“Well . . . maybe I could toss out some of the stuff she never touched?” I pick out a string cheese from the Hefty bag. Annabeth hated string cheese—even before it was flecked with green, like this one is now. “Like this?”
It starts with a quiver. Mom’s breakdowns always start with a little quiver. Either chin or eyelid, and you really have to be artful about spotting it. She is a beautiful woman but also a large woman.
“I suppose,” she says, but it’s her chin this time. It’s quivering.
I touch her on the shoulder. It’s not okay. She’s not ready for this.
“Go watch your stories,” I say, “and I’ll put everything back.”
She looks away. She is embarrassed. She is grieving. Dammit, Quinn, don’t embarrass your mom. You are smarter than this.
“Just for now,” she says. “For now, I want everything back the way it was. I’m just not ready.” She places her hand on the counter, right on top of that postcard advertising BOLD summer haircuts.
“I’ve gotta pee,” I say, and I dash up the stairs. “I’ll put all the food back in a sec!”
“I took the liberty of doing your whites while you were out!” Mom calls out, just as I’m discovering a stack of underwear outside my bedroom in the most perfect pile you’ve ever seen. I stare at it as if a baby has been delivered to my door.
“You went in my room?” I say. I didn’t have to pee. I just had to get away.
“I’m tired of seeing you in that T-shirt,” she says. “And I cleaned out some of the clutter, too.”
I stomp my foot down once, hard. I’m mad and I don’t know why. Why am I mad to see clean laundry? And then it hits me.
I throw my door open and skid across my floor, rug-burning my knee with something even worse, because I don’t have a rug. Ignore. My lamp topples over, but I ignore that, too, frantic as I pull my desk out from the wall, to search beneath it.