And my mom came over to me and asked how I was doing. But I was doing fine. So she asked Jamie, and Jamie thought it was cool, all of us being there together. And Felicia came over to me and asked was this my first one and I said yes. And she told me that she had been to many in her country, but not so much here and they are different. It seemed that everything was always different in her country.
A bunch of my friends were there, most of the Club Crew and a lot of Burn’s friends too. Plus some of Roxanne’s friends—you could tell who they were by the way they looked. Also Christina, looking superhot, and Maddy and April, two girls I had majorly hooked up with, were there, and it only made me think of how different it would have been with Roxanne, when, as if on cue, she got up to speak. She was saying the nicest things about her mom until she started to cry, and then she waved off the rest of her speech, with a “sorry, Mommy,” sat back down, crying, saying, “I miss you, Mommy. I miss you.”
Of course that got most of the adults crying too and me wondering what was going to happen to the two of them, her and her brother.
Then Burn got up and announced that he and Roxanne were orphans now and that God sucked and so did anyone who believed in God. “So if you do, please don’t bother to talk to me ever again. That’s all. Thank you.”
He was all about rage. I made a mental note not to go anywhere near him.
After it was over, I watched to see if my mom and Felicia ever interacted, but except for a possible mutual nod, they never did.
Then the Burnetts left for the cemetery and we went home. But not for long, because my mom had worked it out with Burn’s aunt to set up for visitors at her house, so we were quickly on our way there, despite our protests.
“Listen to me, the three of you. You are going to do the right thing if it kills you,” she announced to us as she drove us over, in a very uncharacteristic shout which pretty much took the wind out of our complaining.
So there we were, the three of us, each of us on our cell phones talking or texting. I paced the rooms nervously, not feeling comfortable about being in a dead woman’s house and knowing that I was going to have to make conversation with Burn and his sister, both of whom were entirely unpredictable.
Then a limo pulled up and out came the aunt, then some random relatives, and finally Roxanne. No Burn in sight. I found out soon enough that David had taken his mother’s car and left the cemetery on his own.
We were there for hours while other kids came and went and Burn never showed up. Lindsey said about everything that she could possibly say to Roxanne in the first five minutes and then mostly sat with other adults. Jamie found her way into the den and was watching TV, so no problem there. And me, I was going out of my frickin’ mind, watching Roxanne spend time with her friends in another room, waiting for some of my friends to show, which they didn’t, and finally sneaking off to watch TV with Jamie. At least until Roxanne finally tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I could go with her.
I followed her up the stairs, past the closed door that was her mother’s bedroom, past Burn’s room, to the room at the end of the hallway that was hers.
It was a mess. A huge pile of interconnected clothes covered the floor, more clothes draped on her desk and her chair, and another pile on her unmade bed.
“Turn around,” she told me, making me face the wall. Ten seconds later, she said “OK,” and when I turned back to her, she was out of the black dress and into sweats.
She pushed the clothes and the other stuff on the bed onto the floor and motioned to me. “I need you to lie down,” she said, which of course I did, wondering what she had in mind. Was this somehow going to be it? And when I did what she asked, she followed, lying down beside me, facing away from me so that I was staring at the back of her head.
“I need you to hold me,” she said. “And not say anything. Can you do that?”
I put my arms around her. She pulled them tighter, one under and around her, the other around her waist, until we were curled up in a ball.
“If you so much as get a hard-on, I swear to frickin’ Christ I will sic David on you” is what she said with me holding her.
“Don’t worry, I’m here for you” is what I told her, all the time wondering how in hell I was going to control my sixteen-year-old ever-ready love bone. I don’t have to tell you how difficult that was, with her hair smelling like coconut and her body gently heaving because she was quietly sobbing.
But I was able to control it, and soon enough we both fell asleep, with me not feeling like the younger brother of anyone anymore, although I had never actually “slept” with a girl before.
Jamie woke us, standing over us, and I felt completely exposed even though nothing had happened. “Mom says we’re going” was all she said.
Roxanne said she just wanted to stay in bed, so I asked if she wanted me to stay and she said she was OK. I invited her back to my house, told her that she could always stay with us, and she seemed to be back to being Roxanne, because she answered, “Good idea, Crash. I’ll sleep in Lindsey’s room.”
So I told her that I could be there for her whenever she wanted, and so she hugged me again without saying anything at all.
I went back downstairs looking for my mom.
It was superlate. Apparently my mom planned to stay a little longer with Aunt Peesmell. Burn was still MIA. Not my problem, I thought. Except I was feeling terrible for Roxanne and even him. I could not imagine life without my mom. Me and Jamie and even Lindsey talked about that on the way home, Lindsey driving, me in the passenger seat, and Jamie in back, just a normal family for once.
According to Lindsey from what she heard from hanging with the adults, Burn’s aunt was going to take care of them, at least for now, unless Burn became too difficult. What she had told them was that she wasn’t equipped to handle the two of them. Not too big a deal where Roxanne was concerned; she was heading to college in a few weeks anyways. David, however, was a whole other problem, as he still had two years of school left and he was not exactly the most stable kid in the universe.
What she also told my mom, in front of Lindsey, was that my father, the ever-helpful Jacob, had offered his services, if she needed it. What his services consisted of, according to Lindsey, was finding a place for David if he couldn’t make it work at Meadows. Finding a place meant, of course, getting Burn into some kind of appropriate school once again. Had this actually happened, I would just be another stoner kid without a book to write or a medal from the mayor or anything else that happened to me as a result of 4/21. Not to give anything away, but of course Burn did not end up going to any Jacob-recommended school.
What Burn did was drive.
Newman once joked that Burn had become like the Forrest Gump of driving, because after school started in September, Burn was hardly around. Everyone knew that he was on the road, which meant that he was on some excursion by himself to another city or another state or upstate New York or wherever his GPS took him.
That was how he dealt with his mother’s death. Newman said that maybe he was looking for his mom in all those places. Kenny, who probably knew Burn best, said he just wanted the solitude of being in a car.
Whatever. All I know was Burn was all about driving during the beginning of junior year.
How Roxanne dealt was another story entirely.
Chapter Eighteen
How Roxanne Taught Me History
Roxanne went retro.
That’s what Aunt Peesmell told my mom, who stayed in touch with her in the weeks after the funeral. What she meant was that Roxanne had apparently decided that she wanted to be a hippie, even though there were like no hippies left. This transition took place after Roxanne was rummaging through some of her mother’s boxes in Aunt Peesmell’s attic and found pictures of her mom all decked out in clothes from the sixties. After searching some more, she found the actual clothes and tried them on and then decided never to take them off again. Not only that, she started shopping at vintage stores in the
city, finding more vintage clothes and apparently deciding to singlehandedly bring back the look.
So when I ran into her on Main Street at the end of September, I hardly recognized her. In fact I might not have recognized her at all, except for her screaming out:
“Yo, Crashinsky, why in frickin’ hell haven’t you called me?”
She was in a bright shirt that had peace signs all over it, making her look like one of those Grateful Dead/Phish heads that are always traveling to see some jam band or another. She also had what she called granny glasses on. Plus long hair, blond hair, and I couldn’t figure out how she managed to grow it out so quickly.
“It’s a frickin’ wig, Crashinsky,” she had to tell me, making me feel stupid when she caught me staring. “I dyed my hair to match it. You like?”
I did, actually.
Turns out she never made it to college in California, and had decided at the last minute to stay home with Burn, which meant that she enrolled in a school in Manhattan so that she could commute. Which, after all was said and done, she didn’t mind, because she loved spending time in the city with her real friends and didn’t want to leave them anyways. And by the way, how was Lindsey doing, she asked, but she knew and I knew that she wasn’t really interested, so I said OK, even though I didn’t actually know, since it had been like three weeks since school started for both of us and I hadn’t actually talked to my sister since she left.
“I heard the new Jackass movie is opening this weekend—you wanna go?” she asked, and even though I had plans with the entire Club Crew for opening night, I said sure. And she said, “I’ll call you,” and I said, “Sure,” and then she hugged me for a long time before she left, and I got to watch her continue her stroll down Main Street like she was a visitor from another time.
She never called, which didn’t surprise me at that point. I didn’t call her either, which I didn’t think I could do, even though I kind of obsessed about it for a few days, even to the point of actually picking up the phone before giving up.
Instead, I ended up blazing and going to see Jackass Number Two with my boys, which was way, way better than the first one, if nothing else just for Johnny Knoxville, who was back in a big way and taking even more risks than my hero Steve-O.
And school sucked again for me, except for the social scene, which was heating up as the girls were getting more into drinking and the guys were getting into experimenting with everything, which made it more difficult to concentrate in school and virtually impossible to do any kind of homework.
This being my junior year, which was apparently considered to be the most important for purposes of getting into college, my mom was determined not to sit back and watch me do poorly again. Also, ACTs and SATs and all kinds of other college tests were coming up, and half my grade already had tutors coming to their houses to teach them how to take these tests, which meant that I was going to have to have one of those guys as well, which was scheduled for every Saturday morning at nine, and which, I don’t have to mention, wasn’t working at all. And just as I was starting to seriously drown in schoolwork, my mom came up with a master plan that would, if all things went well, put me on a path to success. No, not another type of drug, or after-school courses, or biofeedback, or a gluten-free diet; those were last year’s solutions. This year, she found me the perfect tutor.
Roxanne Burnett.
Caroline Prescott had arranged everything without consulting me first and without having any clue as to the possible implications as far as I was concerned. Her logic was infallible. After all, Roxanne was, academically, as brilliant as Burn was. She was available, she needed the money, and she told my mom that I was a “good kid” and she seemed to think we could work well together, which, of course meant that my mom already had had direct conversations with her, so she was in on this.
In fact, it was all set. I was supposed to go over there Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, and after doing my homework with Roxanne, whose schedule coincided with mine on those days, my mom would pick me up after. For that, my mom was going to pay Roxanne twenty-five dollars an hour. Which gave her motivation to have me over. And my mom promised it would be way different from the time that Lindsey tried to tutor me.
The fifteen-second scene from Billy Madison flashed before my eyes, with Adam Sandler’s teacher-girlfriend challenging him to learn by removing one article of clothing for every correct answer that Billy gives her. I pictured myself on a bed, with Roxanne across the room, slowly removing her jacket just like Billy’s girl. Yeah, it could be way different from the time that Lindsey tried to tutor me.
Even so, when I showed up for my first tutoring session, I was beyond nervous, and not because I didn’t know which Roxanne I would be dealing with, the one who wanted me to lie in bed with her when her mom died or the one who considered me to be a “good kid,” words that stayed in my brain after my mom mentioned them, but because I was smart enough to know that while she knew that I wasn’t the sharpest kid in high school, the truth was she didn’t actually know how smart or stupid I really was. After all, there was a part of me that was always able to keep up with her sarcasm, so despite the fact that she was older than me and into entirely different things than me, somehow we connected on a certain level, because I was able to deflect her in my own way. Meaning she was fire, more fire than Burn was, and probably most people were scared of her. I mean, they had a right to be scared of her, because she saw you for who you were, not who you pretended to be. So I was pretty sure that when she actually got a chance to review my schoolwork, when she actually started to read my handwriting and my class notes, she would know, she would totally know that I was an idiot.
Let’s face it, if I could have made things better at school, I absolutely would have. I would have listened more carefully if I could have, taken better notes if I could have, been better organized if I could have.
Except I couldn’t.
I just couldn’t follow the conversations of my teachers, or read a word of my notes, or keep my books in order, or prepare for tests and papers due, because my stupid motherfucking mind could not, no matter how fucking hard I tried, keep up. And once Roxanne opened my notebook, she would know, and it would change her opinion of me forever.
Which was exactly how I was feeling standing in the hallway of Aunt Peesmell’s massive Victorian house, which still smelled like urine, while Aunt Peesmell yelled up to Roxanne, who was in her bedroom down at the very end of the hall in the room where a few weeks before I lay beside her and smelled her hair.
“The Crashinsky boy is here.”
No response, leaving me holding my backpack until it got heavy, not sure whether to put it down or back on my shoulders, thinking maybe it was a setup by Burn or something. Then, footsteps, and then there she was, at the top of the stairs wearing more sixties stuff, a black-and-white miniskirt dress thing, and standing in a way that I could almost, but not quite, see all the way up it.
“Time starts now,” she said, looking at her watch. “You have two frickin’ hours to learn something, Crashinsky.”
Once in her room, she motioned for me to sit, pointing to the far corner, so I slouched into the beanbag chair on the floor. She took my backpack and sat cross-legged on her bed, brushing her hair/wig thing as she emptied the contents onto her quilt.
“Are you OK with this?” she asked.
Then I said what I thought was the most perceptive thing that I have ever said. I asked, “Are you?”
She laughed her huge Roxanne laugh. “What the frig is that supposed to mean, Crashinsky?”
I had to laugh too, as I didn’t exactly know what I meant.
She sat on her bed and went through my notebook, smirk-laughing, me feeling just as stupid as Roxanne could make me feel, for like half an hour, with me staring at her looking through my work, and her making occasional random comments:
“Your handwriting sucks.”
“You write like a child. We can fix that.”
She studied
my books for math, then earth science, which I was actually doing OK in, then English, then Spanish, which I was really super sucking at.
“First, history,” she said, finally. “You have a test in two weeks.”
I, of course, had no idea, but it must have been in one of the handouts. Who even thinks about a test two weeks in advance?
She tossed me the book.
“Open to page sixty-eight,” she said, which I did from my corner of the room. “Read it out loud,” which I did, one paragraph, then the next. “Keep going.” So I read and read and read for, like, forever, and she listened as I got to words that I had never seen before and I glossed over them, trying not to make a big deal out of not knowing. But each time she stopped me and asked me if I knew the word or not, and she would tell me the meaning and then tell me, “Go on.”
And when I finally finished the entire chapter, she asked me questions, some of which I knew the answers to and some I had no idea, even though I had just read the passages. And all this under the very watchful, doctorlike eye of Roxanne, staring down at me from her bed.
“Now what?” I asked.
She stood up. Walked across to me. She had these glossy boots on, called them go-go boots. I could practically see my reflection in them when she approached me. Then she stood over me, and I seemed to sink deeper into the beanbag chair.
“What’s the difference between observation and inference?”
“That’s from earth science, not history,” I told her defensively.
“I know where it’s from. What’s the difference?”
I told her how observation was the direct gathering of information using your five senses, and inference was the conclusion based on the observations that you made, pretty much directly reciting the definitions that I remembered hearing in science class on the first day.
“See, you’re not stupid, so get that out of your head now, because we can’t work together if you continue to think you’re stupid and use that as an excuse not to learn, which is what you do. If I didn’t already know how smart you are, I never would have talked to you in the first place, because I frickin’ hate stupid people and most people are stupid, Crashinsky.”
Crash and Burn Page 33