“All right.” My breathing hasn’t recovered. “Well. All right. You’ll make a good journalist someday. Did you—you didn’t tell Harry, did you?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
She doesn’t answer right away. I say, “Please don’t. Reg, please. It’ll kill him to know that he—to know that I—”
“It wouldn’t kill him.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
Then I run out of words. Regina makes zero attempt to rescue me from the silence. It’s hard not to lose your foothold when someone peers inside you, sees all those things you tried the hardest to keep hidden, all those ugly shames you’ve tried to tell yourself aren’t really as bad as they seem. All those lies disintegrate in the light; I could never tell Regina I didn’t take anything from Sandra, that I only ever wanted the best for her.
My lungs pucker into themselves, shrinking against the air I need them to hold. I’m getting a headache. Finally I say, “Do you hate me?”
“Of course not,” she says, and I can’t locate any of what I’m looking for in the flatness in her voice. “How could I? Now you and Harry are my best friends.”
I’m still reeling when I get off the phone and go out into what’s left of the living room. My dad is stretching packing tape over all the boxes stacked up to the ceiling, and my mom is working on the binder she plans to leave the new tenants with instructions for the garden. How foreign it feels that just a few months ago I was worried about leaving them behind next year—worried that I’d miss them, that the house would feel empty with just the two of them in it.
“I will do anything if you let me still go to MV,” I say. “Please. I’ll do anything.”
They exchange a long glance across the dining/kitchen area. My mom says, “That isn’t possible.”
“I’ll take the bus, I—”
“It’s against the rules.”
“But it’s so close to the end of the year. I’ll be so careful. They aren’t going to care this close to June. Did you already do the green card notification?”
My dad looks at me blankly. “What do you mean?”
With a green card, you’re supposed to notify officials within ten days of moving—I learned that when I went to look up whether it was true what my mom said that it would make his getting a new job more complicated. (A little, maybe, but not the way she was implying.) “The address change. Can we just wait until June? Then it won’t be on any records that I stopped living in the district.”
“Daniel—” my mom says.
“I looked up what happens if you get caught, and it’s a misdemeanor in the absolute worst-case scenario. But it said nothing ever happens because they don’t have time to go around prosecuting people for forgetting to give their address, and if you get fined, I’ll pay the fine. Just—please. I won’t ask for anything like this again.”
I feel a little sick, the corners of the room wobbling. I stare at where the living room couch used to be. And Regina was right, I think—because I start to ask the other questions, too, but then I don’t.
My mom turns away. She folds her arms and she’s staring at the wall, so I can’t see the look on her face. Finally my dad says, “You have just three months at this school and then you’ll be at RISD, Daniel. Think about that part instead.”
The new school is enormous and ugly, all gray cement and darkened windows, an island of a city block on a street made up of long flat houses and a faded medical complex. There is nothing on this street worth looking at, no surprising colors or trees that twist up into the sky or building angles that demand a second glance. At MV I always loved that view of the hills, how out on the fields for PE they rose up like a backdrop behind you and made you feel like you were out on the edge of the known world.
My anger at my parents is a hard lump in my throat. My mom’s already at the Lis’ for the week, and my dad was still on his night shift when I left this morning. I would’ve had nothing to say to either of them anyway. There was a note placed carefully on the table and eleven creased one-dollar bills (Daniel, approximately three-quarter of a mile from here is Q Baguette, which is close enough for you to walk. Go only there after school to purchase banh mi and then come directly home. I will be home by nine). It was still mostly dark when I woke up, and I took a shower with the door open because it felt safer to keep close by to any alarming noise from outside. The whole way to school I kept checking over my shoulder. I’d thought maybe the feeling would break open when I actually got here, that the place would carry that bland bureaucratic reassuring schooly feel schools sometimes do even when they aren’t yours, but this one doesn’t. Even the mascot (a mustang baring its teeth in a giant mural painted on what’s probably the gym) looks menacing. I’ve never trusted horses.
I keep hoping to hear something, anything, from Harry. Last night I finally gave in and texted him thanks for helping me pack, but he never wrote back. My stomach’s been in knots all morning.
I didn’t text Regina. I started more than once, but every time I lost my nerve.
A bell rings, the sound tinny and sharp compared to our bell at home. I make my way down the hallway toward where I think the office is, hating everything about this place. The other kids here feel different, too, all blurred into that indistinguishable mass of thousands of people utterly indifferent toward you.
“Yo homo,” someone calls across the hallway. Something in my heart seizes, some fist clutching all the chambers of my heart. I tell myself not to turn my head. Then in my peripheral vision a slim white guy in fitted jeans ducks his head and tries to walk faster. He passes me.
“Hey, come back, I’m talking to you.” It’s another white dude, one with a casually merciless grin. His voice is pitched unnaturally high and cruel, a mocking lisp inserted like a skewer. “Come back.” The other guy walks faster, toward an open classroom door.
“Come—dammit—” The guy’s already gone in. He yells toward the door, “How come you never call me back, huh? How come you never pick up my calls?”
The people around me kind of laugh. Mostly not, though—mostly, in a way that tells me everything I need to know about this place, everyone ignores it. Something cracks in my resolve. Maybe it’s because everyone I know is too stressed out about actual things that matter, or maybe it’s because I go to school with two thousand people who are probably considering running for president someday, who knows, but the people I know are better than that.
Unexpectedly—this is embarrassing—my eyes well up. I think on some level I always had some idea that living in Cupertino and going to a school like MV was a bubble—that if you whisked any one of us away and plunked us down in some high school in, say, Indiana, the rules would be so different that all the things we’d worked so hard to build ourselves would crumble. You felt it sometimes at away games if you went to go watch and you could feel all the ways you wouldn’t belong there, that hyperawareness of how to an outside eye you’d look exactly the same as everyone you were there with, that same feeling I remember getting sometimes when my family would take road trips and we’d drive through Podunk middle-of-nowhere towns and I’d feel that same mix of superiority and self-consciousness, that simultaneous need to prove my separateness from my family and also my belonging to it, that sense it’s the group of you versus the world. But I’ve never felt all that so keenly as I do right now. It’s difficult to breathe.
The office is at the end of the hall, its windows looking out into the hallway. When I go in the person at the front desk doesn’t look up. I stand there in front of her desk for five minutes, watching them play out on the clock, trying to psych myself up to hand over my forms and consign myself to a life here. My heart is pounding and I feel that pressure behind your eyes you get when you’re about to lose it. She never glances up.
And right then, just as I’m about to say something, my phone buzzes and I get a feeling and I know without even checking it’s Harry. I’m right. It’s a se
lfie of him making a sad face, his lower lip jutting out, and he’s written: this sucks. Fyi.
A rush of pure, euphoric relief. All the worry that’s been coursing through me lifts. There’s a tingling feeling that runs up my legs. And—here in this god-awful place I have no business being in, this stupid detour my life has taken—some part of me zooms back to that day in my dad’s lab and how I watched all those people’s atoms revolting against their own aloneness, leaping into a tandem existence with the people they loved. And that’s what this is. I was thinking of him, and he felt it. I was terrified I ruined everything, but we’ve been through too much together. I’m forty minutes and however many miles away, but he still felt me. And I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life: I need to figure this out between us. I need to see it through. I can’t just fade out of his life like this, not in these last months we have before the future. Whatever it is with us, whatever it’s going to be—I need to be there for it. I am not trashing my best shot at happiness for this shitty building full of shitty people.
So I do the only thing that feels reasonable, which is: I turn back around and walk out the door.
Walking home I work out what I’ll do, and then I spend the rest of the day trying to draw. It’s Mr. X’s face that keeps emerging from my pen no matter what I try—the hard set of his eyes, his sneer. Finally I give in and draw him talking to me, looking at me like I’m a filthy and disgusting thing. I try to, at least. I work on shading in the area around his eyes, trying to make it look like he’s staring you down. It just makes him look like a raccoon. The conversation goes roughly like this:
Mr. X: What if they’re really trying to hide something? They’re hiding out from Ballard, and you’re fucking it up? Your parents will kill you if they find out.
Me: I’m sure it isn’t like that.
Mr. X: No, you’re not sure. You aren’t sure of anything. You don’t know shit.
Me: Well, I’m sure they’re handling all this in the stupidest way imaginable. I’m definitely pretty sure of that.
Mr. X: What, exactly, do you think they should do? Huh?
Me: I mean: get a loan, or—
Mr. X: That’s what you think? You think they should ruin their own lives and their own plans so you can hang out with your friends at school a few more months? Probably won’t even talk to any of them after you graduate. You want your parents miserable because of you?
Me: The school was terrible.
Mr. X: And?
Me: I can’t go there.
Mr. X: You think you’re such a special snowflake you’re too good to go to anywhere but your one precious school? You think the world owes it to you to pay your way when you can’t do it yourself? News flash: you can’t go there. You’re too poor. You literally cannot afford to go there.
Me: I’ll figure out a way. This is important to me.
Mr. X: The world is not lining up to give you the things that are “important” to you. The world owes you nothing. You want something, you earn it yourself. You don’t freeload off the rest of us.
Me: No one needs me to go to a new school. I don’t owe that to the world.
Mr. X: You owe it to the world to follow the damn rules and stop telling yourself you’re entitled to something you couldn’t pay for.
I don’t know what to tell him. The world owes us nothing, maybe; you could look at it that way. Or you could look at the world like you love it and you expect something from it because of that, because that’s the only reason you can ever expect anything from anyone.
Or something. Maybe that’s not quite what I want to say, but it’s something. The drawing, though—it’s nothing. It’s flat and lacks any kind of heat or energy. It’s technically fine, as in obviously the guy has a nose and a mouth and all his parts, but there’s nothing to it. This is what keeps happening—a total lack of perspective, I guess. It used to work, and it doesn’t anymore.
At 3:23, long enough after the last bell’s rung and he’s had time to talk to the millions of people he always has to talk to every day but not so long that he’s already driving, I call Harry.
“Day one,” he says when he picks up. The sound of his voice feels like home. “It sucked about as much as I thought it would. How about you? How was the new school? Was it trash?”
I don’t think Regina told him anything—he’d sound different, I think, or he’d say something. “Right. Um, about that—on a scale of one to ten, how bad would it be if I just…kept going to MV?”
“Wait, did your parents say yes?”
“Not…exactly.” This is my plan: I’ll tell my parents I signed up for zero period, which starts at 6:15, and every day I’ll take the bus to Cupertino and just keep going to MV. It’s only four more months.
I’ve never taken the bus in my life, so I looked up how it works, and that was the first hurdle: to get to Cupertino by 7:35, which is when first period starts, I have to get on the 5:09 bus (which: eff). They wouldn’t believe I need to be leaving the house at like 4:55 to get to school, and so I landed on this: I’ll say I joined the swim team. I wanted to meet people at the new school and the swim team lets everyone join.
“That’s a stupid idea,” he says immediately. “Probably your stupidest ever.”
I guess I could’ve predicted that it would be too far outside the rules for him, a breach of the system. “Yes, but—”
“Do it anyway.”
“Really? You think I should?”
“I mean—no, technically, I don’t think you should, I think it’s risky and probably really dumb, but—I mean, Danny, come on, you expect me to tell you I’d rather you wait out the year in some crappy school forty minutes away? You want me to say it doesn’t make a difference to me whether or not you’re here? If that’s what you wanted someone to tell you, I’m not the person you should’ve called.”
A little after nine, I hear carpet-muffled footsteps in the outside hall and then a key jostling against the doorknob. My heart forgets itself, going quiet for a beat in my chest. Funny how your whole day can be angled toward waiting for someone to get back, and then when they do, you wish you had more time.
It’s not like you can hide in an apartment like this, though, as much as I’d like to stay holed up in here permanently, so I go out there. I do a final run-through of the lies I’ve been rehearsing all day.
My dad’s sitting on the couch/pullout bed, and his belt with the walkie-talkie is sprawled across the couch like taking it off was the first thing he did. He says, “What happened with school?”
He has dark smudges under his eyes and his hair is stringy, and there’s a new hollowness carving itself out under his cheekbones. I can feel how badly he wants not to have this conversation, wants not to have one more thing to worry or feel guilty about. “Did it go all right? You’re enrolled?”
“All enrolled.”
“Do we have to sign anything?”
“No.”
“Was there any trouble?”
My palms are sweating. I try to force my voice to come out casual. “No, it’s all taken care of. They just needed the forms.”
“Well, good. Did you get all the same classes?”
“Ah—yeah. Pretty much.”
“Did they give you a schedule?”
“I think I find out the first day I go.”
He frowns. “You didn’t go today?”
“Oh—no, they told me to come back tomorrow. They have to like process the paperwork and everything.”
“I see.” He leans back again. “Is there any left over from your sandwiches?”
“Oh—sorry, I didn’t know you wanted—”
“That’s okay.” He glances toward the kitchen like maybe he’ll go see if anything materialized, and then gives up, sinking deeper into the couch like he would meld into it if he could, shed his tired body.
A good person, the kind of person I’ve always wanted to be, would feel compassion for him. Would offer—having sat at home most of the day—to maybe put
together something for him to eat or go out and get him another sandwich. Maybe that’s the kind of daughter my sister would’ve turned out to be.
And I know that’s my duty, since she never got the chance. And I also know that if there’s any kind of real karma in this world I’m not exactly in a safe position to nurse my anger.
But still. Looking at him there, exhausted, like his day and probably the past months won’t leave him alone and like probably he regrets all the off-ramps he could’ve taken away from this last stop, all I can think is: Good.
An hour-and-forty-five-minute bus ride starting at 5:09 every morning is, if possible, even more exhausting than it sounds. When my alarm goes off my whole chest cavity feels hollow and aching and I have to drag myself out of bed. I don’t know if I can do this every morning.
But then on the bus I text Harry to complain and he tells me he’ll get there early to hang out. At 6:54, when the bus stops, I see him stopped on the side of Stelling with his hazard lights on, his car spilling over the bike lane halfway into the street. He’s reading on his phone, oblivious to the stream of cars displaced around him when I get in.
“Pretty sure you aren’t supposed to be parked here,” I say, right as someone honks.
Harry waves it off. “It’s practically dark out still and there’s no one on the road. They can go around me.”
The relief I feel at seeing him in person balloons around me, filling the car so thickly between us it actually makes him seem farther away. I can’t stop smiling. I imagine my alternate-universe self making my way through the other school right now, how miserable I would be. This was the right choice. This was the only choice.
Harry has a long external monologue about whether we have time to go to Philz and back before first period starts, finally settling on no (you’re already breaking the rules, so let’s not tempt fate), and so instead we go hang out in the Journalism Lab. It’s mostly dark when we go in, the soft on-off dimming of the power lights glowing like forty tiny heartbeats across the computers. Harry runs his hand up the bank of light switches, and the room wakes up. I kind of miss the darkness. You feel closer to people inside it.
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