Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  I’m lucky. A cool group and a cool project, as far as school stuff goes. Mr. Ericson wants us to “draw and analyze a symbol for our society.” We are going to be reading the novel Animal Farm. But first we’re going to analyze our own society on a symbolic level. We don’t know how to do it, but it seems like a cool project.

  “Are we just going to look at the United States?” I ask. “Or more globally?”

  Sam speaks up, something he never does in class. “We should focus on the United States as an island. Wait. Is an island a symbol?” He looks embarrassed.

  Tabitha looks surprised. Sam’s a jock. Tabitha and her friends think that group has the IQ of a shoulder pad. I glance at his flushed cheeks. Maybe the jock image is just a cover. After all, it doesn’t always pay to be the smart kid in high school. Only so many of the smart kids get to hang on the fringes of popularity in the semi-popular student-council, honors classes crowd. And Tabitha and her friends have that market cornered.

  “It could be,” she nods. “Do you mean in the way the United States isolates itself in its own gluttony?”

  He shrugs. “It was just an idea.” The confidence I’m used to seeing in him seems to be hiding out in the letterman jacket slung over the back of his chair.

  Trey leans forward. “No. It’s a good idea.”

  I nod at him. “Really good. A lot of potential.”

  There’s that Colgate smile. Like the sun. I remember what Emily said at the game. What’s sad about his family?

  Tabitha sits straight up. “Hey. We could draw a big picture of the country as an island, separated from the rest of the world by its own corporate control systems—McDonald’s and Starbucks and Gap. We could play music clips to support our ideas.”

  Trey starts to sketch a cartoon-like picture of the United States adrift in a choppy sea.

  “Wow, Trey.” Sam peers over his shoulder at the Gap model emerging like a weed from the soil of the island.

  The bell rings. Sam stands, collecting his binder. Amber is by his side before the bell finishes ringing. He gives a wave as she curls her arm through his and pulls him toward the door. At the door, he turns back to us.

  “Maybe we should meet after school one day this week to pull it all together, like Thursday or something?”

  Tabitha agrees for all of us.

  Feeling my face flush, I gather up my binder and Walkman and meet Drew at the door, hoping he doesn’t notice my red face.

  CHAPTER 8

  ANOTHER FIRST KISS

  …the dock of the boardwalk is screaming with summer people in shorts and burned noses; my mother eats a caramel apple and smiles big and sloppy at me. A faraway radio plays They Might Be Giants as two people embrace on the curved moon of green grass near the boardwalk edge. Seeing them, my mother stops smiling and tosses the half eaten apple in a garbage can…

  “I’m going to be late today,” I tell my mom. “I’m meeting a friend.”

  “No set painting?” she asks, stretching out on the floor of the kitchen in her yoga tights.

  “Alexa’s out of town for the weekend with her parents.” I slurp cereal from my duck bowl and watch my mom bend her head to her knee.

  “That’s nice,” she says, muffled. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”

  My eyes stray to the cabinet where I found my father’s picture.

  “Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you ever wonder where Dad is?”

  She stops stretching and looks up at me. “He’s at work.”

  “Not Rob. Dad. My father.”

  I look at the soggy remains of my cereal in the bottom of the bowl, waiting. Outside, the fog is starting to thin, and I can just make out the tall eucalyptus tree in the neighbor’s yard.

  She stands and grabs the towel she’d been sitting on.

  “No, I don’t,” she says as she leaves the room. I rinse my duck bowl and go to school.

  ***

  This afternoon the theater is dark inside, the set a strange ghost in shadows, sitting ready for opening weekend on Friday. Rehearsal’s not until five tonight. I wait for Sam outside, clutching our class poster. He missed class today, so I told him I’d show him our project.

  “So let’s see the goods.” Sam walks up beside me, his backpack slung over his left shoulder. I unroll the picture and show him, pointing to the green A in the circle.

  “Sweet,” he says, his eyes scanning Mr. Ericson’s response. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a perfect score on anything before. Good thing I got into a smart group.”

  “You’re smart,” I say, taking the paper back and rolling it into a tube.

  He shrugs. We stand for a moment in silence, waiting. It seems stupid now that we met here. I could have read him the comments over the phone.

  “Do you have to go?”

  “No,” I say quickly.

  “Do you want to go for a walk or something?” Sam has a way of looking past my shoulder when he talks to me. Like he’s looking for someone. Maybe he doesn’t want people to see us talking. I feel nervous and strange in my sweatshirt, my baggy jeans.

  I say, “What about Amber?”

  I don’t really care about Amber, but it seems like something to say. She’s always hanging on him after class or passing him tiny notes folded into triangles branded with pink penned hearts and smiling faces.

  “Amber and I don’t go out,” he says, this time looking at me, eyebrows raised. “We’re not together anymore. Besides, it’s just a walk. I’m not getting us a room.”

  “I know.” I falter and look at my feet. They seem big in my shoes, clunky like battleships attached to the ends of my legs. Amber wears shoes that make her three inches taller and seem a part of her long, tan legs. Her lipstick matches her pink plastic sandals.

  We don’t talk on the way out to the beach. Our feet move in time with each other, and I’m aware of the way he waits a little for me, slowing his natural pace. He’s wearing his grandfather’s letterman jacket; the wool is old and soft. Light hangs around the edge of his profile, a force field. I’m a girl with old sweatshirts and battleship feet and no lipstick at all. He is too cute to be walking with me.

  “I really admire you, Calle,” he says, finally.

  We stop at a rim of hardened sand that crumbles slowly onto the powdery beach. Tiny tufts of grass hang around, and there are shells, cracked and bleached white with sun. The sky is a thin colorless blue. I find it hard to believe that he would admire me. I feel plain and bulky and wrong in the salt air that breathes around us.

  “Oh?” I don’t want to say something stupid, so I try not to say much.

  He looks out at the sea. “You’re so smart, and you don’t care what other people think of you.”

  “I care.” I care very much what you think of me, I want to say to him but don’t.

  He sits down and motions for me to sit next to him, our legs dangling from the lip of sand. My stomach churns with nerves.

  “What I mean is you’re not that stupid, manufactured pretty that the other girls are…you’re just your own pretty. You’re just you.” He looks at me sideways. “I admire that.”

  “I’m not pretty.” I look straight ahead at the waves. The conversation seems unreal, something that should be happening to another girl. A girl on TV. Not to me.

  “You’re pretty. And smart. And just…not like everyone else.”

  I’m strange. I get it. We’ve established that.

  “What’s your mom like?” he asks.

  What a weird question to ask me. “She’s okay,” I say. “Very pretty and funny.” And not at all like me. “She makes some dumb choices in men, moves us around a lot. But she’s doing her best, I guess.”

  “So you’re close.” He looks a little sad for a moment. He kicks at the sand with his heel and stares at the ocean.

  “We sort of have to be,” I tell him. “It’s just us. I don’t have anyone else.”

  “Dad?”

  I tell him about my father.


  “Do you ever wonder about him?” He moves his hand to cover mine; it’s warm like the sun on my face.

  “One time,” I find myself telling him, “I found a newspaper clipping about his band.”

  “He’s in a band?”

  I nod, watching the light hit the water, sending small sprays of diamonds across the waves. “He’s a musician. Plays in a band called ‘Wonderland’—at least he used to. I found the clipping in one of my mom’s books.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  “She wouldn’t say much. Just that she didn’t know if he was still playing. She took the article. We don’t talk about it. You know the funny thing is, until recently, I didn’t really think much of him. He was just…” I search for the right word. “He wasn’t real. Like a character from a movie you don’t notice. Like someone at another table in the restaurant where the main character is eating.”

  Acutely aware of his hand on mine, I tell him the story. Our moves. My different schools. The Fords.

  “How do you even deal with it?”

  I watch a gull dive at the water and come up empty. “It’s just what we do. There’s this Indigo Girls song called ‘Leaving.’ Have you heard it?” He shakes his head. “In the song, the singer basically says that leaving is the only thing she knows how to do. That’s like us. It’s what we know.”

  He nods. “I’ve lived here my whole life. Sometimes I wish I could just start over in a new place, a new life.”

  “It has its benefits,” I tell him, looking out at the water, the sand, the calling gulls—the landscape of his whole life. The subject of my father seems closed. I’m relieved. How can I explain something that feels so uncertain, like sand slipping through my fingers?

  “What about all your friends?” he asks. His hand is growing hot; it’s distracting me, dismantling me. I try to concentrate on his words as they come to me, but the air in my chest is tight.

  “I have my journal and my headphones.” I laugh a little, a forced, nervous laugh, thinking of our hands, of the information I’ve so easily given him.

  “A boyfriend?” He stops kicking the sand and looks closely at me.

  A real laugh now. “Hardly.”

  He looks surprised. “What about Eli? I always see you with him at school.”

  I’m amazed that he notices me at school. “Nope,” I say. “Eli’s just a friend.”

  “You listen to that CD player a lot.”

  “It’s a way to pass the time, you know.” I don’t tell him that it’s so much more than that, the record of my days.

  “If you’re so into music, you should get an iPod.”

  Without thinking, I say, “We can’t really afford one.” Not wanting him to think we’re poor or something, I rush on. “Besides, my mom’s ex-boyfriend Ted gave me this. It’s the only thing I have of his.”

  He nods. “So it’s special.”

  “Yeah.” I give myself a mental kick for the ‘can’t afford it’ comment. So not cool.

  “Who’s your favorite band?”

  I shrug. “Don’t have one. My music taste is kind of all over the place. I like a lot of ’90s stuff, older than that even. I like a song if I can hear it again years later and still like it.”

  “Me too,” he says. “But we’ve got to get some newer stuff on your playlist. Some Katy Perry or the Black Eyed Peas at least.”

  My heart stirs. “Okay.”

  We sit for a minute and soak in the sounds of the beach. I don’t tell him about “Tambourine Man” even though it’s tapping against the back of my mind, anxious to be shared. Then Sam takes his hand away, digs into his backpack, and produces a bottle of water.

  “Thirsty?”

  I shake my head. He takes a long drink. My hand feels light, like it could float away.

  “Actually, yes.” I reach for the bottle and take a drink, wanting something to put my hand around. When my lips touch the rim, I realize that he just drank from it, that his mouth was here.

  Before I can hand the bottle back, he leans into me. His kiss is water and salt and sun, and I only wish that there were music, so that someday I’ll remember this when I hear it play.

  CHAPTER 9

  YELLOW

  In the pewter light of early morning, my mother croons along to Coldplay on the radio, her knees propped up against the steering wheel of the parked moving van. She eats powdered donuts from a white box, and the sugar sifts down on her chest like snow. I wonder how she can sing so loud when she’s spent all night crying over another man…

  Sam wears a yellow shirt that deepens his olive skin. Today I see that shirt everywhere. I watched the yellow shirt getting hot chocolate from the cafeteria window this morning. I saw the yellow shirt at break, lounging on the bench across from the boys’ bathroom with Jake Simon and Ray Herrara.

  Now the yellow shirt sits in the library bent over a book. I finish making a photocopy of the New Yorker article I’m using for my English paper and return the magazine to the front desk.

  “Hey, Calle.” Sam spots me.

  I slide into the chair across from him.

  “Hey.” My face is warm from the heat he seems to give off. All I can think of is that kiss yesterday at the beach. I want to seem relaxed, casual. I hope my face isn’t the neon sign it feels like, flashing, “You kissed me…you kissed me…you kissed me.”

  “Working away your lunch?” He nods at the article in front of me on the table.

  “You too. Isn’t there actually a rule about football players in the library?”

  “Ouch.” He smiles and cups a hand under his chin. “I have a math test next period. Treveli’s class.”

  “Known for the tests from the seventh level of hell.”

  He taps his pencil on the open page and makes a face. “Quadratic formula. Very essential information to my life.”

  I would never reveal in a million years that I actually find the quadratic formula somewhat interesting. “No kidding.”

  “So, are you coming over this afternoon?”

  “Am I still invited?”

  “Of course.”

  He looks over his shoulder at the sound of people entering the library. Chela Walters, one of Amber’s friends, walks through the door with her usual pack of friends. They look straight off the cover of CosmoGirl.

  Sam’s smile disappears. “Treveli said that we could come early for help if we wanted it.” He starts gathering up his books. “I’ll see you later, okay? Four o’clock?”

  “Oh, okay.” I sit up straighter. “Yeah. Four.” I watch him hurry out of the library, nodding to Chela and then pushing through the heavy glass doors.

  Outside, I see the yellow shirt heading nowhere near Mr. Treveli’s classroom.

  ***

  I turn my key in the lock, annoyed that I even have to make this stop at home. At lunch today, Eli had the brilliant idea that he could balance a hot dog (complete with bun, mustard, and relish) on the end of his nose. Back arched so that his nose pointed skyward, he balanced that stupid hot dog for three minutes and forty-six seconds before he sneezed and sent the hot dog all over me—and my white shirt.

  So I’m home to change before heading over to Sam’s.

  I push open the door but stop when I hear my mom’s voice. What’s she doing home from work so early? At first I think she’s talking to herself, but I soon realize that she’s on the phone. I start to call to her, but something in her tone stops me. Still in the open doorway, I tip my head, listening.

  “Well, then where is he now?” Her voice is tight, irritated. “Uh-huh…but I thought he had another year?”

  I take a few steps forward into the entryway. Silence. She must be listening to the person on the other end of the phone.

  The door blows shut behind me. I jump. Mom hurries into the entry, the portable phone attached to her ear. She’s wearing a Jack Johnson T-shirt and a pair of Rob’s pajama bottoms.

  “I’ll call you back,” she says quickly and clicks off the phone.
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  “Hi, Mom!” I say too brightly.

  “I thought you were meeting a friend?” She tries to smile but looks more nervous than anything else.

  “I thought you were at work.”

  “I got off early,” she says. Then she notices my shirt. “What happened to you?”

  “Eli spilled a hot dog on me. I have to change.” We eye each other for a minute. “Who was that?” I nod at the phone.

  She looks at it as if she’s never seen it before. “Oh, no one. Kelly from work. We were just gossiping. About a guy we work with.”

  “Jason?” I ask. My mom works with a guy named Jason who just left his wife for some waitress from Denny’s. I’ve been hearing about it all week.

  She looks guilty. “Yeah. Jason. Kelly’s at work and just wanted to call and chat a bit.”

  I smile at her. “Jeez, and you think Alexa and I are gossip monkeys.”

  I walk by her to my room. After slipping into a new black shirt that my mom bought me last weekend, I find her still in the entry. She is biting her lip, staring at the floor.

  “Mom?” I pick up my backpack.

  She starts. “Oh! Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  She smiles. “Sure. Sure. Just spacing out.” She gives a little wave and disappears into the kitchen.

  Downtown, I walk by OM!, the store my mom works in. I stop and stare in the window. Jason leans on the counter, flipping the pages of a magazine, bored. He is bobbing his head to music I can’t hear. My mom’s conversation tugs at me. I thought Kelly was working today.

  ***

  I knock on Sam’s door at 4:03, having waited down at the bottom of the driveway for more than ten minutes so that I don’t seem too eager. The house is a tall, white Victorian with a wide black driveway. In the front yard, a tree with yellow leaves bends like a dancer. I take a few breaths.

  No one answers, so I ring the doorbell, unleashing a tumbling string of moaning notes. A haunted-house doorbell. Still no answer. I check the address again, 638 Shore View. Iron numbers bolted into the frame of the white porch. I check my watch again. 4:04. From the front step, I can see the ocean, a strip of sheet metal between the autumn-colored trees, silver and then yellow and red. Money buys views like this. Money and luck. I ring the doorbell again and memorize the view.