Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  Sam appears at the door looking flustered and tired, like he’s been sleeping. In jeans and sock feet, he pulls the door behind him and steps out onto the front porch with me.

  “Hi,” he says. His hair looks like he has been running his hands through it for hours.

  “Are you okay?” His eyes seem red. Crying?

  “Umm. Not really.” He steps lightly from foot to foot; the cold of the stoop must eat socks in seconds.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “No big deal. Some family stuff is all. But would you be pissed if I had to cancel today?”

  “No,” I say. Disappointed, yes. Not pissed. “It happens. Anything I can do?”

  “No. No. I just have to go. I’m sorry, Calle. We’ll talk tomorrow at school, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, he ducks back inside.

  ***

  We don’t talk at school the rest of the week.

  In English, he is a gunshot out the door. I don’t try to catch up with him. Now, I’m pissed.

  On Friday, I watch Sam race away, and Drew raises his eyebrows. “Something you want to tell me, Cal?”

  I scoop up my folder and jam it into my backpack. “No. Why?”

  “No sudden interest in football you’d like to discuss?”

  I glare at him. “What, Drew?”

  He holds up his hands in defense. “No implications. Just wondering.” He walks out with me, fiddling with the hem of his “I love mullets” T-shirt.

  Eli joins us in the hallway, linking his arm through mine. He wears shiny red pleather pants. He says, “You ready for tonight?”

  Tonight is opening night of the fall festival one-acts. “Of course.”

  “So,” Eli begins, “a bear walks into a bar and says, ‘I’d like a gin and…” He takes a long pause and then says, “‘Tonic.’ The bartender says, ‘What’s with the pause?’ The bear holds up his paws and says, ‘Well…I’m a bear.’” Eli cracks up.

  Drew looks at him sideways. “What?”

  “Get it?” Eli frowns. “Paws. Pause. Oh, never mind…umpf.” A girl runs into Eli head on.

  Cass Gordon doesn’t apologize. She looks straight at me, her eyes penetrating the fence of hair that falls in front of her face.

  “Whoa. Sorry for driving in your lane,” Eli jokes.

  I try to smile at her, but before I can, she plows away down the hall, mowing over several other people like a street-cleaning machine.

  Eli watches her, fascinated. “That is one weird chick.”

  ***

  At first, I think my eyes are lying, melding together the people I have on my mind and standing them together like toy soldiers. I turn the volume down on the Black Eyed Peas blaring into my ears, but my eyes aren’t lying. They stand pressed into the narrow alleyway created by the foreign language portables.

  Sam and Cass. In a conspiratorial huddle, tipping heads toward each other, whispering, her hand clutching a chunk of his jacket, rooting him there like the mooring of a boat.

  I’m glad they don’t see me. Their huddle is a secretive loop of her clutch and his tilting, nodding head. I step away from the building and head toward my Spanish class across the way from their alley. I cannot even begin to imagine how they know each other: Sam, one of the visible, glowing gems of the campus who knows this place is his turf, and Cass, like a scab on flawless skin, so horribly and embarrassingly not a part of this place.

  They shouldn’t even cross paths, but their talking—her hand on him like they know each other—sends me spinning, jostled like a pack of gum slipping to the bottom of a grocery sack. What could they possibly be talking about?

  ***

  I sit in my plastic Spanish class seat, my CD player a marsupial in the pouch of my sweatshirt, wishing I were at the beach and not here at school where everything seems to slide farther from normalcy each day.

  ***

  The theater hums with a full closing-night house who wait in papery light for the start of the play. I am backstage with a headset that lets me talk to the small lighting booth at the back of the Little Theatre. Alexa is calling the show from the booth. I have been promoted to assistant stage manager backstage because the girl who was supposed to do it switched to home schooling.

  I peek out through the black curtains even though Ms. Hecca told me not to. “If you can see the audience,” she said, “the audience can see you.”

  I look anyway, watching the shuffling of green programs that have my name under “crew” and smelling the chocolate-chip cookies Sara’s mom baked for the show to sell at intermission.

  “Calle?” Alexa’s voice comes over the headset.

  “Yeah?” I click back.

  “Five minutes.”

  I go tell the actors, who smile widely. Sara blows me a kiss from under a messy blond wig. Drew gives me a thumbs-up and pulls a pair of black pants over boxers with hearts on them. He spends most of the play in those boxers and has started wearing them around backstage for luck before putting on the pants he wears in the first scene. His legs are the color of bleached driftwood. Brave man.

  When the house lights dim, I wait for Alexa’s cue to pull the curtain while Drew finds his place center stage. I like being backstage. All of the audience’s attention is focused on the actors while we stay quiet in the dark. From a small folding chair, I listen for my three cues, watching actors change costumes for their next entrance. They switch in and out of their characters in the blink of their exits, focused. I could never get out there, exposed to those waiting eyes.

  At the end, the applause is everywhere at once. Because it’s closing night, Sara, her arms full of roses, pulls me out onstage to bow. The lights sting my eyes; the faces of the audience float and shift.

  Somehow through the glare and floating faces, I know that Sam sees me see him standing in the back. He’s ignored me for two weeks, avoided my eyes in class. Still, I can’t help but smile a little. He gives me a short, quick wave, a salute in midair. The house lights come up. I blink into the softer glow, looking again for Sam, but he’s pushing through the heavy doors into the late fall night.

  CHAPTER 10

  HUMAN NATURE

  …I turn twelve on New Year’s Eve, and for some reason I can’t totally explain, my mother decides to throw me a Madonna party, maybe because she had a Madonna party on her twelfth birthday. People in all versions of Madonna’s rock-star evolution crowd into the living room and bump and grind and…vogue. I sit under the dining-room table and eat an entire package of Nutter Butters…

  “You need to get to class, please.” The yard lady whose name nobody knows stands on the concrete pavement several yards away. “Now. Read your love letters in class.”

  This last comment is unnecessary and a little rude. Still, I gather up my backpack, refold my note, and silently obey orders. I am not one to talk back or make quippy remarks when there could be detention at the other end of it. I can feel her watch me walk the quiet path toward the math building, her walkie-talkie whispering at her hip.

  The note reads:

  Hey, my friend: If you’re going to waste your time here, at least waste it with me. Listen to Green Day’s “Sassafras Roots.”

  I found it wedged into the plastic sleeve of my binder at the end of lunch. Unsigned and written in quick, black letters. I know that song. I love that song.

  I want the note to be from Sam. Maybe more than I actually think it is from him, I want it to be. That would be cool—a cryptic apology of sorts. But inside me, stalking my optimism, is reality. The images of him with Amber, she leaning in close enough that her hair drapes his shoulder; Cass clutching his sleeve; his heroic run of the football; his brisk exit from the theater.

  Chances are, he didn’t write this note. Did he? Does he know I keep songs in my journal? Write down lyrics to cement the memories in ink across the page?

  In math, I rub the folded edge of the note between my fingers until the blue lines of the binder paper are gone, and the paper is as soft as Kleenex. I try to conce
ntrate on the lesson going on at the board, solving for x, finding the value for y. The value of y. Why. Why did he kiss me? Why did he kiss me and then ignore me for weeks?

  I look at my binder. My notes are a mess, and finally I just give up, hoping that the textbook explains the concept well enough for me to figure it out on my own. I want to read the note again, looking for the words beneath the words. A clue. The subtext, Alexa would call it. In theater, the actors have to figure out what’s going on under the lines in order to play the character truthfully. Ms. Hecca does a lot of subtext games with them at rehearsal. To get at the honesty of the line, she says. What is the subtext here in my little secret binder note?

  I tuck the note away in my sweatshirt pocket, letting it sleep alongside my Walkman. I don’t want to risk it getting taken away.

  ***

  I decide that I’ve been imagining things.

  Watching Sam laughing with his friends in the quad at lunch, drinking a soda, thumping Justin Wallen on the shoulder, I realize that maybe he hasn’t been avoiding me at all. I mean, I haven’t exactly approached him.

  This is ridiculous. I should just talk to him. Determined, I cross the lawn to the stone picnic table he sits on with his friends. Small clumps of lunching students brave the chilly wind. The hum of their conversations tickles my ears, or maybe that’s the wind, but I feel detached from all of them. A boat suddenly unanchored from a steady dock. Adrift, I slow my stride as I near him, aware that the boys at the table have stopped talking and are watching my approach. Zach Wilcox follows the gaze I have fixed on Sam, his eyebrows curious.

  “Hi, Sam,” I say when I’m close enough to have to say something.

  He averts his eyes. “Um, hey.” He takes a quick drink of his soda and shrugs at Zach.

  I know the blood has gone to my face. It has to go somewhere, as I’m certain it’s no longer in my feet or my hands or my legs. No matter, with bloodless limbs, I turn away, but not before I hear them ask him, “Who’s that?”

  And hear him respond, “I don’t know. A girl from English.”

  I head straight for the bathroom, hearing and seeing nothing, and push my way into a stall. I close the door behind me, latching the silver arm that flips up and over to lock the stall, and stare at the back of the door. Scrawls of black-marker proclamations, both personal and general: Jim Trainer is a hottie…Erica Greenich is a bitch…this school sucks ass!

  I lie and tell myself I won’t cry. Maybe he kissed me on a dare? Kiss the new girl. Funny football locker room joke.

  My eyes are drawn to the side of the stall where someone has covered half the wall with fist-sized black-ink words. A poem. And not your usual bathroom insult or proclamation. My eyes wash over it.

  Then I read it again.

  Read me, read me here alone, walled off

  In a room to hide in this place of unending

  Night. This shadow place. You race to find

  What’s right here in front of your two-

  Faced space. Read it. And open your eyes.

  All of the lies, the screaming, dreaming lack

  Of focus pleading with the only one who sees

  The truth. Not you. Not me too. This night’s

  Too dark, split apart, to have dreams.

  The words hit me. I’m sitting in the night of this poem. In my life, I’ve been a traveler too many times, a visitor in other people’s hometowns. Each time I’ve set a suitcase down, my other hand has been ready to pick it up again. I’m packed before I even unpack. Until here. I see Sam again, shrugging me away, sipping his soda. He swatted me like a fly.

  This is the worst moment of my life. I had the beach, his smile in the late afternoon sun, his kiss tasting of air and salt, and now I’m sitting in this crappy bathroom stall staring at graffiti on a door. I look at the last line again: “This night’s too dark, split apart, to have dreams.”

  CHAPTER 11

  HARD TO EXPLAIN

  From the shadow of the tire swing in the front yard, I watch my mother and a nameless man drink wine on the front porch of the small duplex in Gilroy, the air thick with the smell of garlic fields. In the summer night, strains of Cowboy Junkies filter from the upstairs radio, washing the dark with their steady, hypnotic melody, and I feel like I could just swing here, back and forth, forever…

  I see him talking to his dad in the bakery and almost duck back into the cake-mix aisle to avoid him. I haven’t showered since Friday morning, and I’ve been wearing the same jeans for three days. I just want to go home, re-cocoon myself into the blanket I’ve been hibernating in all weekend on the living-room couch, and let Mom make me brownies because she says brownies will make me feel better.

  I hesitate, and it is in this tiny pocket of time that he sees me.

  “Hey, Calle,” he says, biting his lip and glancing at his dad.

  “Hi.” I wave awkwardly, a cereal box under my arm. Mom forgot to buy Golden Grahams again. I walk closer, wishing I could smooth my hair down without looking like I was trying to fix it. His father, who shares Sam’s broad shoulders, is rounder than Sam in the face, and his curly hair has turned a white gray, like cotton balls stuck to his skull. Sam must look more like his mom.

  “What’s up?” Sam doesn’t introduce me.

  “Nothing. Brownies.” I hold up the box like a visual aid, and it takes me a minute to realize I’m not holding brownies. I’m holding cereal. Heat rises in my face. What an idiot. I should walk away, but I don’t.

  He doesn’t seem to notice, just studies the floor.

  “Okay, Sam.” His father’s voice is deep but rings of Sam’s. “I’m going to be in the office. Okay?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “You need to call if that happens again. You don’t have to try to handle it on your own.”

  Sam narrows his eyes a bit but nods. “I know.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he says to the space over my head and then disappears down the next aisle.

  “Thing is, we didn’t actually meet,” I say, studying Sam’s interest in the floor, willing him to make eye contact with me. He doesn’t. I try to keep a scowl off my face.

  “Calle…” he starts and then rethinks it.

  Somewhere before the pause becomes a chasm, I decide to push ahead. “So what’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  I feel stupid holding the cereal box, and we are in the middle of a grocery store where about half the town is wandering the aisles. Still, I don’t know if I’ll have another chance to ask him. “Why did you blow me off on Friday?”

  “What?” He pretends to look confused. The attempt would be almost comical if I didn’t feel like throwing my Golden Grahams at him.

  I raise my eyebrows. I’ve seen my mother do this, a look that says, “Are you kidding me with this crap?” I’m hoping for the look now.

  He falls for it. “Look, I didn’t mean anything by it, okay? It’s not a big deal.”

  “It was a big deal to me.” I don’t tell him how embarrassing it actually was.

  He sighs and looks down the aisle, looks behind him, looks everywhere but at me. “Calle, this isn’t really a good time.”

  “When is a good time?”

  He runs his fingers through his smoothed hair, sending it in all directions. His lips pinch together. Finally, he looks at me directly. “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “You ignoring me has nothing to do with me?” I don’t like how loud this comes out, and I bite the next sentence off before it escapes me.

  He darts a look around. “Will you lower your voice?”

  “Sorry.” I am sorry. I don’t want to make a scene.

  He’s flustered; I see red creeping across his cheeks. “Look, don’t be pissed. It’s not you. I have a lot going on.”

  I hear him walk away down the aisle behind me. I don’t feel like Golden Grahams or brownies anymore. The cool grocery-st
ore air suffocates me, so I abandon the box on the end display of canned corn and tuna fish and find the nearest exit.

  ***

  “Calle, wait.” For the briefest of moments I think it’s Sam calling me, and the surge in my chest turns me around. Then I see Drew, with Alexa close behind him, hurrying out of the sliding doors of the market. His blue cape flutters behind him, making him look like an out-of-shape superhero. I stop to wait for them. Deflated.

  “Jeez,” Drew says, breathing and clutching his chest. “I wasn’t expecting a cardiovascular workout today.” I start to smile at his “Spear Brittany” T-shirt and then realize they must have seen my little exchange with Sam. Why else would Drew run?

  “Hey,” Alexa says, her eyes worried. “Umm, we just saw you with Sam Atkins. In there.” She motions to the store. “We saw you guys, umm, talking.” Drew raises his eyebrows at this understatement.

  We stand on the tiny path by the main road while cars whoosh past us, kicking up tiny whirls of litter and dust. I focus on the passing cars and wait for the inevitable.

  Alexa tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. In the early winter light, her hair is the thick red of new brick. “Are you two…” she hesitates. “Are you two involved?”

  I shrug, aware that this is an admission. I do not miss the look they exchange.

  “Cal,” Drew says, “He’s not really the best idea.”

  “He’s not an idea. He’s a person.”

  Alexa clears her throat and speaks slowly, like I’m a child. “He’s got a lot of problems. With his mom.”