Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  “Calle…” my mother starts.

  “Don’t,” I say, still walking backward, gaining momentum. “You made mistakes, but your mistakes aren’t mine. He might not have wanted you—that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want me.”

  She doesn’t try to stop me from leaving.

  CHAPTER 13

  SMALL WORLD

  …Mom humming an Ani DiFranco song in the slash light of the neon diner sign, eating a garden salad with ranch dressing, and picking at my fries she promised she wouldn’t eat. We sit at outside plastic tables. The highway shifts and ripples in the heat of the evening sunset as the waitress brings us iced teas on the house. She and my mom chat a bit. Turns out, Mom knows the waitress at this tiny road-stop along the I-5. We’ve been here before it seems…

  The sun set only minutes ago, leaving a bruised sky. The headlights of an oncoming truck cut into the paste-gray light left over. The truck slows to a stop next to me. My heart beats a warning. As nomadic as I’ve been all of my life, strangers still make me nervous.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Cass is small behind the wheel of the truck. “Get in.” That I’m too cold to argue squashes any initial curiosity about what she’s doing driving since she’s a freshman too. I pull open the door and climb in next to her on the bench seat.

  The truck is very old (not a Ford), and smells of motor oil and pipe smoke. The vinyl seats are cracked and patched with peeling duct tape. A jagged, horizontal slash bisects the window. As I warm up, I can’t help but take note that this slash is right in her sight line.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Just walking.”

  She continues on down the road, one hand draped loosely over the wheel, the other fiddling with the tuner on the portable stereo next to her on the seat. She hits on Theory of a Deadman’s “Not Meant to Be” and turns up the volume.

  She puts both hands on the wheel. “I love this song.” She sings loudly over the music.

  I settle back in the seat as she curves around toward the downtown. Lights begin to click on, the downtown becoming a spattering of lit windows and bright signs. Cass hurls the truck around a corner, and we pull into the drive-thru of Burger Mania. She bumps to a stop at the order station, which is shaped like a giant cheeseburger.

  “You want fries?”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “No sweat.” To the order station she says, “Harper? You working?”

  The plastic cheeseburger comes to life, a crackling voice emerging. “Hey, Cass.”

  “Two orders of fries and two Cokes.” She looks at me. “Coke?”

  I nod.

  She repeats, “Yeah, two Cokes.”

  “Okeydokey,” says the crackle voice. She jerks the car ahead.

  A man leans at the window. He is well into his sixties, barrel bellied, and pocked with tattoos. His blue eyes are so pale they almost match the whites of his eyes. “Who’s your friend?”

  Cass leans on her window, hooking a thumb at me. “This is Calle.”

  “Pleasure,” says Harper.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say.

  He disappears into Burger Mania and then returns with a sack of food and two Cokes in white Styrofoam cups. “Fries and extra ketchup. I threw some burgers in there, kid. You need to eat.”

  Cass smiles at him. With him, she is without all of the knocked-about attitude that she drags to school every day. “You’re the best, Harp.”

  He winks. Another car pulls in behind us. “Say hi to your uncle for me.”

  “Will do,” Cass says and negotiates the truck back onto the street.

  My mouth waters with the smell of the food in the truck.

  “Want to go to the beach?” She digs her hand into the bag and extracts a few fries. Chewing, she says, “We can hang in the parking lot at Clover.”

  “That sounds good.” I ache to follow her lead on the fries. I’m starving, but I wait for her to offer. She doesn’t.

  At the beach, she turns off the engine and the radio. She cracks open a window. The sound of the ocean pours in around us. Cass rifles through the bag and pulls out the food. Flattening the bag, she squeezes ketchup into a mound and drags a fry through it.

  Finally I reach over and pick up a burger. I unwrap the yellow paper. Since Mom went vegetarian, I haven’t eaten anything but veggie burgers, and the first bite of the real thing rushes through my body.

  “Yum,” I say, dipping fries into the ketchup. “Thanks.”

  Cass pulls from her Coke. “Sure.” She studies me. I slow down a bit on the burger, certain I must look like a starved child, and use a paper napkin to wipe my face. Cass unwraps her burger, opens it, and picks off the flimsy pickles. She squeezes two more ketchup packets onto the meat and then pats the top. Eating, she watches the moonlight on the waves. She takes small, delicate bites. “So, just walking, huh?”

  Swallowing, I say, “My mom and I had a fight.”

  “What about?”

  “My father.”

  “Is he being a jerk?”

  I shrug, wadding the burger wrapper into a ball.

  “I don’t know him at all.” I tell her my story.

  She looks at me, her eyes shadowed. “I don’t have a dad either.”

  We both watch the waves, not totally sure what to say now.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally whisper.

  She shrugs. “What happened with your mom?”

  After telling her about the letter, I say, “She didn’t think I should see it, doesn’t think he should be in my life.”

  She rattles the ice in her Coke as she drinks it. “What do you think?”

  I look at the sand, colorless in the glow of the bare moon. “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder what he’s like. If he’s…”

  “Like you?” she finishes for me.

  “I guess, yeah. Or if I’m like him.”

  “That’s normal.” She finishes her fries and starts to roll all the trash into the flattened bag, keeping the ketchup in the middle.

  With the sound of the ocean keeping out the silence, a sudden bravery comes over me. I change the subject. “What’s the deal with Sam?”

  “What about him?” Her whole tone has changed.

  The edge of it erodes any bravery. “Umm,” I stumble, “I just wondered about his mom.”

  She eyes me carefully. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing really. Alcohol. That kind of stuff.”

  “She’s not an alcoholic, if that’s what you’ve heard from that crazy Alexa.”

  She starts the truck and backs out of the parking lot in one clean motion. In less than a minute, we’re back on the street heading toward my house.

  “Alexa’s not crazy.”

  “She has a big mouth.”

  I don’t answer, caught between wanting to defend Alexa and knowing that Alexa does, in fact, tend to have a lot of opinions about people—and no fears about sharing them.

  I say, “She’s been really nice to me.”

  “Whatever.” Cass turns up the volume on the radio, our words replaced with a pounding Kings of Leon song.

  When she drops me in front of my house, she says, “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  CHAPTER 14

  COMPLICATED

  …with a flourish, Mom sets the steaming pizza in the middle of the brown Formica table and brushes a lock of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. She absentmindedly taps her foot to the Avril Lavigne blaring from corner speakers. Her new waitressing job is at Joe’s, a pizza parlor that consists of a jukebox, twelve rickety tables, and caramelized lighting that fails to hide the holes in the carpet. The place is a dump, but the pepperoni pizza is cheesy and greasy and wonderful…

  Not sick, I play hooky for the first time in my life. The empty house a silent animal curled around me, I sprawl on my bed listening to Bob Dylan, Sara Bareilles, Arcade Fire. I listen to Springsteen’s Nebraska album all the way through, even though my mom says my generation doesn’t ha
ve the attention span to listen to an album start to finish. But I listen. And cry. And listen. And cry. At a particularly dark point of the mid-morning, when the sky outside is a clenched fist of gray clouds, I raid my mother’s room again, listening to The Wall, the Pink Floyd CD she only listens to when men leave her.

  In this dark moment, I find the drawer.

  It is a small, thin drawer at the base of my mom’s dresser. I pull at it. Locked. I search through her side table for the key, and check the pockets of her coats and the hollows of her shoes. No key. I almost give up when I spy the brown stuffed bear she’s always had. One black button eye is missing; the fur is matted with age; and it wears a tie-dyed shirt with black writing that reads, “Jerry lives.”

  I pull it from the shelf and squeeze. Something hard bites into my palm, and I notice that the seam of one of the bear’s arms has been pulled loose. Victorious, I wiggle my finger around inside and come up with a small, metal key.

  Inside, the drawer is shallow and lined with midnight felt. I find a pile of snapshots, mostly Mom with random guys. Some I remember. Some I don’t. There is a baby picture of me, my face bunched into a scowl. I smile at another picture of me at four or five with a Tom Petty shirt that grazes the top of my tiny feet. The back of the picture says, “Calle—my wildflower—age five.”

  Under the pictures, I find a black folder, frayed and graying at the edges. I open it and flip through pages of Mom’s handwritten notes: strange addresses, cities, and phone numbers of people whose names I don’t recognize. Folded in half is a newspaper clipping of my dad, younger than the other picture, hair longer, in front of a drum set, the name Wonderland scrawled across it. His band. I’m careful not to let tears drip on the clipping.

  In the corner of the drawer, near the back, I find another newspaper piece, just a small slim square with a list of names. One name stands out:

  JAKE WINTER, CONVICTED, AGGRAVATED ASSAULT.

  My stomach feels full of push-pins. He was in jail, my father. Maybe he still is. I tuck the slip of newspaper back into the drawer, guilt flooding me. I make sure everything is back in place and then close the drawer. I wriggle the key back into the bear and shut the door to my mom’s room.

  I turn up the stereo, sit on the couch with a bag of Doritos I smuggled in past my mom, and contemplate my father, the criminal. I invent scenes in my head that would explain his conviction, aggravated assault. Maybe he assaulted a landlord or a stranger in a bar, one of his bandmates…one of my mom’s lovers?

  When the doorbell rings at three-thirty, I am in the midst of playing The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” for the fourth time in a row, shouting the lyrics at the top of my lungs. Embarrassed, I venture to the door in my pajamas, blue ones with tiny puffs of clouds. Through the peephole I discover Eli, his hands full of book bags and brown sacks.

  I open the door. “Hi.”

  His razored hair slices angles over his eyes, and he shakes his head to clear his vision. “Hey.” He holds up the bags. “You’re rocking out in here, huh?”

  I shrug. “Just listening to some music.” I hurry to turn it off and notice I have Doritos cheese under my nails.

  He waits in the hall. When I return, he says, “I brought the homework you missed. And some food.” Smiling, he looks at me. “Nice pj’s.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  In the entryway, he dumps the book bags. He looks around, squinting in the dim light of the house—we don’t have many windows. “Kitchen?” he asks.

  I point through the doorway to the kitchen and then follow him in. He searches the cabinets for bowls, some spoons, two glasses. “I brought chicken soup and orange juice,” he says, smiling over his shoulder at me. I smile back mostly at his bright yellow, long-sleeved shirt the color and texture of a rain slicker. And at the soup and orange juice.

  He pours the soup from a large Styrofoam container, using a fork to push noodles into the bowls. The smell fills the room, and my stomach stands alert, having consumed only half the bag of Doritos today. “Thanks,” I say.

  “Everyone needs chicken soup when they’re sick, especially chicken soup from Greta’s Diner—it’s the best.”

  He sets the bowls on the breakfast bar, and I slide onto a stool in front of one. He sits next to me. Through slurping spoonfuls, he asks, “So. You have a cold?”

  “I just sort of feel under the weather.”

  He nods. “There’s something going around.”

  Is there ever. It’s called Lying Mother-itis.

  We finish our soup, and I clear the bowls into the sink.

  “I had Drew get your English homework, and Tala got your math assignment; it’s just a worksheet. She said it takes five minutes.”

  I run water over the bowls and put them in the dishwasher. “Thanks, Eli. You didn’t have to do this.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “It’s really nice.”

  “I’m a nice guy.”

  “Very true.” I run a sponge unnecessarily over the counters, aware that Eli is watching me closely. The intensity of his gaze makes me run the sponge back over the clean counter.

  He says, “I wrote the note.”

  At first, I can think only of my father’s letter, of the slim line of text marking him a criminal. Then I understand: Eli’s my secret binder-note poet.

  I have no idea what to say to him, to those dark, steady eyes.

  He clears his throat. “You hadn’t said anything, so I figured I needed to be a little less cryptic.”

  I look at him, my stomach swimming. “I wasn’t sure it was you.”

  “Who else would it be?” His voice hints that there is more behind this question.

  I shrug, thankful for the counter between us. “I don’t know.”

  “Sam Atkins?”

  “No,” I answer too quickly.

  Eli’s jaw twitches. “You know the guy’s a real jerk?”

  I flare. “He’s not.”

  Eli picks up his half-empty orange juice glass but sets it down again just as quickly. “In seventh grade,” he starts, and then takes a quick drink after all. “In seventh grade, he put me through hell because I’m half-Chinese. Made fun of my eyes. He’s a total jock prick, Calle.”

  I can’t believe that about Sam, not if he’s been through so much stuff with his mom. But “I’m sorry,” is all I can manage. I have never seen Eli so serious, no jokes.

  He shakes his soft curtain of hair. “Forget it.” Standing abruptly, he hits his head on the overhang of the cupboard. “Ouch, dammit!”

  I hurry around the counter. “Are you okay?”

  He smiles, embarrassed. “Sure. Probably knocked some sense into me.”

  A large red welt is appearing behind the hair. He rubs at it gingerly.

  “Do you want some ice?”

  As he shakes his head, I reach out and touch his forehead, just barely graze my fingers along the bruise, but as I do so, he leans in and kisses me. For a second, I let him. His lips are soft, and he tastes salty and citrusy, but as quickly as I’d accepted his kiss, I pull away from it.

  He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t apologize or try to explain it—just looks at me closely, then steps by me toward the entryway. Not turning, I can hear him pick up his backpack and close the door softly behind him.

  I sit at the counter and bury my head in my arms. I should have gone to school.

  ***

  Drew sees them before I do.

  Under the eave of the library, hidden only accidentally by shadow, stand Sam and Amber. Actually, Sam stands. Amber sort of leans into him, all of her weight cemented into his, so that if he took a sudden step back, she would go toppling onto the ground. I would love to see that—her spilling head first into the pavement. But instead, I watch him kiss her. If they are going to topple over, they’ll go over together. Even by high-school standards, their display is revolting.

  Drew agrees. “Get a room.” His voice, though, is anxious, and I know he’s studying my face.

  �
�Yeah,” I manage, attempting to mask my emotions, which is hard because I don’t even know what I’m feeling—anger, jealousy, disbelief. I probably look like I’m going to puke.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Drew says, vaguely pulling on the elbow of my sweatshirt. He sounds embarrassed, and I realize that I am literally gaping at them. People are following my gaze and starting to whisper. “Come on, Calle, let’s go.”

  I will my legs to follow him, one after the other, until we’ve rounded a corner and my heart stops pounding in my chest. “We should get your fries,” I say, staring blankly at the ground. Fries, after all, had been our whole reason for walking through the quad. “Class starts soon.” I realize that I can’t even remember what class I have. Biology? Do I go to biology class first period?

  “They’ve been on and off since seventh grade.” I notice the soft edge in Drew’s voice. “But it’s really more her than him. I give that chick kudos for perseverance.”

  “He didn’t look too unhappy,” I say, still studying the ground.

  “A guy only has so much willpower, Calle. She throws herself at him. You can’t blame him.”

  At this, I look at him. “Can’t I?”

  Drew flushes. “I just mean…Look, he isn’t the type of guy to tell her no.”

  “Well, that’s just great. It is.” The unfairness of it courses through me, and I fight at the tears coming. “She gets to be with him because she’s pushy? And skinny. And perfect.” The tears begin to gain ground, and I’m in no position to stop them.

  Drew frowns. “I wouldn’t say perfect. Skinny, yes. Perfect? Calle, this is Amber. This is the girl who, in eighth grade, managed to get her hair stuck in her own locker and then forget the combination. But rather than have anyone cut her hair—just at the end—she waited four hours for someone to come cut the lock off. Four hours. She’s pretty damn focused. She’s always been insane about Sam Atkins. If anything, admire her stamina. He’s the dumbass who can’t tell her no.”

  I take a shaky breath. “She should give seminars. How to harass someone into being with you.”