Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

Quietly, Drew says, “Maybe Eli should take it.”

  The words sting, but they stop the tears. “What’s your point, Drew? I should be with Eli even if I don’t feel that way about him?” The bell rings for class, and students start to file into the small alleyway between the buildings where we are standing.

  “No. It makes more sense than you and Sam Atkins, but no.” He stops. He’s clearly already said more than he meant to, and now we have an audience. Drew, unlike many of the other actors, only likes an audience when he’s in control. “I have to get to class or I’ll be late. Don’t forget we have lunch rehearsal today.”

  “Right.” I wipe at my wet eyes. “You’re real worried about tardiness.”

  He digs his hands into the front pocket of his Billabong sweatshirt and turns to go. The sweatshirt says “BONG” in big orange letters. For sure, his first-period teacher will make him turn it inside out. Funny, Drew’s always willing to push confrontation about things that don’t really matter.

  ***

  At lunch, I don’t go to rehearsal; instead, I walk out behind the gym to the empty, cold football field. My mind is full. Sam. Eli. My fight with Drew. My father in jail. My mother’s lies.

  The stadium hibernates, a massive sleeping bear. I walk one whole loop around the track before I notice the lone figure crammed into the lower corner of the bleachers. On the visitors’ side.

  Sam.

  He nods when he sees me see him and gives a small wave. I hesitate, then decide to join him.

  “Hey.” His hands are crammed into the pockets of his grandfather’s letterman jacket. Next to him sits an empty plastic Pepsi bottle and a crumpled brown lunch sack.

  “What are you doing out here?” I ask.

  He smiles slightly. “Hiding from Amber. She won’t come out here. Too cold.”

  I cram my own freezing hands into the pouch of my sweatshirt. “You weren’t doing too much hiding this morning in front of the library.”

  He flushes, staring out at the wintry stretch of field. “You saw that?”

  “I’m surprised Yard Duty doesn’t start charging you by the hour.”

  He takes his hands from his pockets and runs them through his hair. “I’m sorry about that.” He looks sideways at me, but I won’t catch his eye. I stare at the cement floor of the stadium, the gray amoebas of smashed gum, the faded illegible graffiti. He says, “I guess we’re sort of together now.”

  “I guess you are.” I can smell the undercut of salt in the chilly air. Overhead, the sky shifts and churns, the clouds thick like taffy. I feel one or two tiny drops, fairy kisses, on my face.

  “Well, whatever makes you happy.” I stand quickly. His nearness drains me, and I feel a sudden kinship to his empty soda bottle.

  He looks flustered. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yep.” I take the stairs quickly down to the track, fumbling with my Walkman. If I can only get my earphones on, I won’t have to listen to all the emptiness.

  “Calle?”

  My earphones halfway on, I turn to see him standing several feet behind me on the stairs. “What?”

  “I don’t want it to be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugs. Sighing, I look at him, bundled there in baggy jeans and his grandfather’s jacket. He looks small instead of strong. Maybe Drew was right. Maybe Sam Atkins isn’t the type of guy who can say no to a girl like Amber. But if that’s true, then he certainly can’t handle a girl like me. A girl whose mother remarries more often than other mothers redecorate and whose father maybe left, and for sure was in jail, and who doesn’t know her at all. That would be too much for a boy like Sam Atkins.

  This is what I tell myself.

  “I have rehearsal,” I tell him, plugging up my ears with my music, and I leave him there on the stairs.

  CHAPTER 15

  HEAVY THINGS

  …the oddly perky Phish on the stereo, I watch through the curtained window as Ted speeds his red Mustang away down the street, the blond woman next to him hurriedly tying a scarf around her hair. My brown-haired mother remains, crumpled like a napkin on the wedge of grass by the mailbox, having just thrown the empty plastic garbage can after them…and missing…

  I have walked in on a fight, even if they are doing their best to disguise it. The air is thick with it.

  “Hi, sweetie,” my mom says, placing a bowl of tiny green peas in the center of the table. Her voice is strained, and her eyes never leave Rob who is running water into glasses, his back to me.

  “Hi.” I glance from her to him. “What’s up?”

  “Dinner is up!” She is overdoing it. “Spaghetti and veggies, yum!”

  “No meatballs,” Rob says quietly, still filling glasses at the tap.

  My mother’s fake smile wavers as her eyes flit to him. “I made the spicy sauce you like,” she tells me, placing a bowl of noodles by the peas as she sits down.

  Rob places glasses of water on the table. Sitting, he unfolds his napkin into his lap. His eyes down, he spoons peas onto his plate. I notice that the top of his hair is starting to thin, just barely. He does a good job of hiding it.

  I pull out my chair and slide into the seat next to my mother. They avoid each other’s eyes. Frowning, I spoon myself noodles and sauce, and sprinkle grated Parmesan from the tall green can. We focus on the clink of our forks against the plates, the sound of swallowing.

  “How was school?” My mother takes a small bite of pasta and dabs at her mouth with her napkin. She is the only person who can make eating spaghetti a delicate affair. Rob and I both slurp our noodles.

  “Fine. I got an A on my math test.”

  “Good, good,” Rob says, attempting a smile in my direction—a fractured, lank smile almost masked by the smear of sauce on his mouth.

  My mom catches his eye and points to his mouth. “Sauce,” she whispers, which is ridiculous as I can obviously hear her.

  Sighing, he reaches for his napkin. After a few strokes, he manages to get most of it. My mom wrinkles her nose. She tries to point out the last stray bit, using her own face as a map. “A little on the left side…”

  “Oh, for christsake, Alyson!”

  My fork clatters to the plate, and my mother freezes as if she’s been struck. I have never heard Rob yell. From the look of my mother’s face, she hasn’t either.

  He stands abruptly. “Can I just eat my goddamn food?” He picks up his plate and leaves the room. The door to their bedroom bangs shut. Soon we can hear their small TV click on.

  My mother takes a sip of water, dabs her mouth, and eats a forkful of peas. I wait.

  And wait. Finally, I ask, “Well?”

  “It’s really nothing.”

  I look down the hallway toward their door. “That didn’t seem like nothing.”

  She chews slowly, eyeing me. Swallowing carefully, she says. “Adults just fight sometimes is all.”

  “I’m not nine.”

  Sighing, she pushes her peas around on her plate with her fork. Then dropping her voice, she says, “It’s mostly a money thing.”

  “Like we don’t have any?” I ask.

  She nods. “The job is not going the way he expected it to. And his boss is putting a lot of pressure on him.”

  I realize that I still have no idea what Rob does for a living, which is sort of embarrassing. I decide that I won’t admit this to her.

  “Can you pick up more hours at the shop?” My mom doesn’t really like working at OM! She hates retail, but she gets a great discount on the clothes. Discount is my mother’s favorite word.

  “I can barely get three eight-hour shifts now,” she confides. “Business is really slow. Kelly had to cut Jason’s hours too. I should go back to school. We can’t live on eight bucks an hour.”

  Every time we have a financial crisis, my mother talks about going back to school. I don’t really know why she says “back” since she never started in the first place.

  “Why don’t you waitress again?” I finish the l
ast of my peas and spoon more from the bowl. They’re cold, but I’m starving, and no one else seems to want seconds.

  She shrugs. My mother’s a terrible waitress and she knows it, but it paid better than eight bucks an hour.

  “I could get a job,” I offer. I have no idea what I’d do, maybe baby-sit or get a job at one of the local restaurants. “It’s almost winter break. People need holiday help.”

  “No way,” she says quickly. “You need to study. You’re going to college.”

  “Mom, I can work and still go to college. School is not hard.”

  “You’re only a freshman,” she says. “It just gets harder and harder.”

  I’m only slightly ashamed at how quickly I back down from my offer. If I push her, she’d let me get a job at a bookstore or somewhere else reasonably educational. But I don’t really want to work—it would take too much time away from drama stuff—so I just nod and eat my peas.

  “Anyway,” my mother says, as if she’s finishing an internal conversation out loud, “I’m sure it’s nothing; it’s just a bit rocky at work for him.”

  With a swift opening of the bedroom door, Rob appears in the doorway. “I’ll be out.” He doesn’t wait for an answer. Pulling on a jacket, he leaves.

  Something cold, fear maybe, trickles through me, and the peas sit hard in my belly. What if we have to move again? I voice my concern, careful not to sound as freaked out as I suddenly feel.

  “Oh, no,” my mom assures me, reaching across the table to close her hand over mine, her eyes resting sadly on the recently closed front door. “We won’t move. It’s not that serious.” This last comment sounds hollow and unsure of itself—her eyes not at all behind her words.

  CHAPTER 16

  SHOOT THE MOON

  …I give the Norah Jones CD to Mom for Christmas, and she plays it in the new CD player that Dan bought her. Our Christmas tree glows in the pale light of the foggy Sacramento morning, strung with white lights and blue ornaments like Mom saw in the Pottery Barn catalog. Dan reads by the fire, covered in the apple-red fleece blanket I got him, and Mom bakes cookies in the kitchen. The house is warm smells of cinnamon, and the recently unwrapped presents are stacked about in piles. I sit in the center of the room, in the middle of a mound of wrinkled wrapping paper, and smell and watch and drink it all in…

  I make it through an entire English class without looking at Drew. I got to class early and buried my head in a book so I didn’t have to watch him walk in. We still haven’t spoken since the Sam and Amber show (as Sara likes to call it) debuted last week in front of the library. Mr. Ericson’s been on a lecture stint so we haven’t done any group work, which makes it easier.

  At the bell, Drew sprints for the door, but Alexa waits as I stuff my books in my backpack. Luckily, Mr. Ericson didn’t notice that I spent the duration of his lecture doing my math homework. We’re reading Lord of the Flies, which I read last summer anyway.

  “You two should talk,” Alexa says, slinging her maroon corduroy bag over her shoulder. “You’ll have to do it. Drew can be really stubborn.” I don’t respond. She shrugs and adjusts her bag. “Apparently he’s not the only one,” she says under her breath but loud enough.

  “Calle?” Mr. Ericson is standing behind his lectern.

  “Yeah?”

  He looks at Alexa quickly, clears his throat, and looks back at me. “Umm. Can I talk to you for a second?”

  Alexa raises her eyebrows. “I’ll see you at lunch,” she says. “Bye, Mr. E.”

  “Bye, Alexa.” He watches her leave the room before his eyes slip back to me. I wait. Finally, he says, “Listen, I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  He comes out from behind the lectern to lean against the table where we turn our homework into the “In” box and pick it up from the “Out” box. “I’m a bit worried about your performance in class.”

  He had seen me doing my math homework. “I’m sorry about the math, Mr. Ericson. I just got a little behind.”

  He frowns slightly—okay, he didn’t see the math homework and is clearly talking about something else. I want to kick myself for offering information I didn’t need to give.

  He sidesteps it. “I mean your English work. It’s slipping a little. The in-class essay you wrote on the poetry unit was not up to your standards.”

  “Oh,” I say, looking at my shoes, knowing that the essay had been crap. I had spent most of that period thinking about my fight with Eli and trying not to watch Amber and Sam pass notes back and forth. “What did I get?”

  “It’s not about the grade, Calle.” He clears his throat again. “Look, you’re the best writer in this class asleep. You and Cass Gordon are probably the best writers in the whole freshman class. You’re getting an A. It’s just the work itself. It’s not what you’re capable of.”

  Cass Gordon? He let her name slip so easily, just a casual mention, not really the point of what he’s saying at all, but it hits me and I can’t hear what else he’s saying. When does Cass Gordon write? She never even comes to school. I try to focus. He’s still talking, and I haven’t heard any of it. Finally, when I clearly should have said something, he stops, looking closely at me. “Is everything okay?”

  I look at his face. Some teachers pry, but he seems genuinely concerned. I notice the small, spider-web wrinkles around his gray eyes; he must be older than I thought. “No,” I say quietly.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” He folds his arms across his chest. “Maybe I can help?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Try me.”

  Before I can stop myself, I tell him all about my dad, even pull the letter from my backpack.

  “So I can’t even contact him,” I finish, jamming the letter back into the front pocket.

  He softly whistles. “That’s a lot to deal with.”

  He doesn’t know the half of it. Besides my dad, there’s my mom and her downhill slide with Rob, my fight with Eli, and the one with Drew. Alexa’s annoyed with me, and to top it off, Sam and Amber are making out all over campus. I can’t escape them. It’s like they figure out where I’ll be and then set up make-out camp. But to Mr. Ericson, I just say, “Yeah.”

  “Have you talked more with your mom about it?” When I shrug as an answer, he argues the point. “You know, I spoke with your mom at Back to School Night. She seems easy to talk to.”

  I try to explain that she is easy to talk to. She just doesn’t want me talking to my father. “He was a mistake for her, so she assumes he’ll be a mistake for me. She’s totally weird about him.”

  “Well, he clearly hurt her.” Something dark slips behind his eyes. I notice his cords, his soft tan sweater, the gray in the dark hair at his temples. No wedding ring. “I know something about that,” he says. I study the posters on the wall. Noticing my discomfort, he changes the subject. “You should talk to her. I’m sure she has good reasons why she doesn’t want you talking to your dad.”

  I frown. “She doesn’t. It’s all about her,” I tell him. “I mean, Mr. Ericson, if it was your daughter, you’d want to be able to see her, right?”

  He hesitates and then pulls a yellow brick of sticky notes from his pocket and writes down some information. “You know there’s a search program online that helps you locate people. Maybe you could try it.” Unpeeling the top note, he hands it to me. “Here. My sister’s husband found a cousin he hadn’t seen in years.”

  I look at the website information, my mind racing. “Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  The bell rings. We’ve talked away the whole twenty-five-minute lunch period. Mr. Ericson has a brown sack on his desk. I can only imagine a plastic-wrapped sandwich inside and an apple, maybe some cookies. “You didn’t even get to eat,” I worry.

  He waves the thought away. “I have prep sixth period. I’ll eat then. What about you? Do you want me to write you a pass to the cafeteria?”

  “No thanks,” I tell him. “I’ll just eat my sandwich between classes.�
� I don’t actually have a sandwich, but I don’t want him offering me his—even his imaginary one. Besides, I’m not very hungry during school lately.

  “Okay.” He moves back around behind his lectern. “Well, thanks for the talk. Have a good break.”

  “Sure.” I leave the room. I’m all the way out of the little hallway and halfway across the quad before it dawns on me that I should have been thanking him.

  ***

  Today, a clear sky peeks through tissue-paper clouds. After breakfast, I grabbed my song journal and walked to the ocean. The beach stretches, blinking at the bright winter light like a cat awakened suddenly when the sun appears from behind a tree. This morning, my mom went for a long walk. The past few days she’s been pale with dark circles staining the skin beneath her eyes.

  Today, when she got home, she seemed better, rosy cheeked and crammed full of endorphins. Humming an Aimee Mann song over and over, she made Rob and me mounds of scrambled eggs and soy bacon (which, I have to admit, wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be). Rob has been sullen, running a lot and prone to long stretches with the TV in the bedroom, but this morning—with the light spilling through the kitchen window, I felt things creak into place. Settle. He even left late for work, lingering with us at the table.

  The first weekend I met Rob, he made us breakfast. Mickey Mouse pancakes, even though I was fourteen. I remember how his face fell when the chocolate-chip eyes melted into running puddles so that Mickey resembled a tearful drag queen. My mother laughed until orange juice spurted from her nose. Watching Rob, I knew he would fall in love with her. Even with orange juice out her nose, my mother was radiant.

  We have two weeks off from school for winter break, and I have nothing planned. I spent the weekend helping Ms. Hecca clean out the costume barn. Yesterday, I heard three songs that sparked memories, and I only had time to jot notes. Today, with a whole unplanned Monday of no school before me and with the sun on my face, I will fill out the bodies of these skeletal notes, give them color and shape.

  I bite the end of my pen, the black Bic top pliable in my teeth, and look at the water. What is it about water that frees me? Down on the thin strip of beach, a man throws a ball for a dog that becomes a white blur in the chase of it. When the dog pauses to scoop the ball from the waves, I smile at the perfect hoop of black around his eye and the one bent ear that just won’t stand up straight. We’ve never had a dog—my mother claims allergies—and I have always wanted one. A smooth head to run my hand over, a wagging tail at the end of the day.