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Californium

Page 14

by R. Dean Johnson


  Keith shakes his head.

  “I thought we were talking about Ted Three,” I say.

  “I have no idea what we’re talking about,” Keith says. “Military-commercial complex? Woodstock? I thought Woodstock was a bird.”

  Treat holds his face tight for a second longer, then bursts out laughing. He steps over and slaps Keith on the back. “A bird. That’s so bitchin’.” He tells Keith what Woodstock really was, about the peace and love, and about the people running around naked and how it went on for days.

  “What’s that got to do with Ted Three?” Keith says.

  “Do you know when Ted Three is?” Treat says. “Or where it’ll be?”

  Keith shakes his head.

  “Exactly,” Treat says. “It may never happen.”

  “But people want to see us. Maybe we can play a party or set up—”

  “We will,” Treat stops him. “This is happening.”

  “We really need to get going,” I say. Treat says fine, he’ll clean everything up, he always cleans everything up. So, of course, we say we can help and he says he’s kidding, that he doesn’t have school tomorrow like we do.

  .

  We can see the glow of the park as we’re walking up the hill out of Treat’s neighborhood. These nights are the best, people practicing on the soccer fields while we sneak our way from the shadow of a tree to the shadow of the bathrooms, trying to time it so the East German soldiers on the parade grounds don’t see us on our secret mission.

  When we get to the first shadow in the park, behind a light post, I say, “Have you got your cyanide tablet?”

  “No,” Keith says.

  “No?” I say and point at the soccer players. “What about the mission?”

  Keith shakes his head and walks right out into the light. “Edie thinks we should play soon. In front of real people.”

  “Edie? When did you talk to Edie?”

  “We’ve got a band,” Keith says. “We should play a show.”

  We’re alongside one of the fields now, the soccer players steaming in the cold air. “We will,” I say. “Two weeks ago we had nothing. Now we’ve got a name people know, instruments, some songs. It’s happening.”

  Keith stops, grins at me, then takes off running. He slides through the wet grass, stopping perfectly behind a light post, and whisper-yells, “Take cover.”

  I drop and crawl over to Keith faster than my little sister can run.

  “Here,” he says and forces something into my hand. “I stole this from their headquarters, but I’m a dead man. You must deliver it to Agent Okuda.”

  I look down at a folded-up note, and there’s Edie’s name written so big I could have read it without the park lights.

  “She’s expecting this intelligence at your morning logistics briefing.”

  “Algebra?”

  Keith smiles and takes off for the wall, catching it with both hands and flinging himself over, disappearing into my backyard. When I get to the top of the wall, Keith’s already through the yard and opening the side gate.

  I catch up to him on the sidewalk in front of my house, holding up the note. “Why did you give this to me? Just give it to Edie yourself.”

  “I don’t want to keep it in my room. My mom’s a snoop.”

  The note feels heavy, maybe two or three pages. “Do you like Edie?”

  Keith looks at his house, then back at me. “I don’t know. She wrote me a note and told me to write back. Maybe she likes me.”

  “Maybe,” I say, even though Edie’s way too smart for Keith. It’s probably good he’s doing this by note, you know, so Edie can be nice about things and it won’t ruin everything the way it does when one friend likes the other and it’s not mutual and everything gets out of balance and uncomfortable.

  “Don’t read it, okay?”

  “I won’t,” I say. “Just don’t get weird on me.”

  Keith’s head snaps to his shoulder a couple times and his eyes round into Ping-Pong balls. “I’m never we-we-weird.” He smiles and salutes me. “And now, for something completely different.” He turns on one heel and goose-steps up the sidewalk toward his house.

  Up in my room, I unfold the note slow and careful, making sure to notice how Keith has folded it originally. There’s two pages of writing with little drawings in the margins: a little bear, some DikNixon logos, and a square-looking swan with markings around it like it’s the blueprint for how to build a swan. It says Origami 101 on top and I start feeling bad for Keith. He’s trying pretty hard and it might be really embarrassing when things don’t turn out. And it’s not like me and Astrid. Astrid’s older and popular and doesn’t really know me, so I can’t exactly take it personal if she never likes me. But if we were in the same grade and hung out together a lot, and then everybody in the world found out how much I liked her and she rejected me, that’d be the worst. Just thinking about how this could wipe Keith off the face of the earth makes my stomach hurt.

  I start folding the note back up without reading anything. A few words stick out the way you see someone you know in a crowd—do, think, cute, hot—and it’s hard not to stop and read the whole thing. But I promised, you know, and you’ve got to be loyal to the people who are closest to you, even if you think what they’re doing might not be the best idea. Even if it means you have to sort of help them do the thing you think they shouldn’t be doing. That’s what friends are supposed to do.

  .

  On the way to school Wednesday morning, Keith makes sure I’ve got the note. He helps me safety-pin the TSOL and GBH patches to the shoulders of my Packy jacket.

  In Algebra, I plop the note down on top of Edie’s book. “That’s for you.”

  She says, “Thanks,” without looking up from her homework.

  “It’s not from me,” I say and sit down sideways in front of her.

  “I know.” She flashes me a quick smile.

  When the bell rings and Mr. Tomita starts in at the board, I hear the note crinkling open. Edie giggles a couple times, quiet ones that don’t make it up to Mr. Tomita; then there’s more crinkling, the little quick ones from paper getting folded and smoothed at the creases.

  After class, Edie asks me about the new instruments we have, not what they are—she already knows that—but how they sound. “Good,” I say as we get to the stairs. “I mean, we’re still trying to get it all together.”

  “You’ll have it together Friday, when you play on the back of a truck at San Diego State.”

  I get it. “How’d you hear about that?” I say.

  “My cousin goes to school there. She’s going to tell me all about it this weekend.”

  “Wait. Do you really have a cousin at San Diego State?”

  Edie shakes her head. “No, she goes to UC San Diego, but SDSU is the party school. More believable.” She smiles and hands me a note with Keith’s name on it. “Can you deliver this? Cherise has to eat in the cafeteria today.”

  “Why?”

  Edie sighs. “Will you please just give it to Keith?”

  The note is a perfect square and Edie has made a flower out of the i in Keith. “If you open it,” she says, “I’ll know.” She taps the note. “The top of the i is on a different fold than the bottom. You’ll never be able to line them up.”

  The letters are neat and swirly and the folds come together in a diagonal across the front, a tiny white line on the white paper separating the flower from the stem. I can’t believe she’s spent all this time on a note for Keith.

  “I won’t read it.”

  “Good,” she says, and we stand there for a second longer while the stairs empty out. “Call me if you need help on the homework.”

  “You can call me too.”

  Edie shakes her head. “No, I can’t. You’re the boy.”

  Her face doesn’t crack a smile as s
he turns and heads up the stairs, and I can’t tell if she’s razzing me. Would only a boy need help on math homework? Is she not allowed to call boys no matter what it’s for? What else is she up to?

  The note is thick, at least three pages pressing against my thigh all through English and Spanish. It’s killing me not to read it, because no matter how embarrassing whatever it might say is, Keith would trust me with it. I mean, when I told him that sometimes Astrid lies out in her backyard with her bikini straps undone so she doesn’t get lines on her back, I didn’t deny it when he said, “I bet you pack your mule every time you see that. I would. Guys have to do things like that or we’ll die.” And if I ever lose my mind and tell him about everything that happened in Astrid’s bathroom, he’ll be on my side about it. So maybe that’s why I don’t read the note, because Keith will tell me if something big is up.

  .

  At lunch, it’s just me and Keith in the Bog. He reads the note before taking a bite of his sandwich, his eyes scanning the page, lips shaping some words and stretching into a smile for others. Then he stuffs the note into his pocket and looks up at me. “Do you think Treat’s been acting funny lately?”

  “Treat?” I say, and Keith nods. “Has Treat been acting funny?”

  “Yeah,” Keith says. “I mean, has he been staring anywhere at lunch or looking at anyone a lot but not saying anything?”

  “I don’t know. Treat always acts funny.”

  “Yeah. I guess for him to act funny he’d have to not act funny.”

  Keith sits back on the planter, really giving it some thought, really acting serious, and that’s it. We start talking about a million other things after that: homework, tests, how Petrakis never messes with us anymore, and how van Doren only drops books near my head now, never directly on it. Things are getting better at school and it’s all because of Treat, which is what I’ll tell Uncle Ryan in the letter I write later tonight. I won’t tell him that nobody knows tomorrow is my birthday. I guess I’m holding on to that like a fifth ace, or a pen that’s really a gun, or a note from a cool girl. Or maybe I just don’t want anyone making a big deal of it. Things really are getting better, but it doesn’t mean I’m ready to celebrate. After all, for things to be better that means they had to have been pretty bad in the first place, and you can’t just all of a sudden forget that. At least I can’t, no matter how hard I’ve been trying.

  Flatbed Truck

  Before I left for school today, my dad was still in the kitchen, work clothes on, car keys in hand. “Happy birthday,” he said. “We’ll celebrate tonight.” I said, “Okay,” and he looked at my mom. She nodded once, like it was okay for him to leave now, and then one of those Mona Lisa smiles came over her face, and that’s how I knew the whole thing was rehearsed. I appreciate it and all, but I wish it didn’t seem so fake.

  School, at least, feels normal until I get to English. There’s a circle of people around Treat before the bell rings. He’s telling everyone that after Mr. Marshall sat down behind his desk Monday, he uncrumpled the pages to the song lyrics and couldn’t talk until he’d read them twice.

  “I told him, ‘I know my First Amendment rights. I can write lyrics no matter how punk they are.’ And you know what he did?” Treat pulls the exact same crumpled-up pages from his back pocket. The pages in my handwriting. “He gave them back to me and said, ‘Fine. But you keep the swearing to yourself.’ So I took them and said, ‘I’ll try hard as hell to keep the goddamned swearing under control.’”

  Everyone laughs and a couple people sneak a peek at the desk to see if Mrs. Reisdorf heard. Her pencil never stops moving, checking off last period’s assignment, but there’s a smirk on her face that she usually saves for when we read our own work out loud.

  “Did you really say that?” Penny Martin asks because she isn’t afraid to ask anything of anyone, not even Treat.

  “Yeah,” Treat says. “Right before I asked him to jam with my band.”

  A couple people laugh and Mrs. Reisdorf comes out from behind the desk, saying the bell is about to ring so we need to get to our seats.

  “That’s boss,” the sneezer whispers to me as he sits down.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Totally unbelievable.”

  .

  Me and Keith are already in the Bog, halfway through our sandwiches, when Treat gets there. “Where’re your little girlfriends?”

  “They’re in the cafeteria,” Keith says.

  “They’re not our girlfriends,” I say. “Where have you been?”

  Treat looks around and grins. “Promoting the band.”

  Keith wipes his mouth off with his hand. “What does that mean?”

  “Making up stories,” I say.

  “No.” Treat holds up a finger. “Letting people think what they want.”

  “Yeah?” Keith says with a mouthful of sandwich. “Like what?”

  “Some people think I told Mr. Marshall to fuck off. And some people think I got arrested for attacking Mr. Marshall in his office.”

  “No way,” Keith says and smiles.

  Treat nods and peers into his lunch bag.

  Petrakis comes up to us and stands next to Keith. He’s wearing his dark blue Levi’s 501s and the T-shirt all the football players wear: The Future Is Now: Esperanza Football, 1982. “Gentlemen,” he says.

  Keith steps aside without saying a thing and Treat squints at Petrakis.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He holds a hand up, like, That’s enough, and turns to Treat. “I heard you’re in a pretty bitchin’ punk band. Is that true?”

  Treat crosses his arms, crumpling his lunch bag between them. “Does the Ayatollah Khomeini have a beard?”

  Petrakis thinks about it a second. “I knew it. Are you guys playing anywhere soon?”

  Treat stares at him and it’s hard to tell if he isn’t answering on purpose or has no idea what to say.

  “Friday,” I say. “We’ve got something going on.”

  Petrakis looks at me, kind of surprised I’m in the band. “Sweet. Where?”

  Treat comes back to life. “Why?”

  Petrakis turns to Treat. “Me and my friends want to check it out, see you fuck a few people up in a slam pit. Like the time you did that backflip off the stage at the Palladium.”

  The Mohawk moves up and down and Treat laughs a quick “huh.”

  “Yeah,” Keith says. “That was an awesome night.”

  Petrakis looks at him, like, You’re in the band too? And now we need to make this real or he’s not going to believe anything we say.

  “We’re going to be in San Diego on Friday,” I say. I look off to the side like I’m talking to the ground, the way they do the undercover drug deals on Starsky & Hutch where you don’t make eye contact because only a cop would make eye contact. “We’re parking a flatbed truck in a parking lot at SDSU and playing until the cops make us leave.”

  “Ah, man,” Petrakis says. “That sounds awesome, but we’ve got a game. What about Saturday?”

  Treat shakes his head. “If we’re not in jail, we’re working on some new shit Saturday.”

  Petrakis get this sly grin; then he looks over at the Senior Circle and you know he’s feeling the pressure, talking to freshmen this long. He shoves his hands into his jeans pockets and takes a couple steps. “Let me know when you’ve got a Saturday show. I’ll bring some of my boys.”

  “Sure,” Treat says. He waits for Petrakis to turn and step away; then he flicks his hand out a couple times like he’s brushing Petrakis off. Some people nearby give that an “ooooh,” but Petrakis keeps walking like it can’t possibly be about him. Treat turns to me and whisper-yells, “What the fuck is this SDSU stuff?”

  I tell him about Edie and her cousin, and he likes it. But now I’m wondering what Treat said about his band. “Did you tell people you’re in DikNixon?”

  “No,�
�� Treat says. “Just a band.”

  Keith is suddenly miserable. “We can’t go to the football game now, can we? We’re supposed to be in San Diego.”

  I look at Treat. “You know when everyone hears about the SDSU show from Edie, they’re going to connect those dots to what Petrakis knows and—”

  “DikNixon lives!” Keith says. So happy now.

  Treat flicks my TSOL patch. “We’re gonna need a lot more songs. Soon.”

  Just as the bell’s ringing to end lunch, Edie comes up to me, right past Keith and Treat, and shoves my shoulder back. “Somebody just said, ‘The Mohawk guy’s band is playing at SDSU.’”

  Cherise has come over too and they’re both looking at me, waiting for an answer. I smile. “It’s kind of a long drive, so you guys might want to wait until we’re playing closer.”

  Cherise nods like that makes sense, but Edie’s got that look in her eye, the one she uses when we’re comparing homework answers and mine are different. “You know what this means?”

  Cherise looks at Treat and actually talks. “Everyone’s going to know you’re DikNixon.”

  Treat lifts his arms and makes peace signs with both hands.

  Cherise crosses her arms and sort of smiles, then looks at Edie.

  “Are you guys ready for this?”

  “We’re gonna be,” Treat says.

  Edie brushes atoms off my shoulder. “You better be.”

  On the way to our lockers, Treat tells Cherise and Edie it’s too bad they can’t come down to SDSU. It sounds so good I’m thinking what it would be like to say that to Astrid. Then suddenly we’re playing the same party with van Doren and Filibuster and Astrid is all over me between sets. I’m nothing but happy until Edie shows up in my head saying our set didn’t sound anything like Bad Brains but it looks like we have them. It’s a punk rock joke, which Edie wouldn’t really make, but imaginary Edie and real Edie are both right. If we don’t sound like we know what we’re doing when we do play for real, they’ll call us names or throw things or, worse, rush the stage and throw us off. There’s no coming back from a meltdown like that, and just the thought of it makes a bolt of pain shoot through my stomach.

 

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