“So are you going to ask Tegan on a date or not?” said Aaron.
I sighed. “Fine. I guess.”
“Good. She’s sitting two tables behind you.”
“Wait, what?” I said. I turned around, and sure enough, she was there, two tables away, sitting with Frankie, Jed, and Carlos.
“We’ve still got nine minutes until the bell rings,” said Aaron. “That should be plenty of time to ask her on a date and get her digits.”
“Her what?”
“Her phone number, dumb-ass. Now hurry!”
“Okay, one: I just barely agreed to this. Two: I am not going to ask her on a date in the most public place in the whole school. Three: I don’t even own a phone.”
“You don’t have a phone?” said Aaron. “What are you, Amish?”
“Also, I don’t have any money. And I’ve heard rumors that dates cost money.”
Aaron pulled out his wallet.
“No,” I said.
He pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and threw them on the table in front of me.
“Put that shit back in your wallet,” I said. “Right now.”
“It’s not for you,” said Aaron. “It’s for Tegan—the girl who will never know I had the hots for her. Because you, my friend, are going to take her out on a nice date. And then you will kiss her, and make her your girlfriend, and when you graduate, you two will get married and have twenty-seven gigantic babies, and you will name them all Aaron—even the girls—after your good friend, Aaron Zimmerman, who funded your first date. Deal?”
I stared at the two twenties like they were cleverly disguised mousetraps.
“You have seven minutes before the bell rings,” said Aaron.
“Damn you,” I said. I shoved the twenties in my pocket, stood up, and started toward Tegan’s table. With each step, I practiced lines in my head.
Hey, Tegan. Ever since you put that joint in my mouth with your lips, I can’t stop thinking about how high you make me. Like metaphorically high. Without the drugs. Wanna go on a date with me?
Dammit.
Hey, Tegan. Remember that offer to let me touch your boobs if I let you touch mine? Maybe both of those things will happen if you go on a date with me.
Shit.
Hey, Frankie. I really like your sister, and I was wondering if I could have your permission to ask her on a date.
This was destined to be the worst seven minutes of my life.
The cafeteria was a human beehive—the chatter and laughter and yelling and clatter of silverware joined together into a mind-numbing buzz. I suddenly felt very claustrophobic, like this human hive was closing in on me. Or maybe that was just me having a panic attack. Whatever the case, I was already thinking about flipping a U-ey, but by the time that thought even processed, I was standing at Tegan’s table. Frankie and the gang were having a riveting discussion about herbology (of the illegal variety) when they apparently noticed the human skyscraper eclipsing the sunlight pouring through the window behind him.
Suddenly, herbology wasn’t as fascinating anymore.
“Hell no,” said Frankie. “You ain’t getting no more free samples.”
“Oh. Um, that’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want your weed.”
“What?” said Frankie. “My weed ain’t good enough for you?”
“Huh? No. No! Your weed was fantastic! I’ve never been so wonked in my entire life.”
“Oh,” said Frankie. Now he just looked confused.
“You wanna sit down?” said Tegan.
Tegan was wearing a white Death Grips T-shirt, baggy sweatpants, and a bandanna around her head—a look that was simultaneously intimidating and adorable. I couldn’t tell if her expression was curious or pitying, but I didn’t even care. Standing up was making me dizzy.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
I sat down. Right next to Tegan. Which I immediately realized was a bad idea because my overwhelming body mass was brushing up against her.
Carlos’s eyebrows were making a serious attempt at touching his hairline. Jed’s face was pinched, looking slightly jealous that my fat was touching her and his wasn’t.
“So…” said Tegan. “S’up?”
“Not much,” I said, which was a total lie because my dick was at twelve o’clock and harder than advanced Calculus.
“Oh. Okay. Cool.”
And that’s when I had the worst kind of mental breakdown. The kind that is worse than not talking. This was the sort of mental breakdown where you say anything—anything!—to backtrack your way out of the pit you just walked into.
“Aaron wants to go on a date with you,” I said.
“Huh?” said Tegan.
Carlos’s eyebrows reached even higher, which didn’t even seem anatomically possible, but whatever.
“I know, right?” I said, laughing nervously. “He said he thinks you’re really cute, which was surprising to me too, but he wants to go on a date with you because he’s really not into Lacey anymore. You should totally go on a date with him though because, I mean, c’mon, it’s Aaron Zimmerman.”
Tegan blinked. Her face was the most indecipherable thing since the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“He doesn’t know that I’m telling you this, though,” I said. “But, like, you should ask him on a date. He’ll totally be flattered. And. Um…”
I dug my hand into my pocket, pulled out the crumpled twenties, and set them on the table in front of her.
“There. You can even pay for it. It’s actually Aaron’s money, so technically, it’s like he’s paying for it…except you have the money instead of him. So now he has to go on a date with you.”
I laughed, mostly as a tension reliever. No success.
For the record, I had about zero mental comprehension of the words coming out of my mouth. It was like they were a river, and the dam had busted, and now here comes the flood and several million dollars’ worth of damage.
Tegan glanced from the balled-up twenties, to me, back to the balled-up twenties, and back to me. Each time her gaze shifted, her eyes narrowed further.
“Is this some kinda joke?” she said.
Tegan stood up. This was made slightly more difficult because she was wedged next to a mentally stagnant Neanderthal, but she battled her way up, shoving me out of the way because surely anything was better than sitting next to me.
“Go to hell, bitch.”
She said this while walking backward with both middle fingers extended—suddenly cool, indestructible, fearless—like a total badass. Like she was the Queen of Not Giving Shits.
But as she turned around, I caught the glimmer of a tear. She walked fast, her arms straight, and she rounded the corner out of the cafeteria.
And that’s when I realized that everything I touched was meant to fall apart.
“Damn,” said Carlos. “That was screwed up.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt exhausted—like I had just run a mile with my mouth, only to find out that I’d been running the wrong direction.
“You do know that she has a thing for you, right?” said Frankie.
“Thing?” said Carlos. “Thing doesn’t even start. That girl is in love with you.”
“It’s true,” said Jed, glumly.
I already had a wound. Frankie, Jed, and Carlos were the salt, lemon juice, and steel wool brush to scrub it all in.
“Yeah,” I said, miserably. “I heard.”
“Seriously?” said Frankie. “Well, what the hell, man?”
“I came over here to ask her on a date,” I said. “And then I panicked.”
It took several seconds for the sheer idiocy of it all to sink in. And then they laughed.
“Oh man,” said Frankie. He lifted a beefy, tatted arm and proceeded to wipe an actual, legitimate tear from his eye, he was laughing so hard. “Oh man, oh man. That’s too funny.”
“Can you talk to her?” I said. “Tell her that I’m a dipshit, and I’m sorry?”
“Oh, hel
l no. I ain’t touching that. You wanna fix it, you’re gonna have to talk to her yourself.”
My gaze shifted dejectedly to my size fourteen shoes. They might have passed as clown shoes if I wasn’t roughly the size of three small clowns stacked on top of each other.
“But,” said Frankie, “I will give you a hint.”
I glanced up.
Frankie pulled his backpack up, removed a pen and a notebook, and began scribbling on the first page. “This is our address. Any guy that comes to our house to apologize is gonna get her attention.” He ripped out the sheet and slid the paper to me.
735 Golden Row Dr.
The bell rang. With profound reluctance, I grabbed the crumpled twenties—mousetraps, indeed—and shoved them back in my pocket.
“Oh, and Cliff…” said Frankie.
I met his gaze.
“My pop’s crazy. Just so you know.”
Great. As if I didn’t already have one of those to worry about.
I knew something was wrong when the address Frankie gave me—735 Golden Row Drive—took me to the north side of the river.
The nice side.
Tegan and Frankie’s house was waaaaaaay north. Past the shiny new businesses that were keeping Happy Valley alive. Past the fancy new subdivisions on the outskirts of town. Past anything that even remotely resembled civilization. I soon found myself wandering out of the last neighborhood, walking down a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. If Tegan and Frankie lived with the Blair Witch, I was done.
But this was still Golden Row Drive (according to the last street sign I had seen fifteen minutes before), and the numbers were in the early seven hundreds and going up. So I kept walking.
And then I saw it.
It was impossible not to see it.
Frankie and Tegan’s “house” was not a house at all. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a mansion. It was more like a big, swanky-ass log cabin extraordinaire. It was about the same size as one of those neighborhood mini Walmarts. Every inch of the vast, ribbed log exterior had a glossy sheen, gleaming in the floodlights. A dozen triangular arches jutted over fancy window frames, peering into the warm coziness inside.
I knew it was Tegan and Frankie’s house because of the large stone mailbox with the number 735 carved into the surface.
My first thought was: Frankie and Tegan live here? Why the hell are they selling drugs?
My second thought was: Shit. I’m here.
My awe melted into dread. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know how to say it.
All I knew was that I had to.
When I reached the door, I took a deep breath, raised my unsteady hand, and rang the doorbell. From inside, I could hear the obnoxious: ding-dong-dang-DONG…dang-dong-ding-DONG!
“Goddamn!” said a twangy male voice from inside. “Who in the hell? If this ain’t the goddamn Girl Scouts sellin’ ’em Thin Mint cookies, I’m gon’ shoot the fool.”
Crap.
My fight-or-flight response was currently telling me to get the hell outta there. Except that my fight-or-flight response had a third, less-evolved option called deer-in-the-headlights.
The door opened. On the other side of the door was an explicitly hairy man—hair on his back, his shoulders, and other ungodly places. He was like a Chia Pet experiment gone wrong. He was also wearing nothing but socks, boxers, and a Bass Pro Shops ball cap to emphasize the hair factor. The man was tall but built like a summer squash—long neck, deflated chest, wiry arms, and a humongous gut. His face was mostly engulfed in an impressive, ZZ Top–esque beard, but it hardly hid the scowl on his face.
“You ain’t no Girl Scout,” he said.
“No, sir, I am not,” I said. “You’re Mr. Robertson?”
Mr. Robertson’s eyes narrowed on me. “The hell you know my name? You with the IRS or somethin’? ’Cause I don’t owe a goddamn penny.”
Was this guy for real?
“Actually, I’m here to see Tegan? Your daughter?”
“Tegan? What you want with my baby princess? You her boyfriend or somethin’?”
“No, I just wanted to apologize to her.”
“Apologize for what?” Mr. Robertson leaned forward, grabbing both sides of the door frame. His summer-squash build became tense and dangerous. What he said next came out in a whispering growl. “You didn’t knock up my baby princess, did you?”
“What? No! No, no, no! We’ve never…” I just shook my head because I suddenly felt uncomfortable even verbalizing the S-word around this guy. “I mean…we haven’t even kissed! I just wanted to apologize for saying something stupid. That’s all, I swear.”
Mr. Robertson turned his head slightly and glared dissectingly at me with his left eye—like this was the eyeball that meant business.
“Okay, kid,” he said, finally. He stepped aside and gestured me inside and toward the living room. “Come on.”
I came inside and followed Mr. Robertson into the living room—which I could’ve easily parked my house inside and had room to spare. An honest-to-god antler chandelier hung from the tall, vaulted ceiling. The walls were adorned with mounted fish and mounted animal heads, and the Grizzlies were getting their asses kicked on all sixty inches of an LED flat-screen HDTV—also mounted on the wall.
Mr. Robertson turned the game on mute. “Take a seat…uh…what you say your name was again?”
“Cliff.”
“Right,” he said, as if he’d known this all along. And then he shouted, “Frankie! Get your ass out here!”
Frankie appeared around the corner of what I assumed was the kitchen. He had a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. Like his dad, he was also shirtless, except his upper half was pure, taut muscle, graffitied in badass tattoos.
“Yah?” he said through a full mouth. “Wash hup, Popsh?”
And then Frankie saw me. He smirked—a little too amusedly—and he swallowed. “’Sup, Neanderthal?”
“You know this gigantic kid?” said Mr. Robertson.
“Yeah, he’s Tegan’s boyfriend.”
Mr. Robertson turned his left-eyed death stare on me. “I thought you said…”
“I’M NOT HER BOYFRIEND, I SWEAR!” I said.
Frankie had made the mistake of taking another bite of his sandwich. He barely had a chance to chew before he was laughing and choking on it.
“All right, all right,” said Mr. Robertson. “No need to get your big-ass panties in a knot. Frankie, go tell your sister that her boyfriend that ain’t really her boyfriend is here.”
“You got it,” said Frankie—sounding way more excited about this than I was comfortable with. He started up the nearby staircase, leaving me alone…with Mr. Robertson.
“Take a seat.”
I sat down on the leather sofa—positioned precariously beneath the heads and bodies of every dead animal known to the northwest. Mr. Robertson sat down in the adjacent armchair—which also happened to be beside a glass display gun cabinet.
Like, who in the hell keeps a gun cabinet in their living room?
“So…what do you do for a living?” I said—because making light conversation with this guy was better than being stared down by his evil left eye.
“Construction,” said Mr. Robertson.
“Seriously? Wow. So you…uh…make a lot of money doing that?”
“I don’t do the construction. I own the construction. W and W Construction Company. Run it with my brother, Wade.”
“Ah. That…makes sense.”
Silence proceeded to fill the room.
“So what you wanna be when you grow up, Clinton?”
“Uh, it’s Cliff.”
“That’s what I said, ain’t it?”
“Right. Um, I dunno. I haven’t given it much thought.”
Again, Mr. Robertson was laying the lefty stink eye on me thick. “Well you better figure that shit out if you’re gonna date my baby princess. She deserves somebody that can take care of her, not some ho-hum bum who don’t know what he’s gonna do wit
h his life.”
“Tegan and I aren’t dating.”
“Right. You’re just the nice guy that comes over to her house in the middle of the goddamn evening to ‘apologize.’” Mr. Robertson air-quoted the word apologize with his middle and index fingers. “My mistake.”
I shifted uncomfortably.
That was when I heard an upstairs door open and close and footsteps storm over to the balcony overlooking the living room.
It was Tegan. And she did not look happy to see me.
“Cliff?” said Tegan. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
“Clinton and I were just discussing you two’s future and all,” said Mr. Robertson. “You need to tell your boyfriend to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up.”
“Daddy, stay the hell outta this!” said Tegan.
Mr. Robertson chuckled lovingly but made no attempt to argue further.
Tegan’s gaze narrowed back on me. “Well?”
I should’ve written down an apology speech, because I was drawing a special kind of blank. I had nothing.
But I was really good at gaping like an idiot with my mouth open.
“Know what?” said Tegan. “I don’t give a shit. Get lost, Neanderthal.”
With that, Tegan stormed back into her room and slammed the door.
“Daa-aa-aamn!” said Frankie from the balcony. I didn’t even notice he was there until his exclamation echoed across the tall living room, and he doubled over, laughing. “Neanderthal, your girlfriend’s pissed!”
I couldn’t even get mad at Frankie. I deserved this. I was a grade-A, first-class dipshit.
“I should go,” I said.
I stood up slowly from the sofa and started shuffling to the door.
“The hell for?” said Mr. Robertson.
I stopped awkwardly and gave Mr. Robertson a confused look.
“You came here to apologize to Tegan, di’n’tcha?” he continued. “’Cause far as I seen, you ain’t done shit.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I said. “You heard her. She won’t talk to me.”
“Okay, first off, stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself. Secondly, if you really wanna apologize to her, you’re gonna march up them stairs, knock on that door, walk into that bedroom, and give her the best goddamn apology ya got. And then, if she still don’t feel like forgivin’ ya, you can at least walk outta here like a man.”
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 10