Yeah.
“I’m sorry, Cliff,” said Aaron. “But Shane’s gone. The List isn’t going to bring him back.”
In some far-off cubicle of reality, I saw Aaron turn and walk away. I was left in the storm of his tumultuous wake—shattered, and broken, and alone. I was only abstractly aware of the students around me—laughing, slamming locker doors, rushing off to their sixth-period classes before the bell rang.
But it was all background noise.
By lunchtime the next day, I decided that Aaron didn’t exist. I just didn’t care anymore.
I mean, obviously he did exist. And I cared so much, it was killing me. But what else could I do? When life gives you lemons:
1. Add Mr. Spinelli’s half gallon of Smirnoff vodka.
2. Drink vodka-ade.
3. Don’t stop until you have amnesia.
It amazed me how much I hated my drunk dad, and how much he inspired me to want to drink all of my problems away.
Maybe, deep down, I was just like him.
That’s what I thought in the cafeteria, sitting alone at my table, while Aaron abided the interstellar laws of my invisible quarantine force field. Then again, he wasn’t sitting at his old table, either. That involved sitting with Lacey, which was so far out of the question, it was a nonquestion.
Aaron was just gone. Nowhere in sight.
I don’t know what my face looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t good. The moment Tegan saw me, her smile inverted.
“Oh no,” said Tegan. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s not wrong?” I said.
“Ah hell no. You tell me what’s wrong, or Mama will bring out the whip and handcuffs. Don’t you test Mama.”
You had to appreciate that, with Tegan, a threat and an innuendo were basically the same thing. If I wasn’t so depressed, I might have challenged her.
But I was sooooooo depressed. So I told Tegan everything.
Tegan listened—completely deadpan. No reaction to Shane’s journal. No reaction to any of Aaron’s hurtful words. Which was a good thing, because if she reacted, I might’ve reacted—be it sobbing or swearing or sobbing AND swearing. It was like I had two default emotions—Sadness that Knows No Depths and Fuck Fuck Fucking Fuckers Fuck!
Regardless, Tegan was a really good listener. It was one of those stellar human qualities that I’d never even recognized in her until now.
I finished my story. Tegan responded with a fierce, turbulent silence. Finally, she said, “Do you really want to know what I think?”
“Uh…” I said—filled with a sudden dread of inconvenient truths. “I dunno. Do I?”
“First off, I think it’s rad that you found Shane’s journal.” Her tone was uncharacteristically soft, and she chose each word carefully. “Secondly…I don’t think that it necessarily proves that the List is real.”
“What?” I said. My tone was low-key devastation.
“It’s just, I think you want the List to be real so bad, your brain is latching on to any evidence it can get.”
“But it just showed up on my doorstep! How else did it get there?”
“What? You think God dropped it off on your porch?”
I knew Tegan wasn’t trying to make me feel stupid. With that said…I felt pretty stupid.
“It’s almost the year anniversary of Shane’s death, right?” said Tegan. “That Haley chick prolly dropped it off on your porch. Prolly feels like a bitch for making Shane wanna kill himself. Or whatever that shit’s all about. Shane was a little cryptic on the details.”
“Well…” I said. I was running out of arguments. It kind of felt like running out of oxygen. “What about Aaron?”
“What about Aaron?”
“Do I just not be friends with him anymore?”
Tegan rolled her eyes. “Aaron has some emotional baggage. He did a really douchey thing to Lacey, he got cut from the football team, and he has a brain injury or whatever, and now he doesn’t know what to believe in. Baggage like that don’t resolve itself.”
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t—”
“Does Aaron want to talk to you?”
“Um…”
“Does Aaron want anything to do with you?”
“Uh…”
“Then you can’t.”
I pursed my lips into a perfectly straight line. Arguing with Tegan was like arguing with an evolved, highly intellectual honey badger. Not only did she appear to be right in the most infuriating ways possible, but she wasn’t even nice about it.
“I mean, if you want to keep getting your feelings stomped on, be my guest,” said Tegan.
You know, maybe honey badgers were nicer than Tegan.
“Ugghhh,” I said, grabbing great clumps of my hair—as one does in times of suck. “What am I supposed to do with my life?”
“I dunno,” said Tegan, shrugging. “I mean, you have a girlfriend. You can always do the things boyfriends usually do with their girlfriends. But, you know, whatever.”
On the outside, Tegan was being her usual smart-ass self. But deep down—beneath the hostility and the badassery—I could see it.
She was hurt.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Somehow, “sorry” didn’t feel like enough, so I attempted to give her an awkward remedial hug—like I was eleven years old or something.
Tegan shoved my awkward hug away. “Man, keep your stupid hugs to yourself. What am I, a Care Bear? Fuck!”
I shoved my hands into my lap and blushed.
“Just—!” said Tegan, suddenly, intensely. “I get that the List is important to you. I don’t want to be the one who tells you it’s crazy. Maybe it is…but maybe it isn’t. That’s for you to figure out. I just want you to know that I support you. And if you do find out that the List is crack-ass crazy, just know that I won’t think any less of you. You’ll still be my bitch.”
“Thanks?”
“My question is: Do you really need Aaron to do it?”
“Do what?”
“It. The List. Do you need Aaron to do it?”
I wanted to point out the sheer stupidity of this thought, but the words weren’t cooperating with my brain. All I could come up with was: “It’s Aaron’s List.”
“Is it?” said Tegan. “’Cause last I heard, it was God’s List.”
Tegan invited me to her place after school. I was all in favor. If I didn’t distract myself from my current downward spiral, I was going to lose my mind.
What I failed to realize was that Tegan didn’t have a car. Due to the fact that she didn’t have a license. Due to the fact that she couldn’t drive.
“I drive just fine on Need for Speed,” said Tegan, disclaimerishly. “But you can drive into walls and shit there, and apparently that’s frowned upon in real life.”
“Ah,” I said. “So…do you ride the bus?”
“The bus? Nah, man. School buses are for wieners. I ride home with Frankie.”
Had I known that earlier, I might have developed a sudden case of pneumonia. But seeing as the bell had rung, and school was out, I figured my window of opportunity was gone.
“I don’t think Frankie’s gonna wanna gimme a ride,” I mumbled nervously.
“Of course he will,” said Tegan. “Frankie loves giving people rides.”
Frankie drove an ancient two-door Chevy 4 × 4 that, as far as paint goes, hadn’t made it past the primer stage. But it was equipped with a subwoofer, an honest-to-god gun rack, and mud tires that were about seven sizes too big. Seriously, these puppies belonged in a monster truck rally.
Frankie was just climbing into his truck when he saw us. Both of us. He read the situation with his eyes, and then he shook his head.
“Nope,” said Frankie. “Hell no. I ain’t givin’ Neanderthal a ride home.”
“You don’t have to,” said Tegan. “He’s coming to our house.”
“Hell. NO. Have you seen my cab? It’s a two-seater.”
“It’s a three-seater
.”
“Nuh-uh, it only has two seat belts.”
“Have you ever worn a seat belt in your life?”
“Your boyfriend is the size of that big hairy dude in Harry Potter.”
“His name’s Hagrid, dumb-ass! And if you don’t let Cliff in the truck, I’m gonna drop your ass, right here in the parking lot.”
“Are you on your period?”
“Do you wanna get stabbed to death with a tampon, fucker?!”
“Whatever,” Frankie said in surrender. He climbed into the cab of the truck. “Get in, losers.”
Tegan turned to me and offered an uncharacteristically girlish smile. “See! I told you he’d be cool with it.”
When we arrived at Château de Robertson, Tegan grabbed my hand and pulled me inside—rather forcefully, I might add.
“It’ll be another hour before my dad gets off work,” she said—suddenly all business. “And it’s a twenty-minute drive home. Thirty if he stops at the Junction and grabs a beer. Ricky always talks his ear off. That gives us a small time frame to work with, but really, it’s all the time we need if we cut the foreplay and get down to biz-naaaaas, if you know what I mean.”
Tegan tilted her head and winked at me.
Whoa.
Wait.
What?
Tegan’s head whipped forward, and she towed me across the entry, up the stairs, down the balcony hallway, and into her bedroom.
Hoooooooly shit.
Okay, so I probably spent about eighty-nine percent of an average day thinking about sex. But now that it was possibly actually happening, I didn’t know if I could go through with it. Hell, I didn’t even know if I could do it right! I mean, I get that you stick the thing in the other thing, but I had a feeling it was a little more complicated than Tinkertoys.
The moment Tegan shut the door behind us, she went straight to the window—which she opened. You know, instead of closing the blinds, which I always assumed was a thing you do when you do the thing. Then she rushed to her dresser, pulled the top drawer open, and dug through her panties. Seemed like a reasonable place to hide condoms.
She pulled out a Ziploc bag of pot.
Oh.
Oh!
Tegan raised it high over her head and grinned. “Who’s ready to get roasted?”
Part of me was relieved that we were merely breaking the law (rather than breaking my man-cherry). The other part of me was so hard, I could’ve sunk the Titanic just by turning sideways.
I spent the next five minutes trying to turn myself off by conjuring the most unprovocative images imaginable—dirty public toilets, tuna fish casserole, Mr. Spinelli in his underwear—while Tegan rolled a single joint for us to share. We both sat on her bed while she leaned over her nightstand, all the tools and ingredients strewn across the surface.
She was an origami master with that rolling paper.
It was then that the thought occurred to me: I didn’t want to smoke pot. It mostly had to do with the fact that it was illegal—recreationally speaking. It didn’t help that I kind of hated the shit. The last incident left a bad taste in my brain.
“Isn’t there something else we can do?” I said.
Tegan tacked the bottom of the joint and licked the length of it.
“Yeah, man,” she said. “We can do whatever you want.” And then she grabbed a pen off the nightstand and packed the pot in.
Apparently she meant whatever you want after we were ripped to the tits.
“I mean, aside from smoking pot.”
Tegan blinked as “smoking pot” registered as the activity for which I was seeking an alternative. Her face was like a loading screen. Loading…loading…ding!
“Oh!” said Tegan. She hastily discarded the joint on the nightstand. “Yeah, of course. Sorry, I just assumed…Do you not like weed?”
“I’ve only smoked it twice,” I confessed. “I was having a bad day when I asked Frankie for that free sample. And honestly, it only made things worse.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Tegan seemed more embarrassed than me. “No need to explain. It’s cool. Peer pressure is for wieners.”
I nodded. Apparently, I had a misconstrued understanding of what makes one a wiener. No school buses, no peer pressure. Got it.
“So…whaddaya wanna do?” said Tegan.
A valid question. I still had the Leaning Tower of Pisa in my pants, so anything involving standing up was out of the question. I shifted forward in an effort to hide the incriminating evidence.
“I dunno,” I said. “We could just…talk.”
Tegan leaned back and chuckled. “I always do the talking thing better when I’m not stone-cold sober.”
“Sorry.”
“No,” Tegan snapped. “Don’t be sorry. Believe it or not, I actually respect people who don’t wanna get fucked up.”
“You do?”
“’Course I do! Andre 3000 doesn’t do drugs anymore. He devotes his body to his art. To his music. Christ, he’s a vegan now! I respect the fuck outta that.”
“Oh. That’s cool.”
“It’s just…” said Tegan, “I guess I’m like you. I tend to smoke when I’m having a bad day.”
“You’re having a bad day?”
Tegan tensed up—like the question itself had somehow backed her into a corner. I saw her eye the freshly rolled joint, lying indiscriminately on the nightstand. She shoved her hands into her lap.
“It’s my mom,” she said.
“Your mom?”
“I guess you don’t know anything about her. I’ll give you the Bernadette Robertson starter pack: she’s a hard-core heroin junkie. Has been since the invention of the needle. She walked out on us the week after I was born.”
“She just left? Why?”
You know that moment when you ask a question, and exactly one second later, you realize that was the absolute dumbest thing you could possibly ask? Yeah. That. Fortunately, Tegan didn’t take offense.
“That’s the million-dollar question, ain’t it?” she said. “It’s not exactly rocket science. Two possibilities: either she left ’cause she’s an addict, and that’s what addicts do—they walk out—or she left because I was the kid that she didn’t wanna have. Obviously, I try to pretend that the first option is the reason why. Makes me feel less shitty about myself.”
I frowned.
“She called me today,” said Tegan. Her lips pinched shut, like this was the worst sort of bad news.
“And…that’s a bad thing?”
“She asked if Frankie has any heroin.”
“Oh.”
“Like, that was literally her icebreaker. Not Hey, how’ve you been? or Sorry I haven’t talked in so long. Just straight to the heroin.”
I just stared at her, sort of speechless.
Note to self: Never complain about my mom ever again.
“Which Frankie does,” Tegan continued, when I failed to have a response. “Have heroin, I mean. He’s got this rich-ass customer in Helena Valley West Central. Makes a run every couple of weeks. But that’s more of a side thing. He doesn’t advertise it—”
“What’d you say?” I blurted out.
“What’d I say?” Tegan looked confused.
“To your mom. What’d you say to her?”
“I told her to fuck off. What do you think I said? Of course, she immediately backtracked. Told me how much she missed me, that she wanted to ‘rebuild our relationship,’” Tegan air-quoted. “She tried to make it seem like this could be our thing: me hooking her up with Frankie’s heroin. Said we could shoot up together. That’s her idea of mother-daughter bonding.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s awful.”
“Is it bad that I actually considered it?”
“WHAT?”
Tegan shrugged. A single tear budded at the corner of her eye, then trickled down the contour of her cheek.
“I want to hate her,” she said. “I want to, but I can’t. Instead, she’s just a reminder of everything I hate about m
yself. She didn’t walk out when she had Frankie. Apparently, she was a halfway decent mom when she had him. She cleaned up her act and everything. I was the baby she didn’t want to have. She left us—she left all of us—because of me.”
The dam broke, and the tears came flooding in. Her body went limp, and I caught her, held her close. Her frame trembled and dissolved into me.
“I was a mistake,” she said, sobbing. “I wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Hey!” I said. I grabbed Tegan’s shoulders. Held her back so she could look me in the eyes. “Don’t say that. If there’s anything in this world that was supposed to happen, it’s you. If the universe tried to give me a world without Tegan fucking Robertson, I’d ask for a refund, because that’s bullshit.”
Tegan simultaneously laughed and cried even harder. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with her in this splintering state of emotions, so I just hugged her. Squeezed her until the trembling stopped. Which it did.
“Cliff,” said Tegan, “you have questionable taste in girls. Sorry you got stuck with me.”
“Shut your face hole,” I said. “We both know that I have superior taste in everything.”
“Superior? Ha! Prove it.”
“You want me to prove it? Okay. I’ll prove it.” I pulled away from her, just enough to point to the mirror on her dresser. It was low enough that you could see both of us, intertwined in each other. Even though she’d been crying, and her eyes were rimmed in red, she was beautiful. It was kind of breathtaking just stepping back and looking at her. Her hair was dark and wild with a rocker’s edge, rounded pouty lips pressed into a cutting smirk, and her face like a diamond—an exotic cut of perfect symmetry.
“There,” I said, pointing at the mirror. “She’s your proof, right there.”
“Her?” said Tegan. “I dunno, man. Looks like a hot mess on the edge of a walking disaster.”
I shrugged. “Shows how much you know.”
Twenty-four hours passed like a dream. School came and went like foggy memory. All the while, Tegan’s words from lunch the other day were ringing in my head.
Do you really need Aaron to do it?
It. The List. Do you need Aaron to do it?
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 18