Boy

by Blake Nelson

  When we finally got outside, I found myself opening Emma’s door for her, so she could climb into the RAV4. When she was in, I closed it for her. Everything was going to be very formal tonight.

  We drove downtown, making small talk on the way. Emma directed me to park in a parking garage, so I did, even though it cost twelve bucks. Then we walked up Broadway to the theater. There was a pretty big crowd, older people mostly, people who looked like Emma’s parents.

  I made a joke about the old ladies, but Emma was too nervous to laugh. And she never liked my jokes anyway. She always got touchy whenever I joked around at the Owl office. Like high school journalism was not supposed to be funny.

  • • •

  Anyway, we made it through the play and then walked to the frozen yogurt place across the street. Several other people from the play were there, dressed-up middle-aged people. It was all very polite and civilized.

  Emma finally seemed to relax once she had the frozen yogurt in her hands. It gave her something to focus on. I ate mine too, and we sat there and tried to talk about the play, which I totally didn’t understand. It was about people living in a New York apartment building. Kai might have liked it. She might have understood the jokes.

  As I drove Emma home, I suddenly felt sorry for her. When she got inside, her parents were going to grill her. What happened? Did he like you? Will he ask you out again? That was Emma’s problem. She had been dominated all her life by her parents. They had pushed her to excel at high school and then pushed her to go to Yale. Now they were pushing her to go on dates, because it was getting to be “that time.” She needed to learn about boys so she could eventually meet her husband and start her family.

  One good thing though, halfway through the play she took off the scarf. And she did look good in the dress. She would eventually get a husband, at Yale or whatever.

  60

  I wasn’t the only one going on awkward dates. In May, Peter Frohnmeyer flew up to Portland from San Francisco. This was a business trip supposedly, but his real purpose was to see my mother.

  Naturally, she was a wreck about it. I wasn’t supposed to know what was happening, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. My mother would walk around talking on the phone and getting advice from various friends. Should she marry Peter Frohnmeyer? Had too much time passed? Were they too different as people? After a couple glasses of wine, she’d forget to keep her voice down. Or she wouldn’t notice I was there. Or she was too worked up to care.

  The day she was to meet Peter Frohnmeyer for dinner, I came home from school and found the kitchen a mess. My mother was upstairs. I cleaned up a little. I was nervous too, for some reason. I had found Peter Frohnmeyer on Facebook and looked him over. He was old now. He was thin at least, unlike my dad, who remained heavy and out of shape, even with his twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend. Frohnmeyer had a runner’s body: gaunt, a bit skeletal. His sharp nineties clothing style had morphed into fleece and khakis and lame caps that said PUERTO VALLARTA on them. His hair was mostly gray and there wasn’t much of it left on top. He looked much more corporate in general. There were glossy headshots of him on his Facebook page. He was a senior vice president at a big solar energy company. I clicked through to their site, which was super slick and full of eco-friendly philosophies and grassy fields and babies. Which probably meant they were evil.

  The night of their date arrived. My mother came down the stairs looking better than I’d seen her in years. She looked sexy, which was good for her, I guess, but wasn’t something I wanted to see or think about.

  I made my own dinner that night, but I couldn’t eat it. Then I didn’t feel like sitting around the house, so I drove over to Claude’s, which I hadn’t done spontaneously like that in probably a year. He was playing Assassin’s Creed while he texted back and forth with Rachel, who was out to dinner somewhere with her parents. I texted Kai and then checked to see if anyone was liking the two Cars at Night pictures I had posted on Instagram. It was a strange night of nobody paying attention to anything or anyone. Claude and I barely said a word to each other.

  So then Rachel came over to Claude’s, which was my cue to leave. As I stood up to go, Rachel gave me an update on Ingrid, like she always did, as if Ingrid and I might get together. I left and drove around in the RAV4. I thought about my mother and Peter Frohnmeyer. I didn’t want her to make a mistake based on desperation. I felt like that was a possibility.

  My mother’s car was in the driveway when I got home. Inside, she was sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of wine in front of her, disappointment weighing on her face.

  “You okay?” I said as I closed the door behind me.

  She nodded that she was.

  “How did it go?”

  She shrugged. “Not that good.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I tried at least. And he tried. So at least we know.” She took a slow sip of her wine.

  I did what I always did when I got home late. Got the milk out. Got out a bowl and the box of Cheerios, only this time it was Special K, because we’d run out of Cheerios. We had Special K because my mom was trying to lose weight now that she was single.

  “Does he like Portland?” I asked.

  “Not particularly. He said he could never live anywhere but San Francisco.”

  “Well, that’s where they do the tech stuff nowadays,” I said.

  “He’s like that about a lot of things,” said my mother, with a blank look on her face. “He’s very clear about what he can and cannot do.” She put down her wineglass. “I guess I’ve become set in my ways too.”

  I nodded and poured the milk into the bowl. Then I tried to make my escape, through the dining room to the stairs. Special K got soggy fast; you had to eat it immediately.

  “Wait a minute,” said my mom.

  I stopped.

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s about Henry Oswald.”

  I looked down at my bowl. I had not moved quickly enough. The Special K was already turning to mush.

  “Henry and his wife . . . ,” said my mother. “They’re going through a transition.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’re not living together anymore.”

  This I did not want to hear. My feelings about Mr. Oswald were very simple. He had helped me get into Cal Arts. And I was grateful. And whatever else he was up to, with or without my mother, was none of my business. I didn’t need to know. I didn’t want to know.

  “This might affect us,” said my mother.

  “Not us, you,” I said.

  “No. All of us. A lot of people are involved. His family. Our family. It’s a very complicated situation.”

  “Are you and Mr. Oswald going to be together?”

  My mother looked at her wineglass. “That’s what he wants. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Couldn’t you at least wait until I leave for college?”

  “Hey, this isn’t easy for me. Why do you think I went out with Peter? Believe me, if there were an easy way out of this, I would take it.”

  I looked down at my bowl of mush. “Could we talk about this in the morning?” I said. “I’m sorta tired.”

  My mother looked at me. “You’re tired?” she said. “How do you think l feel?”

  61

  June 12 was graduation day. It was one of those days, like a wedding or a funeral, where you feel like you’re not quite in your body, at least not in the usual way. You kind of float through things. As I walked through Evergreen’s halls that day, I could already feel a distance forming. I was already separating from it. And the sports fields, and the breezeway, and the picnic benches, even the courtyard where I used to watch the fog during geometry class: It was already getting smaller, turning into something juvenile and in the past. Like whatever happened here, however important it had seemed at the time, it was already fading. Nothing lasted.

  Emma Van Buskirk gave the
big speech, the same one my brother gave two years before. It was the usual stuff, about looking toward the future, not compromising our ideals, and contributing to society. Everyone stopped listening after the first thirty seconds. When it was over, we threw our hats in the air.

  Logan had a big party that night. He had the pool going and the hot tub. Kai and Antoinette even came: I guess they figured since we were graduated, it was safe to come mingle with these people. Claude and Rachel were there, and Ingrid, who I talked to a bit. Then Emma Van Buskirk showed up. That was interesting. After having her opinions about the popular people, here she finally was, seeing them in their natural environment. The funny thing was, she got a little drunk and then started talking about Hanna in this loud voice. Like how some people thought she was a bitch, but how she, Emma, had always liked and respected her as a strong woman and how sad it was, what had happened. And then a bunch of other people who never knew Hanna also chimed in about it. Nobody who actually knew Hanna said a word. And then, just in time, someone started pushing people into the pool. Emma screamed and ran away.

  • • •

  In July we had to start packing up my parents’ house. My mother was going to be moving at the end of August. This was a pain in the ass, but inevitable. I was still working at the Garden Center, so I could only help with the packing after work and on the weekends. It was quite a job, sorting through everything, trying to figure out what to save and what to throw in the big Dumpster in the driveway. My eighteen tennis racquets? A book I wrote about space aliens in fourth grade? An old skateboard I never rode? Kai came over during this, which was nice of her. One night she sat at my brother’s desk while Russell gave me detailed instructions on the phone of what to do with his stuff. I was all in favor of the new Russell, who cared about the poor and loved his new professor who personally knew the president, but when he started telling me how exactly to pack up his things, I saw that he was still basically the same old Russell, wanting everything done very meticulously and thinking his time was much more valuable than anybody else’s.

  Since it was summer, and warm, Kai and I would sometimes take a bottle of wine from my dad’s collection and drink it outside in the backyard late at night. This was super fun, doing nothing, being there together.

  “Do you ever think of how totally different we might be when we’re older?” said Kai one night. I was on my side, pulling on the grass. Kai was on her stomach beside me, watching a ladybug crawl up her finger.

  “Different like how?” I said.

  “Just like, all the different directions there are. That we don’t even know about yet.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Like people go to college and figure out they really love molecular biology. And then they go off and do that.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to love molecular biology,” I said.

  She watched the ladybug. “I feel like there’s going to be this moment in the future when we’ll have to choose.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I wonder what I’ll choose.”

  “I think you’ll choose something cool.”

  “But you don’t know,” she said. “Because my mom? She was going to do all these things. But then she got pregnant, and now she’s a housewife, driving a minivan.”

  “I can’t see you as a housewife.”

  Kai blew gently on the ladybug. “If I become super boring, will you come find me?” she said.

  “Yeah, if you want.”

  “Maybe you and I could get married,” she said.

  “I’d marry you.”

  “You would?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll have my little molecular biology job and I’ll need a wife, so I’ll hit you up.”

  “Thanks a lot!”

  “No, but seriously,” I said. “There’s probably a time in your life when the minivan makes sense. There must be. Since so many people have them.”

  “Why would you marry me?”

  “Why?” I said. I put a piece of grass in my mouth. “Because it would be fun. You wouldn’t take it too seriously. And I could be myself.”

  “I could write things and you could take pictures.”

  “Exactly.”

  She sighed. “God, life is going to be so strange.”

  “Yeah, but it’ll be fun. I think it will be. I hope it will be.”

  She rolled onto her back and stared up at the stars. “Would you really marry me?”

  “I think I would.”

  She thought about this. “That’s good to know,” she said.

  62

  Antoinette was the first to leave. She flew to Germany the first week of August to be with her dad. Then she was going to fly directly to her college in New Mexico. Her mom and Bald Mike were going to drive down with her stuff and help her get situated in her dorm.

  Antoinette didn’t want to make a big deal of saying good-bye. She didn’t want us to come to the airport. But Kai and I insisted we do something, so we all went to the downtown Jamba Juice the night before. Kai drove us in the Subaru. Once we got there, we mostly checked out the other Jamba Juice customers and made fun of some of them and also said which ones were cool. This led to us wondering what music people would be listening to at our various colleges and what they would dress like and be like in general. Antoinette thought her college would be super nerdy but would probably have some geniuses hidden among them. Kai thought everyone at New York University would be chewing gum and have designer clothes that cost a fortune. I didn’t know what the people at Cal Arts would be like except that supposedly people took mushrooms and walked around naked. Antoinette said she couldn’t see me doing that, I was too conservative, but Kai said she could see it. And I could see it too, since my brother had changed so much at college. I was pretty adaptable, I thought.

  Then Antoinette’s mom called to remind her she wasn’t done packing, so then we all got back in Kai’s car and drove back to Antoinette’s. And then we really did have to say good-bye, which was kind of shocking and terrible in a way. I guess I hadn’t prepared myself for that part, actually hugging Antoinette and then standing there while Kai hugged her. Everyone started crying. Even Antoinette cried a little. And then Kai and I stood there like idiots while Antoinette went back in her house and did a final wave before she went in the door.

  Kai drove us back in silence, wiping the tears off her face the whole way.

  • • •

  Kai left next. She left in the third week of August. She said you had to go early to NYU because the housing there was so impossible, and dorm space was so limited, and if you screwed up you might end up living on the street or under a bridge. She was pretty worried about the city in general. Her neighbor had recently visited New York and lost her wallet, or had it stolen, or something. Kai was pretty sure she would get robbed by someone or kidnapped by a taxi driver. “What’s to keep them from just driving off with you?” she said. “Who would ever know?”

  It didn’t help that nobody in her family had ever lived anywhere east of the Mississippi. Her dad knew one guy who he’d gone to dental school with who lived outside New York, so they’d looked him up on Facebook and gotten in touch, in case Kai needed to be rescued. Richie laughed at all this. He said New York was “five million rich assholes walking their dogs at night” and that Manhattan was probably the safest place on earth. I told Kai this, and her dad, who I was seeing a lot of, since Kai was constantly wanting me to come over during that last week while she was packing and getting ready.

  At least she had great clothes. By this point, Kai was the best dresser of any high school person I knew. All summer she had been on fashion blogs studying what people were wearing. The couple times we went to Agenda, she would wear weird colors and combinations and the other girls would be super jealous. Still, she thought she would look like a hick in New York. I’d been in Berlin, which was probably similar to New York, so I kept telling her: You’re hot. You look great. Everyone is going to think you’re amazing. B
ut she never believed it.

  Finally, her day came and I rode to the airport with her and her family. Kai cried during much of the drive. She was really scared. She’d apologize and fix her makeup in the mirror and then start crying again. Her mother was pretty upset too, and her dad was getting a little annoyed with everyone for being so emotional. He kept reminding everyone she was coming home for Thanksgiving—they’d already bought the plane ticket—which was only twelve weeks away.

  When we got to the airport, we got out, and Kai suddenly remembered something she needed out of her big suitcase. She pushed it over and unzipped it, right there on the ground in front of the airport with all the cars and the people crowding by. Nobody knew what she was doing. She took out her folded clothes and stacked them on the dirty cement. She was panicking, basically. She finally found whatever she was looking for, but now she was sweating and her makeup was all a mess again. I knelt down on the ground to help her repack the suitcase, and then we all started laughing. Even Kai laughed. Then her dad took her in his arms and really squeezed her hard until she went limp for a minute to calm her down. We had plenty of time. We were two hours early.

  So then she gave me a long hug, and I kissed her forehead, and she said in my ear, “Oh, Gavin, why am I so scared?”

  “Because you’re doing something amazing,” I said back.

  Then she got all her crap together and tromped off, all red-faced and crying but also with her determined Kai energy. I had tears in my eyes too, and her mom was crying, and Kai went into the big revolving door, and that was it. She was gone. She was gone away to New York. And we were all standing there, getting yelled at by a traffic cop. . . .

  • • •

  My flight was a week later. I didn’t do much for those days. I packed. I drove around. I kept my camera with me, since I was having all these different feelings about everything, and Richie always told me, whenever you’re going through something, that’s the best time to take photos.