“I’m waiting in the car.”
A small dog came leaping out of a doggie door I hadn’t noticed until its owner filled it, distracting from Lindsey’s grand exit. From the perk of his ears and the bounce in his posture, it seemed he was there to play. He’d never encountered an intruder in his life, but his welcome was a noisy one. Four joyful little yaps.
“Okay, I’m out, too,” I said. “If this thing keeps yapping, every person in that house is going to be out here before you get through the first bottle of dye. There’s no way we’re gonna pull this off.”
When the door to the house opened, we all ducked behind the patio furniture closest to the screen door, getting the dog even more excited. He thought we were doing it for his benefit. Whoever opened the door didn’t walk out onto the patio, only called through the narrow gap he had cracked it.
“Bruiser! Quiet!” It was a male voice, agitated. He said it like he assumed that the dog was barking at nothing, and I felt a little bad that the dog was being reprimanded for doing his job. When Bruiser—a name he must have been given ironically—barked again, the voice demanded he come inside, and he complied. I waited until he had gotten through his doggie door before I turned to go.
“Wait! What are you doing?” whispered Nina.
I looked to Lila for help.
“I told you, I’m going! We haven’t even started and it’s a disaster!”
“But he left!”
“You’re delusional. We gave it a try, and it’s not going to work. We can try something else. Later.”
We both looked at Lila.
“Are you going, too?” Nina asked.
Lila didn’t say anything for a full ten seconds, not looking at either of us. It was an active concentration—it looked like she was solving an equation in her head rather than zoning out. Finally, she let out a loud, irritated sigh, and Nina, knowing what this meant, raised her hands in silent victory.
“I knew it!” Nina said. “You’re the best.”
“I’m on their side, for the record,” I heard Lila say as I started crawling for the door. “I just know that if I leave you alone out here you’re going to destroy the place.”
• • •
I don’t want to be an artist or a jewelry maker or a singer. I don’t paint or build furniture or write poetry. I don’t have a head for numbers. I want to work at a souvenir store in the Grand Canyon or be a waitress in a coffee shop in Seattle. I want to rent a trailer in Austin and drive it to L.A., and eat pie in every city along the way. I am not unhappy being poor.
I’ve been friends with exactly one nerd in my life: Trevor Jenkins. But I use the term loosely. Friends, not nerd—Trevor Jenkins was definitely a nerd. Some overworked secretary in our scheduling office accidentally put me in college-prep chem lab junior year, and by the time I realized the mistake all the other classes were full. It turns out there are plenty of students at our school who wanted to take regular, don’t-pull-a-muscle science classes, but not that many who want to take college prep, which was, by the way, as high as it got there. There were no honors or AP-level classes offered in any of the subjects.
When I walked into class that first day, three of the four tables were full of the twelve kids who traveled in one hive. Whose lives weren’t even that much lonelier on account of their being smart, because there were just enough of them to establish their own hierarchy. So they didn’t have to bother with the larger, school-wide hierarchy, which they sat at the very bottom of. There is something unnerving about an obese or acne-riddled sixteen-year-old without any immediately detectable insecurity issues, and this, too, they used in their favor. It felt, sometimes, like they were waiting for you to put them down in some subtle way—maybe not even intentionally—so they could make it clear what they thought of the kind of person who would judge someone as gifted as them on superficial criteria. Trevor sat all by himself at the fourth table.
He was watching an episode of The Sopranos on his iPhone without making even the smallest effort to conceal it. Everyone at our school used their phones when they weren’t supposed to, but everyone had their own particular method for not drawing any attention to themselves by doing so. Some people wore hooded sweatshirts with hand pockets sewn onto the stomach, in order to store their devices there. Some people slid them in between notebooks, while the least motivated students (including Nina) cut out pages of their textbooks for convenient electronics storage. When I walked up to Trevor and asked if anyone else was sitting at the table, he shushed me, not looking up from his phone, making it even more obvious what he was doing and how little he cared. Already feeling defeated by the fact that there would be only two of us working toward answers most tables would have four people collaborating on, the very real possibility that this class would stand in between me and a high school diploma felt more real still.
“I guess it’ll just be us, then? I wonder if they’d rather we both go join other tables? If, like, they prefer groups of five to groups of two?”
“I doubt they give a shit,” he said, still not looking up. “Our teacher didn’t even bother to show up. He just left copies of this problem set, which is a joke. I already did the first half. I left the second half for you.”
He slid the paper across the lab table toward me, still looking at the phone.
“So if there isn’t any teacher coming, why are they still here?” I asked, looking at the table closest to us.
“Because they’re idiots.”
“So why are you still here?”
“I’m just finishing the episode.”
“Is Adriana dead yet in the episode you’re watching?”
This, finally, made him look up.
“Yes, but what if she hadn’t been?”
“I just wanted to make sure you had eyes,” I said. Which only made him look back down at the screen.
“Just do the second half of the problem set. We’re supposed to turn it in on Monday.”
I meant to at least attempt my half of the problem set, I really did. The weekend sometimes just has its own trajectory, along which the plans you had feel utterly inconceivable when it comes time to execute them. And as the weekend pulls you pleasantly along the current it’s set on, you can’t imagine what you were thinking when you made the plans you did, and then, suddenly, come Monday morning, you’re just as confused as to why you didn’t do whatever you were supposed to when you had the chance. It’s as close to a double life as normal, average people ever come. It’s not that I forgot about the problems while I was walking the stray puppy Nina had found that week and hid from her mother for two full weeks before driving it three and a half hours to the closest no-kill shelter, or making pot brownies with Lindsey when this idiot twelve-year-old on her street told her he would give her two hundred dollars for a batch, or paying for one movie and then sneaking into a second and third with them both, sitting in the theater long enough to actually need a refill on the unthinkably large tub of popcorn, a second helping of which is normally outside the realm of human possibility. It was always in the back of my mind, making everything less fun, and by the time the sun set on Sunday, I was nearly immobile from panic. But even then, wanting desperately to solve the problems, I knew I’d have no idea what to do first if I did go all the way upstairs to my bedroom and take the time to unzip my book bag and open the folder where I had stashed them. Trying to save myself from that empty feeling I knew I would have when I saw those problems staring blankly up at me, like a pervert on a playground, I never took them out. And I voluntarily went to bed, an accomplice to the atrocity that not doing anything would make my Monday.
It was the first time I was ever early to class. I thought if I could be there, ready to explain what happened before Trevor had time to settle himself, he would be doing other things while I was talking and might not hear how empty whatever I had to say was. At first I thought it was working. He didn’t seem concerned enough to
look up from the backpack he was unzipping—probably to get out his phone to watch another episode of The Sopranos—until I got to “which is why I didn’t do my half of the set.” And then, like the weapon used for the last mob hit you ever saw coming, a look crossed his face and then disappeared so quickly that it took a moment to process, but I saw it: He was physically elated at the fact that he had more problems to do. And even though he went on to tell me what an idiot I had to be to not be able to do the first day’s homework for a class like that, and asked me if I knew what the word for a female idiot is, I liked him. Because he hadn’t left the second half of the problems to make my life more difficult or even because he wanted to get back to his show. But because he thought I might like to do them.
“Give me the sheet,” he said.
I wordlessly complied, and after three minutes of attention more rapt than even what he had shown Tony Soprano, the sheet was finished.
I never saw him outside of the classroom, never mind the building, but after that, I considered him a friend, if only because we both gave the other something they wanted. He got to have an entire lab table’s worth of homework all to himself, and I got my only A in the only college-prep class I ever took in high school. I have no idea where he landed after we graduated. If he’s the brightest burger flipper in the country, or if he’s one step closer to cutting into people’s brains or curing autism. But I think about him often, because he taught me that it wasn’t just my short attention span and my addiction to MTV years after everyone else had stopped watching it that conspired in the low B’s and high C’s and even the stray D’s that marched across my report card. I saw something in Trevor Jenkins’s eyes when I handed him that unfinished set of problems that I had never felt. For numbers or language or anything you can find on the periodic table. And I had to see what people were really capable of before I could truly embrace my own limits.
Which is fine by me. I just don’t want to live in central Florida anymore.
• • •
Back at the car, Lindsey and I buzzed with the kind of relief you feel physically in response to getting out of the most hopeless situations—when a blizzard closes the school on the day of a midterm you didn’t study for or your lab partner proves a genius; when your dentist decides the cavity he had you come back in to have filled isn’t bad enough, on closer inspection, to require drilling; a sealer will be enough. The kind of small miracle that happens only a handful of times in a life. I felt the endorphins of a runner’s high. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been dreading the prank until I didn’t have to do it anymore. The ease with which we’d absented ourselves—it had taken only a single phrase, and Nina hadn’t even been mad—made every problem seem solvable, and made it clear that it had only been our mishandling of the situation that made it a problem in the first place. All we had had to do was say “no,” a word we were going to have to use more often. And the solidarity with which Lila and Nina had stayed was like watching your parents who were on the brink of divorce share a tender moment—hands clasped across a white-tablecloth dinner, or a shoulder massage at the end of a long day. And of course, things always seem less dire when they’re happening to other people. When we had been in on the plan, it had felt like breaking and entering. Now that we were safely off Max’s property, we saw that it was really only a little bit of ink. Everything, we were suddenly sure, was going to be fine.
We didn’t talk about any of this in the car, of course. We were teenage girls. We talked about the liquid earwax that was always flowing freely out of Garrett Henchler’s left ear, and whether he and his best friend, Aaron, were concocting a substance that looked like earwax or if it was real. The pride with which they went pointing out the problem and the fact that Garrett was a perfect physical specimen in every other way made us certain it was fake, but we couldn’t decide why they would spend so much time and energy on something that would make them less appealing. When that ended in a draw, we took up whether Jenna Lipman’s mom was sleeping with Tommy Clooser’s dad, which is what everyone claimed, and how awkward it would be if they had to move in with each other, since they’d been dry humping in the supply closet in the school gym for months by then.
I was just about to tease the limits of my new good fortune with a yawn, and by wondering out loud what was taking them so long, when Lindsey’s face changed. She was looking out the window I was leaning against, the one closest to the curb outside Max’s house. It was the look on the horror-movie heroine’s face when she spots the killer behind the person she’s talking to.
“Oh, fuck.”
Four
Bobby must have had less caffeine than normal that day, because Sal came back to our booth after what couldn’t have been more than a single inning. “Okay, girls, name the animal that went extinct almost exactly a hundred years ago, and in which museum the body of the last one is currently on display.”
This was our favorite part of the night.
“The passenger pigeon, in the Smithsonian. Her name is Martha,” said Decker, before we could even gather our heads and begin the long think-tank process of coming nowhere near the right answer.
“Gross, they gave her a name,” Lindsey said. “Why does that make it seem more morbid?”
“I guess I should tell my brother he’s got to get his kids watching that Mickey Mouse show you were on, huh?” Sal said, clearly more impressed than he was disappointed at having been unable to stump the table.
“You have nieces and nephews?” Nina asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s just weird to think of you with brothers and sisters. I’ve always kind of assumed you came out of the womb as a fully grown man.”
“You’re out of luck,” I said, to avoid having to think of Sal covered in amniotic fluid. “It’s been years since that show was on.”
“Eh. It’s fine,” he said. “Those kids watch too much TV anyway. They’re worthless.”
“I knew there was a reason we had never heard of them,” Nina said, vindicated, as if anyone had been arguing against the strangeness of Sal having siblings.
“For you,” Sal said, nodding at Decker and ignoring Nina’s comment, “a drink on the house for the right answer. What’re you drinking?”
“Awesome. I’ll have a bourbon,” Decker said with all the earnest enthusiasm he might have had if he didn’t have enough money to buy his own bourbon distillery.
When Sal disappeared behind the bar to fill the order, we all turned to Decker.
“What?!” he asked.
“Dude, how did you know that?” Lindsey asked.
“When I was in D.C. to promote White House Winter, the curator of the Smithsonian gave me a private tour of the exhibit on extinction they were preparing before it was open to the public. So Martha and I go way back.”
“But you haven’t made a movie on extinction or a movie set in a museum,” I said, earning another Don’t get carried away in your public display of Decker knowledge look from Nina.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “People want to impress. I’ve seen blueprints for buildings that were commissioned for millions of dollars before ground was broken on them, and I’ve been given tours of flagship stores for brands that only sell women’s clothing. I never ask. People come to me.”
“No offense,” Nina said. “But why do they want your opinion? You’re a good actor and everything—I mean, obviously—but why would you have anything to say about dead birds and architecture?”
“You know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that,” he said. “And I think they want to show me how good they are at their jobs. Like, Okay, you might be one of the biggest movie stars, but I’ve got the market cornered on geology, or whatever the fuck you call the study of things that lived a long time ago—”
“Um, not that—” Lindsey said.
“And I’m not even saying tha
t they like my acting—I find that as long as you say your lines correctly most people are fine with a performance, it’s the critics that try to make it something more than it is. But they just trust, from all these movies I’ve been in, that I’m good at what I do. And they want to show me that they’re good at what they do, which, I mean, in a way I respect.”
“But isn’t it sometimes awkward?” I asked. “When they’re, like, looking at you, expecting you to see the beauty and tragedy and meaning in what is essentially roadkill, and all you see is a bird corpse?”
He looked at me like we had just figured out that we were from the same small town, or had the same distant cousin.
“You have no idea. I would far rather spend an hour with a dying kid—”
Lindsey and Nina drew back in horror at the prospect.
“Dude, I know, but that’s part of the job, too,” he said. “But that’s easier for me—I leave feeling better than I do after spending an hour making some middle-aged scholar or businessman feel like his life’s work isn’t good enough to impress me because I’m not a good enough actor to make him believe that it does. And sometimes I don’t even want to be there. I mean, that day at the Smithsonian I was exhausted. What I needed was a jar of Vaseline and some pay-per-view—”
“Gross,” Nina said, making it clear that she didn’t really think it was.
“And other times I feel really grateful.”
“For the pigeon corpses?” Lindsey asked.
“Because I know there are people who do want to see these things—who have read about them or heard about them—who will never get to see them, and I’m sitting there thinking about the waitress I had at lunch who I wouldn’t mind seeing naked, when I’m standing right in front of them.”
He was really getting worked up now, and the pronunciation of his words had grown a little soft. The complimentary bourbon that one of Sal’s waiters had dropped off was already gone.
“School was never my thing. Part of why I got into acting was that it was all I thought I was qualified for, and somehow I’ve managed to cobble together a first-rate education, from things that even people who go to Harvard don’t have access to, and it makes me feel guilty.”
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