by Matthue Roth
“Who?”
Suddenly, I realized I was headed toward a severe danger zone—I might not be allowed to tell.
“I can’t say,” I said. “But it’s someone who you’d never guess was—”
“Is it Bates?”
My mouth hung open. “How did you know?”
Sajit pulled the emergency stop button before the doors could open.
“Honey, please. I am the ultimate air traffic controller on high of gaydar, thank you very much.”
“But he doesn’t act—”
“So, dish!” He was past the headline, past the news, and into the clever back-and-forth Crossfire dissection of it. “How did you find out? What have you been doing?”
“Well, for one thing,” I said, “we went to Bubbles.”
“Bubbles?” Sajit groaned. “Quelle nightmare, Jupe. These days, I’m all about the sophistication.”
“Damn,” I said, sinking back against the wall. I felt a wad of months-old gum touch the back of my spine through my T-shirt, and I immediately lifted myself back up. “Sajit, you’re crazy. You’re totally hooked up. You operate, like, fifteen different lives, and you’ve totally managed to pretend you’ve never even been to the Yards. How the hell did you do it?”
He pulled his head back, baffled. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? I mean, everyone I know from the Yards is either still in the Yards, or we’re so wrapped up in trying to not look like we’re from the Yards that none of us just deals with it. None of us are just happy with what we are. Vadim is trying so hard to act fluent in C++ that he barely remembers he owns a Mac. Reg doesn’t do anything but sports. And me—well, Devin Murray just found out how close I live to the club where her party was, and now I have to try and convince her not to shame and disgrace me in front of the entire school.”
“Man,” said Sajit at last, “you really don’t know much about being in high school, do you?”
“Of course I do, I’ve been doing everything—”
“Jupiter, listen—you don’t.”
I clamped my mouth shut.
“First of all,” Sajit told me, “you need to chill. The world will not shatter the moment that people discover you grew up in the Yards, okay? And, second—you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Vadim is going in one direction and you’re going in another. Just like you and I did. Eventually, you’ll get to some sort of crossroads where you run into each other again, and you’ll be able to check in with each other and act like nothing happened, because, really, nothing did.”
I was speechless.
I really, really was. I didn’t know how, in the span of time since last June when eighth grade ended, Sajit had become so wise. But, dammit, I was impressed. I felt like I’d just had a religious experience. Like, now, everything made sense.
“And, about falling for a girl? I wouldn’t sweat it, Jupe. Right now, you’re working on yourself. She’ll come out of the woodwork when the time is right.”
“Oh,” I said, dazed and overloaded.
Sajit pushed down the emergency stop button and, after a momentary hiccup, the elevator doors popped open. We were on the fourth floor. My class was on the first floor, and I was already late. It didn’t matter. I’d just ridden the elevator. How cool was that?
Sajit was holding the door open for me. “Hey, Jupe. You coming?”
I snapped myself out of it. “Uh—yeah, sure. Definitely,” I said, hustling out of there. Then, in a flash, I remembered what I’d needed to ask Sajit in the first place. “So,” I said, “what do you know about Freshman Day, anyway?”
“Oh, that.” Sajit rolled his eyes, sounding as bored as if it were a piece of Hollywood gossip two weeks old. “Well, with all your little extracurricular activities, you’ve got more of an inside scoop on it than I’ll ever have. Why don’t you just ask Bates?”
“Freshman Day?” Bates barked out a wholehearted, full-bellied, stuffed turkey of a laugh when I found him in the hall. “Don’t worry about it, man. Just come find me after school tomorrow on the South Lawn, and we’ll chill.”
Freshman Day came and went, both sooner and faster than I’d anticipated. I rolled up to school that day with two of the best iced teas I’d ever made, lime and fresh mint and rosemary, poured inside two empty one-fifth-liter bottles of Jim Beam that I’d managed to beg off Mr. Diggory, who was building a whole glass house out of them next to where he usually slept in our back alley. After school, I took both bottles outside to the South Lawn and handed one to Bates. He reached into his own backpack, pulled out two paper bags in a perfectly matching size, and stuck both inside. We clinked glasses, settled into a comfortable resting spot between two of the gigantic stone pillars that layered the south entrance to North Shore, and settled down to watch the fun.
The truth of the matter is, hardly anybody ever gets nailed on Freshman Day who isn’t actually looking to get nailed. Through the miracle of school gossip, everybody but me knew about Freshman Day days in advance. All the nerds, weaklings, red-haired kids, and other traditional targets of mindless adolescent venom had in mind to be well out of sight way before the final bell of the day rang. They stuffed their backpacks and got on the first bus home at the end of the day.
Bates and I did see some things go down. Most of them were tough-looking freshmen who’d been bumming around the corridor near the South Lawn, virtually waiting for someone of Bates’s stature and demeanor to swoop down and grab them. Once they’d been rolled—it was an initiation rite of sorts, as much as anything could be—they started tossing each other down the hill, jumping on top of them. They stuffed each other into trash cans and hammered on them like drums.
It wasn’t like anyone was asking for it. It was more that they were looking for an excuse to do all sorts of ridiculous stuff to each other.
The South Lawn, I was finding, wasn’t nearly as creepy as everyone made it out to be. I mean, sure, the kids dressed like they were going to a funeral, and not the funeral of anyone you’d ever want to be associated with. Half the time, their conversations were so obfuscating as to be totally unfollowable—I’d think they were talking about an old monster movie, and halfway in I’d realize they were actually talking about a religion. There was one kid, Casey, who was a straight-up Satanist. But he was actually really nice, and he was obsessed with those peanut-butter cheese crackers and always brought extras, since they tasted disgusting but once you smelled one, you were filled with a craving. He would talk for hours about scientific theories from the ‘50s and was always really amiable, except that occasionally he’d say something about the coming apocalypse and you’d wonder whether he had insider information.
Everything was cool. I mean, as cool as it could be, considering the circumstances—considering that Vadim hated my guts and that my classes sucked and that I still didn’t have a girlfriend, that is. As far as the South Lawn went, I wasn’t officially a member—I could feel that in their attitudes, in their speech and in the way they looked at me. When someone heard news from their favorite metal band or a new chain-gang joke, I was always the last one to hear. Since I didn’t even know most metal bands’ names, that was okay with me. Mostly, I was starting to get known as Bates’s friend. His sidekick, even. But, in a place where everyone carried jewelry which was frequently mistaken for weaponry, there were worse things to be known for.
I walked down the hall, the picture-perfect poster boy for well-adjusted adolescent cool. And the sea of faces smiling back at me only reinforced the image. I wasn’t really happy, but I knew I was doing okay. I was counting down the minutes till I could take a bus downtown to the land of unspeakably cool people who still didn’t talk to me. But, until that time of day came, I could chill on the South Lawn and make myself feel cool, cooler than cool. With my own brute squad and my own gay best friend—even if nobody knew it but me (and Sajit).
And so I had another place to hang out, another vessel for my after-school activities. Which was just
as well, since I was having to go to further and further lengths to avoid my home life.
“Is official,” my father announced to me that night. “We are being evacuated.”
“Evacuated?” I repeated, not believing what I was hearing. Then the spell-checker in my brain switched on, and I adjusted to compensate for his language. “Oh—you mean about the house. It’s evicted, Dad—the word is evicted.”
Which was not that much better.
My father didn’t even bother trying to turn it into a grammar lesson. He cleared off a space on my bed, which was covered with the folded-out liner notes to ten or fifteen different tapes, and sat down to look at me eye to eye. “We have letter from company, must move out by next month.”
“Next month?” I said. “That’s not too bad. At least we’ve got a whole month to pack up and move and find another place.” Seeing the furrowed Venetian slits of my father’s forehead grow even thicker with worry, I asked, “Isn’t it?”
“No, Jupiter,” he said. “Is not, really. To find new house is long, long work. And how we will afford it—you know, you don’t need to hear none of this. You are still too young.”
That was a lie, and we both knew it. That insular, us-against-the-world trust that I used to have, when I was five years old and I thought that my father was a superhero, felt like it belonged to a long time ago. I used to think he was the tallest and smartest and most dependable human being ever created, that the traffic lights would always change on his command when he was in the driver’s seat. And now…
Well, I wasn’t five years old anymore.
Now his head looked knobby and weak. The folds in his skin, the ones that I always used to think made him look like a tree-god, mighty and old and created of oak and cedar wood, now made him look sagging and deflated. The perfect smoothness of his cheeks had day-old stubble in an uneven pattern, spiraling down his neck like a rash. If this was one more stage of growing up, well then, I didn’t think I was ready for it.
But some things, I guess, happen anyway.
“Tell me about our family,” I said suddenly.
My father looked up from the paper in surprise.
“Our family? What you want to know from our family? Your grandfather he did the rabbi for a small congregation in Lithuania, they throwed him in jail and chop off his beard. Your grand-grandfather he lived in Sevlusz, husband of very important woman, she come from Vitebsk, in—”
“No! No—I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to say it so loud. It’s just, that’s not what I want to hear.”
He peered at me with thoughtful eyes, incisive eyes, eyes that wanted to see my next move before I made it. For fourteen years, he’d been the wisest person around me, knew my every thought before I thought it. Now, however, I was a teenager. This was new ground for both of us. Now, my mind was moving in all directions, thinking about girls and parties and the kids at school he always warned me about hanging out with. He didn’t know what to think of me, and that scared both of us a lot more than either of us would ever acknowledge.
He reached over and touched the left side of my face, his thumb over my temple, his pinky just brushing my chin.
“Your grand-grandfather, he was glazer,” he told me. “Very poor boy, but he was very good at his craft. Not glazing, you understand, which is taking very rough mineral, putting shining coating on, making it smooth and shiny. That is how to do glazing, yes. But he is something different—every job he had was new. He was forever always selling himself. He travel, you know. He travel from town to town, always meeting new people who looking for the glazing, always to find customer. He always say, each job is two jobs. The glaze, that is easy part. First is selling yourself to customer, and that is the real job.”
He stopped talking and stared out the window, at the night sky.
“Your grand-grandfather, he is dead when I am fourteen,” my father said. “I only been working for him in shop two years, not know him well. My father took over glaze shop then, he run for few years. But it was not the same. He always say, he never have what it take.” He shifted his weight on the bed from one leg to another. “Maybe it is same for me. Maybe, for this America thing, we not have what it take.”
I finally lifted myself up out of my not-quite-looking-at-him position and pulled myself to the edge of the bed, next to him. I looked at his distant face. The short hairs of his beard were prickly and rough, standing straight out at attention. His eyes were small, glasslike beads. I followed his gaze out the window, crusty with dirt, to the dim silhouettes of stars.
“It’s not over yet, Dad,” I said. I don’t remember if I was speaking in Russian or English, but it felt like both. “You’re looking at the stars, aren’t you? Even if the view is all crappy and stained, you can still see them. We’ll get through this one, Dad. One way or another, it’s all gonna come together. It’s all gonna happen.”
Abruptly, he broke his gaze and looked back at me.
“I was not looking at stars, Jupiter. I looking at window. How is it that rest of your room is so dirty, but the window is freshly oiled?”
Uh…went my brain, struggling to keep up with the speed of the conversation. It was true: If you wanted to fool your parents, you couldn’t just fool them and be done with it. Once you started tricking them, you had to keep tricking them until either they found out or you moved away to college. And I so didn’t have the stamina to keep this up for four years.
“Uh…” I said.
He stood up and walked over to the window.
“If it is that you are finally to clean your room, I am proud—but Jupiter, I do not think it is that,” he was saying. “Jupiter, my son, are you—”
“Dad,” I blurted out, “what’s the name of the management company that owns the building?”
He froze. You could tell, he’d been thinking about this for a while. Actually, knowing my father, he was spending every free ion of brain space trying to think of a way to keep us in the life to which we had become accustomed, plotting a way to keep us off the street. I felt bad about the diversion, but I’d been needing to ask him that anyway. “You mean the ones who run our factory? Jupiter, you already know name of company we work for—”
“No, not our company. You said they wanted to open another factory, but there were none on the market. Who are the people who actually own the building?”
He looked at me askance. “Why you need to know?”
“I just…listen, Dad. I have an idea.”
He snapped his fingers. “It say on insurance papers downstairs! Follow me, Jupiter. We find out.”
Misdirection. The last refuge of the cornered adolescent, needing to hold on to the only secrets he has left, feeling the predator closing in.
But in this case, my parents weren’t the predators. As much as they were trying to fight with me, force me to come straight home after school and to share the salacious, embarrassing details of my life with them over dinner, I knew they weren’t trying to fight me. This was just the way they worked. It was the only way they knew how to work.
My mother, seeing me and my father working together, was naturally suspicious. “What are you digging for?” she crowed, peering over my father’s shoulder, trying to find out what chicanery we were up to, what kind of devilry was making us suddenly team up, and for what purpose. Neither of us answered her. We just kept digging through my father’s ironclad long-box files, tossing aside tax forms and receipts from the hardware store until, at last, my father seized upon the needed document and pulled it out. “Hah!” he cried, holding it in the air with both hands. “Is here!”
I reached between his fingers and pulled the document toward me. It was a cc: of a letter sent from the landlords to the company that ran our factory, whose trucks showed up like clockwork to pick up the fruits of our daily labor. I ran my finger from the body of the letter to the top and checked out the company letterhead myself. “ ‘Golden Property Investments,’ ” I read. “Dad, isn’t this the same logo that’s on every bu
ilding in the area? How can they say they have no property?”
My father let go of the paper, deflated. “Is America,” he said, his stock answer for why anything didn’t work out, “is complicated legal answer. We cannot know what.”
I still held on to the fatal letter, scanning it over, looking for clues, for tricks, for anything that would help us.
“Dude,” said Bates, “why don’t you just go out with Devin Murray?”
We were lying on the grass in the South Lawn, early the next morning. Like my mother said, it wasn’t enough that I had to stay at school late every day—now I was getting there an hour earlier than everyone else, trying to squeeze as much out of my out-of-the-house life as I conceivably could. Large patches of the lawn were flattened, one-directional crop circles left over from Freshman Day, where the eponymous freshmen had been rolled down the hill. But off toward the sides and around the bottom, the grass was thick and tall, perfect for camouflage. Standing up, it came up to our waists. Lying down, the thick, savage blades towered over our heads, rendering us a Huckleberry Finn shade of inconspicuous.
“What?” I said, suddenly struck with the belief that Bates was on crack.
“You like her. That information is uncontestable—you fricking bring up her name every time you’re talking about anything to do with school. I’m so goddamn popular, Devin Murray likes me and What would Devin Murray think? and Does this make me look like Devin Murray? You’re practically her slave already. The only thing that you’re missing is the chance to bump uglies. And she’d probably say yes.”
“Even if she would—which she wouldn’t—what makes you say that?” I asked.
Bates shook his head in despair. “Listen to you, Jupiter. That’s the thing about you popular kids. Heads permanently twisted around so you can’t see nothing but yourselves. What none of you realizes is, you’re all so popular that none of you has time to be normal kids. Chess nerds get more play than people like you and Devin Murray. You’re all losers.”
My natural instinct, to protest being called a loser, was stifled by two very important other impulses: First, that he had said you popular kids, implying that, finally, I had reached the level of being recognized as one of those people identified as popular. And, second, the realization that Bates, though now we were almost officially at the level of being friends, could still punch my lights out.