Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book

by Nancy N. Rue

  I could have predicted that Rose would bow to him, which she did.

  “Who’ve you got with you?” he said.

  “Yes!” Rose said.

  “Hello, Yes!”

  “It’s Jess,” I said.

  “Close enough. I sent your order down, Rosie. Was there a problem?”

  “No.” Rose smiled and shook her head and smiled some more. If I’d been the guy in the nasty apron, I would have been pulling out what little hair I had left.

  “Need more squid,” she said.

  “Squid?” I said. “Are you serious?”

  She just smiled–again–and pointed to the tank we were standing in front of. Ew–they were squid, all right, except they were smaller than the gigantic ones in the middle-of-the-night movies I’d seen, and less evil looking, but still very strange.

  Apron Guy lifted a metal lid with holes in it from the top of the tank. “Go ahead and check it out, Rosie. Let me know what you want.”

  Rose nodded, but she looked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You pick,” she said.

  I looked at the squid, and several of them appeared to be staring back at me with eyes that bugged out from clear blue skin.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take that one that’s looking at me.”

  Rose shook her head.

  “Why? What’s wrong with him?”

  “Touch tentacles,” she said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “You have to make sure the suckers are still active,” Apron Guy said. “That’s how you know they’re fresh.” He winked at Rose. “I tell her they’re all fresh, but she’s suspicious, that Rosie.”

  “So what do I do, stick my hand in there?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “Do they bite?”

  “Nah.”

  They both looked at me like it was perfectly normal to put your fingers in a tank full of squid. It actually sounded kind of cool. I stood on tiptoes and poked my hand into the water. When I grabbed for one, they all scattered.

  “They shy,” Rose said. “Go slow.”

  “Shy squid. Okay.” I let my hand float toward one pink guy hiding in a corner. His tentacle slid out and curled around my finger and hung on with his little sucker cups tickling my skin. It was so weird and delightful I giggled out loud. “This guy’s definitely fresh. That feels so cool. You want me to pick out another one?”

  Rose nodded, and Apron Guy said, “You’ve got the touch, Yes.”

  I selected four and rejected one whose suckers seemed a little sluggish to me. Rose also let me pick out some live shrimp–the active ones, she said. I chose a bunch that looked like they could have had ADHD. She taught me how to nudge open the shellfish to see if they’d close by themselves and how to check the eyes on the tuna–which I had never seen anyplace outside a Starkist can–to make sure their pupils weren’t “like clouds.” Took me several tries to understand that “crowds” were “clouds.”

  We both did a lot of bowing and smiling while we were translating, but I got out of there knowing that you had to stroke fish to make sure they weren’t stiff and sticky and didn’t have droopy tails and did have tender heads. Who knew all that went into the little roll things Bonsai made like they were craft projects? I was pretty sure the people at Captain D’s didn’t go through all that when they made fish sandwiches.

  “Now we clean,” Rose told me as we scurried–she pretty much always scurried like a chipmunk–back to the shop, me swinging the full cooler and checking out the windows of the shops full of pirate stuff and beach furniture and art that looked like someone real had actually painted it.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I definitely need to wash my hands.”

  “No. Clean fish.”

  “I don’t know how to do that,” I said.

  “You will,” she said, and bowed to me for no apparent reason.

  It sounded icky–but, then, it couldn’t be any worse than sticking my hand into a tank full of suckery sea creatures. So I put on my apron and cleaned the cutting board and was practicing saying “san-mai oroshi” with Rose–which she said was the name for the way we were going to cut the fish–when Lou poked his head into the kitchen.

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  “Don’t disturb me,” I said. “I’m trying not to bruise the fish.” I held one up by its tail to show him.

  “Can you spare her at lunchtime?” Lou said to Rose.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “To the doctor,” he said. “Meet me at twelve thirty.”

  “The doctor! Why?”

  But I already knew why, and I let the fish flop to the cutting board.

  “Careful,” Lou said. “You’re going to bruise it.”

  It was a miracle I didn’t bruise something besides a tuna that morning. Napkins and chopsticks. Hunks of wasabi and ginger. The glasses I yanked out of the dishwasher. Everything took it heavy as I beat up on Lou in my head for pulling the doctor thing on me. Even Rose stopped smiling. Bonsai told her, “Don’t let her near my dragon rolls. Everyone will get indigestion.”

  I definitely had indigestion by the time we got to the doctor’s office. I was biting my nails and swinging my feet and doing whatever else it took not to karate chop Lou while we sat in the examining room.

  “You’re going to make me take medication, aren’t you?” I said.

  “I’m not going to ‘make’ you do anything,” he said. “I want us to hear what the doc has to say about it, and we’ll decide from there.”

  “‘We’?” I said. “Don’t you mean ‘you’?”

  “No, I don’t. You’ll have a say.”

  I swung my legs harder off the side of the examining table. “And then you’ll decide what I’m going to do.”

  Lou tilted his head at me. “Is that the way it works with you and your mom?”

  “Yeah. It did.” I stopped swinging. “I don’t know how it works now.”

  “So, until now, you haven’t been allowed to make any decisions for yourself.”

  “Except when she’s in an In-Bed Phase. Then I make all the decisions–until she gets up and changes everything, so what difference does it make?”

  I chomped down on my lip. I hadn’t meant to Blurt all that out. But, then, when did I ever mean to Blurt? I folded my arms into my middle and went back to swinging. Lou was now making more decisions for me than my mother ever did.

  The doctor came in then. He was sort of young looking, and I could tell he and Lou already knew each other because they called one another Lou and Jason and looked like they could play tennis together or something. Great. It was already two against one.

  “You must be Jess,” he said to me.

  “I must be,” I said. I gave him my bubbling-over-like-a-soda smile. In spite of how annoyed I was, it just kind of kicked in when I was in doctor’s offices and other places where it might get me out of something. It had worked before.

  He asked me a bunch of questions that I answered with the truth because what else was I going to do with Lou sitting there checking off my answers in his head? Doctor–I couldn’t remember what he said his name was–listened and nodded and then looked at the folder he’d walked in with.

  “How was the medication working for you?” he said. “Before you stopped taking it?”

  I glared at Lou. He hadn’t missed telling him anything, had he? Traitor.

  “I could get through a class without having to go to the pencil sharpener twelve times,” I said. “I could finish a test without forgetting what subject I was in. It was okay, I guess.”

  “And without it?”

  I waited for him to glance at Lou for an answer, but he just kept looking at me as if I had actually been speaking intelligently. It gave me a funny feeling in my throat.

  “Without it I’m a ditz-queen-airhead-moron,” I said.

  He looked like he might have a funny feeling in his throat himself. He closed the folder and cranked up a stool so he could
sit on it and look at me at eye level. “I think we can do better than that,” he said. “I’d like to try you on a new medication. It lasts longer, doesn’t have as many side effects. It should give you more concentration so you can keep working on your coping skills.”

  “Oh,” I said. I shot Lou a killer smile. “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “The meds aren’t going to do it all,” Doctor Tennis Player said. “Have you guys talked about counseling?”

  I stopped smiling. Lou shook his head. Lucky for him. I couldn’t have controlled myself if he had said, “That’s next.”

  The doctor squeezed my shoulder and stood up. “This is entirely up to you two–and in terms of the meds, that’s your call, Jessie. Unless your dad plans to shove them down your throat.”

  He hit Lou on the arm with the folder and left. I barely waited for the door to close.

  “I’m not doing counseling,” I said. “If you make me go, I’ll just sit there and not say anything.”

  Lou’s lips twitched. “I have a life-size picture of that.”

  “Don’t laugh at me–it’s not funny! I’m not going to some shrink and have him tell me I’m crazy. I’m not doing it!”

  “No, you’re not. I wasn’t even going to suggest it.”

  “Oh,” I said, and felt stupid. And I was about to cry, which made me feel even stupider.

  Lou leaned forward. “But I would like to see you try the medication, Jess,” he said. “Life isn’t an endurance test, you know? Why make it any harder than it already is? If there’s something that can help take the edge off all this frustration, why not use it?” He looked down at his hands for a second. “If there were something I could take for my own stuff, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  What stuff? I wanted to know–as he sat back and held onto his jaw and watched me. I shook that off. Whatever “stuff” he had, he was wrong about mine. But I’d told myself I’d let him find that out for himself–and be sorry.

  “I’ll take the pills on one condition,” I said.

  He answered me with his eyebrows.

  “You have to promise not to tell the–tell Weezie about it–or about us doing all this other stuff that we’re doing for my–you know.”

  “ADHD.”

  “Yeah. That’s the only way I’ll do it.”

  “I’ll go you one better,” he said. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t even bring it up again. Deal?”

  He had his hand out like he wanted me to shake it. What adult had ever done that? I put my hand inside his and he squeezed it, and I said, as best I could with a lump in my throat, “Deal.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t wrong about the pills. Although I didn’t tell him, I knew, like, the second day that they were working. A little.

  Like, I learned how to fillet a whole fish by myself–without “bruising” it. I kind of liked saying “WHACK!” when I chopped off a head and cut away the fins. Bonsai gave me a lot of out-of-the-side-of-his-eyes looks, but Rose always giggled. Although, she giggled at everything I did, including when I shrieked, “No, not the skin–not the skin!” as I skimmed it off a salmon, and when I danced the squid around a few times before I started to clean it.

  That was still as close as Bonsai would let me get to the sushi–except to taste it. Before the lunch crowd came in Wednesday, he made me sit at the counter and work the chopsticks until I could pick up a single piece of rice with them, and then he put a roll in front of me and waited.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Maki-zushi,” he said. “Tekkamaki.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “What’s in it?”

  Bonsai rested his forearms on the countertop and shook his head at me.

  “I just want to know what I’m eating,” I said.

  “You picked it out and cut off its head and pulled off its skin and you still don’t know it?”

  I picked up a roll with the chopsticks and brought it close to my nose. “Tuna?”

  “Tekkamaki. Tuna roll. Thin and light and perfect for lunch.” He craned his neck at me. “Eat it.”

  I started to put it in my mouth, and then I said, “What are the little red beads on there?”

  “Fish egg,” Rose said beside me.

  Bonsai glared at her.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “Eat,” Bonsai said. “Dip it in the soy sauce first.”

  I did, and then I closed my eyes and inserted it in my mouth. Maybe if I just swallowed it whole, I wouldn’t taste it and I wouldn’t throw up.

  But I immediately knew it was the most delicious thing I’d ever had on my tongue. “I think I died and went to heaven,” I said with my mouth full.

  “You irritating child,” Bonsai said. But I saw the corners of his mouth twitch. He must have learned that from Lou.

  I also knew the pills were working–a little–when by Thursday morning I made it onto Levi without having to go back inside and get something I’d forgotten. And when I got back to the house after my usual sunset visit to the beach before Lou had to come looking for me. And when I only checked my phone four times a day instead of a thousand, to see if Marcus or Chelsea had called me back.

  Or maybe that last one was just because I was giving up hope. Chelsea I could understand–she was wrapped up like a mummy in Donovan. No wonder she’d warned me when she started going out with him. That seemed like such a long time ago now.

  But Marcus–that brought me down. He always called me. He was always there. The only thing I could figure out was that he hadn’t found any place for me to stay, and he was afraid to tell me because he knew I’d go off like a bottle rocket.

  That I could still do, as I found out Thursday afternoon.

  I was wiping off the last table after lunch when Lou came out to score some leftover salmon rolls from Bonsai.

  “Take them, you mooch,” Bonsai said, giving him a plate of them decorated with bamboo leaves cut into the shape of turtles. I kind of wanted to learn how to do that, but I knew it wasn’t happening with Bonsai, who still gave me as many evil looks as he did blank ones.

  “Don’t go there with me, Bonsai,” Lou said. “I know you throw them away anyway–which seems like a waste to me, but what do I know about sushi except how to eat it?”

  “Not much evidently,” I said.

  Lou looked at Bonsai and then at me, a curl of pickled ginger hanging between his chopsticks.

  “If you keep them too long the yaki-nori gets soggy,” I said. “That’s the seaweed it’s wrapped in. Thirty minutes max, even rolled in a paper towel and plastic wrap.”

  “Is that so?” Lou popped a piece of salmon roll in his mouth and chewed and grinned at the same time. “You’ll make a sushi chef out of her yet, Bonsai.”

  Bonsai grunted. Rose giggled. I bowed, just for the hang of it.

  Lou glanced at his watch. “It’s about free time for you, isn’t it, Jess?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You only have to work until three. It’s that now. Don’t you want to explore St. Augustine a little bit?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s part of your schedule.”

  “You didn’t tell me that!”

  “It was written right there in the sand.” He dipped his roll in the soy sauce. “Of course, you were so busy ranting about how I was taking over your life that you might have missed it.”

  “I never said that!”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  I did that thing he always did and erased the conversation with my hand. “Okay–so I have ’til, like, five?”

  “Not ‘like five’–exactly five. Use your cell phone as a watch.”

  “So, do I get to use a scooter?”

  He looked at me as he chewed.

  “Just asking,” I said.

  “Just answering.”

  I tore off the apron and headed for the kitchen and stopped.

  “I don’t even know where to go,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “You’ll have a
guide.”

  “What, you mean, like a map? I’m really bad at reading maps–I could get lost in a closet with a map.”

  “No, not like a map,” Lou said. “Like a personal guide.”

  “Who?”

  “Rocky,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That was when I went off. Not to Lou’s face. That would have made him think he was right about me–that I needed all these rules and schedules and babysitters. No, I saved the blow-up for Rocky.

  After all, Rocky had probably set the whole thing up so he could try to drive me off the deep end, which was apparently his new career. That was why I’d made it a point to avoid him all week, why I always stayed out in the restaurant even when there wasn’t anything left for me to do there. The thought of spending two minutes with him, much less two hours, sent me straight to the restroom where I flushed the toilet four times in a row and turned the water on and off and destroyed several paper towels until I stopped wanting to do all of the above to that gap-toothed weasel. Hottie weasel–but still a weasel. And definitely not my type. At all.

  Rocky was sitting on one of the scooters when I emerged from the building, and for a second I thought maybe my tour of St. Augustine was going to be on the back of one of those. That would mean being really close to him. Not gonna happen.

  But he stood up and sort of strolled toward me like he thought I couldn’t wait for him to get there and he was making me suffer. Whatever.

  “So you want to see St. A,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But not with you.”

  “Not even on the back of my bike?”

  “I am SO not riding on a bicycle with you.”

  “No, my motorcycle.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You have a Harley too?”

  “An old Sportster.” He shrugged. “But a Harley’s a Harley. I’ve seen how you get into riding with Lou. You know you want to.”

  I did. I swallowed what little pride I had left and said, “Okay.”

  “Gotcha,” he said. He flashed the gappy teeth. “You’re not allowed on a bike with anybody but your dad. He told me that himself.”