“Not at all,” I said.
“Thanks.” She had a small nose and freckles the color of sand. She set her purse down on the table and began rummaging through it. I could hear her keys jingling in there, something plastic clicking against something plastic—a tube of lipstick, a compact, a ballpoint pen. “I need to clean this thing out,” she said, flustered, poking around her purse. “Shit. I hope I didn’t leave it at the museum.”
“What’s your number?” Heidi asked, pulling out her own cell phone. The girl told her, and Heidi dialed, her thumb moving quickly over the numbers. She motioned with her eyebrows at another boy, her neck bent slightly. “How about him, Is?” she said.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, with thick curly hair. “He’s kinda cute,” I said.
Heidi swayed her torso like an exotic dancer. “Oh, I’d do him for sure.” She looked at the girl, her phone still to her ear. “It’s ringing,” she said.
The girl tipped her head toward her purse. Silence. “I knew it,” she said. “I must’ve left it at work.”
“Hello? Who’s this?” Heidi said to the person on the other line. She handed the girl her phone. “It’s Mr. Ziolkowski,” she said, her mouth twisted downward in disgust.
The girl lifted Heidi’s phone to her ear. “Hi, it’s Vanessa from second period,” she said. “Sorry, sorry…Where are you now?…Okay, I’ll be right over….” She hung up and handed the phone back to Heidi. “Thank you,” she said, rising up from the table.
“No problem.”
“Where’s the teachers’ lounge?” she asked. “I’m sort of new here. Just point me in the right direction.”
I looked at Heidi. “Let’s show her.”
Heidi stood up from the table. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Thanks, guys. I’m Vanessa, by the way.”
“I’m Heidi.”
“I’m Isabel,” I said. “You can call me Is.”
“Okay, Is,” she said.
I liked Vanessa immediately. I could tell she wasn’t a snob. She seemed sweet, down-to-earth, maybe a little shy. Her voice had a lilt to it that made it sound like she was always asking a question. She wore a cute green top with stonewashed jeans and had this shiny silver bracelet with black stones in it like drops of ink.
“Thanks,” she said when I told her how pretty it was. She lifted her arm and rotated her fist back and forth like she was trying to open a door. Her bracelet flashed in the sunlight. “My mom bought it for me for my birthday.”
“I wouldn’t trust my mom to buy me anything,” Heidi said. “She wears the ugliest jewelry.”
It was true. All the times I’d seen Heidi’s mom in person she was wearing these godawful earrings. One pair was gold and looked like flattened bottle caps. One had feathers that dangled from big hoops. Feathers! I wondered what she would hang from her ears at a funeral, what hideous stones she had to go with a black dress. Then I wondered who the funeral was for, who was lying inside the casket.
That was something else I’d been doing more often, along with the tunnel vision: thinking about death. When my mom told me the other day I had a face like a cherub, I asked her, What’s a cherub? and she said, A child with wings, an angel child. I said, So a cherub is some kid that died. And she said, Well, in a sense, yes. She walked away and then I started thinking about all the kids dying at that moment around the world and becoming cherubs, wings sprouting from their shoulder blades. A boy falling off a roof. A girl snatched off the street. A boy in a hospital gown with a bald head. A girl on a crosswalk, oblivious, a truck barreling down on her. Dreamlike, morbid visions.
Issues. I had them. So sue me.
Heidi turned to Vanessa before we entered the administration building, a one-story structure with stucco walls and gray doors, very bleak. “You know about Mr. Ziolkowski, right?”
“Nuh-uh,” Vanessa said.
We stopped walking.
“What?” she said. “Tell me.”
“Mr. Z’s a total perv,” Heidi said. “Haven’t you noticed how he looks at some of his students? The girls and the boys?”
Vanessa nodded repeatedly. “Yeah, there’s definitely something creepy about him.”
“Miranda Brewer told me she saw him on 4th Street wearing a dress,” I said.
Vanessa’s eyebrows jumped up her forehead. “Shut. Up.”
“Her boyfriend saw him, too,” Heidi added.
“We had a teacher like that at Wilson.”
Heidi and I waited to hear more, both of us looking at Vanessa intently. She turned her head toward the parking lot as if she’d heard someone calling her name. “Yeah,” she said, even though neither Heidi or me asked her a question.
We went into the administration building, down the west hallway, and found Mr. Z sitting on a coffee-colored sofa chair, his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. You could tell he was as tall as a streetlamp even though he was sitting down. He was thin, bird-faced, with short blond hair that bristled on the top of his head like a toothbrush. He reminded me of a skeleton, which reminded me of death, which made me wonder when he was going to die, where and how, and then I imagined him keeling over in the grocery store, his body crashing into a pyramid of apples, thumping like red fists on the waxed floor before wobbling away from him.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Z,” Vanessa said.
He reached into his shirt pocket and slipped out Vanessa’s phone. It looked ridiculously small in his hand, like a Matchbox car or a nine-volt battery.
“These things are constantly ringing in my class,” Mr. Z said. His voice cracked a bit like he was in the middle of puberty. “If your phone ever rings during my class, it’s automatic detention.”
“It won’t,” Vanessa said. “I promise.”
“Good,” he said. He extended his long, bony arm and handed Vanessa’s phone back to her. When Mr. Z stood up I thought his head was going to punch right through the ceiling. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and headed out the double doors, taking languid, ostrichlike steps.
When Mr. Z was gone, Heidi asked Vanessa if she’d ever played Who Would You Do?
“How do you play it?” Vanessa said.
“It’s not really much of a game,” I told her.
“Would you ever jump on Mr. Z’s bones?” Heidi asked point-blank.
Vanessa had this I-just-sank-my-teeth-into-an-icy-lemon-wedge look on her face. “Never,” she said.
Heidi grinned. “That’s how you play.”
“I told you it wasn’t really much of a game,” I said.
Vanessa looked at Heidi. “Would you?”
“Never,” she said. “But I bet he has a nice, long salami.”
Vanessa covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh God, don’t make me think about Mr. Z’s dick!”
Heidi and I started to laugh.
And just like that the three of us became, well, the three of us.
CARLOS
Me and Snake were kicking it on the bleachers, roasting in the sun, instead of sitting in biology and learning something we’d probably forget in a year anyway. It was February, but it felt like summer, felt like you could fry an egg on my forehead. The air above the blacktop rippled in the heat where freshmen in PE tossed a basketball up and down the courts. Their bodies rippled too, their scrawny arms and legs, like a television with bad reception.
Snake let out a guttural burp. I glanced at my watch. We were waiting for Will and Suji, his girlfriend. We all planned to ditch our last three classes and head out to the beach. Meet us by the basketball courts, I’d told them. I had asked Mira to come along, but she had a test in history she couldn’t miss. We can go to the beach this weekend, she finally said. I have to work at the museum, I reminded her. A continuous flow of students moved around us like a river coming to a boulder, splitting, then braiding together again. We’ll think of something, she said, and hurried off in the opposite direction, but not before she pecked me on the lips, softly, like a raindrop had landed on my mouth.
&nb
sp; We met at a beach party last summer, Mira and I. There were twenty or so people, including Will and Snake. There was an ice chest sunk into the sand stocked with beer and Sparks, with peach and peppermint schnapps. A bonfire made our skin golden, an ocean crashed and shushed in the darkness behind us.
I saw her on the other side of the flames, sipping from a bottle and chatting with a friend. I recognized her immediately. She was that mysterious girl I spotted every now and then walking by herself across the quad, shy and beautiful, always in a hurry, as if she was late for an appointment. Someone leveled the sand with his palm and laid a beach blanket across it, then twirled an empty beer bottle over the striped fabric. A small group gathered, excited to play, and I was surprised to see that the shy girl had scooted up to the blanket. Snake was wasted, flicking his tongue between his parted fingers, smashed against his lips. Can we kiss anywhere? he asked. We were all pretty drunk. The ocean boomed, the gold light of the bonfire pulsed over our skin, and a few spins of the bottle later, Mira and I brought our lips together.
We began dating that summer, kissed some more and messed around, her shyness slowly dissolving over the months like an ice sculpture as she became more confident, less meek—a different person altogether.
“Where the hell are they?” Snake asked.
“They’ll be here,” I said.
“Hey, man, did you hear about those puppies?” Snake was drawing abstract flames with a Bic on the side of his red Converse.
“What puppies?”
“The drug puppies.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“These drug smugglers cut open their bellies and slipped some packets of heroin inside them,” Snake said, now drawing on the other side of his shoe. “Then they stitched them back up.”
“That’s some evil shit right there,” I said.
Sweat glinted on his forehead like bits of glass. “Those drug smugglers are some creative mofos,” he said.
“They really know how to think outside the box.”
“What will they come up with next?”
Snake capped his pen and we both watched the freshmen run sluggishly up and down the courts, yelling at one another. “Pass the ball, pass the ball!” they shrieked. “Here, over here!” One kid took a shot from the three-point line and the orange Spalding clanged off the rim and out of bounds. “I told you to pass the damn ball!” another kid screamed.
“A dolphin,” I said. “They’ll train a dolphin to deliver their heroin. In a waterproof vest with lots of pockets.”
“Or a carrier pigeon,” Snake said.
“A dolphin would carry more dope.”
“Not if they had a whole flock of pigeons. Then they could strap little Baggies to each one.”
“Good point,” I said.
I zipped open my backpack and took out my Red Vines. I pulled a piece from the bag before handing it to Snake. He jammed the licorice into his mouth and gnawed on it.
“Has anyone else pissed in the museum yet?” Snake asked, chewing.
“Nope,” I said. “Man, that dude was psycho.”
“So all you have to do is sit there and keep an eye on people?”
“Pretty much.”
“Sounds boring as shit.”
“It’s better than working at Ralph’s,” I said. “I’d rather sit than run around sweating.”
“I guess,” Snake said. “What time is it?”
I glanced at my watch. “Quarter till one.”
“Where the hell are they?”
“Hell if I know.”
“They’re probably boning.”
“Probably.”
“Which one’s her house again?”
I surveyed the track homes that lined one side of the soccer field and pointed. “I think it’s that yellow one over there.”
Snake wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Damn sun,” he said, looking up, squinting. “Knock it off.”
I held the coiled licorice between my teeth and pulled. I wondered if there would ever be a day when I stopped eating Red Vines. I pictured myself ninety, blue-haired with thick bifocals, chewing on the red licorice with my dentures.
“You think they used any anesthesia on the puppies?” Snake said.
“That would be messed up if they didn’t.”
“It’s already messed up.”
“I know. I’m just saying it would be even more messed up.”
“There they are,” Snake said. He jerked his chin toward the track homes.
Will had already jumped the wall of brick that separated Suji’s house from the school soccer field. She was sitting on top of the wall and Will’s hands were lifted up toward her, like he was reaching for a vase on a high shelf, but then she waved him off and jumped down without his help. They crossed the field, Will with his hands in his pockets and Suji with her head down, her long hair shining blue-black in the sun. When she finally lifted her head she gathered a few loose strands away from her face with a hooked finger and slid them behind her ears.
“Hey, Carlos. Hey, Snake,” Will said.
“Sorry we’re late, you guys,” Suji said. “It’s my fault.”
“You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself a-round,” Snake sang. He grunted twice, thrusting his hips forward. “That’s what it’s all a-bout.”
We laughed, Snake and I, like hyenas on nitrous. Will and Suji sat down on the bleachers and kept quiet. She turned to face the kids scrambling for the ball on the basketball courts.
“I’m just goofing,” Snake mumbled.
Will cleared his throat as if he was going to say something but then started fingering a piece of thread twisting from the corner of his shirt pocket.
“Anyone want a Red Vine?” I offered.
“No thanks,” Will said.
Suji shook her head no.
A boy shouted on the courts: “Foul, foul! I was fouled, man!”
Will pinched the corner of his shirt pocket between his thumb and forefinger and lifted it to his mouth, lowering his head at the same time. He held the thread between his front teeth and yanked, then spat the thread out onto the blacktop.
No one was talking. Something had obviously happened between Will and Suji, an argument about something silly, I figured. Me and Mira had been seeing each other for six months and fought only once during that time. I’d caught her checking out some guy on 2nd Street. She said she wasn’t and I said she was and suddenly the vibe between us turned black. Next thing I knew she was weeping.
“Did you guys hear about the puppies?” I finally said.
Will looked at me. “What puppies?”
I slapped Snake on the arm with the back of my fingers. “Tell ’em.”
“These crazy drug smugglers sliced open some puppies and put heroin inside their bellies,” he said.
Suji turned her attention away from the basketball courts and looked at Snake.
“That’s got to be a hoax,” Will said.
“No, man. I saw it on the news this morning. Matt Lauer and shit.”
“Did they die?” Suji wanted to know.
“Some did,” Snake said, “but they were able to save three that still had dope in them.”
“God, that’s awful.” Suji turned back to the courts, but her eyes were focused someplace farther. The parking lot. The gleaming cars going up and down Palo Verde. The houses on the other side of Palo Verde. The leafless February trees.
Snake grabbed my backpack and unzipped it.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Getting another Red Vine.”
“Why don’t you ask, dickhole?”
Snake slipped out a piece and jammed it into the corner of his mouth. “Can I have one?” he said, chewing and grinning like an idiot. “Please, Carlos?”
Will chuckled, and Suji jerked her head in his direction. There was anger blazing in her dark brown eyes.
“So are we going to the beach or are we just going to sit here?” Snake asked.
Will had h
is head down. “I can’t, man. I have a quiz in algebra.”
“You just remembered that now?” Snake said, irritated.
A basketball came bouncing toward Suji in short hops. She caught the ball and held it at her midsection, her elbows pointed outward as if she was about to toss it back into the courts. A boy lacquered in sweat came running with his palms out before him.
“Here,” he said.
Suji held the ball.
“Come on,” he said.
Suji held the ball.
“What’s her damn problem?” the boy asked.
ISABEL
Back in September, my dad clipped out a chart from the Los Angeles Times and left it on the kitchen counter by the coffeepot. I had just woken up and was moving around the kitchen with the speed of a slug. I took down the box of Cheerios from the top of the fridge, my favorite red bowl from the cupboards, and set them both on the counter. That’s when I saw the newspaper clipping. The chart was labeled “Risk of Death” and looked like this:
Risk of Death
This chart lists some causes of death, their annual numbers, and the odds that a U.S. citizen will die of each over the course of his or her lifetime. For example, the lifetime risk of being killed by alcohol poisoning is one in 10,530.
Cause
Annual Deaths
Lifetime Odds
Heart disease
652,486
One in 5
Cancer
553,888
One in 7
Diabetes
71,372
One in 54
Motor vehicles
44,933
One in 84
Homicide
16,137
One in 226
Assault by firearm
11,624
One in 324
Fire or smoke
3,229
One in 1,167
Fall from stairs or steps
1,638
One in 2,301
No More Us for You Page 2