“Don’t worry,” he said, and now it was he who put his hands in the air, like I was sticking him up. “I’m not contagious.” And he smiled again. And then the shyness overtook him again and he put his hands down and opened his mouth like he was going to say something and then thought better of it, and the same thing was happening to me. We were opening and closing our mouths like fish in water, like fish out of water. It was so uncomfortable and it was so alluring and it was too much. It was almost as bad as the poison, the anger. I felt like I was going to vomit.
“Oh shit,” I said, and ran to the bathroom and slammed the door shut and the whole Genesee beer ball came tumbling out of me. I sat by the toilet, defeated, deflated, empty. Soo came in and quickly shut the door behind her.
“Don’t say it,” I told her. “I know I drink too much.” I had that headache I always got from alcohol and I had just ruined my chances and that boy would probably never talk to me again. I laid my whole body down on the cold tile floor and kicked my legs and shook my head back and forth with enough velocity to give me whiplash and I let out some kind of crazy curdled sound that even I could barely hear over the music. I let the fit take over me.
Soo said, “Shhh, it’s okay.” She took a lock of my hair and put it behind my ear and that was probably the nicest thing that had happened to me in my life since my mom took off. She kept her hands on me until my body calmed down, until I could release the crying.
I stood up and looked in the mirror, cringing at what I saw. Whenever we went around and played the what-movie-star-do-you-look-like game, no one could ever name someone for me. I wanted to be Ally Sheedy, but I wasn’t. My eyes were red, drunk-looking, and even with the alcohol out of my system, I felt tipsy and poisoned and poisonous.
I walked out of the bathroom, hanging my head in shame. A familiar beat was pounding. Dean was standing next to the turntable, holding the sleeve of Thriller. Dean had put Michael Jackson on. But he didn’t look up. Or at least, if he did, I didn’t see him, because I walked out without saying goodbye to anyone and went home. I’d be back long before my curfew, riding my bike in the misty night.
My father, perpetually the science teacher even during summer break, was reading a book by the physicist who used to consult on Star Trek and Doctor Who called Black Holes and Other Mysteries of the Universe. I loved that book. He sat in the living room, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He’d aged a thousand years since Ginny died.
“This came for you,” he said, handing me an envelope that smelled sharply of caraway seeds, as had the others in the last three months. His face bore no reaction.
“Oh,” I said. Beside him sat the other envelope, addressed to Rosie and, I knew, filled with rosemary seeds. I could imagine the garden my mother had harvested them from out there on the chilly mountaintop monastery. There was never enough sun here for her to grow her herbs. The wild ginger fared okay in the shade, and her pots of mint sort of limped along, but the rosemary she tried to cultivate failed to prosper, and I supposed she just couldn’t look at those wilting, browning needles anymore after Ginny was gone. What was left of her attempts were a few unruly bushes at the front of the house.
“You’re not going to open it?” he asked.
That sharp, nutty smell made me recall the whole thing over again: the day Ginny died, the way she died, the subsequent implosion of my family, my mother fleeing to her “temporary meditative retreat” so she could hide among the herbs and vegetables and flowers and cold stone walls instead of people. “I hate people,” she’d said to me once, when I found her crying on the floor of her closet. She, like my father, loved stars, the sky, the immutable sun and all its nuclear power. She loved plants and the science of cooking. Since our first family trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City when I was five and I had flipped out (in a good way—We’re on a ball hurtling through space and forever circling a ball of fire while a giant rock is forever circling us), they had plied me with all this information about the universe and its workings. Then they had dumped me here on Earth. I shook my head and started up the stairs.
“Nah,” I said. “I know what’s in it. And I don’t actually like the way they taste. Maybe you guys should have named me cinnamon. Now, there’s a spice.”
This totally weird and foreign thing called a smile crept onto my father’s face. “Thank you,” he said.
I scrunched up my nose at him, skeptical. “For what?”
He lifted his book back up, done looking at me, done trying for the night. “For coming home.”
Chapter 5
For a treat, we were having tool lessons. Lynn, of course, really saw this as a gift as he strewed warped pine boards, screws, drills, screwdrivers, and hammers over the lawn in front of the park offices. He held the items up one by one, asking if we knew what they were. I, unsurprisingly, did not know the name of an unwieldy-looking piece of equipment with a round blade and terrifying-looking curved teeth.
“It’s a circular saw,” Tonya called out gleefully.
Well, I couldn’t judge Tonya for knowing this. My idea of a good time used to be similarly nerdy, involving peering into a telescope for an embarrassingly long time.
Lynn passed out screws to each of us so we could feel them, hold their weight in our hand, he said. “There’s not going to be a test, but I’d like you to familiarize yourself with the different sorts of screws.” The drywall ones were thin and had flat heads, larger than the others. There was a wood screw, a deck screw, and what he called a self-countersinking screw. Whatever that was, I probably needed it. Or maybe I was it.
He explained that he had a particular fondness for drywall screws, not just because they were inexpensive but because, contrary to popular belief, they could be gentle on wood. But if you were screwing two pieces of wood together, he cautioned, you should always go with a wood screw. He said this with all the authority of a parent, as if cautioning us not to take candy from strangers. As if he were preparing us for life.
First we would practice the simplest of tasks: hammering nails into wood. What could be so hard about that?
Almost immediately, I whacked my left index finger with the hammer.
“Jeesh!” I said, lifting my hand up to blow on it.
“First thing to know is to get your hand out of the way,” Lynn said.
“I’ll be sure to violate the laws of nature next time so the nail can stand on its own.”
“Just tap it a tiny bit, applying some pressure,” he said, demonstrating. “And then hold it nearer the bottom and give it a couple of solid, but not wild, whacks.” His went in with two pounds of the hammer.
“You have arms like the Hulk,” I said. “It might take me more than a couple.”
“Just keep trying,” he said. And I did. After three nails, I sort of kind of did it okay, even though my index finger was throbbing.
Then we worked on drilling the screws into wood, and after that, we each took turns, under heavy supervision, with the circular saw. Except that Tonya was so good at it that she became the heavy supervision.
“You ready?” she asked Jimmie, who nodded meekly as she fired it up. Poor Jimmie—he was even less likely to have a girlfriend than I was a boyfriend. “Slow and steady,” she said, gliding his hands forward.
When it was my turn, I put on my protective eyewear, which was giant on my tiny head, and I had to step on a wood block to get the right height. “I don’t need help,” I said to Tonya, but it was pretty terrifying when I flipped the switch on this giant monster of a tool that ate its way so quickly through a solid piece of wood. It seemed to be moving without me and then I kind of got the hang of it, gliding it across the wood until I reached the other side. I felt this terrible, embarrassing thrill that I immediately wanted to discard.
“Rye Bread, what are you doing?” I heard Tommy’s voice calling. He had apparently decided to drive by at this inopportune moment. The benefit of not having to work.
I ignored his fading cackle until h
e’d driven away. Then I put the saw down and announced, “I’m done.”
Later we moved on to what Lynn called “leveling the ground,” but I was pretty sure it was ditch digging, whacking at mounds of black soil. We were back on the path between the calcium deposit and the observatory, a path so worn and eroded that it turned into muddy slush anytime it rained.
“The best time to work with the earth is when it’s slightly moist,” Lynn told us. “Not too dry, not too wet.” To demonstrate, he inserted the end of the shovel into a mound of dark dirt and hoisted it up, shushing the dirt off gently toward the tree line. “We are truly blessed today, because even though it hasn’t rained, there’s enough moisture in the air to loosen the soil.”
“Praise the loam!” I said, but only Tonya—ever a fan of earth science—chuckled. What was it about boot camp that made me so unfunny? Tonya resumed her look of superiority. “So, Lynn, why is it better if the soil’s moist? Wouldn’t it be easier if it was dry?” I said this skeptically, as if I didn’t believe Lynn, as if, with my grade-ahead-in-science brain, I understood more about the particles of soil than a psychologist-plus-youth-construction-chain-gang leader.
“It’s the same as a blender,” Lynn said placidly. “You need some moisture to allow it to move. It gets compacted when dry and too heavy when wet.” He paused. “Does that answer your question, Caraway?”
“Completely,” I said. I could somehow feel Tonya rolling her eyes.
“Troops, fall out,” she called as she assumed her position, hovering over the shovel, raising her right foot to press the shovel’s mouth deep into the perfectly moist soil.
Tonya was especially adept at this work and not particularly approving of my tendency to lean on my shovel and watch her. She made mechanical, almost rhythmic movements, the shushing sound of the shovel going in and the maraca-like cascade of the dirt falling off it. But when I took up my own shovel and tried to do the same, barely any dirt graced the end of it. I had to practically jump on it to get it below the surface of the dirt, and then it took all my strength to push it through and get a half shovel’s worth of the soil. Apparently this was very entertaining, as several of the other kids had temporarily suspended operations to watch me wrestle a shovel.
“I’m like a foot shorter than the rest of you,” I said.
“Nothing to see here, folks,” Tonya called out.
“This does not seem legal.”
Tonya responded to my observation with a snort. “This is your job.”
“Not by choice,” I replied, to which she just shook her head. Well, add her to the list of people I’d disappointed. She looked over at Kelsey and Jimmie, who were having a contest to see who could shovel the most dirt.
By the time Lynn came over to inspect my work, I’d already given up. I was leaning against my shovel, inhaling the sharp scent of pine needles and the cloudy smell of dirt circulating through the air.
“Caraway,” Lynn said, hands on thighs, half crouching to get down to my height, “I know this is hard work, but there are ways to appreciate it. Doesn’t it feel good to be actually contributing something to the world?” I managed not to point out that our contribution was digging—in some ways the opposite of a contribution. A subtraction. “Doesn’t the weight of the shovel just feel so good in your hands?”
“Not really,” I said. “My hands have leprosy.” I held them up to show him the still-scarred skin. Two of my calluses had sloughed off, though I had to admit that the occasional application of jewelweed seemed to be helping.
I could see I was wearing him down, that his optimism was eroding much as this path had, and it gave me a rumble of satisfaction inside. I could make anyone hate me. Maybe I sucked at construction work, but my power to alienate was intact.
But for some reason I picked up the shovel and I thrust it into the ground where it filled with that dark, sparkly soil, soil made of elements that had been here since the dawn of Earth, and then I hoisted it out and deposited it onto the growing mound. And, okay. It did feel kind of good. But it wasn’t like I was going to say that.
When I called Soo later in the week, her voice sounded faraway and sad. Boy trouble, I figured, and braced myself for listening to the boring details.
“Who died?” I asked. “It’s awful quiet over there.”
“Nobody died,” she said. “We’re just sworn to silence like a bunch of monks. We’re going to stop being teenagers and become monks.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
Soo’s mother had declared a moratorium on the basement until we swore to be quieter so she could hear the full romantic bass of Ricardo Montalban’s accent when she watched reruns of Fantasy Island. This had happened earlier in the week, on one of those nights when I was sequestered in my room.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “Piece of Toast can’t live without its practice space.”
“Not funny,” said Soo. “We’re going to soundproof the basement.”
“What does that entail?” I picked some dirt from my fingernails and rubbed the spot on my nail that was beginning to turn black.
“We’re getting all this foam stuff that we’re going to install.”
“And who’s supposed to actually do that?” I asked. “I don’t remember any of us actually having skills other than guitar playing. And even Tommy can’t really do that.”
In a way I was glad a construction project was going to preempt our normal hangouts. I didn’t want to see Dean again after that night. I mean, of course, I wanted to see him again. I just didn’t want him to see me. I wanted to see him if I could place a few droplets of some memory-loss serum into his nonalcoholic drink so he’d forget my special hugging session with the toilet.
“You are,” Soo said. “Aren’t you a construction worker now?”
“I failed the shovel test,” I said.
“Just joking. Dean is super handy. He’s going to the hardware store to get all this stuff, and he’s going to show us what to do.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, you guys have fun.”
“Us,” Soo said. “You’re coming too.”
And that’s how I came to park my bike in front of Soo’s on Saturday morning, next to the five cars in the driveway: Soo’s mom’s Pontiac Firebird convertible (the one we’d taken out and driven around with the top down on several nights after Soo’s mom was “asleep,” aka passed out), Soo’s Le Car, Tommy’s BMW, Tiger’s Volkswagen Rabbit, and a dusty old green Jeep that I didn’t recognize. Well, I almost didn’t recognize it. Its form was vaguely familiar—I’d seen it behind our fence.
The gang was gathered in the basement, staring at a giant bucket of something called Noiseproofing Blue Glue and a bunch of big, floppy sheets of foam. I pretended not to notice the presence of the world’s most beautiful boy, but then the beautiful boy started explaining the principles of soundproofing, because the world’s most beautiful boy was also handy, which made him even more beautiful.
“So, in the ideal world, we’d install additional fiberglass insulation, preferably with a higher R-value” he was saying. Tiger and Tommy nodded as if they were actual men who understood what Dean was saying. “But I don’t think Soo’s mom wants us to expose to the studs, and we probably can’t decouple the drywall, so we’re just going with damping the sound.”
“So, just pour some Coke on it?” I asked. He was forced to look at me, a confused smile taking over his face. “You said ‘damp’ it, right?”
Oh, crap. I was once again in the flat-joke zone. I wanted to hide in the walls with the low-level R-value, or whatever he’d said.
“Mountain Dew would probably work better, but in the meantime I was gonna go with putting this up to absorb the sound,” he said, holding up a layer of the charcoal-colored foam. “So, we have to apply this compound over the walls, hold the foam in place with a staple gun. We also have to do the door—we have to put a layer of MDF over it with the blue glue sandwiched in between.”
Maybe we needed Tonya to get this done. Or someone who spoke Dean’s language?
“So, yeah, we should do it in twos,” Dean said. “Um, Greta, why don’t you and Tiger do the back wall—you can apply the glue and Tiger can do the stapling.”
“That’s such a girl’s job,” said Greta. “I can use a staple gun.”
“Okay, you staple, he’ll glue. And Justin and Soo can start on the stereo wall.”
“It’ll probably take half the day just to take the records off the shelf,” Soo said.
“It’ll be worth it, babe,” Justin said. I refrained from the fake vomit sound this time.
“So what should Carrie and I do?” Tommy asked. Shit. Crap. I was not getting picked for the right kickball team.
“Oh, well, Carrie’s going to help me with the door,” Dean said. We must have suddenly jolted three light years closer to the sun because my whole face turned hot. “You’re the floater.”
Tommy’s face melted into some form of disagreeableness. “That doesn’t sound like a good job.”
“Oh, it’s the most important job,” Dean said. “Everybody needs you. Go over and help Greta and Tiger first.”
“I’ve been told you’re the only one who knows how to use a hammer,” he whispered to me as Tommy walked away. Which only made my face hotter and redder, and then I was embarrassed that my face was red and hot, and it got worse. I was the color of a red supergiant star.
I showed him the expanding splotch of blackness on my fingernail. “If using a hammer means hurting myself with it, then, yes. I’m an expert.”
Everyone else moved away to do their jobs, but Dean and I just stood there not looking at each other. It felt like the moment lasted all 31,557,600 seconds that it takes to get around the sun in a year, and for a minute, I didn’t know if I was actually there or not. I was so uncomfortable I might have actually evaporated. Then Dean said, “So, um, you want to grab that bucket of glue and I’ll take the boards?”
“Yeah,” I said. My voice cracked. Wonderful.
I went to grab the glue but I still had my backpack on and it tumbled off me, all its contents spilling out. Dean bent down to help me gather my things as I rushed to get them back, but before I could grab it, he took the opened notebook, with its Vira memorabilia exposed.
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