Notes to Self

by Avery Sawyer

  “I don’t know, Robin. I don’t know your dad. I only met him a few times.”

  “He’s cool.” I bit my lip. That wasn’t what I meant to say. What did cool matter when he wasn’t there?

  “Okay,” Reno replied. He nodded, so I knew he didn’t think that what I’d said was stupid.

  “How’s, um, school?” I asked.

  “It’s school.”

  “Yeah. My new nickname at mine is ‘Short Bus.’”

  “What? You should ask your mom if you can transfer.” He looked at me and I felt the Jeep slow down.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I didn’t say what I was thinking: that we couldn’t even come close to affording Windermere Prep tuition. It would just make Reno uncomfortable. Besides, the idea of school uniforms made me itchy.

  Finally, the interstate cleared up and we were able to travel above thirty miles per hour. We drove north of Orlando, past Sanford and Deltona. I began to watch for signs for Highway 44, which would take us to the ocean. I hadn’t been in almost a year, which was weird since it was only an hour away. I liked knowing it was there, though. I couldn’t imagine living in a state that didn’t reach the ocean. It was a giant reset button. You could go to the edge of the land and see infinity and feel renewed.

  The sun was behind us as we turned onto 44—a gorgeous, fiery red-orange orb sinking into the earth. The sky in front of us was indigo, and stars were beginning to appear above. This stretch of road was so quiet that it was easy to believe we were the only people for miles, though that probably wasn’t true. I almost asked Reno to stop the Jeep, to let me get out and smell the clean air, but I didn’t. We weren’t just on some pleasure drive; I’d hijacked Reno for a reason.

  We crossed under 95 and reached Highway 1. I gave Reno the address, and then, just like that, we were there. I guess there wasn’t that much going on in a beach city on a Tuesday in November. Reno parked and we walked up the stairs to the first bar we saw, which was called the Beachcomber, and was nestled among small hotels that all looked as if they had been built a long time ago and survived more than one hurricane. I sniffed at the sea-salted air and for a moment. I wanted to give up on finding my dad altogether and just enjoy an evening at the ocean without any stress. But Reno would lose it if I admitted I had made him drive me all the way out here essentially for nothing. We entered the Beachcomber, which was deserted. I walked up to the bar while Reno headed for the men’s room.

  “Hey,” I said to the bartender, a woman with spiky blond hair who looked at least seventy years old. “I’m, um, looking for Craig Saunders. My, uh, dad. Does he still work here?”

  “Craig? Not for a long time, kiddo. But you can usually find ‘im down at Chases this time a’night. Tell him Cleo says hello if you find ‘im.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks, I will.”

  Less than a mile down A1A, we found it. Chases on the Beach was colorful, painted like some sort of cracked-out Jimmy Buffett dream with a sunset and one of those planes you can land on water.

  The minute we reached the bar, I saw him.

  His dark hair was a little thinner than I remembered, but his Hawaiian shirt and light blue eyes were the same. He wasn’t working; he was sitting on a stool nursing amber liquid on the rocks and staring at a flat-screen television mounted high above all the bottles. He looked right at me and I saw that he didn’t recognize me. I almost lost my nerve then—something inside me felt like it was breaking—but I swallowed, glanced at Reno, and walked up to him.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. I pulled out the barstool next to him and sat down. Reno sat on the other side of me, looking hugely out of place but determined not to show it. He still had the Jeep keys in his hand.

  “Robin? Oh my God, you’re all grown up,” he hugged me and I hugged him back. I was happy for one full second before I felt him lose his balance a little. He had to grab for the stool to right himself, and I immediately wanted to get out of there. Dad loved me, as much as he could, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a drunk. “PETE!” he bellowed. “Get over here. It’s my daughter come down to see me.”

  “Dad, calm down. It’s not a big deal. We actually, um, drove up from Kissimmee. You remember Reno.” Reno shook my father’s hand. I had the most random thought: my ninth grade World Geography teacher, Mr. Zhou, could not abide people using the terms “up” or “down” to denote “north” and “south.”

  “It is a big deal! I’m so happy to see you,” Dad said. “Lemme buy you two some drinks. What’s your pleasure? Piña Colada?”

  “Um, Dad? We can’t drink. Reno’s driving.” I thought guiltily of the times I’d had beer or UV at parties. I didn’t mean to sound sanctimonious. But I didn’t want my dad buying me a drink, either. Jesus. “I’ll take a Coke,” I told the bartender.

  “Oh, yeah. Right, yeah. So, how’re you? You want some wings?” He took a deep swallow of his own drink and handed me a menu. “Relo? You hungry?”

  I shot Reno an apologetic look and said, “Wings would be awesome. Listen, Dad. I came because I was in an accident and I wanted you to know. Mom didn’t have a number for you.”

  “AT&T can lick my balls,” Dad said. Reno smiled at that. The bartender brought us both Cokes. “Don’t have a phone number at the moment.” His eyes lost focus and drifted to the TV screens, then back to me. “Accident? What accident?”

  “I fell. Off the Sling Shot at Fun Towne. I hit my head and my friend Emily…she…she’s in a coma.” I took three tiny sips of my soda. My eyes were threatening to tear up, I could feel it. Someone did a cannon ball into the pool and sent so much water splashing into the air that cold droplets hit us, twenty feet away. I flinched. I hadn’t brought a sweater and the temperature was dropping fast.

  “Fun Towne? Fuck those bastards.” Dad pounded the bar and Reno and I both backed away from him. We shouldn’t have come.

  “Yeah, um. I, uh, wanted you to know what happened. Actually, we’re not that hungry. We just wanted to see the ocean and then we need to go back home. I have a curfew and stuff,” I stammered, shivering. “I’m glad we found you, you should, ah, come down sometime. How’s the Beast?” The Beast was my dad’s prized possession, his beat-up old Chevy convertible that had to be a million and one years old. I remembered how I always used to do that with him: bring up stuff that wasn’t important so we wouldn’t have to talk about the stuff that was. I guess adults do this kind of thing all the time (How’s the weather been lately? What ya paying for gas these days?), which is why most of them are so freaking boring.

  “Aw, hell, I had to junk her. But listen, Robin. I’m so glad you’re here. You’re all grown up, and…the thing is, I could use a little help. You know? For your old man? Just somethin’ to get me through the night, you know? The tips I’m makin’ these days don’t add up to squat.”

  I stared at him. Reno stood up and threw a twenty on the bar. “For her Coke,” he said. It was way too much, but his body language showed he couldn’t care less about the change. I stood up too and felt Reno’s hand on my back, firm. I was never so grateful for anything in my life as I was for that hand.

  “Dad, we have to go. Buy yourself another drink with Reno’s change.” I kissed him on the cheek and we got out of there. He yelled after us, slurring his words, “Come back anytime, Pumpkin. I miss you!”

  Back in the Jeep, I said, “Well, that was your standard issue nightmare.” I breathed in and out, trying to blot out the memory of what had just happened. I should’ve accepted that drink offer. Dad always said he needed beer “to take the edge off,” and I was all edge.

  “Robin, it’s okay.” Reno held the keys in his hand and put them in the ignition, but he didn’t turn it. “I mean not, obviously, okay, but…”

  “I want to get the hell out of here.”

  “Okay.”

  He drove south on Highway 1, giving me a little time to think before heading home. When we got a couple miles from Chases, I felt a little calmer.

  “Can we stop?” I wanted to put my
toes in the ocean.

  “Reset button?”

  “You know about that theory?” My face turned pink. Sometimes I forgot how well Reno knew me. It was embarrassing.

  “That’s my theory,” he said.

  “It is not!” I swatted him and felt a little better.

  We parked on a beach that was almost deserted. I felt a chill. Not because it was cold, but because it was so romantic and there I was, with Reno. I looked at him. He was a lot taller than I remembered him being, and I suddenly wanted him to kiss me. I thought about how well he’d handled himself back at the bar, paying for my soda and getting me out of there before I broke down crying and humiliated myself. I felt so…safe, which was what I had been looking for when I came out here, wasn’t it?

  “Reen?” I whispered. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime. Ooh, look. A perfectly formed spirula shell. Some people think it’s a Golden spiral, but it’s actually not, it’s just logarithmic.”

  “Nerd.” I grinned at him and grabbed his hand, pulling him to the ocean.

  The water was too cold to do anything but get our feet wet, but it worked.

  Reset.

  CHAPTER 34

  DREAMS FROM MY MOTHER

  I know the location of every Ivy League university and I pretty much always have.

  “Mom, stop.”

  “Come on, Robin. It’s important. It’s for your own good.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s for your own good. You’re sad you never had the chance to go to some fancy school and you’re taking it out on me. I want to go to the mall, and instead I’m being tortured.” I ate my cereal and glared at her. We had this fight every time she asked me to name the location of every Ivy League university. She said she wanted me to feel familiar with places that had names like Dartmouth. As if saying the word could make a person feel comfortable there. Snort. All I could picture when I said “Dartmouth” were people wearing scarves and laughing hysterically about how rich they were.

  “I just think you’re very smart and you should have the best in life. This might come as a shock, but Kissimmee, Florida is not the best the world has to offer.” Her eyes looked around our tiny kitchen, at the cabinets that had maybe been in style in the eighties.

  “Who says the best is some school filled with rich kids in Boston? Isn’t it winter there like eight months of the year?” I scrunched up my nose and kept chewing my store-brand Cheerios. There was no way I was ever going to move to Massachusetts, even if the idea of snow and red brick buildings and real Christmas trees did kind of make me swoon. Okay, never say never.

  “Everyone. Start over, and I’ll put on the Wicked soundtrack again instead of opera.” My mom turned back to the massive book she had open in her lap and I gave up.

  “Fine. This is so dumb.” I let out a massive sigh. “Harvard: Cambridge. Princeton: Princeton. Yale: New Haven. Columbia: New York. Cornell: Ithaca. Dartmouth: Hanover. Brown: Providence. Penn: Philadelphia. Okay?”

  “And Stanford?” She looked up.

  “Mom. That’s not even in the Ivy League.”

  “Very good! Still, a worthy school. Where is it?”

  “Mom. I’m not going to Stanford. I’m thirteen. You don’t even know if I’m going to finish eighth grade.” I finished my cereal and rinsed out my bowl. Store-brand Cheerios practically glued themselves on permanently if you let them dry in the dish.

  “Where?”

  “God. California.”

  “Very good. Okay, time for music.” She put a CD in the old stereo and turned it up. I didn’t mind this part. I’d never admit it to her, but I didn’t even mind real opera. Some parts of it really were beautiful. I liked to feel the bass vibrating in my spine, so I lay down on the floor next to the speaker. Maybe she’d forget I was there and I could make a break for the Florida Mall after lunch.

  It was the first Saturday of the month, a day my mother had designated Culture Time. She felt the Florida schools were not adequately preparing me to, like, conquer the world, so we had to spend one day a month studying things like art, opera, classical music, architecture, and literature. She loved getting books from the library with titles like The Western Humanities (shoot me) and Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (please). Ever since she had enrolled in college, she wanted to find out if I had the capacity to appreciate, like, impressionism. I did. But that didn’t mean I was happy about it.

  The whole thing would have been funny if it weren’t so random. We lived in Orlando, a place where no one cared about Shakespeare or had even heard of Goethe (pronounced GARE-tuh…whatever, I can’t believe I know that).

  When I complained to Emily about Culture Time, she said she thought it sounded cool. She said fascinating women should probably know about stuff like that. I was out-numbered. When my mom planned a trip to OMART, The Orlando Museum of Art, I invited her. She also went with us to Tampa for the Salvador Dali museum.

  It was actually fun.

  Emily made everything fun.

  CHAPTER 35

  CIVILIZATION BEGAN WHEN MAN HELD FIRE IN HIS FINGERTIPS

  Before the accident, I could never just sit somewhere doing nothing. I had to be watching TV or chatting with Emily online or playing Farmville. But now, it didn’t bother me to just lie around and stare at the ceiling or the clouds for an hour. Sometimes, I even felt something shift in my brain when I did nothing, as if it was actually healing. My head didn’t hurt anymore, but it didn’t feel the same, either. I wondered if it ever would.

  My mom occasionally got copies of Life & Style or People or whatever, and I remembered reading about celebrities who went to these spas and ate, like, wheatgrass and tofu and drank lots of green tea. I imagined them up in the mountains or on a perfect beach, doing yoga and letting all the bad energy from living just seep out of them. I wanted to go to a place like that, with clean air and clean thoughts and healing energy. It seemed deeply unfair that only 0.000001 percent of humans on earth got to go to resorts to de-stress and fill themselves up with things that were pure. The rest of us had to try to maintain our calm in the regular world, with ugliness and pollution and homework and cracked pavement and trips to the grocery store and fast food hamburgers that look nothing like the advertisement. And the worst part is, never before in the history of the world did all the suckers like me even know about resorts and spas and rich-people hideouts. But now, pictures of them were plastered inside every glossy magazine sold on every grocery store magazine rack, everywhere. I wanted to float in a pool of mineral water, heated to my exact body temperature. Was that too much to ask?

  I was sitting outside by the gross pool as the sun came up, turning into one of those bored elderly ladies who spends all day watching her neighbors come and go. I didn’t see anyone else, but once in a while I smelled the smoke of a clove cigarette, so I knew someone in my building was up already and near a window. I didn’t want to talk to the neighbor; I just wanted to stay where I was, with my eyes closed, breathing their sweet smoke.

  The cloves reminded me of a place we used to go all the time, a coffee shop in a strip mall called Planet Perk. It was in a sort of gross part of Kissimmee (as if there’s any other part), but the furniture was comfortable and they let you sit there for ages, even if you only bought one thing. The bagels all tasted like they had been there a week; I only made the mistake of getting one once. The coffee was good and strong and they let people smoke in there, so high school kids loved it. Occasionally, you could smell pot smoke coming out from the kitchen.

  Not that I was into that, but I did try it once, with completely embarrassing results.

  I feel much younger than I am, and much older. Usually at the same time.

  “No, thanks.” Of course Emily wouldn’t touch Josie’s one-hitter. And of course no one would give her shit about it. If they did, she would just laugh and tell them to eff off. Emily was immune to everyone’s hammering because she really didn’t care what they thought. We were all packed into Jaden’s small block house at the end of f
reshman year; his parents were obviously gone. I didn’t even know why I’d agreed to go. As parties went, it was pretty much the worst. Bad music, warm beer, sweaty guys trying to grind with whichever girl made the mistake of standing up in the general vicinity of Jaden’s speakers. Josie didn’t blink when Emily waved away the offer. She just continued on with what she was saying, about how hideous she found some movie she’d just seen. It impressed me when people hated movies. I liked most everything I saw, so it seemed remarkable to be able to A) hate something that probably had at least a few funny lines, and B) be able to give actual reasons why. It made Josie sound like she knew things the rest of us didn’t, which, I suppose, was why she was going on and on about it.

  I wanted Josie to like me and I was bored and uncomfortable. People had smoked weed for fewer reasons than that, so I said: “I’ll try it.”

  “You?” She looked at me for the first time since I’d arrived. Her sneer made me wish I hadn’t said anything so I could stay tucked in the couch cushions, mostly invisible. My t-shirt was even the same color as the ratty carpet and I wore no jewelry, unlike Josie, who had shiny bracelets on both of her wrists and a brand-new eyebrow ring. You could see the skin all around it was tender, pink. I wondered if it hurt.

  “Um, sure. It smells kind of good.” I cleared my throat and took a tiny sip of my beer, which tasted bad and made me feel odd and relaxed. My eyes met Adam Jordan’s, who nodded at me as he took a deep drag from his cigarette. I thought about my dad, who always smoked and probably still did, wherever he was. He said he enjoyed being able to walk outside in the middle of conversations, to take a break from life. I understood that, even though I always thought he smelled stale and gross. I wondered why humans couldn’t come up with something like smoking, that would allow us to go outside lots of times during the day and chat with strangers as if it was natural, but wouldn’t kill us. Was that so hard?