He shook his head, popped a pistachio into his mouth.
“You usually do,” I said.
He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and told me he’d see me around. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to my editor why she’d come up from New York and Josh wasn’t here.
That night I sat on my back steps gazing into the night. Planes flew overhead to and from Logan, one of them carrying Josh to an unnamed city to resume his quest. I watched the planes every few minutes until I just knew which one held him. I had no idea what his seat assignment was or where he was headed, but I could feel in my bones he was on that plane.
Later, the television news would be filled with talk of terrorism and corporate looting, but right that minute I felt reassured that thousands of feet above me there was at least one person focused on love and peace. I blanketed that thought around me like wool and took a sip of tea. Tomorrow I would call that citizen group and volunteer my time. Hell, I’d volunteer Karl’s time too. But for now, I let my eyes follow this plane across the rooftops and the trees. I leaned back and watched it move through time and space to an expanse of possibilities that seemed hopeful, infinite.
You can run Web searches for more information about the statistics under the subtitles below:
America’s Youth
www.tobaccofreekids.org
Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Injury and Prevention
Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency Prevention
UNICEF State of the World’s Children
The State of America’s Children, Yearbook 2001, Children’s Defense Fund
Quality of Life
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The Center for Media Education
How Much Is Enough? by Alan Durning
Children’s Defense Fund
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics
The Increasing Gap Between Rich and Poor
New York Times, February 13, 2003
U.S. Department of Agriculture
Business, April 17, 2000
Economic Policy Institute
Multistate Tax Commission
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
The Environment
Associated Press Poll, February 2001
National Recycling Coalition
How Much Is Enough? by Alan Durning
, September 30, 2002
1993 Information Please Almanac
U.N. World Meteorological Organization
Register to Vote:
www.fec.gov
www.beavoter.org
www.newvoter.com
www.rockthevote.org
Print out the form, sign it, mail it; in most states, you’re a registered voter.
Notes
1 That would be me … .
2 Unexpected worship for my anti-consumer Web site resulting in me faking my own death. The usual senior-year routine.
3 Conservation, biodiversity, environmental protection, to name a few.
4 Story of my life.
5 A guy needs hobbies, right?
6 Yes, I still owned fewer than seventy-five possessions, in constant rotation.
7 Don’t bring up Beth; it’s still a sore subject.
8 I loved my old job at the bookstore but given my situation I thought it might be too risky working with a bookish crowd.
9 It’s not a MALL mall, but a long semi-touristy promenade where everyone in town hangs out.
10 I told you she reminded me of my mom.
11 Janine would’ve gone nuts if she knew the part Bono had played in my past life.
12 HOW DO YOU SAY NO TO ALL THAT GREAT MUSIC?!
13 Don’t be too horrified; it gets worse.
14 I told you it got worse.
15 I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get one; even Brady got offers from every bank in town. You don’t want to hear about how I held the card up to the light, watching the holographic square change colors, rubbing my fingers across the raised letters of the name that was just as fake as I was.
16 Don’t answer that.
17 And let’s not forget the fact that she thought I was dead—a minor inconvenience to any successful relationship.
18 Punching those familiar numbers into the keypad was the most rewarding moment I’d had on the road up until that point, believe me.
19 Betagold: a sixty-year-old woman named Tracy Hawthorne who became obsessed with exposing Larry’s true identity. Get a life!
20 It was hard for me to truly despise her I-don’t-believe-Larry-is-dead speeches. After all, she was right.
21 I say “he” because the person was about my size, but his face was covered by a hooded mask.
22 Duckie? Was she serious?
23 Okay, you got me. She had these beliefs before Larry; he (I) was just the one who’d gone public with them.
24 They used more animal terminology than I did back at C.U.
25 Speaking of James Bond, is this car equipped with an ejection seat?
26 My vote now—flee.
27 Her snored with an accent, I swear.
28 Just because I was buying Tommy Hilfiger boxer shorts, you didn’t think I gave up perusing the dictionary Web sites, did you?
29 Myself included. I still was trying to recover from months of The Planet’s Funniest Animals.
30 This had never actually happened, of course. Baseball was too slow a game for me. (That and the fact that I couldn’t hit the ball, no matter how many times at bat.)
31 When I was a kid, I used to pretend her penciled-in eyebrows were connected to her mouth like marionette strings, making her talk.
32 Okay, it wasn’t perfect—it was thirty-four degrees. A short, cold vision quest.
33 I love that word.
34 It was the wrong choice of words, but I knew what she meant.
35 For once.
36 I may not solve any of society’s problems, but I was certainly enjoying myself.
37 To throw in some references from Ms. Kelly’s senior year lit class.
38 This time.
39 Standing on a stool in the downstairs bathtub.
40 Thermodynamic propulsion devices. I love science, but I still had to run for my old textbooks after Simon left.
41 Almost.
42 Or come to her senses and realized what a fake I was.
43 Because I wasn’t insured, Peter hadn’t filed any claim after my death, so there was no fraud. And because I didn’t leave a note, there was no way to prove I had planned a suicide anyway. Peter got his attorney involved to ensure that my answers were worded correctly. As I explained to both of them, my original plan had been to return quickly after the furor died down. Unfortunately, news of my “death” had only fueled the fire.
44 Here’s where the cameras clicked into overdrive.
45 Thankfully for my shattered ego, I beat him by several minutes.
46 Precedent, president, precedent, president—I love that.
47 My initial thought was to set up headquarters at my hole in the woods or as close to Walden Pond as we could get. I quickly nixed that plan when I realized I’d have absolutely nowhere left to go when I wanted to be alone.
48 Political Action Committees—representing Big Business. They give a ton of money, but expect a lot in return—mostly legislation that benefits them.
49 Forty-three percent of the incoming freshmen elected to Congress in 2002 were millionaires—just regular folks like us. According to my calculations, the candidates who spend the most money on their campaigns win 95 percent of the time.
50 Does this mean you’ll be cheating on Simon anytime soon?
51 Okay, he wasn’t just hanging around; he was doing a lot of great work.
52 Pun intended.
53 Which she’d sprayed with red paint in a sicko attempt at recreating a PETA protest. So funny.
54 Not me; I always sat up front alone.
55 The MP3 file was Ka
zaa’s number seventeen download in Baltimore that week.
56 You’d think there’d be some perk to being the guy running for president, yes?
57 The word mock doesn’t do these kids justice; they were into it.
58 Whenever the media describe a large, successful fund-raiser, their yardstick is always how much money was raised, not how many people got to interact with the candidate or were moved to political action.
59 Peter had insisted I get one for the campaign. I hated it—and not just because it rang at inopportune moments like this one.
60 She was such a trouper, Tim made room in his office and dragged in a desk for her when she was in town.
61 Talk about a GRASSROOTS effort.
62 When in doubt, quote Dylan.
63 I didn’t really appreciate his use of the phrase “walked away with,” as if I’d waltzed in without doing any work. We’d been working tirelessly for months, but I wasn’t about to quibble with such amazing results.
64 African-American women, sixty-five cents; Latinas, fifty-eight. Scary, huh?
65 I went even farther but for a different reason—to prove Janine’s innocence. I had Lisa call the Post to see who’d taken the photo. They said they’d received it anonymously
66 I could almost hear every girl I went to high school with howling at these allegations.
67 One administrator looked so angry, I swear she was about to rush the stage. I haven’t made a teacher that mad since I Cling Wrapped the toilet seats in the teachers’ lounge back in junior high.
68 She and I were at a dude ranch with Bart and Lisa. Hilarious.
69 Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa.
70 Okay, it was outdoors, but still …
71 That’s an oxymoron, I know, but it’s true.
72 Commander in chief? Not with this crowd.
73 Not that a hundred screaming teenage girls was a bad thing. Did I just say that?
74 And this time Bono was nowhere to be found.
75 See? I was paying attention in history class even though I was making a paint-by-number chess game at my desk.
76 They really landed in Provincetown, I know, but they settled in Plymouth and that’s what ended up going down in the history books.
77 And we all know how that’s been ruined by greed.
78 Don’t get me started on a Curly vs. Shemp vs. Joe vs. Curly Joe debate. Believe it or not, I’m even too angry to go there.
79 The Fifteenth, Nineteenth, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments fixed those omissions much later. I told you I was paying attention in class while I was doodling.
80 Now I know how Ralph Nader felt when they wouldn’t even let him watch the Bush/Gore debates at UMass back in 2000. Let’s face it, for a democratic country, we’ve been downright hostile to third-party candidates for years.
81 I could almost see Thoreau smiling from the heavens as I took his theory of civil disobedience to heart.
82 The Supreme Court—you used to think they were impartial, right? For me, finding out those judges were political puppets too was the saddest part of the 2000 election.
83 Had the magazine even considered me?
84 Please say yes. Choose me over one of the most beautiful people in the world, I dare you.
85 The debates are monitored by a supposedly independent group called the Commission of Presidential Debates, which consists of two ex-Democratic and Republican Party chiefs. They say a candidate needs at least 15 percent of the electorate’s support in the opinion polls before he or she can take part in the televised debates. Kind of a catch-22—how are you supposed to get 15 percent of the vote if they won’t let you debate? Doesn’t sound too independent to me.
86 Warning: This conversation brought to you courtesy of your morphine drip.
87 Unless, of course, you count pretending you had killed yourself.
88 Or just to have someone to recite the Dead Parrot sketch with.
89 You do that on birthdays too, right?
90 Which thankfully covered the worst haircut I’d ever received in my life—a boys’ regular from a barbershop on the road in Des Moines. I hate to admit it, but when I obsessed about the nationally televised debates, half the time I was worrying if my hair would grow out by then.
91 Why aren’t they fighting over me? Why are they bonding?
92 l’m not the only person analyzing foreign policy while watching a belly dancer, am I?
93 It was also what I was wearing on my last vision quest when Beth paid me that little visit. I mean, come on!
94 An international agreement to reduce global warming signed by almost every country except us.
95 This country was founded on dissent and the exchange of differing views. Cut me some slack here!
96 Due to the new Patriot Act, I was stopped at every security checkpoint because of who I was. I’m all for airline security, but I always missed my flight. Gee, I thought by trying to make the country a better place, I was being patriotic.
97 Like an oral version of the SAT, just less fun.
98 Another catch-22: if the press buried the new facts of the story on page forty-seven, how was I supposed to clear my name and start to catch up in the polls again? Throughout the campaign, I’d spoken about how wrong it was for six conglomerates to own almost all the U.S. media outlets. I was now experiencing their corporate wrath and one-sidedness firsthand.
99 Except for the older monkey who resisted the change. Figures.
100 And proceeded to almost fall.
101 I dealt with the anxiety in another way, doodling a map of Gilligan’s island on the marker board, laying out where each hut was in relation to the others. It kept my mind off the extraordinary fact that we might actually win.
102 As quickly as someone can race with a healing femur.
Copyright © 2004 by Janet Tashjian
All rights reserved.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
115 West 18th Street, New York, New York 10011
www.henryholt.com
Henry Holt is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC
eISBN 9781466822924
First eBook Edition : May 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tashjian, Janet.
Vote for Larry / Janet Tashjian.
p. cm.
Sequel to: The gospel according to Larry.
Summary: Not yet eighteen years old, Josh, a.k.a. Larry, comes out of hiding
and returns to public life, this time to run for president as an advocate
for issues of concern to youth and to encourage voter turnout.
[1. Elections—Fiction. 2. Politics, Practical—Fiction.
3. Political activists—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T211135Vo2004 [Fic|—dc22 2003056578
ISBN 0-8050-7201-2 / EAN 978-0-8050-7201-3 / First edition—2004
Vote for Larry Page 15