by Don Zolidis
“Yes. Yes I do,” I said slowly.
Glenn kept going. “It’s kind of amazing that a high school senior would need help with his homework from an eighth grader—”
“But that’s because Glenn’s so brilliant,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “You know, I’ve heard musicals actually help you…with math.”
Amy’s mom wobbled in from the kitchen, leaning on the doorway. “Oh, Craig, you’re here! I didn’t hear you come in either!”
“I’ve got a lot of ninja skills,” I said. “I keep to the shadows.”
She turned to Amy. “I thought we weren’t having anyone over.”
“I know,” said Amy. “This is just a thing that Glenn and Craig set up…apparently.”
“Oh.” Her mom’s smile withered.
I noticed then that the house was in a bit of disarray. The other times I had been there it had always seemed immaculate, like it was some kind of Swedish-Wisconsin museum of adorable kitsch and fresh-smelling flower arrangements. Now it seemed darker—dirty dishes were piled in the sink, the floor hadn’t been vacuumed. Then again, I had never been there in the morning, and it was still way cleaner than my room.
Amy’s mom saw me looking. “If I would’ve known I would’ve cleaned up! This place is a pigsty.”
“You should see my house,” I said. “We have actual pigs.”
“You are too much! You are just too much! It is good to see you!” And then she opened her arms and gave me a hug. Amy’s mom was skinnier than before; she felt almost weightless. She had never been a large woman, but now she was positively birdlike. She’d been losing weight in a hurry.
Your daughter deflowered me last night.
And then I let go because shit got weird.
Amy sensed the strangeness. “It’s too bad you have to go,” she said.
“Yep. Well,” I said, suddenly aware that my hair was conspicuously jutting out from the sides of my head in a very clear case of bedhead. “Now that Glenn has…helped me—”
“You were really just making some simple mistakes,” Glenn interrupted with a sly grin. “If you just check your work you’ll get it.”
“Thanks again,” I said.
“Anytime. If you need help, I’m here for you, bro.” He held his hand out.
I looked at it. He looked at it.
“Are we gonna high-five?” I said.
“My fee. For tutoring?”
“Ohhh…”
“My goodness, Glenn,” said Amy’s dad. “That’s real industrious of you.”
“Yeah, Craig’s paying me ten bucks an hour,” he said as I looked in my wallet and was about to pull out a five-dollar bill.
“Do you have change?” I said, taking out a twenty.
“I’ll get you next time,” said Glenn.
“Son.”
It was a week later. I was in the kitchen, and so was my dad, elegantly draped in his most unappealing pajamas, which, considering his collection of pajamas that still existed from the 1970s, was saying something. It’s not that they had holes (they did) or that they were so threadbare as to be largely see-through; it was the odd and disturbing combination of cherries and bears that seemed to dance in a satanic circle of awfulness that made them the worst. I did not appreciate it when he wore them, and yet here he was wearing the pajamas in the kitchen just after midnight.
The job search had not been going particularly well, and my dad had responded by growing a goatee. I wasn’t sure if this was a midlife crisis or something, but it made him a look like Bizarro evil dad. Like, normal dad had a job and went to work and never said anything, and evil Bizarro dad expressed his feelings.
Amy had gone home a little bit ago, and he had emerged from his slumber like an ornery black bear ready to lay waste to a campsite.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, pretending to yawn. “So I’m gonna…go to sleep.”
“Hold on.”
He sauntered behind me, and I could tell he had something important on his mind.
Crap. Two big hands descended on my shoulders, and he gave a halfhearted attempt between a “shake the life out of you” and “neck massage,” either of which would have been very, very odd.
“So how long have you and Amy been dating?”
“Um…like continuously or if you put them all together?”
Dad frowned. He had no idea what I was talking about. He tried a new line of questioning.
“Are you getting serious?”
This is part of the problem when middle-aged people talk to young people about relationships. We live in completely different worlds. What the heck was he talking about? What did serious mean? Did I give her a promise ring or something? Were we going steady? We weren’t engaged or anything. Was that what he was suggesting?
“Define ‘serious,’” I said.
“You know what it means.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
“I’m pretty sure you do.”
“Well, uh…I guess we’re serious, then.”
“Uh-huh.” He nodded, as if he had known it already. “I kind of knew that. I’ve seen her around here a lot.”
“Yeah.”
Dad took a deep breath and settled onto one of the very uncomfortable barstools. He put both hands, which he had balled up into fists, on the counter and steeled himself. This was probably worse than going to war.
“So…um…there comes a time when you and Amy are going to want to…explore different possibilities.”
What?
“Like what?”
“Um…like when you, uh…want to express yourselves physically.”
“Like charades?”
Dad frowned. This was not going well for him.
It finally dawned on me that he was trying to find a way to avoid saying “sex.”
“Oh. You mean sex!”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Sex. Good stuff.”
Dad looked at me again and puffed out his cheeks like he was caught in a field of razor wire. “If you and Amy decide to take that step, I want you to make sure to use…protection.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it.”
“Okay.”
And then Dad took out a small box from the pocket of his ratty pajamas and put it on the table. I tried to avert my eyes, but I had already seen what it was. Trojans.
“These are your best friends,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder again.
I kept my eyes down. My dad had just given me a box of condoms. A box of condoms, I might add, that was ALREADY OPEN. This is what happens when you anger God. He sends doom upon you.
“I’m too young to be a grandfather.”
“You’re not gonna be one for a while. Don’t worry.”
“All right.”
“Are we done?”
Dad exhaled again. “Nope.”
Oh, crap.
He looked down at the island again and gathered himself for another round of “embarrass the hell out of Craig.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re gonna do some dumb shit in your life, Craig. Really dumb.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve discovered that recently.”
“When you were a baby, you used to have really dry skin. And you would claw up your face scratching it. You remember that?”
“No. Because I was a baby.”
“Right. Sure. But my job was to put mittens on you. So you wouldn’t hurt yourself, you know? So, basically, that’s been my job ever since. Putting some damn mittens on you so you won’t hurt yourself too bad.”
“I think I’m doing okay,” I lied, vaguely aware that my heart had been broken four times by the same girl in the past five months.
“No, you’re stupid. It’s okay. You’re supposed to be stupid right now. The key, though, is not to be so stupid that you mess up the rest of your life. ’Cause you’re at the point now where what you do is going to affect the whole rest of your life, you understand?”<
br />
“Yeah.”
“So if you don’t screw up, you’ll be fine. And the way to screw up is to do the following: get a girl pregnant, get arrested, drop out of school, or get married. Okay? Don’t do any of that shit.”
“All right,” I said. Apparently there were only four ways to screw up my life. According to Amy’s book, women had ten. So that was a bonus.
“Good. I’m gonna go back to sleep, then.”
“Good talk, Dad.”
“Good talk, son.”
And then he got up from the really uncomfortable barstool and shuffled upstairs, with the holes clearly visible in his pajamas.
A second later, Kaitlyn was there. She had been listening the whole time.
“Hey, give me that,” she whispered, taking the box of condoms.
“No, I need those,” I said, swiping them back and trying to, once again, ignore the fact that the box HAD ALREADY BEEN OPENED and at least one of them WAS MISSING.
When I took them back, Kaitlyn froze, her mouth open.
“Oh my God,” she said, realization flashing over her. She pointed at me. “Oh my God! Did it work?”
“I’m not telling.”
“It did!”
“I’m not saying whether it did or not. I can neither confirm nor deny the—”
“Holy shit!” said Kaitlyn, stunned. “When you were going over to her house I was like, ‘This is not going to end well.’ Amy Carlson.” She looked at me. “You and Amy Carlson. This is, like…everything I believed I knew about reality has been upended. I don’t even know what the hell’s going on anymore. Who am I?”
“Shut up. I just had the Talk with Dad, shut up.”
“Oh whatever. I had the Talk with Mom, like, four years ago.”
“Four years ago?”
She hit me in the shoulder. “I didn’t need the talk then, idiot.”
“She probably just sensed where you were heading.”
“You suck, Craig.”
An uncomfortable silence settled between us. I still had the box in my hands.
“So…um…when did you, uh…?” I asked.
“Oh, shut up. I’m not telling you.” Then she smiled. “Like two years ago.”
“Two years ago?!” I stopped myself. “Cool. I guess, right? Cool?”
“Pretty cool.”
“God, we’re a bunch of sluts in this family, aren’t we?” And then I high-fived Kaitlyn. “Here, you can have half of these.”
It was December when we had the First Infamous Family Dinner. A week after Amy had broken up with me the first time I was still in a miserable funk. I had improved somewhat, but as far as I knew, no wolves had descended on Chad and devoured him, so I was a bit bummed by that.
My mom started it. “We have some news,” she said, and looked kind of sadly at my dad while she distributed the fish we were not going to eat. “We won’t be going to Florida to visit Grandma this year.”
“Yes!” hissed Kaitlyn.
I kicked her under the table.
“Ow.” She kicked me back.
“Goddamn it,” I said, trying to kick her again.
“You don’t get to kick me, Craig! I don’t want to go to Florida. It’s horrible there. All we do is tour through old houses. It sucks.”
“Okay, but still, this is a very serious moment and you’re acting like a brat!”
“You don’t like Grandma either!”
We had come a long way since our ninth birthday party, obviously.
My mom and dad exchanged the we-have-failed-as-parents-and-here-is-the-evidence glances.
“Guys,” said my mom a little too quietly. “Please stop.”
Kaitlyn put her hands in the air like she was being arrested and leaned back in her chair.
“The reason we’re not going to Florida,” she continued, “is that your father”—she paused, trying to figure out the best way to put a smile on this—“is going to be transitioning into a new role at the company by not being there anymore.”
“I’m getting laid off,” said Dad.
“But it’s going to be okay! We’re going to be okay. This is temporary.”
“Maybe,” he added, and sighed. Dad had been morose ever since the hunting trip, and it was tough to watch. Normally he prowled around the house like a panther, talking about how stupid people were, but he had been subdued lately. He barely had the strength to talk back to the weatherman on the nightly news. (Usually he’d say things like, “You weren’t right yesterday, genius—why should I trust you today?” To which the weatherman wouldn’t respond because he was inside the television.)
He put his hands on the table. “The job market’s in the shitter right now, so…so we have to prepare for me being out of work for a little while.”
“We’re not saying ‘shitter,’” countered my mom.
“I’m saying ‘shitter,’” said my dad.
“It’s going to be okay,” added my mom, short-circuiting the discussion of whether or not we were going to become a family that cussed in front of each other. “It’s not all doom and gloom.”
“I’ll get to spend a lot more time with you,” he said. A little noise of pain escaped Kaitlyn. “But it does mean that we’re going to have to tighten our belts. Not as many dinners out. We might need to sell your car.”
“What?!” gasped Kaitlyn. I kicked her under the table again. She kicked me right back harder. (I was getting the worst of it—she could definitely kick harder than me.)
“If I can’t find something right away, we’re gonna have to get rid of it,” he said. “And, um…there might be the possibility we have to move.”
“Move where?” asked Kaitlyn.
“Wherever he gets a job, dumbass,” I said, channeling my dad. I got your back, big guy.
“Craig,” sighed Mom, trying to keep her smile going. “Not helpful!”
“But we’ll see. I’ll look around here first. They gave me a decent severance package, so it’s not an emergency yet.”
“So how about we sell the car when it becomes an emergency—”
“Stop worrying about the car,” I said.
Kaitlyn turned on me. “First of all, I’m not the one who spends all the money in this house.”
“What the hell?” I said.
“How much Dungeons & Dragons crap is in the basement? We should sell that!”
“No one’s gonna buy that,” said Dad. “That money’s lost.”
“Hey!” I protested.
“Oh, honey,” said Mom. “You’ve got a lot of toys.”
“They’re not toys! They’re miniatures!”
“What about Craig’s billion comic books?”
“Kids,” said my dad holding up his hands like he was the pope. “Hopefully we’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be fine,” added my mom.
“Hopefully.”
“Well, what about college?” asked Kaitlyn.
That question hung in the air for a moment, just long enough for a shadow of doubt to run through me.
I had been dreading going back to Youth in Government. It was one thing to see Amy in the halls, it was another to be in a room with her, actually listening to her speak and staring at her the entire time. I had vowed not to stare at her, of course, and focus on the words carved into the desks, but I knew myself. I’d be staring at her.
“Dude, whatever,” said Groash on the way there. “You should just be like, ‘Screw this, I’m not your slave anymore!’ And then you just walk out.”
“That doesn’t really sound like a good idea.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s an awesome idea. That’s what I would do if I were you. ‘Bitch! Look at me!’ Maybe I’d rip my shirt off. You know, if I was like, built, you know? Like if I had muscles or whatever, off comes the shirt—‘This is what you’re giving up!’ And then I just storm out of there, feeling myself the whole time.”
I would like to point out here that at this moment in our lives, Groash had had two girlfriends and I ha
d had one. (And my relationship had lasted like three weeks.) Repeat: He had been more successful at love than I had.
“That’s shitty advice, man.”
“Well, at least you don’t have to go to Madison for that thing.”
“I can’t get my money back. That’s like three hundred bucks. It’s kind of huge for my family right now.”
“Just don’t go. You can hide out at my house instead.”
The prospect of hiding out at Groash’s house for three days sealed the deal. “I’m definitely going to Madison,” I said.
“You should totally get ripped first,” he said.
And then there was the meeting.
She was standing near the pool table going over a list with Chelsea when we walked in.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said.
Her blue eyes glittered in the light. A tumbleweed blew through. Probably a plane crashed. Time slowed down to nothing. I figured this would be the moment she admitted she was wrong, swept the billiard balls to the ground, and threw me on the pool table.
That didn’t happen.
“So I’m gonna sit down,” I said.
“Okay.”
Then she patted me on the shoulder.
I patted her on the shoulder.
She smiled and my stomach dropped out again.
I want you back, I thought, not saying anything. I want to be able to love you.
“So make sure you’ve got your toiletries. Every year there’s people who forget their toothbrush and it’s not pleasant,” said Chelsea, handing out the little lists of things we shouldn’t forget but probably would because we were morons. “And I’m not talking about the people who don’t normally brush their teeth. If you normally don’t brush your teeth, start.”
“Toothbrush,” muttered Groash under his breath as he looked over the sheet.
“And, guys, you need to be wearing suits and ties. Please don’t get the little clip-on ones. They’re ridiculous. If you need help tying a tie, find one of the older guys to help you.” I looked around. Groash and I were the older guys. I knew he had no idea how to tie a tie. I had about a 20 percent success rate. “Black socks with black shoes. I do not want to see white socks; I don’t want us looking like a bunch of donkeys out there.”
Amy cut in. “Thanks, Chelsea.”
“I’m serious. Not cool.”