“It’s real easy, hon. You wash that bird under cold water—inside and out, mind—then pop it in a pan and rub it with oil and salt. Put your potatoes and veggies around the bottom. Half an hour at four hundred, then maybe two hours at three twenty-five. You got that?”
“Half an hour at four hundred, then two at three twenty-five,” I repeat.
“Wiggle the leg around when you think it’s cooked. If it feels like it’s gonna fall right off, you’ve done good.”
When I get home, I do exactly as she said. I wash the thing, I dig out the bag of guts and toss it in the garbage, and then I smear the bird with oil. She didn’t say whether to cover it or not, so I leave the lid off the pan and hope for the best.
Once the chicken’s been in the oven for an hour, the whole house starts to smell like Christmas in June. I sit on the couch in the living room waiting for the timer to buzz, my mouth watering.
Just in time, I hear Dad stomp in the front door and grunt as he pulls off his boots on the landing. He comes into the living room like a bloodhound on the scent of a body. I can actually see him sniffing. He’s a big guy, built like a wrestler. At the lumberyard, I’ve seen him heave boards as if they’re toothpicks.
“The neighbors bring somethin’ by, Cole?” he asks. For a couple weeks last summer, right after Mom’s funeral, the neighbors left casseroles on our front stoop every night. Only for a couple weeks, though.
“I cooked.” I try to sound casual.
Dad’s eyebrows shoot up, and he goes straight to the kitchen to investigate. “Looks done,” he calls. “You going to carve?”
He’s using his hearty voice, which is fake enough for reality TV. Dad alternates between sessions of complete immobility on the couch and sessions of pretending everything’s perfect. I’m pretty sure the latter are for my sake.
I shrug from the doorway. “You can carve.”
“No, no. You should try.” Dad pulls out a cutting board and a knife. He waves the blade to motion me over, then he shows me how to twist off the wings and slice into the breast meat.
“That’s some good chicken,” he says once we’re sitting at the kitchen table. It is good. The skin’s nice and crisp, and the meat . . . well, it tastes more like meat than the pepperoni on frozen pizzas does.
After that—after we both finish saying how good it is—we run out of things to talk about. I glance at Dad now and then, watching the glow of the kitchen light reflect off the dome of his head, noticing the squint lines around his eyes. He glances at me, noticing . . . I have no idea what. I don’t know what we’re doing sitting at the kitchen table, anyway. Dad and I always eat in the living room.
“Want to turn on the TV?” I ask finally when there are only smears left on our plates.
“May as well,” he says.
There’s nothing left of the chicken. We scrape the bones into the trash and stick the roasting pan in the dishwasher. Add two plates. Two sets of silverware. When we flick off the kitchen lights, it’s as if dinner never happened.
Then we crash on the couch and watch World War I repeat itself on the History Channel. Everything and everyone coated in gore and mud.
• • •
Later that night, when the dishes are done and Dad’s snoring on the couch, I find myself roaming the house. I flick on the TV again, then turn it off. I pick up a book, but I can’t concentrate.
I feel like bawling in a way I haven’t cried since I was probably three years old. I miss Mom so bad it’s as if someone has cut through my chest with a chain saw.
It’s not just because of the chicken, either.
Usually, at a time like this, I would call Lauren. She’d come over for a while, or I’d pick her up in Dad’s truck.
Once last year, after we’d heard bad news from the doctor’s office, I couldn’t handle staying in the house anymore. I didn’t want to hear Mom say, “We just have to take it one day at a time,” or Dad say, “Those doctors don’t realize how tough you are.”
That night, I picked up Lauren and we went to the park and sat on the swings. She didn’t ask any questions. And then we were swinging. When you’re as big as me and you swing on kids’ playground equipment, it feels as if you’re going to lift the entire metal frame from the ground and soar out into space.
It feels good.
Calling Lauren’s not an option anymore, though. I slip outside and walk down the hill to Greg’s house instead.
By the time I get there, it’s too late to ring the doorbell. I bang on his bedroom window. Greg’s family lives in one of the 1950s bungalows that line most of Webster’s streets. They’re perfectly rectangular, with windows all the same size, like a picture drawn by a little kid. Greg’s has stucco on the top half and then a stripe of orange boards, then more stucco. It’s butt ugly, actually.
Greg’s twelve-year-old sister turns on her light and squints outside. I wave. She sends her eyes skyward, a perfect little copy of her mother, and flicks her light off.
When Greg finally pokes his head out, his brown hair is sticking straight up. There’s a red crease on his cheek where it’s been squished against the pillow.
“This better be good,” he says.
“It is. It is,” I assure him. “I’ve come to celebrate the freedom of man. This man, in particular. You are looking at a newly single Cole Owens. Bring out the girls and let’s have a toast!”
“I have no girls,” he grumbles. “And you have no drinks.”
Then the rest of my words slowly worm their way into his sleep-dulled head. “You and Lauren broke up? Are you serious?”
“Serious as a train wreck,” I say. “Now get out here. And bring something to drink.”
A few minutes later Greg emerges with a bottle of rye and an extra jacket.
“That’s why you’re my best friend,” I tell him after an hour of committed drinking. I flip over from where I’ve been sprawled on the community center field to slug Greg on the shoulder. Blades of grass stick to me. The ground is still spongelike from the spring rain, and I can smell the dirt clinging to my hair. “How many guys would get up in the middle of the night, provide alcohol, and think to bring me a jacket? You’re quality, man. Quality.”
“Yeah, right. And you’re drunk,” he says. “So how come Lauren dumped you, anyway?”
“She didn’t dump me.”
He looks doubtful. “Who started the conversation?”
“I did!” I’m forging into the future here. Deciding my own destiny. I thought this would be more obvious.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“What do you mean, what was I thinking? For months I’ve been telling you that things aren’t the same.”
He nods. “I just figured . . .”
“You figured what?”
“I figured you were still feeling down about your mom. I thought you’d get through it.”
Get through it. Is that what I’m supposed to do? I can’t ask. My voice will come out wrong.
“Nope,” I say instead. “Time for a change.”
Greg rubs his forehead. I know what he expected. Lauren and I would keep dating and eventually get married, buy a house, then hatch mini-Coles. Everybody thought that. I’m screwing with an entire town’s worldview right now.
There’s a pause in the conversation while I pick hunks of grass from the field and take a good look at Greg. He isn’t as big as me, but he’s wiry. He no longer has the round cheeks from our kindergarten monkey-bar days. In fact, as I peer at him in the dim glow from the community center’s streetlights, he looks almost exactly like his dad. Under his farm-boy mop of hair, he has the same round brown eyes and broad nose—even the same cleft in his chin. I wonder if he’s going to stay in town like his dad, take over the auto shop, spend his spare time overhauling that RX-7 he’s so proud of. Maybe he will.
He obviously thinks I’m making a mistake with Lauren, and that irritates me. I try to think of a way to explain.
I admit, Lauren’s great. She’s
one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, in that can’t-pass-a-dog-without-petting-it kind of way. Once, we’d driven a few hours to the mall in Spokane, and there was this old woman at the top of the escalator, frozen. Her daughter was at the bottom.
“Just grab the rail and step, Mom,” the daughter was saying, a note of exasperation in her voice.
The mom put a toe forward toward the stair, tottered slightly, and slid her foot back to safety.
Before I’d even absorbed the situation, Lauren walked right up to that old lady, took her elbow, and stepped with her onto the escalator.
That’s the kind of nice I mean.
But nice isn’t everything.
“Remember last month when there was a partial eclipse, some sliver of the moon that wasn’t going to look that way for another six centuries or something?”
Greg nods.
“Well, I borrowed the truck and I stuffed all the blankets from my bed into the back so we could lie there and look straight up. But when I got to Lauren’s, she’d fallen asleep and she was too tired to go out.”
Greg stares at me blankly. I haven’t explained things well enough.
“Wait. I have a better example. We watched a documentary one night about child soldiers in Uganda, and I said I would love to go and make films about stuff like that. Lauren rolled her eyes and said, ‘We don’t even know where Uganda is.’ ”
I don’t tell Greg what she said next: that I shouldn’t make life plans during my time of grief. Who says that? What kind of person under the age of forty says “time of grief”?
Greg still doesn’t get it.
“Listen, maybe I won’t ever go to Uganda. Maybe I don’t know exactly where it is in Africa. But I don’t want my girlfriend assuming we can’t get there. I want her to feel like we’re going to go wherever the hell we want for the rest of our lives. Isn’t that how it should be?”
By this time I’m yelling and a dog is barking nearby and Greg’s agreeing with me, probably to make me shut up.
Things get sloppy after that. At one point I pin Greg on the grass and force him to tell me that I’ve made the right decision about breaking up with Lauren. Then I sling my arm around his shoulders on the way back to his house and tell him that he’s the best damn guy in the whole town.
He drives me home.
“If you had to break up, you picked the right time,” he says as we wind through empty streets.
“Why’s that?”
“Way I see it, this is going to be the best summer of our lives. Next year we’re getting ready to graduate. Everyone’s going to be stressing over college applications, or getting jobs, or looking for jobs. We’re facing serious stuff in one year, man. This is the last summer of freedom. The countdown’s on.”
I think that’s the most apocalyptic view of life I’ve ever heard. I would say so, if I were up to pronouncing “apocalyptic.”
“Besides,” Greg continues with a grin. “Hannah Deprez is hot for you.”
My face flushes in the darkness of the car. “Hannah? She is?”
Now that would be different. And different . . . it’s a good thing, right? Greg can consider this his last summer of freedom if he wants to. I’m going to think of it as the first year of change.
chapter 4
close encounters of the warped mind
I’m whistling as I unlock the basement door and chuck my pack into a corner, where it can stay for the next two months. My exams are finished, my report card’s collected, and I have all summer to celebrate.
I yell a hello and head upstairs.
No one’s home. I can tell Dad stopped here after work—his stuff upstairs is tossed around the same way mine is downstairs. He’s gone out, though, and the house is cold and silent.
My mom was a quiet person, but the quiet when people are in the house together is different from the empty kind. As I make myself some peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches, I try to imagine she’s here in the kitchen with me.
She always had to stand on her tiptoes to see over my shoulder.
“You eat that, you’ll ruin your dinner,” she’d say. Since we both knew that I could eat a stack of sandwiches and every other scrap of food in the fridge and still be hungry, she’d say it as a what-moms-are-supposed-to-say sort of thing.
When I took the milk out of the fridge, she’d hand me a glass so I wouldn’t drink out of the jug. Then I’d lean against the counter to eat and she’d stand nearby slicing onions on the plastic cutting board, looking at the knife and the onions but really paying attention to me.
“I’m going to work a few shifts at the cherry plant this summer,” I’d tell her. “I just finished exams. And I broke up with Lauren.”
“The cherry plant sounds good. Hard work, though. You and Lauren broke up?” Her voice would be neutral. She wasn’t one of those people who would tell you there were other fish in the sea. And she wasn’t someone who would list all the things she hated about your ex, as if that would make you feel better. She was smarter than that.
“You doing okay?” she’d ask, scraping the onions and some tomatoes into a pan.
“Yeah. I think Lauren’s still upset.” Understatement. There was one enormously awkward phone call after the sex incident, and she hasn’t spoken to me since.
It takes me a while to decide what advice this conjured mom of mine would give.
Maybe: “When you break up, you lose the person you tell things to—the person you talk to about your day, about a funny moment, or what makes you mad. It takes time to replace that.”
Then she’d pass me a spoon of something to try. Something good. Something better than peanut butter on stale bread.
It sounds stupid to say I miss my mom, like I’m some kid left at kindergarten for the first time. I’m almost ready to graduate and move out and then I wouldn’t see her anyway, so what’s the big difference? And what does she know about losing people? My dad and I are the ones who had to learn about that.
My eyes are watering, probably because of the imaginary onions.
When the phone rings, it’s Greg, saying that everyone’s going to Dallas’s house. I figure I’d better grab the lifeline before I make up any more conversations and lose my mind altogether.
He says to pick him up at nine. I glance at the driveway to make sure Dad left the truck, and then I agree. It looks like I’m the designated driver for the evening, which I’m not thrilled about. House parties in Webster tend to be the same fifty kids you saw after school, except milling around someone’s kitchen instead of standing at their lockers. It takes a beer or two to make it seem more interesting than that.
Pick up Greg at nine o’clock. There are still five hours to fill.
Bored, roaming through the silent house, I find myself in our wood-paneled downstairs rec room. I’m standing in front of the east wall, which is lined floor to ceiling and corner to corner with bookshelves. Mom was an English major. She was going to be a professor until she met Dad and became a high school teacher instead. If she were still around, she would have been my lit teacher next year. Having my mom lecture me about books would have been nothing new.
“TV rots your brain,” she used to nag, taking away the remote control and plunking a book in my hand.
I wonder how she’d feel now that my movies and my film books have taken over a few of her shelves. Randomly, I pull out the Project Grizzly disc and pop it into the machine.
Project Grizzly.
It’s the first documentary I can remember watching. When I was seven, or maybe eight, I walked into the living room and found Dad focused on the screen. There was a man on TV dressed in the strangest armor I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Come over here. Have a look at this idiot,” Dad said.
So I sat cross-legged on the carpet below his chair and we watched as the armored man got smacked with a flying log. He was trying to create a bear-proof suit that would allow him to safely stalk a grizzly. It looked like an astronaut costume, and he could barely walk in i
t. He couldn’t even get in or out of it without his friends’ help.
“What kind of idiot . . . ?” my dad kept saying, but with a little admiration in his voice.
Even my mom got drawn in after a while, and all three of us sat there shaking our heads in unison.
In the years since that first viewing, I’ve learned that the National Film Board made Project Grizzly. Apparently, it’s a personal favorite of Quentin Tarantino—which proves how twisted it is.
I turn it off, finally, when my stomach starts growling. As the microwave spins my pizza, I’m still thinking about the bear-obsessed man and all the guys helping him out. Did they really have nothing better to do than watch their friend try to kill himself?
I do my dishes. In case the spirit of my mom’s still lingering around, cutting onions, I even wipe the counters. That’s when I spot the brochure Ms. Gladwell gave me. It has somehow migrated to the stack of papers beside the microwave.
VANCOUVER FILM STUDIO
A PREMIER ENTERTAINMENT ARTS INSTITUTION
The cover is black matte with a makeup artist’s rendition of a monster along one side.
It stares at me. I flip it over.
Do you have a vision? A need to tell stories? A distinctive way of looking at the world? Your time at the studio will help you explore your talents with an eye to becoming an industry-ready filmmaker. It’s time to realize your unique creative voice.
Unique creative voice. I could have one of those. Maybe.
I’ve heard of the studio before, of course. Quite a few famous directors and actors have studied there. I’ve even glanced at the school’s website before. But now I get a churning feeling in my gut when I think about the place. Because it could be real. One year from today, I could be blowing town and heading to Vancouver.
It’s the year of change, right?
Maybe I should call it the year of escape.
I grab a handful of cookies from the cupboard and head downstairs to the computer. The studio’s home page features the same image as the brochure. I click on the tab for admissions information.
Step 1: Application. Forms available for download. Deadline for early admission is January 15.
Anywhere but Here Page 2