Nate Expectations

by Tim Federle

  Also, full disclosure: I don’t really do the flop-swear thing anymore, but Libby’s still into it, and why would I squash her fun?

  “Maybe Jordan’s mom would let me crash with them,” I say, but I don’t mean it, and Libby knows I don’t.

  She knows it’s such a non-starter—that Jordan will stay put here, and that I’ll come back to a town that somehow both never knew my name but also hated everything about me—that we change the subject immediately, begin talking about Libby’s mom; about how muggy it is in New York right now; about how Libby thinks two of her teachers back home are having an affair because they “have these weird fake fights in the hall between the cafeteria and the science lab.”

  And the image of those normal halls—the halogen lighting, the dull slam of lockers—makes me wanna barf up my Indian food and go get another Popsicle, maybe give myself such an intentional ice cream headache that I’ll be deemed medically unable to attend school at all.

  “Nate, one last thing and then I have to boogie, because my phone is about to die and a girl should always have a little power to spare.”

  “Yes?”

  “You seem completely unexcited to come home, which is completely offensive as your oldest friend.” I take a breath to offer a retort. “Be quiet, I’m not done—because, I will make it so fun and worth it for you to be home. Seriously! And ever since my mom was declared cancer-free for over a year, she lets me have dessert twice a day. So you can partake. If you wish.”

  “I wish,” I say, and we do our thumbs-up thing at the screen, and the call is over—her batteries run out. Or maybe it’s just her patience with me.

  Another siren goes off, somewhere down below, on the streets of Queens, just as I’m picturing that piercing Pennsylvania school bell that I’ve always hated—a bell we don’t have on Broadway, where tutoring sessions end if you’re needed in an emergency rehearsal. And where, no matter how crappy your day is, a group of a thousand people are going to clap for you at the end of the night.

  I mean, you have to admit, it’s a pretty good way to be a kid, if you have to be a kid.

  Heidi’s kitty runs back in from the living room and meows at the sirens.

  “Same, kitty,” I say, pulling back Heidi’s curtains to try and memorize the New York skyline, like someday I might be tested on it. “Same.”

  Teacher, My Teacher

  Somewhere in here I should mention that being tutored for a Broadway show is not anything like a real school, with its funky cafeteria trays and frog dissections.

  It isn’t an ancient 1960s building with bad acoustics, or a football field that’s seven times the size of the school auditorium.

  On Broadway, it’s a mobile classroom in the basement of a gilded golden theater.

  My tutor’s name is Savanah. Not “Miss Savanah” or “Mrs. Savanah” or Mrs. Anything. Just Savanah. We’d never call our teachers by their first names in Jankburg, but then, we’d never give our teachers audition tips either. Which I do here, all the time.

  Savanah is an actress. Or a used-to-be actress. Or, in her words, a “never-quite-was” actress. Her age is somewhere between seventy and almost-not-alive. She showed me some old videos of her singing, uploaded on grainy YouTube clips. And she could really sing. She can still generate a lot of sound, whenever one of us kids gets rowdy. Man, she can go from zero to shouting in no seconds flat.

  But mostly she acts like my favorite kind of grown-up, which is: the kind who wishes they didn’t have to be a grown-up, but will occasionally act like one if pushed too hard.

  “Well, Nate-o,” she says to me, “I suppose this is it. We never quite cracked algebra, you and me”—she leans in close and I can smell her day-old perfume, and citrus mints on her breath—“but you’ll never need algebra where you’re heading.”

  She hugs me, and I don’t cry because I tell myself, Don’t cry.

  “Where?” I say. “Jankburg? Tell that to my parents.”

  I’m heading back tomorrow. We close the show today, a single matinee performance, a final Sunday, and then I take the bus one-way in the morning. Even though Heidi said something stupid about how every one-way trip is just a round-trip that hasn’t been told so yet.

  (Heidi just got a new self-help book for toilet reading, and has started speaking in these kind of generic positivity statements that drive me positively negative.)

  But I’m still going to miss the heck out of my aunt, and her futon that’s always full of crumbs, and the way she pretends not to hear me sneak out into the living room after lights-out, to watch Netflix on her big screen.

  I’m going to miss all of it.

  Oh, whoops. I am crying. Right into Savanah’s sweater.

  “I’m going to screw up your sweater,” I say, like an idiot, because how can you screw up a sweater by crying.

  “Nate, if I can give you one piece of advice,” Savanah says. I swear if she gives me some chipper quote like “Every door closing is a window not closing” or some other B.S., I’m gonna kick a wall or push over a recycling canister. But she doesn’t.

  “This next time in your life—this going back home—it could truly and royally be terrible,” she says.

  “O . . . kay?”

  “It will seem like a version of forever, these next couple years.” Her eyes get glassy. She might just give this speech any time a sensitive boy graduates from one of her shows. “It will be a community of people who probably won’t get you, or understand what you’ve been through . . .”

  I sense this could go long, and sit on a chaise in the basement of the theater—just as I hear the front doors open upstairs. Crap. I should be back in my dressing room, saying goodbye to the boys, and blasting vintage Britney Spears songs as a warm-up.

  “But even if those kids back home don’t get you—even if they look at you like you’re a four-foot-tall alien—know that there are people who love you, who will be happy when you’re ready to come back. Here, I mean. And know that, even if you can never truly go home again, you can, in fact, enjoy Wichita Falls, in doses.”

  She attempts a smile that makes her face stall like a computer program that’s taking too long to load.

  “Um, Wichita? I’m from Jankburg.”

  “Did I say Wichita?” Savanah says. “How funny! That’s where I’m from.”

  I hear the stage manager making a “Ladies and gentlemen of the company, this is your final half hour” announcement, and Savanah hands me back a piece of homework that I turned in (late) on the Ottoman Empire. A paper I dashed off so half-heartedly that if it were an actual heart, it would not pump enough blood to keep even a Chihuahua alive.

  “An A,” I say. “You . . . genuinely shouldn’t have.”

  “I know,” Savanah says, smiling at her handiwork, the unapologetic lie of a great big A grade, splashed across a paper that’s got too many half-researched facts, pulled off Wikipedia. “But you know who doesn’t care about grades, Nate?”

  “Who?”

  She grabs both of my shoulders and shakes me. “Show people, baby. Show people don’t care if you went to Harvard. They care if you make ’em smile.”

  It’s awkward, because she’s still shaking me, a full ten seconds later, but I appreciate this form of self-help—the kind that’s less Buddhist than it is Barbra Streisand.

  “I should probably . . . ,” I start to say, and she releases me and flings me into a wall like I’m a shark and she meant to catch a catfish.

  “—get ready for the last show!” she says, for me. And she kind of pats her helmet-hair of a head, and grins at me. She has lipstick on her teeth and seems so vulnerable that all of a sudden I think, I’ve got to call my grandma and tell her I love her, sometime.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go to wigs, because that means it’s really over. But we’ve cried here, and we’ve half laughed. And she said something odd about how alien and short I am. (I’m not just four feet tall, for the record, jeez.) But I love this lady. And so I just turn aroun
d on myself, because Heidi taught me that “goodbyes are just hellos that haven’t happened yet.”

  I push open the door that snakes through the secret passage backstage, and I hear Savanah go, “Nate?”

  And I say, “Yes, teacher my teacher?” (Old inside joke; she called me her Nate once.)

  And she says, “If I were really doing my job right, I’d have given you a D for that Ottoman Empire paper.” Her voice gets dark and ragged, just like how the weather can turn its back on you unexpectedly, without warning, back home in Jankburg. The tornado capital of Pennsylvania. “Charm can get you far in Times Square. But be careful back home.”

  Parting Gifts

  “I’ll be back for Thanksgiving,” Jordan says, in between swigs of hot tea in his dressing room. “And I think I have a hiatus on the series for Halloween, because the director is, like, very into the ‘dark arts,’ and is spending time at his second home in New Orleans. So I’ll see you back home all the time!”

  Jordan swings around in his seat and kind of kicks his legs a couple times. “Nate! Wouldn’t it be so cool to have multiple homes someday?”

  “Uh, maybe? Sounds expensive. But I mean, sure, if I ever made real money. Or I don’t die in high school. In Pennsylvania. Faraway Pennsylvania.”

  Jordan swirls back around in his chair—that’s the only word for it, he’s a swirler—and looks at himself in the mirror. “Look, we’ll FaceTime a ton and we’ll text a million times a day and it’s going to be like nothing has changed. Proms-ies.” That’s how he says “Promise” these days. Everything has an -ies on the end. Swears-ies.

  I stare at a photo tacked to his dressing room mirror of a selfie he took with Lin-Manuel Miranda and that he had his mom print out in color.

  “Well, have a blast on the series. It’s like, of course they hired you.”

  Oh, to catch you up: Jordan “got” the TV show. The not-quite-lead role. He’s a series regular, and when I asked if his name was going to be in the opening credits, he clucked like I’d suggested we wear roller skates to a Homecoming dance, and said, “No, it’s going to be one of those shows that are almost mini-movies, where the names don’t come on till the end,” and I slapped my forehead theatrically and said, “How could I be so stupid?” and he didn’t laugh, he just nodded.

  “Well, here,” I say, and I dangle that rabbit foot he didn’t mind borrowing for luck. “A parting gift.” I hate romance, but I like gestures.

  “For moi?” he says, with a pretty good French accent, even though he takes and aces Spanish with poco (little) effort.

  “Yes, for . . . ywa,” I say—a joke-attempt at “you” plus “moi.” It comes out weird. Everything is coming out weird these days. Coming out is weird.

  “But, don’t you want this thing?” he says, side-eyeing the rabbit foot like it’s, well, a dead animal. “For good luck at regular school?”

  “Nah. I’ve got Libby. She’s basically a bodyguard in high-tops.”

  He takes the keychain from me, and our fingers touch, and I feel like I’m being struck by boy lightning.

  I push my hand into his, and squeeze it, and say, “Are we just going to totally stop being Nate and Jordan now?”

  “Jordan and Nate,” he says, double-squeezing my hand back, in the least sweet gesture of all time. “I always get star billing.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  He leaps up and fake-punches my arm, and says, “You know what your problem is, Nate?” and I say, “Algebra,” and he says, “Good one,” and I say, “Thanks,” and pick up one of his spare Gatorades, which I decide I want and should have.

  The overhead speaker comes on, a stage manager with the annoyed voice of a grocery store employee who has to announce a cleanup in aisle six. “Nate Foster,” the stage manager says, “we need you in the boys’ room to get ready for our last-ever Act Two—like, now.”

  It dawns on me that I never ran late for anything before I met Jordan.

  I pull my hand away from his. The human lightning storm has passed. Or, it’s still here, but now it feels like a faint electric current that could actually do real damage to my circuitry, or heart.

  “Jordan,” I say, and put his spare Gatorade back down. Maybe I don’t want it. Maybe I have to stop picking things up just because they’re there. “I’m sorry that I always make everything weird, but I’m really going to miss you.”

  And because I refuse to cry until today’s curtain call, I pivot hard and reach for the doorknob. But he stops me.

  “Your problem, Nate,” Jordan says, and then takes such a deep breath that the next part comes out like hot air after a summer storm, “is you take everything too serious.”

  “Seriously,” I say, and I guess I see what he means.

  When I’m alone in the hallway outside Jordan’s dressing room, I mutter “Anyone can whistle” through my gritted jaw, and attempt (fail) to whistle my way back to the dressing room.

  Oh. Anyone Can Whistle. Leeeegendary Broadway flop. Our Lord and master Stephen Sondheim’s biggest doozy. Ran something like twelve performances—total, in all!

  So, yeah. I guess I’m still swearing with flops. Even if I certifiably stink at whistling. And saying goodbye.

  The Part Where I Hum “So Long, Farewell” with My Aunt

  Basically, there’s so much crying, if you watched the farewell scene between me and Aunt Heidi on mute, you’d think one of us was dying and the other one just learned they aren’t a matching donor for whichever vital organ the first one needed.

  Basically, it’s that.

  I guess it’s just our fractured history that turns this whole thing so weepy. She was a long-lost relative, but then she found me. And I crashed with her during my entire E.T. run. And a futon became a bed, and an aunt became a mom.

  “I’ll be back home for Christmas,” Heidi finally manages to announce, through the kind of shake-sobs generally reserved for putting a beloved dog to sleep.

  “Then I’ll vow not to have a good day until Christmas!” I half say, back.

  And then we heave-cry some more, and spontaneously hum “So Long, Farewell,” and she manages to hand me a twenty-dollar bill, “just in case you need a healthy snack at a rest stop.”

  The Greyhound driver at Port Authority finally stands up and hollers back at us, “I can’t hold this bus in the station any longer. If the lady’s staying, she needs to buy a ticket.”

  Which is Aunt Heidi’s cue to smudge away her tears, and slobber-kiss my cheek, and walk past the driver to try and whisper without me hearing, “Take care of that kid.”

  But I hear it. She’s an actress. An actress is technically unable to whisper without her audience hearing it. Even when her audience can’t stop crying.

  All the Things That Could Go Wrong

  Once the bus rockets its way through the Holland Tunnel, I open the Notes app on my phone, to make a list of all the things that could go wrong at my new high school in Jankburg. And all the ways I could fight back, if I wanted to. If I had to.

  But after I type THING NUMBER ONE: It’s safe to assume nobody wants me back at all, so I’ll just act like I don’t want to be back, somehow I nod off, hard.

  Apparently, crying hard is a form of exercise, and leaves you in urgent need of rest. And all I’ve been doing the past week is crying hard, and trying hard too—trying to get Jordan to give me a meaningful goodbye, which never seemed to happen. Believe me, you’d have gotten a lot more Jordan here if there were more to give. There were half pecks, sure, and shoulder punches, and promises of “constant texting while we’re apart!!!!” All of which felt about as nutritious as cherry pie for breakfast.

  Which, by the way, can be delicious. But isn’t exactly a way to build a healthy diet. (I’ve been trying to eat, like, 20 percent better recently. I’m a freshman now. Freshmen worry about health, I heard somewhere.)

  When the overhead lights on this bus flicker back on, one-two-three, and wake me up without apologizing, it’s not one of those cliché things where I “th
ink I’m in a dream” or “wonder if I’m in a nightmare.” I know exactly where the heck I am.

  My dad is in the Pittsburgh bus terminal in his nice jeans and a red baseball cap. And my mom is holding a just-for-Nate floral arrangement from her flower shop. And she waves at the bus as it pulls in, but on old instinct I don’t wave back.

  Maybe because I’m shocked Dad showed up at all.

  The bus doors gush open, and my left leg is numb from this weird position I was in.

  “Here I am,” I say like an apology, shaking out my leg. And my mom comments on my height, and asks if I’ve had anything to eat, and we spend the whole ride home with my dad trying to get “the game” to come in clear on the radio. When I ask who’s playing (innocent enough, no?), my dad says it’s a vintage game—that it was the Pirates vs. the Orioles, “way back when you were a glimmer in your mom’s eye.”

  I’m surprised anyone would listen to sports to begin with, let alone sports that took place in the past. I don’t even find sports that are happening in front of you, live, intriguing, and they at least have the chance of something exciting happening, like a Broadway-theme halftime show.

  Mom drops Dad off at T.J. O’Malley’s on the south side of Jankburg, so he can keep listening to the Pirates vs. the Orioles game, surrounded by fellow guys like him. Normal guys like him. That’s the only reason he came to pick me up at the bus station, it turns out—so he could catch a ride to the pub.

  “Here we are,” I say, to no one, when we pull into our rocky driveway.

  If my dog, Feather, somehow forgot who I am while I was gone, I will be microwaving my head. Just FYI!

  The Most Thoughtful People I Know

  Mom hears me in the bathroom around 2 a.m., possibly on the verge of throwing up.

  “Natey?” she says from outside, and I jump to my feet—don’t want to look weak or like a kid in front of her. She lets herself in just as I knock my knee into the sink and skip around like the very picture of puny.