Woodbury, Minnesota
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Blues for Zoey © 2015 by Robert Paul Weston.
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First e-book edition © 2015
E-book ISBN: 9780738745046
Originally published by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., Toronto, 2014.
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For Anyone Who Plays—Anything
In the brightness of life
In the dimness of dreams
In Heaven, on Earth
It ain’t what it seems
—Shain Cope
“Freudian Slap, Part 1”
1
This Story Is Not a Mystery
This story is not a mystery. It’s a puzzle. A bunch of oddly cut slices of cardboard, jumbled together in an unmarked box. How do you solve a puzzle? You dump the pieces on a table, spread them around in a way that makes sense (or seems to), and then, one by one, you start putting it all together. That’s when the trouble starts.
There are a lot of pieces and nothing is what it seems, not when you’re holding just one. How do you know which way is up? Is that the blue of the sea or the blue of the sky? To see the connections, you have to put them in order. Piece by piece. Moment by moment. It’s true for puzzles and—that summer—it was true for me, too.
If you’re still following this lame puzzle metaphor, you may be wondering, What sort of pieces am I talking about? In this particular puzzle-slash-story, they would go something like this:
Fathers
Illness
Lies
Love
Money*
Murder
Music
Secrets
Sex
Sleep
That’s the top ten in alphabetical order (which is not to say the alphabet is going to help; it’s merely convenient). Why the asterisk beside Money? Because even though I might be tempted to say number nine is the most important piece of all, it’s not. The most important thing in this story is life’s other major trip-up. Money. That summer, it ruled my life (and ruined it).
Which brings me to the worst problem of all. Unlike a puzzle, life doesn’t come in a neat little box. There’s no picture you can look at to tell you where you’re headed. Sometimes, you don’t even know you’re doing a puzzle at all. Not until it’s too late.
2
The First Time I Saw Her, Part 1
It was the end of July, the deadest time of summer, when Mr. Rodolfo saved money by skimping on air-con at the Sit ’n’ Spin. That would be the laundromat where I worked part-time during the school year and full-time over the summer. If you’ve never had the pleasure of folding two hundred ratty towels for the semi-homeless men of the Emerson Center, here’s a tip: don’t. It sucks.
That day, the only do-it-yourselfer was an old lady at the back. She moved so slow, I worried she was on the verge of a stroke. She kept dabbing her head with a handkerchief while leaning heavily on Ol’ Betty, the store’s perpetually broken washer. (It was Sit ’n’ Spin policy to dump the floor swill down Ol’ Betty’s gaping gullet whenever the floor was mopped.)
It was just after one in the afternoon. I know this because the Brothers had just left with the Premium Service dry cleaning. Premium Service meant your undies were scrubbed with chemicals in a factory space Mr. Rodolfo rented down by the lake. I’m not sure if the Brothers were genuine twins, but in their baggy workman overalls, they were indistinguishable. Every afternoon, they stalked in like a pair of thugs, rarely saying a word to me, and collected the Premium Service. We so seldom interacted, I’d forgotten their actual names. Joe and George, I think, but they could just as well have been JJ and Gonzo.
I was folding towel two-hundred-fifty-three-million-and-six (give or take) when guess who showed up?
Becky.
She was wearing a baby-blue mini-tee and yoga pants, and I’ll admit I got a momentary flashback, a semi-dirty one of us making out on her bedroom carpet. I hadn’t seen her in over a month, not since school ended. We had been basically avoiding each other since March—the eleventh of March, to be precise—which was when she dumped me.
“Kaz!”
She flapped her arm like crazy, as if I wouldn’t notice her without a ferocious wave. “You know you forgot your jacket? Digby’s been sleeping on it for, like, months!” (Digby was Becky’s big, butter-colored Labradoodle.)
The jacket was a woolen, navy-blue peacoat, a hand-me-down I’d inherited when Dad died. I had wanted it back, but I was too lazy-slash-chicken to go reclaim it. I wasn’t all that fond of Becky’s dad. He always seemed creepily proud of me for dating his daughter. I expected that sort of thing from Mr. Rodolfo, but from Becky’s own father? Creepy. I had a strong suspicion he would have made fun of me for getting dumped.
“Thanks,” I said. “I was wondering where that was.”
“Now you know.”
Instead of handing me the jacket, she laid it on the counter, possibly to avoid touching me. I saw that what Becky had said was true. The coat was indeed covered with the leftovers of Digby’s dog-balding.
“It must have been under there since, like, um …since … ”
“March,” I said. “The eleventh.”
“Thanks, Kaz. Way to hold a grudge.”
“Only a little one.”
The return of my coat got me thinking about Digby. Once upon a time, I was the one covered with the dog’s unwanted hair. Not so much anymore, though.
Obviously.
3
A Side-Note about Becky Leighton
She was the first girl I had sex with.
I was her first time too, incidentally. Call it a mutually beneficial exchange of virginity-loss. Unfortunately, that was all
it was. Just the one time. Once.
After that, she dumped me and hooked up with my former—and obscenely wealthier—schoolmate Topher Briggs. Knowing Topher (which I do), it’s safe to say that by the time summer started, Becky had garnered a lot more below-the-belt experience than I had.
Let’s say, hypothetically, there was a Becky versus Kaz leader board. It would have looked something like this:
Kaz Barrett: 1.
Becky Leighton: 10,000,002—with Topher Fucking Briggs, who once-upon-a-time had been my friend, back when Dad was alive and you defined friend as somebody who farted into a pillow and smothered you with it at sleepovers; back when we could afford to live in oh-so-rosy Rosemount, instead of oh-so-shitty Evandale.
If there’s one thing I learned from Becky Leighton, it’s that what Mr. Dearborn taught us in his doomed-from-the-start health class is true: you do always remember your first time.
In my case, I remember not having a clue what I was doing. I remember being so nervous my teeth were actually chattering. And I remember the worst part, which was stabbing around in the dark. Literally. Actually jabbing my hips around, hoping Little Mr. Kaz would instinctively know where he was supposed to go.
In my head, it all made sense. Wouldn’t a hundred thousand years of evolution make things work all smooth-like? I figured two people could just get naked, press themselves together, and things would, you know, slide into place.
Yeah, well, not so much.
It was humiliating. Becky suddenly went, “Wait! Stop! Not there! Here! ” At which point, she reached down and took hold of Little Mr. Kaz so she could demonstrate. This might have been a wise course of action except for the fact that tugging gently-slash-helpfully on my unit was almost exactly like getting a hand job, something which, at that point, I was way more familiar with. Which of course meant it was all over before it truly began. If you see what I mean.
But that was okay. I was optimistic. Don’t worry, I thought, maybe the first time was a sort-of-halfway-in mega-fail, but me and Becky are pretty solid. There’ll be plenty more chances to get it right.
Wrong.
Becky dropped me the next day, which does very little for a young man’s burgeoning self-esteem.
If you ask Calen, he’ll tell you Becky was just using me. He thought all she wanted was to figure out how the plumbing worked. Anybody would do, he told me. And I said, if that’s true, then how come she didn’t pick someone who actually knew what he was doing?!
“You’re lucky,” Calen informed me. “At least you went and did it already. Alana’s making me wait until we go away to college. That’s, like, a year and a half from now!”
So why am I going on about Becky so much?
I don’t know, to be honest. I guess maybe I want to lay down a little background and besides, she was there when it happened: when I first saw the Girl with the Dreads.
4
The First Time I Saw Her, Part 2
“I found this in one of the pockets.”
Out of her purse, Becky took a photograph. It was of me and Dad. We were standing on the courts at DeWinter Hills, the park in Rosemount where we used to play. He had a basketball under one arm and there was a nasty sweat stain spreading down the front of his shirt. His other arm slung down over my shoulders. In the picture, I was six or seven, back when Dad could still outmaneuver me, back when it was just the three of us: Dad, Mom, and me. Nomi wouldn’t have been born yet.
I slipped the photograph back where I knew Becky had found it, in the jacket’s inside pocket. Meanwhile, Becky gazed up at the ceiling.
“How’s your mom?” she asked.
“Pretty good,” I lied.
“So … ” Her eyes wafted down to me in little increments. “You still saving up?”
“I’ll have enough by the end of summer.”
“Cool. I’m glad.”
Was she really? When Becky dumped me, chief among her reasons was the fact that I was too cheap, too obsessed with saving cash. She whined that we never did anything, partly because I wasn’t prepared to shell out and partly because I worked every day at the Sit ’n’ Spin. She had a point. Anyway, my cash was destined for a higher purpose.
Becky glanced up at the ceiling again. “Have you told her yet?”
“Nope.”
“But she’ll do the treatment, right? Like, if you have the money?”
“Maybe. She still thinks I’m saving for college. As if they’d let me in anywhere.”
From downstairs, I heard the jingle of Mr. Rodolfo’s keys. As operator and sole proprietor of the Sit ’n’ Spin Laundromat, he kept an office down there. I was never allowed inside.
After we closed on Saturday nights, it was down in the basement where he hosted poker games with a bunch of Evandale regulars.
Mr. Rodolfo is a big guy. As he came up the steps, every one of them creaked. He wasn’t exactly fat, just thick—thick arms, thick legs, thick neck. He looked like those old wrestlers you see in pictures from the fifties, chubby but solid guys, big kettledrums with arms and legs.
“Becky!” he shouted, flashing me a dirty grin. “If only I were young again.”
“If only,” I said.
“Becky, Becky, Becky!” Mr. Rodolfo slapped the glass of the dry-cleaning booth as he repeated her name. “We haven’t seen you in aaaaages. You’re making your boyfriend here lonely!”
Boyfriend. I winced. (I hadn’t gotten around to telling Mr. Rodolfo Becky had dumped me. I had the impression that, a bit like Becky’s father, he might be disappointed.) Becky, meanwhile, wasn’t impressed. Her eyes tossed a drawerful of knives at me and then whipped a few at Mr. Rodolfo.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Don’t worry.” Mr. Rodolfo started straightening the little one-dollar boxes of detergent on the shelf behind the counter. “This way, your beau here can concentrate on his job, instead of—well, you know, getting all distracted with you around.”
The knives were growing in size and sharpness. They were now more like a set of katana. “Um, Kaz? I think maybe you have something to explain to—”
But she never finished. She never got her chance to spill the beans, because that was when the Girl with the Dreads walked past the window.
5
The Precise Words That Went through
My Head When She Walked Past
Holy shit, it’s Jesus of Evandale.
6
What My Boss Would Think If
Jesus Was a Skinny, Goth-slash-Rastafarian White Girl Who Came with
the Craziest Cross in the World
You can’t blame me for thinking what I thought. If you’d seen her that morning, you would have thought the same thing.
Because of the cross.
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like a regular cross. Not like a church cross. This was something welded together from the guts of a giant robot, and the welder was obviously a lunatic, probably living in a shack on the edge of a burning forest. It was that sort of cross.
There was sheet metal, driftwood, plumbing pipes, rusty cutlery, crappy toys, and bamboo shafts, all hitched together into something that resembled a gigantic crucifix. More junk dangled from the crossbar: chains, cogs, copper wire, knife blades, forks with their tines curled into hooks. There were bones, too. All pocked and yellow, like rotten teeth.
The girl’s face was in shadow. All I saw were flashes of pale skin under a thick curtain of dreadlocks. They were mostly bleach-blonde, but with a few strands dyed the colors of grape juice and bubble gum. Her jean shorts hung low on her hips, exposing a thin strip of skin between a rainbow belt and the bottom of a black T-shirt that fell off one shoulder, exposing the strap of a pink leopard-print bra (though I’m fairly certain there’s no such thing as a pink leopard).
If right at that moment you had told me this person—this goth-rock Jesus freak
, half Bob Marley, half Kewpie doll—would spin my life upside down in a matter of weeks, I would have laughed. At the time, however, nobody let out so much as a giggle. Becky was so disgusted by the girl’s appearance she forgot all about telling Mr. Rodolfo she had dumped me.
“What a freak,” she said.
My boss agreed. “She tries coming in here with that thing,” he said to me, “you don’t let her. Understand?”
I nodded in silence.
“Bad for business.” He turned back to the boxes of Tide, sprucing them into rows for the gazillionth time. “Soon as someone like that walks in, you’re losing money.”
Maybe so, but for some reason, I was curious. Maybe it was her legs, straining under the weight of the cross. In my head, I still saw the streaks of lean muscle flashing up and down her thighs with each step. I went to the window, trying to get a look at her again, but she was gone.
“Get back here,” Mr. Rodolfo said. “You’re not finished folding. Leaving a pile like this out on the counter—no way. Bad for business.”
Before I went back to folding, we all heard the pitter-pounding of tiny feet. They were coming down the back stairs. They were never supposed to come down the back stairs.
It was Nomi.
7
B-L-O-O-D
My sister burst in through the back door.
“Use the front!” I shouted at her. “You know that!”
It was a rule in our house, mostly directed at Nomi: whenever you go down to Kaz’s work, don’t go down the back way. The problem was the rear stairs off our kitchen spat you straight into the alley behind the laundromat. Drivers were always speeding through there to avoid the lights at Steinway and Emerson. (And yes, it meant the three of us—Mom, Nomi, and me—lived directly above my work.)
“I’m sorry,” Nomi whimpered, “but … ”
“Forget about that,” I said, sensing something was wrong. “What happened?”
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