$10
$20
$35
Back to
nothing but coffee stains.
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$10
$20
Despite what Zoey said, all that wasn’t for nothing. It was for $10. She walks in with $25 and walks out with $35 (plus a coffee she didn’t even drink).
37
Sudden Conquest
I leaned over to her, my lips right at her ear. “If you needed ten bucks, you could’ve just asked me.”
Her body went rigid. “What’re you talking about?”
“What you pulled on that guy in the café. It was cool. You totally conned him out of ten bucks, didn’t you?”
She let go of my hand.
“Zoey?”
She didn’t answer.
“Seriously, I thought it was cool. That guy was an idiot.”
Zoey made a hasty grab for her purse and stepped over Calen and Alana to get to the aisle. Calen didn’t get it. In his world, you watched a movie to the end. Always.
“You can’t go now. There’s, like, five minutes left!”
I followed her out, but Zoey wasn’t in the lobby. She was down on the sidewalk, standing near the road. I went out to meet her.
“What’re you doing? ”
“It’s called flagging a taxi.”
“But why?”
Several blocks down, something alarmingly taxi-like crept toward us.
“What’s the big deal?” I said. “It’s only ten bucks. It’s not like I’m gonna call the cops.”
“Shut up! ”
“What’s your problem?”
“Just leave me alone. I’m going home, okay? I changed my mind. It’s a dumb movie.”
“I don’t get you.”
“What’s to get? You hardly know me.”
“Exactly! Why do you think I wanted you to come?”
She turned again and looked for the taxi. It was stuck at a red light. Seeing her like that, turned away, willfully ignoring me, I realized she was right—I hardly knew her. I wanted to change that. A part of me wanted to know why she had pulled that thing in the coffee shop, but another part of me didn’t care, and both were tiny compared to the biggest part of all: the part of me that just wanted her to stay.
“Okay, so maybe you feel guilty about what you did. Maybe you needed the money and you were too embarrassed to ask me to lend you some. Believe me, I know what that’s like. Needing money.” I thought I was getting through to her, but she was still staring at the taxi. “I thought it was a cool trick. It reminded me of something my dad used to say, about faking somebody out in basketball. That’s what it was like, and … seriously, what’s ten bucks? The guy behind the counter was an idiot and you conned him. It’s not a huge deal.”
“Stop saying that!”
“Saying what?”
“That I conned him. You’re wrong. I just ripped him off, that’s all.” She looked down. “It was just stealing.”
“Looked like a con to me.”
“That’s cuz you don’t know what it means. Haven’t you heard that old saying? ‘You can’t con an honest man.’ It’s true. The clerk was an idiot, but he was an honest idiot. He was just doing his job.”
Zoey raised her hand for the cab, but I grabbed it to stop her. “Okay, fine. You stole some money. Ten bucks, I don’t care. I told you—I totally know what it’s like to need some extra cash. It doesn’t mean you have to go home already.”
“Actually, it probably does.”
“Why? ”
The light was green now and the taxi was on its way.
“I liked it when you thought I was divine,” she said. “Nice to get mistaken for a goddess, or an angel, or whatever. Something heavenly, anyway. But then, when you whispered to me in the movie, it felt like I’d lost all that.”
“You haven’t. It’s still true.”
“Honest?”
I nodded. The cab pulled to the curb.
“No one’s ever figured it out before,” Zoey admitted.
“So?”
“Guess it means you’re smarter than most. Apart from my dad, most guys in my life have been pretty thick.”
“You think I’m smarter than most?”
“You are today.”
We stared at each other for a second. Neither of us was angry or confused anymore. Strange how fast it melted away.
“You pull that sort of thing a lot?” I asked her.
“My dad says, ‘When you see an opportunity, take it.’ ”
I took a step closer to her, but the cab driver whirred down his window. “You guys need a ride or what?”
“Hold on.”
In my head, there had been a kiss coming. A real one. It was a lean-in moment—and I missed it (of course). Because Calen came dashing out of the cinema.
“Hey! The movie’s over! You guys coming back?”
“No,” I told him, in probably the boldest move of my life. “Zoey’s not feeling well. I’m gonna take her home.”
She flinched. “You are?”
“If you’re okay with that.”
She bit her lip. “Actually, yeah, okay. My dad’s away tonight.”
The driver looked relieved when, like a perfect gentleman, I opened the door for Zoey and then climbed in beside her.
38
Val Mer Residences
We made out in the back of the cab. Zoey’s skin felt smoother and thinner than anything I’d ever touched. Or maybe it was just my imagination, an illusion of contrast, the way the roughness of her dreads brushed the backs of my hands when I slid my fingers behind her ears. I expected to taste the lime-and-mango fruitiness of lip gloss (something like what Becky had worn), but Zoey smelled of something simpler, like hot bathwater or a glass of milk.
We were nearing the east end of the city, where the buildings were more derelict and the streets emptier.
“Where are we?”
She shrugged, a little embarrassed. “This is my neighborhood.”
Vacant buildings stood like forgotten monuments. “Seems like a weird place to live.”
“Not everybody has a grand piano in the living room, you know.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, why so far east? Falconer’s on the other side of the city. It doesn’t seem very convenient, like for your dad.”
“Oh, yeah, well, we started out with this pretty nice place, an apartment on campus, but … ” Zoey bowed her head and rifled through her giant denim purse. I thought she would come up with some memento, but she just kept rifling. “Turned out there was a problem with vermin. Bugs or rats or something. The whole building was fumigated, so they were like, ‘come out here and take your pick.’ I think Falconer owns the land. They’re planning to build another college or something.”
“Out here?”
“I guess.” Zoey stopped rifling and closed her purse. “How come you’re so interested in the landscape?”
“Just seems weird is all.”
When I turned away from the window, Zoey’s face was right there. Her big eyes were electric in the flash and flow of the street lights.
Then we were making out again—in the back of a taxi, in the gloomy shadows of warehouses and metalworks, rushing past the shipping ports of an endless black lake. It all seemed appropriate and (this may sound strange) kind of romantic.
After a couple turnoffs, we arrived at Val Mer Residences, a two-story apartment block that nearly had a view of the lake if it weren’t for th
e massive sugar refinery standing in the way. The apartments were two buildings connected in an L-shape. They sprouted from one corner of a fenced-in sandlot that might have once been the bud of a residential development that had failed to blossom.
Half the L wasn’t finished yet. It was just a naked shell, surrounded by scaffolds, wheelbarrows, and piles of gravel. I could see that the construction had been left unfinished for a long time. The wood was beginning to buckle, leaving everything slumped and crooked. Zoey led me toward the completed side of the building (thankfully).
“I think it’s kind of charming,” she said.
“You do?”
“Sometimes you gotta look for what’s beautiful; it’s not right there on the surface.” She shrugged. “Beautiful means different things to different people.”
I thought of how Becky and my boss had thought Zoey was a freak when they first saw her, but how I thought something entirely different.
“Don’t worry,” Zoey told me. “It’s nicer on the inside.”
39
Water from a Fisherman
What do you think was in my head as Zoey tugged me down the corridor toward her apartment? Making out some more? Her eyes? Her hair? A blow job? Sex? What she was wearing? What she was wearing underneath what she was wearing? Nope. None of that. I was thinking about Mr. Dearborn, my ex-health-class teacher.
Let me explain.
From the moment I started at Evandale, Mr. Dearborn was my favorite teacher. He could do anything: math, English, chemistry, social studies. Basically, he was just good at putting stuff in your head—and making it stick there. He believed people who were too into one subject cared more about information. True teachers, he said—people who could teach anything—they were more interested in knowledge. All knowledge.
Dearborn had this saying: “Information gets you through a test, but it’s knowledge that gets you through life.” You might think this sounds sensible. It might even sound like common sense. Ironically, however, this was precisely the idea that got Dearborn fired.
Evandale High had a “Three Strikes and You’re Out” policy. I’m not sure what baseball has to do with good behavior, but people think it sounds good, so they use it. I never expected them to use it on a teacher.
Mr. Dearborn’s three strikes went like this:
1. The Amy Handler Bad Word Incident
This happened when Mr. Dearborn judged the school’s annual short story contest. He awarded the grand prize to Amy for this story about two sisters driving up to a cottage and then fighting over a boy. The problem was the thing was full—brimming—with novel examples of the worst profanities you can think of.
There was some debate over whether or not Amy was deliberately trying to piss Mr. Dearborn off, but most people thought no, it was an honest story. All the details were there. The way the older sister walked as if she was in heels, even when in Birkenstocks; how it felt to do a face-plant on the surface of a lake; how it felt to have your heart broken. (Plus, everybody knew that over the previous summer, Amy’s sister had stolen her boyfriend.)
After the contest, Amy was supposed to read the story in front of the school, but she only got through two paragraphs before they switched off the mic. Afterward, Mr. Dearborn made his famous speech. “To a writer, there’s no such thing as a bad word. Each one has a time, a place, a feeling. Taking words away from a writer is like taking wood from a carpenter, taking water from a fisherman. To a writer, the only bad words are the ones that aren’t true.”
(Strike number one.)
2. The 17.3 Incident
This happened in a social studies class called World Issues. Dearborn informed us that the average age at which a human being loses his or her virginity is 17.3. It wasn’t like he was encouraging us to go out and start screwing; he was merely quoting the results of an extensive and reliable study. You can just imagine the volcanoes going off at the next PTA meeting. As for me, I had no problem with the statistic. I was proud to know that if you counted Becky—dubious, yes, but if you counted her—I was months ahead of the curve.
(Strike number two.)
3. Boys’ Eleventh Grade Sex Ed Incident
With all this in mind, you have to wonder what they were thinking when they assigned Dearborn an eleventh grade boys’ health class.
“Boys,” he said when our two-week sex-ed unit was almost up, “I’m beginning to fear I’m not doing you justice. Some of these are the same videos they showed me when I was your age. So I know from experience that when it came to some of the really crucial stuff, very little of this helped.” He opened his briefcase. “Yes, of course it’s important to know which direction an egg travels down a fallopian tube, but let’s face it, unless you’ve got your heart set on becoming a gynecologist, a good deal of what you really need to know happens … on the outside. Which is why I brought this in.”
He held up a DVD. It was porn.
Well, it was and it wasn’t. Technically, yes, it was pornography in that it was a film of two people having sex, but there were no beefy, glowing-orange men, and the woman didn’t have fake tits-ass-eyes-nails et cetera.
What Dearborn brought in was different. The film had been produced in Montreal by a group of regular people who were honestly trying to make what they called “educational erotica.” They were definitely not porn stars. (The guy looked a bit like a shaved rat and the woman’s breasts were floppily genuine.)
“Let’s try to be mature about this,” Mr. Dearborn told us before he popped in the DVD. “There’s a lot more to sex than rolling a condom on a banana.”
I know he was trying to do us some sort of weird favor, but think about it: watching porn with your chemistry-slash-English teacher while he makes it even more squirm-inducing by standing beside the screen, offering helpful commentary.
Like:
“See what he’s doing there? Foreplay! Highly recommended.”
Or:
“Lube. It’s not just for after school when you lock yourself in the bathroom.”
Or:
“Notice how he holds the base of his penis to slide it in. It’s like a lot of things in life: without a bit of guidance, you can end up anywhere.”
Yeah, I thought, already learned that one the hard way.
So yes, it was—without a doubt—the most awkward thing that had ever happened, but somewhere behind all the wincing and squirming, I was thinking what I’m sure a lot of us were thinking.
Best.
Class.
Ever.
(Also: strike number three.)
40
Bottom Drawer
Zoey unlocked the door to her apartment while I tried to remember everything Dearborn had taught me.
Inside, I expected shelves full of her father’s books, hefty bricks about philosophy and music theory. There weren’t any. There weren’t even any bookshelves. The only furniture was a TV on a nightstand, two caved-in recliners, and a kitchen table with mismatched wooden chairs. The nearest thing to literature was a stack of Sports Illustrateds on the floor beside the TV.
Zoey went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard. I saw that inside, there were only bottles, one each of vodka, rum, and Irish whiskey.
“What are you staring at?”
“It’s not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. Something different.”
She led me over to the fridge, where she took out a bottle of Coke, followed by a fifth of Captain Morgan spiced rum from the cupboard beside it. When the fridge door thunked shut, I spotted a magnet printed with a familiar symbol. A cartoon daisy with the exclamatory words Get Wellness!
“Beauhaven,” I said, tapping the magnet. “My mom goes there.”
“Really? My dad, too. He’s deep into the whole health-food, working-out thing. The diet’s okay, but I’m not into
getting stabbed with needles.”
“Stabbed?”
“Acupuncture. My dad says it ‘keeps him sharp,’ which is his idea of a joke.” She poured us rum-and-Cokes in huge red tumblers. “If you’re gonna stab me with a needle, I better be getting a vaccination or a tattoo.”
“Do you have any?”
“Tattoos? Just one.”
“Where?”
“Maybe I’ll let you have a peek and maybe I won’t. First, tell me what you expected to see when you came in here.”
“More books, I guess.”
She laughed. “Why would you think—oh! I get it. You mean, like, because of my dad. The professor. He keeps all that stuff at his office at the college. Here, hold these.” She handed me the two cups and then picked up the bottles. “Lemme give you the grand tour.”
There was a hall off the entrance that led to a couple bedrooms and a bathroom.
“That’s my dad’s,” Zoey told me as we passed a murky room, the door open only a crack.
Zoey’s bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the apartment, but it seemed more alive, more lived-in, than the other rooms. The bed was unmade; clothes were all over the floor; newspaper clippings and pictures from magazines were pinned over a small desk. A torn poster for Wild Blue Bounce covered one of the walls, Veronica Heller standing front and center.
I was about to sit on the stool by the desk when Zoey stopped me.
“That’ll wreck your back. Just sit on the bed.”
I wanted her to join me, but instead, she reclined on some pillows on the floor. The big red cup sat in the valley of her stomach.
We talked. I told her about my dad, what he was like and how he died. She told me about her mom leaving because she didn’t dig her dad’s lifestyle. Moving all the time, college to college to university, trying to nail down a decent teaching gig. Her mom couldn’t take it.
I wanted to tell Zoey about Mom’s illness, but I didn’t. I had vowed I wouldn’t tell people, and I stuck to it. (Well, sort of. Apart from the people I’d already told.) All I said was that my mom had once been a musician, but that she lost her job and now she worked in a library. It was what I told most people. “She’ll go back to the orchestra eventually,” I added.
Blues for Zoey Page 10