Her laugh unlocked me and we really started talking.
I told her my hope is, retrack to Mathy but it’s a longshot forsure, I’m worried it’s too late for an oaf like me, so much ketchup and notenough time, and Hue Family is really putting on the pressure like if you fail this retrack, we’re pulling the plug, ejecting you and your sister from our nice house.
She told me, with her actually it’s same same, parents put crazy pressure on her like if she doesn’t get into law school they’ll expel her from the family, but she doesn’t have enough time to study either, at home she has to wait tables, wash dishes, take out the cowsoy garbage, and the law school entrytests are super hard, not a ton of law schools have middlepoor facilities either so there’s not even that many places she could even go, it’s pretty nerveracking, sorry to babble at you like this.
I told her, nono please babble away, thatscrazy that they make you work and expect you to study so much, do they ever let you sleep, do you even get to Dreamworld on a regular basis.
She told me, she sees Dreamworld maybe twice a week, mostrelaxing part of her day is at school forsure, in the parkinglot or at Mun World, she can’t even read her comics at home, when her dad catches her reading comics he grabs them and throws them away.
I told her, comics huh, what comics do you like, could you recommend some, I’m trying to get better at reading.
She told me, ohman, there are some good ones, rightnow I’m really enjoying Lords And Swords, it’s a middleearth but crazier, more violent for sure.
Her friends got sick of watching us eventually and Angel yelled, “Time to go, we’re missing class, psycho,” all buzzed from pints of bubbly slush.
My brain tried one last reminder of, Warner, don’t forget, you lived in this girl’s garbage for two days, feel some shame.
So I felt some shame.
But she piped, “Well hey, it’s great and amazing to see you scaledup, anyway let me give you my number, we can meet up again sometime and I can give you a comic maybe.”
I said, “Heckyeah, areyoukidding, I’d love that.”
She tapped it into my phone with spangly fingernails.
“Thanks for the drink, Warner,” she smiled, in her voice my name was a pair of pearls.
“Ryangosling, since when do you know girls,” demanded Tray, watching me strut out of Shaky Buzz with a girl’s number, but I stayed mysterious about it.
DREAMWORLD
Didn’t just get the number from Grace, got a comic too, infact she gave me a couple and then kept messaging me, ayyy read it yet, wat do yew think, phonegifs of blinkyeyes and clashyswords.
Nope, sorry Grace, I have no time to read unfortunately, I only have time to stress endlessly about math.
Mathy Track was my only hope for retracking. Wordy was a lostcause because of my still crappy readingskills and none of the other retracks intrested Hue.
“I know your goal is to make the absolute most of yourself,” he told me, “so let’s avoid the more vocational tracks that will limit your potenchill. Mathy and Wordy are the ones that I believe will open more doors than they shut.”
“Or what about Busy Track, couldn’t that put Warner on a path to one day running a great corpo,” tried to help Prayer.
“Let’s try for Mathy Track,” firmed Hue in a tone of This Is Not Actually Super Upfordiscussion.
And Mathy made some sense for me anyway, I was learning to enjoy the way numbers click together neatly. Plus I always sort of knew munmath without really knowing it, forexample even as a kid you could ask me, hey Warner, popquiz, what’s the scale of fiftythousand munmuns, prettyquick I would tell you that’s fourtenthscale, more than thirdscale, less than halfscale, whatelseyougot.
So sure, of all the studies probably math was the best fit for my brain if I had years and years to learn it, but I only had weeks, and the thing I was learning was, math was a house with too many rooms.
Numbers, negatives, plus minus times divide, the percents and fractions of munmath, you think you’re pretty quick with that stuff, well, congratulations idiot, that’s just the first room. Step into the nextroom and you’ve got letters running around in there, letters that might mean a number and might not, so have fun dealing with that. Sometimes you solve for ecks, ecks is a mystery criminal you have to catch, sometimes else it’s not a crimeshow it’s a lovestory, ecks is in a relationship with why.
Nextroom, nextroom, room after that, here come more wild symbols, squiggles, pies and roots, brackets, brambles, parentalsis, mediums and means.
Meanwhile branching off the whole freaking time to left and right are rooms of shapes, angles, grids, lines, charts, artrooms of mathy drawings, and the doors between the rooms are insane relationships, somehow a square can also be a sentence of letters and numbers, pee equals four ess, riddle me that, math wizards.
You think okay, this is a little berserk, but I can probably manage as long as they don’t come up with anymore stuff and then you find some stairs leading up up up, ohno, there’s a whole other floor, you stagger upstairs and it’s just bonkers up there, everything is a function, everything is in parentalsis now, buynomeals, somehaitians, intergulls, signs cosigns loggerrhythms, meanwhile the shapes in the artrooms are mutating, threedee, fourdee, sillenders and prisons, scalers victors tensores manyfolds, meanwhile meanwhile step right this way so I can introduce you to the number eye, root of a negative, it exists in the next world but not in this one, a moaning groaning mathghost, now it haunts you forever.
Panicked, you vidsearch, how much more math even is there, how many more floors, you stick your head out the window and look up and ohmygod, ohcrap, pagesandpages of mathtopics in your vidsearch, floors and floors, it’s a whole tower teetering into the clouds and you’ll never get to the top.
Now for the finalblow, look out the window across the street, more endless towers with endless rooms, mechanics, electrics, chemicals, medicals, programs and logics, all stuff you’ll also need atleast firstfloor knowledge if you want the counselors to let a fifteenyearold retrack at Votech.
In the sweetsmelling aircondition Dreamworld of Hue Family Palace, moreandmore everyday I felt panicked, afraid, fighting off hopelessness, trying to win little victories one problem at a time. But every win was dwarfed and drowned by the hugeness of math.
“Warner, how would you feel about having an afterschool and weekend mathtooter,” said Hue one night.
“Like a specialist, one of the top mathminds at Wet Almanac, a mysterious genius tobehonest,” added Kitty.
“I guess for sure, do you think that would really help though, isn’t my problem more just having a toosmall for math brain,” I asked.
“Do not ever allow yourself to think that for a second, infact rightnow go erase that thought with a lobotomy,” cried Kitty.
“This mathtooter is not who I think it is, is it,” Daisy wanted to know.
Everyone was nervously quiet.
“Who does Daisy think it is,” wondered Tony.
Daisy said, “Is it by any chance a guy who drove into a,” at that point she was drowned out however by Hue and Dawn and Kitty yelling, OKAY DAISY THAT IS QUITE ENOUGH, Tony was yelling it also without knowing why.
The guy was a junior named Markfive, one of the top mathstudents at Wet Almanac High, mysterious genius I guess in the sense of, it is a mystery how this kid could possibly be a genius at math. Because he was also a doofy drugster who kept crashing pricey cars into trees and houses and eventually the highwaycops couldn’t ignore it anymore, we need to find a way to punish this kid, obviously though not mess up his life toobad.
Fortunately there’s a great solution, Markfive’s mom is a steady donor to Hue Campain, therefore Markfive here’s your punishment, communityservice of tootering math to a middlepoor. Markfive meet scrappy little Warner, Warner feast your eyes on this handsome bushyhead slacker with his velvet hoods and slinky jeans.
How did he get his name, obviously he was the fifth son of a bigrich pharmalord named ofcours
e Mark. Mark lived with his many staffers in the seaside bigburb of Balustrade, riding around on tanks and barges the way the biggest have to.
But Markfive and mom of Markfive weren’t bigs because their muns weren’t joined to his, mom wasn’t Mark’s wife, just a rando babymama. Therefore Mark didn’t grow up twelvescale in the giantville, instead twoandahalfscale back here in Wet Almanac, rattling around your basic twobedroom cliffside, every month their munflow quietly plumping with childsupport from Mark.
Turnedout that for mom of Markfive it was no great sadness not to be huge. She liked her nothuge life actually, glossyskinned middlerich woman basically just wining and dining as a job, fat and happy, sometimes dabbling in the opposite politics of her babydaddy to infuriate him.
Markfive somehow did have glorious math skills, teaching skills notsomuch. At the beginning I think his main focus was, maybe this roughandtough excon can get me some intresting drugs.
“Oh chill, look at you,” he yelled the first time he saw me, “you’re yoked as heck, so in your classes do you guys just lift weights and smoke weeds all day.”
“Weights forsure, weeds for me not really so much, but the other kids, whoknows, maybe we got a couple burnouts in there,” I said.
“Lol though, that would be me, puffing everyhour nodoubt, getting every kind of ripped, haha lol so are you in a gang like selling drugs or anything,” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“But wait, you were in jail though right,” he said.
“Yup,” I said.
“In jail don’t they beat the crap out of you if you’re not in a gang,” he said.
“Yeah, I got beat up a lot,” I said, “so anyway, area of a triangle, what’s that all about, like any random triangle.”
“One half basstimes height, so does Daisy ever talk about me, I mean probably not, nevermind, don’t tell her I asked you that,” he said.
“Sure thing,” I said. “Instead of Daisy maybe we could talk a little more about these mysterious basstimes.”
“Hey, look,” said Markfive. “Okay. Sorry, but first, before we get into it, hey. I just need to know. Are you going to ask me about my freaking dad.”
“Nope,” I said.
“My dad’s a tenbillionair,” said Markfive. “So, you know. Sickteenscale. Like basically a hundredfeet tall.”
“Prettybig,” I agreed.
“It’s just because everyone is always asking me, whoa, your dad is a tenbillionair, ohmygod, that must be so crazy, what’s it like having a bigrich dad, and, I gotta be honest, I just completely hate talking about him,” said Markfive.
“Goodnews, bigrich dads are not on the test,” I said, and he laughed way too hard, and then he did teach me some stuff about triangles, atleast until his focusmeds wore off and he had to start playing phonegames.
Most tootseshes went like that. Save some time learning secret math tactics, lose some time learning about random things Markfive likes and hates. Overall we were probably even, I guess atleast each of us had a new friend.
I called the Dockseye church every few nights to check in with Mom, it was too far to visit, three hours on the bus each way. In the doublecar it would be a fourtyminute drive, but I felt bad about asking for a ride.
Our convos always left me feeling funny, she was for sure happy me and Prayer were in school but mostly just wanted to scold me about not visiting church.
“Mom, this family doesn’t go to church, plus I don’t have time anyway, I’m studying twenfourseven,” I pleaded.
“Well that’s just crazy, you’re telling me you don’t have time for the Lord King God when He made all kinds of time for you, specifically to swoop down and save your life and give you all kinds of blessings it soundslike,” Mom piped up in her littlevoice, “your big red butt better be in a church this sondaymorning and ofcourse drag your sister nomatterwhat, if she falls back into that space cult it’s going to break my sad old heart.”
My culty sister meanwhile failed out of junioryear at Wet Almanac.
It wasn’t a total tragedy though, they dropped her into sopmoreyear classes, and she told us it was going waybetter.
“Instead of essays, Teacher lets me give presentation speeches about corpos,” she chirped at dinner, “it’s multidissupline and here’s how, when you analyze a business you’re using the power of words, math, science, and socialstudies, so you’re learning everything at once, it’s a true studying multivitamin!”
“How come they didn’t let me do that,” I yelled.
“You didn’t ask, I guess,” Prayer winked, Hue chuckled and Markfive did, too, he was guesting at familydinner to sneak peeks at completely unintrested Daisy.
“Lol Warner your sis is crazy,” Markfive lolled, Prayer beamed, atleast one girl at the dinnertable liked him.
“Your new friend is highly cute,” Prayer remarked that night as we were going to sleep.
“The only friend of mine you get to date is Usher,” I told her as a reflex, then felt stabs of sickness from having no idea where Usher even is.
That night I shook myself out of Kitty Operahouse, got to look for Usher, don’t want to because he’s probably dead, would have found him bynow, but toobad, no choice, have to look for the poor guy.
In Dreamworld I tumbled and drifted, wandered Sand Dreamough, checked the old coastguard station, blew through the sky above Lossy Indica, the view he wanted to show my sis. I looked for his twisty body, his gray face, nowhere to be found. I hoped for the gray firework, no one’s sending it up into the sky.
I tried dreaming myself to Usher but he’s not dreaming himself to me, even if he were alive why would he, it’s been more than a year.
I put up some gray fireworks myself, still pretty outofcontrol and nightmare so some of the fireworks fizzled, shot sideways, made no sound, sucked light from the sky and sound from the air.
No Usher anywhere, night after night. Tonight he’s just not sleeping deep enough, I kept thinking, maybe tomorrow he conks out good and I’ll see him.
But he doesn’t and I don’t.
LIFEANDDEATHWORLD
Down in Eat I kept taking little breaks from school to see Grace meanwhile, I even read some Lords and Swords on the bus. This thing was pretty intense, the adventures of some crazy allwhite lordoftherings, come ride with me to a mystical realm where everyone’s skin is painfully white and getting punctured with swords and knives constantly, tons of dragons and rapes, everyone is seeking revenge on everyone and prettymuch every page a thousand people die screaming, notmything if I’m being honest with you but something made me happy that Grace liked it, a weird bloodthirsty mind was hiding in that mild head, behind the fakegreen eyes.
I bugged and pestered sometimes to see her real eyecolor, she said it’s just stupid plain superviolet, honestly like black.
I told her I bet it’s like a pretty nightsky, she tried to choke off a little smile and look stern but her freckly plumskin blushed even plummier.
Meanwhile nowandthen I saw her huddling with this other guy in the parkinglot, the scrawny nervous guy who showed her stuff on his screens.
His name was Frank and he was Wordy too, they were in lots of classes together, does he have more incommon with her than me, dang, he might.
But does he take her to fun loud delicious Shaky Buzz, no, instead he corners her in the shadeless parkinglot to read his poems and novels, soundslike a date from hell tobehonest but I saw her smiling and laughing and I wanted to sprint over there and fling Frank into the street like a frizzbee.
Instead I casually mentioned, “Hey, I think in the hot dusty parkinglot I saw a guy reading you his endless tolstoy, was it any good.”
“Oh, you mean Frank,” she said. “Yeah, it was good, uh, I mean I’ve known him for a while, he’s really improving as a writer.”
“Good good, it’s important to support new artists,” I encouraged in a super calm voice, then I looked down and I was mangling a napkin.
She saw it too, started to choke off
a smile, decided not to, let it flood into the cheeks.
“Warner?” she asked. “Would you like to go somewhere today afterschool?”
Wasn’t quite a date though, more of a group invite to Angel Brother Birthday Beebeecue. Grace’s crew, my crew of Tray and Brand, plus a few other randos from Wordy and Busy walked from school to a ballfield, you could smell the meaty smoke from many blocks away.
Look, even if it wasn’t a date, Grace tucked her hand in mine as we walked like it was nobigdeal, my heart got hot and frantic, I tried not to mangle her hand like a napkin.
Angel yammered happily, “Warner, Tray, Other Random Friend, you’re going to love it, my family has the best beebeecues, we have like eight secret recipes that my grandma has sworn to take to the grave. Warner bytheway it’s time for you to know this, I’ve changed my mind about you, atfirst I assumed you were a creep but now I think you’re goodenough to date my friend, and she’s a beautifull sexy miracle, so that means you’re prettygood, congratulations.”
I hugged her from the side, maybe a little too hard, she laughed and yelled, “Okay, okay, strongguy, I get it.”
gotta skip tootsesh, I messaged Markfive, he responded lol allgood.
mite be late for familydinner, I thought about messaging Prayer or Kitty or someone but didn’t, Warner you’ll just stick around for an hourandahalf, home by seven forsure.
A rottysmell cigstick got passed around our walking group. Angel handed it to me.
“Nothanks, don’t burn cigs,” I said.
“What about weeds, which is what this is, wow can you not smell that,” she said.
I looked at Grace, Grace shrugged.
“Nerds, how about for once you be chill,” suggested Angel, so Grace and me took puffs and strolled giggly and hothearted into middlepoor heaven.
• • •
The beebeecue took over half a ballfield, many families in attendance, blankets and nets, balls and grills, portable soundsystem. Angel Family you can recognize because they’re the shortest and most cheerfull. Birthdayboy Angus was a chubby happy little guy turning thirteen and chomping meats.
Munmun Page 16