“OhmyGodwherehaveyoubeendon’tyouknowwhattimeitisyou’renotdressed!”
Mom was screaming so loudly she set off car alarms three streets over. She was decked out in black velvet pants, pearl earrings, a necklace of jingle bells, a sweatshirt covered with stoned-looking reindeer, and antlers.
Reindeer.
“Uh-oh,” Hannah whispered.
There was no nice way to say it: our mom was a Christmas freak.
Everystinkingthing about Christmas was holy. Not just the church stuff; you could understand that. But the rest of it—decorations brought down from the attic as soon as the Thanksgiving dishes were done, carols playing 24/7, candles with the choking stench of “Holiday Cheer,” cookies that were not for eating, but for “atmosphere”; it was nauseating.
Worst of all was the stupid family photo that always went on the front of our Christmas card. Seventeen years’ worth of those pictures were lined up with military precision on the walls of the living room. In the first one, I was a month old. I looked like a deformed vegetable swaddled in a Santa suit.
Hannah and I sprinted upstairs to change while Mom stomped around in the kitchen.
“Where is your father?” she yelled again as she slammed down the receiver of the kitchen phone.
If he was smart, on a plane to Tokyo.
I pulled the sweatshirt over my head. “Why don’t we just Photoshop him in?”
“Only if we can add a mustache and cross his eyes,” Hannah called from the bathroom.
“I can hear you both,” Mom yelled up the stairs, “and you are not funny. Do you know how hard it is to get time with Davis Gunnarson?”
I tugged at the bottom of the sweatshirt, but it stayed at the level of my belly button. I looked in the mirror hung on the back of my door. Not cool.
“I’m not wearing this!” I shouted.
“Wear it or die,” Mom shouted back.
Hannah pushed my door open, almost smacking me in the face with it. “Let me—oh, snap!” She couldn’t say anything after that, because she was writhing on the ground, pointing at me, and laughing so hard she could barely breathe.
Fifteen minutes after we walked in the front door, we were breaking the speed limit to get to the photography studio of Mr. Davis Gunnarson. Is there anything more embarrassing than being driven around by your mom? Yes, if you’re wearing a reindeer sweatshirt that is two sizes too small.
“I left messages for your father on every number I have for him.” Mom accelerated to make it through an intersection as the light turned red. “I e-mailed him directions to Gunnarson’s, too.”
“Why can’t we just use your camera and take the picture in the kitchen?” Hannah asked.
“Or use your studio?” I added.
“No way,” Hannah said. “It smells like dog poo.”
Mom did most of her pet photography in clients’ homes, but she rented a small, climate-controlled garage for people who wanted to pose their pooch in front of a fake backdrop of a Hawaiian beach or the Egyptian pyramids. And no, I am not making that up.
“The studio does not smell like dog poo.” Mom’s eyes darted left and right as she coasted through a stop sign. “It’s perfectly clean. But my equipment isn’t good enough. I’d need better lights, the right filters.”
I rolled down my window for some air. “You should buy them, then. You take good pictures. Better than this guy, I bet.”
“You think?”
“Hell, yeah. It’s time to give up the doggies and kitties.”
“Don’t swear,” she said automatically. She hit the turn signal, checked the rearview mirror, and sped past a taxicab. “I’ve thought about it.”
“If you don’t kill us in the next five minutes, I’ll help you find the space.”
“That would be nice.” Mom made a hard left into a parking lot and hit the brakes. “We’re here.”
Dad wasn’t.
We waited for an hour, but he didn’t show.
Mom had a fit, then rescheduled.
If Dad ever explained why he didn’t show up or call, I didn’t hear about it. When the mail arrived the next day, it had interim notices from all of my teachers. He came out of his lair long enough to ground me until the end of time. Again. He also confiscated the power cord to my computer.
I spent Sunday combing through the real-estate listings and found two properties for Mom to look at. She didn’t sign a lease for either one, but she asked me to please work a little harder at bringing my grades up, and bought me a new power cord.
33.
On the last day of September, we had to attend a senior assembly about college. I sat next to Yoda, who slept. He had already filed his applications. Now it was just a matter of seeing who wanted to throw more financial aid at him.
Chip Milbury and his minions were sitting two rows behind us. I stayed alert in case they decided to lob hand grenades. Chip hadn’t retaliated yet, and that made things worse.
The speaker said that college deadlines were firm, correct spelling was important, and choosing a college was a serious decision.
After the assembly, I walked with Yoda to Hannah’s field-hockey game. Her team had sort of adopted him as a community-service project after he’d quit football. They thought his glasses were cute. Whenever he kissed my sister (horrifying, yes) the team would all say, “Awwwww!” the way girls do when they see puppies, ponies, and baby ducks.
The coach liked his ability to spot weaknesses in the opposing team. They hadn’t lost a game since Yoda sat at the end of the bench, stat tracker in hand.
Hannah was playing center forward with astounding brutality. The referees didn’t care, and the other team quickly learned it was less painful to stay out of her way. By halftime she had taken four shots and scored twice.
The second half opened with another lightning-fast breakaway by Hannah and Sue-Jen Parks, giving-and-going all the way to their enemy’s goal. Sue-Jen caught a stick to her shin just above the pad and crumpled, but the play continued, with Hannah sprinting across the field just as a defender wound up to fire the ball as hard as she could.
She shot a fraction of a second before Hannah’s stick made contact. The ball lifted off the field and traveled in a direct line to my sister’s face.
Yoda was off the bench before the ref blew the whistle. I was right behind him.
She was only knocked out for a second. She demanded to be put back in the game, even though the ball had snapped the frame of her goggles. The coach ignored her and told us to take her to the trainer’s office.
The office was like an emergency room, with a moaning soccer player bleeding from the mouth on one table and a shivering football player whose foot was stuck in a bucket of ice on another. We laid Hannah down on an empty table. I left messages for my parents at their offices and on their cell phones while the trainer, a short woman with red-rimmed glasses, checked out Hannah’s head.
When she finished poking and asking questions, she washed her hands.
“Well?” I asked.
“Nothing critical, but she needs to be seen by a doctor.”
Hannah tried to sit up. “It’s just a little headache. I have to get back.”
Yoda gently pushed her down. “Forget it.”
The trainer finished drying her hands. “He’s right. Your doctor will order an X-ray of the skull to rule out fractures. He might want an MRI, too, if he suspects bleeding on the brain.”
“Her brain is bleeding?” Yoda asked, the color draining from his face.
“Shhh, not so loud,” Hannah said.
“I doubt it,” the trainer said. “But doctors like to order tests, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. So no more field hockey today. Are you eighteen yet, Tyler?”
“In November,” I said. “Why?”
She glanced at the clock. “If you were eighteen I could release her to you. We’ll keep trying to get ahold of your parents.”
To say I was shocked when my father showed up an hour later doesn’t come c
lose.
Dad never showed up for emergencies, not ever. Not when I fell off my bike and needed stitches, not when I fell off my skateboard and needed pins in my arm. Not when Hannah had pneumonia so bad that after they saw the X-rays they put her in intensive care and Mom sobbed in the plastic chair and there was nobody to take me home because I was only five.
But it was Dad standing over Hannah, brushing the hair off her forehead and talking to the trainer about what he should do next.
“Where’s Mom?” Hannah asked, as confused as I was.
“Her van broke down outside Hamilton,” Dad said. “Shhh.”
Hannah’s good eye found me and asked, WTF? I shrugged. Dad was looking even rougher than usual, like he was in training for a marathon or was on chemotherapy. But he was there and that counted for something. Half a point, maybe.
Then his cell phone rang. He glanced at the number.
“I’ll be right back,” he told the trainer. “Have to take this call.”
He stepped outside and closed the door, but we could hear him when he started yelling.
“Is he talking to Mom?” Hannah whispered.
I listened. “No, somebody named Stuart. It’s work.”
She closed her eyes.
When he came back in, the trainer gave Dad a piece of paper with instructions on it. We helped Hannah to her feet. She batted our hands away and grumbled.
Hannah rode with Dad to the ER so a doc could check her out, just in case. Yoda wanted to go, too, but Dad gave him the evil eye and said this was a family matter.
I wound up driving Yoda home in his car because he was so freaked out. Exploding Death Stars was one thing; watching your girlfriend get knocked out cold was another.
34.
The concussion turned out to be minor. The only damage was that Hannah’s team lost and she had to sit out the next four games. She sat them out on Yoda’s lap. He claimed that her black eye was cute. If aliens had crawled out of my sister’s forehead and nested in her nose hair, he would have called it cute.
The day after Hannah’s accident, Dad had to leave for some mysterious meeting in Omaha or Topeka or God Knows Where. He and Mom had a screaming match in the kitchen before he left. The postal look on his face when he stalked out to the taxi made me think I should steal the gun hidden in his bottom drawer and toss it in the river.
Mom kept busy photographing dogs in Santa hats and antlers for other people’s Christmas cards. I helped her by combing the real-estate listings for better studio space. She said it was impossible to find a landlord who wouldn’t mind that most of her clients had four legs and unpredictable bathroom needs. I suggested again that she should take pictures of people, who were generally better at using a toilet. That made her laugh.
We didn’t talk about Dad or Omaha.
Bethany was able to ditch her crutches a couple days after Hannah got creamed. I was afraid this meant the end of our relationship. Not that it was exactly a relationship, not quite. But she would sit next to me at lunch a couple times a week and she grabbed or punched my arm an average of 1.2 times a day and she waved to me in the halls and she hadn’t blocked my screen name, so there was hope. I did push-ups every night until my arms shook.
Chip and I had reached a standoff. He didn’t like me talking to Bethany, standing near Bethany, or kissing the ground that Bethany walked on—that much was obvious—but he just stared at me like a gorilla and cracked his knuckles whenever I was around. The knuckle-cracking was supposed to intimidate me. Maybe if I was a walnut or a pecan. And the staring? He had miles to go before he came close to competing with my father.
Dad came home after four days spent in God Knows Where. He didn’t say anything when he walked in, just set his suitcase in the laundry room and went straight downstairs.
Two weeks into October, I finally figured out how to get Gormley across the Tophet sulfur pits. All he had to do was to lash himself to a Nightmare. Duh. I leveled up (down, actually) to Thirty-Six, the Frozen Plains of Despair. The time I dedicated to crossing the Pit contributed to a failed Calc quiz and the plunging of my Government grade from a solid C to a whiny D, but you have to make sacrifices if you’re going to get anywhere in Hell.
35.
Our homecoming football game had always been held on Friday of Columbus Day weekend to give everyone an extra day to recover from the hangovers.
No, not really.
It was on Friday of Columbus Day weekend because our archrivals, the Forestdale Bulldogs, needed that extra day for hangover recovery. We Washington Warriors prided ourselves on intelligent drinking. That’s what people said, anyway.
Since our football team was 0 and 7, there was not much interest in the game itself. There was a lot of talk about parties that I was not invited to, but nobody bothered about our chances.
That all changed when we got to school on Friday.
Instead of the normal crowd hanging in front of the building, streams of chattering people—looking strangely awake—were hurrying towards Warrior Stadium. There the police had cordoned off the gate with yellow crime-scene tape. We ran around behind the bleachers to stare through the chain-link fence.
“Those bastards,” my little sister muttered.
Someone, some deviant Forestdale Bulldog, had burned WARIORS SUCK! into our sacred football sod with weed killer.
My fellow students swore vengeance and punched the fence until it jangled. Members of the football team were told to kill the opposition so that we could regain our lost pride. This wasn’t just a prank; it was a declaration of war.
I stood very still. Were people staring at me? Did they think this was my handiwork? Did they think I would stoop so low?
Of course they did. I was the moron who specialized in misspelled defacings of school property. Maybe I should curse loudly. Or hawk up a loogie and spit on the ground, just to prove that I was not a traitor.
I twisted my head around, looking for Chip and the Chipettes, half expecting them to drag me on the field, tear me limb from limb, and set my corpse on fire. I didn’t do this, did I?
“Hannah, where was I last night?” I whispered.
“What are you talking about, you idiot?”
“Just help me out. What was I doing last night?”
“You tried to pay me to IM Bethany and convince her to go out with you. And then you took a shower that was so long you emptied the hot-water tank.”
Oh. That.
“Thank you,” I said.
I couldn’t have done it. It wasn’t me. Good. Sometimes I scared myself, because once you’ve thought long and hard enough about doing something that is colossally stupid, you feel like you’ve actually done it, and then you’re never quite sure what your limits are.
36.
Principal Hughes went on the loudspeaker during homeroom to assure us all that the police were investigating the crime and that the criminals would be found. No retaliation of any kind would be allowed, but we were supposed to encourage our football team to do their best.
Bethany said something to me right after the announcement, but with all the whooping and hollering and the ringing of the bell, I couldn’t hear her.
I leaned closer. “Say that again?” She smelled like cinnamon, and her lips were wet.
She smiled and pushed her hair back. “I said, are you going to the game tonight?”
“What game?”
She laughed as if I had just made a joke and gave my shoulder a little shove. “The football game, duh.”
“Urn, I could be. Should I be?”
Do not touch her, I warned myself. Do not touch her, kiss her, bury your face in her hair, or throw her over your shoulder and head for the nearest cave. Those would all be bad choices, and they would have immediate, negative consequences. No touching.
“Well, yeah, Tyler. That would be nice.” She picked up her books and settled them on her hip. “It would be nice if you came to the game. It would be nicer if you sat next to me. And it would be nicest if you
brought me a cup of hot chocolate because it’s going to be cold tonight. Got to go. We’re late.”
Don’t ask what happened for the next eight hours. I’m pretty sure I was unconscious.
37.
Yoda stayed after school to watch Hannah’s game. I walked home. It was finally sinking in—Bethany wanted me, ME!—to sit next to her. That was extremely close to a date, which was a half step away from permission to make out and touch her glorious private bits and so on and et cetera.
A car almost ran me over a block away from the school. I growled at it and bared my teeth. My testosterone was peaking at world-record levels. I had new hair sprouting on my chest and stomach. I was turning into a wolfman with a life-threatening hard-on, all because a cinnamon-smelling girl wanted me to sit next to her.
I took another shower as soon as I got home. I also took some personal time to think things over. (Not going into details, thank you very much.) Then I set my alarm clock and fell asleep for a couple hours. Being wanted by the woman of your dreams is exhausting work.
I slept through the alarm. I had thirty minutes to become confident, manly, shaved, dressed, relaxed, and sitting on a metal bleacher armed with several gallons of hot chocolate.
Crapcrapcrapcrap.
I took another shower, a quick one, because I was already beginning to stink of panic. I cut my chin shaving. I dressed in boxers and socks (all clean), one of my new shirts, a sweatshirt, jeans (clean, too), sneakers, then ran downstairs. Yoda had just arrived. Hannah was all ready to go out.
I was just about to ask Mom if I should make the hot chocolate or buy some at Starbucks when Dad’s car pulled in the driveway.
Hannah’s eyes widened. “Why is he so early?”
“This is early?” Yoda asked.
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