Tell It to Naomi
Page 6
In short, I knew that all of Naomi’s insane schemes had one thing in common: they all ended in catastrophe. (Or they would if they ever got off the ground in the first place.)
On the other hand, I also knew she needed something to do with herself—something to make her feel productive, to bring her closer to that elusive gig that would change all our lives for the better … even if it involved perpetrating a fraud on her former boyfriend.
I could probably use something to do with myself, too. I wasn’t exactly a Polaroid of contentment.
“You know what the best part is?” Naomi said, sounding scarily earnest. “We can write the column Celeste Fanucci wanted to write. I mean, after I talked to her, I realized that kids need something like this. They need a forum to express themselves, not just to ask the usual advice-column questions, about boyfriends or whatever, but to ask about everything. About issues. About real life. You know? You’d be great at handling that.”
I almost laughed. She was really pushing it now. But a thought was dawning on me: if Celeste had meant what she’d told Naomi that she could use an advice columnist—and if Naomi became an advice columnist … well, odds were good that Celeste would write in to Naomi.
Which meant, of course, that she’d write to me.
And that, as Naomi had so archly observed the night before, was what I really wanted.
It was sort of perfect, in a twisted way. Yes. It was the alternative to stalking I’d been looking for. Celeste Fanucci would pour out her soul to me without knowing it. I would immerse myself in the intimate details of her life. More importantly, I would learn what she desired in a significant other. I would use this secret knowledge to transform myself before her eyes. I would become that significant other. And in the end I would bridge the unbridgeable chasm.
Sure, the chances of all that actually happening were approximately one in eight trillion. But I decided I might as well try. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither did Naomi. I sighed, glancing around her rat hole of a room. Better to live for a dream than to wallow in reality, right? At the very least, as Naomi had pointed out, it could be fun.
“So what do you say?” she asked.
I shrugged. “If you think we can pull it off…”
She smiled wickedly “We already have, Dave,” she said. “Remember?”
Somebody in our family was in a great mood. I knew it as soon as I walked into our building Monday afternoon because I heard the frenzied cacophony of Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” coming down the stairwell. It was a little muffled, but even down in the lobby there was no mistaking the song—which meant it wasn’t just being cranked; it was being blasted. By the time I reached our apartment, it sounded as if Jimi himself had risen from the grave to perform a live gig in apartment 4R.
Now, in normal families the blasting of “Fire” probably wouldn’t mean a lot. But for us, Hendrix—particularly when played at a loud volume—takes on a deep, almost mystical significance. We all revere his music. Or rather, each of us reveres it. He is unique in this way. Mom and Aunt Ruth can tolerate the Strokes; I can tolerate Naomi’s Michelle Branch collection (sort of); Naomi and I can both tolerate Sly and the Family Stone (on a limited rotation) … but Hendrix alone somehow does it for every family member—individually. I’m just as likely to carry around one of his CDs in my Discman as Mom and Aunt Ruth are.
The funny thing is we’ve never acknowledged it. At least not out loud. The only time we ever talk about music at all is to rag on each other’s lousy taste. But since we all know it, Hendrix’s songs have become the unofficial soundtrack for any special occasion. Whenever we break fast at the end of Yom Kippur, whenever we rent a car to go upstate on vacation … pretty much whenever the four of us celebrate or have fun together as a family, Jimi is there, too. And there’s never any discussion or debate. Somebody just puts on one of his CDs. It’s gotten to the point where I could probably change the answer to the first of the four Passover questions: Why is this night different from all other nights? Because on this night we hang out and bask in the glory of Jimi Hendrix’s searing, psychedelic guitar.
So when I first heard him down in the lobby, I knew something was up. Maybe Mom and Aunt Ruth had gotten raises. That was what had happened the last time I’d heard Hendrix down four flights of stairs (“The Wind Cries Mary,” two years ago). Lord knows they were due for one. And now that I remembered, they’d also gotten off work early that day…
I threw open the door.
The music was coming from Naomi’s room.
Crap.
Mom and Aunt Ruth weren’t even home.
There’s nothing more irritating than when your older sister is happy for some reason, and you’re not. That goes double when you’re already annoyed with her. All you want to do is make an obscene gesture. Or at the very least, you want to know why she got her lame ex-boyfriend to run a moronic ad in the school paper without consulting you first, even though you’re the one who’s going to be writing the stupid advice column in the first place.
I trudged down the hall.
Naomi’s door was cracked. She was hunched over her computer—in her pajamas, of course—whispering along to the lyrics. “Let me stand next to your fire! Let me stand …”
At least she’d opened her blinds. But the sun just spotlighted all the trash on the floor.
“Aren’t you ever gonna clean this place?” I yelled.
Naomi jerked.
“Dude!” she yelled, laughing. She let out a deep sigh.
I scowled. “Please don’t use that word.”
“Why?” She scooted over to her stereo. “Cheese uses it all the time.”
“Mm,” I grunted.
Now I was even more annoyed. Naomi didn’t know that Cheese and I were in a fight. I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want to know. The weekend had come and gone, and I still hadn’t heard from him. I knew he was home, too, because I saw his parents’ SUV parked right in front of the building the whole time. He could have been sick, I supposed. Or he could have had a serious bug up his butt for no reason at all. One possibility was a lot more likely than the other.
“You’re gonna give me high blood pressure if you sneak up on me like that,” Naomi said once she’d turned the music down. “You scared me.”
“You’re scaring me. What are you so giddy about?”
Judging from her expression, you’d think I’d just asked the dumbest question in the world. “Didn’t Joel tell you?” she asked.
“Tell me what? That he ran an ad in the school paper that makes me sound like a girly little wuss?”
“Oh, come on, Dave,” she said. “There was nothing in the ad like that. Besides, you’re pretending to be me, remember? So the ad doesn’t make you sound like anything. And personally, I don’t think it was girly at all.” She glanced at the computer screen. “But, hey, don’t take my word for it. Just check out the response.”
My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
She grinned.
I walked over to her monitor and peered at it.
You have 10 new messages.
Time: 3:32 pm Subject: i owe my friend $573 dollars
Time: 3:33 pm Subject: how do i transfer to different trig class
Time: 3:34 pm Subject: I LIVE IN A TOILET AND PAPA WEARS BANANA HAMMOCK BRIEFS
Time: 3:34 pm Subject: frightened of new york
Time: 3:35 pm Subject: (No Subject)
Time: 3:35 pm Subject: yo yo yo whaddup bee—atch!!!
Time: 3:36 pm Subject: my boyfriend smells
Time: 3:36 pm Subject: Fwd: fast food executives the REAL hate mongers
Time: 3:37 pm Subject: BOZ (Beard Of Zits)
Time: 3:37 pm Subject: i have this problem i play 11 hours of Game Boy every day
I glanced at the clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. It was 3:38.
“Is this for real?” I asked.
Naomi started laughing. “These are just the ones I haven’t opened yet
. I’ve already gotten more than fifty. What did I tell you? You should read some of them. I didn’t know kids your age were so … I don’t know … all over the place.”
I frowned. “Kids my age? Who are you, Aunt Ruth?”
“You know what I mean. It’s a little scary.”
My eyes flashed over the list again. I couldn’t argue with her. Scary was putting it mildly. These looked disturbing. To be honest, I hadn’t really expected anyone except Celeste to write in. Or maybe I’d just been hoping.
“Hey, wait a second,” I said. “How come it doesn’t say where the e-mails are from? I mean, how do you know who sent them?”
“I don’t,” Naomi said.
I turned to her. “What do you mean?”
“Joel set up the system to ensure anonymity. Well, actually, he got a friend who’s a programmer to do it. But on the home page there’s a little information bullet—”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down. The system? The home page?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said.
“Uh, just out of curiosity, when were you guys planning on telling me about all this? And who said anything about anonymity?”
Naomi smiled and slouched back in the chair. “The system has to be anonymous, Dave. Otherwise nobody would write in. See, Joel and I did some research over the weekend. In order for an advice column to work—or any sort of therapy to work, really—the people who use it have to feel safe that their identities are kept secret. It’s the only way they’ll be honest. That’s why so many kids wrote in. They know that ‘Naomi’ can’t figure out who they are, so they can say whatever they want. But listen: this could turn into a gig for me. Joel has a friend at the Village Voice, an editor—and the guy said that the whole teen-column angle sounds like great story material. ‘Very cutting edge,’ he said. So he told Joel to tell me to send in some writing samples…
My jaw tightened. The more she rambled, the angrier I got. And it wasn’t only because she and Joel Posterior-Massage had conducted their own “research” without me. She was just so slaphappy. She was acting like a little kid, like she’d gotten a puppy or something. I knew it had nothing to do with a potential gig at the Village Voice, either. She’d told me lots of times that those sorts of friend-of-a-friend connections were always tenuous at best. No, that wouldn’t have made her glow like this. That wouldn’t have prompted her to blast Hendrix—
“What?” she demanded, giggling. “Why are you giving me that look?”
“You’re just acting sort of weird.”
“I’m acting weird?” Naomi shook her head and stood. “Listen, Dave, I’m sorry we kept you out of the loop. It wasn’t intentional. I just thought the technical side of things would bore you. I promise it won’t happen again. But you know what? I think you should look through some of these. And maybe even answer one of them. I bet it’ll make you feel better.” She patted my back. She was trying to console me, but the way she placed her hand between my shoulders made me think of a ventriloquist with a dummy. “Maybe you’ll find your friend Celeste in there.”
I shook free. “How can I find Celeste?” I barked. “It’s anonymous!”
“Okay, okay,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. Why are you so grumpy?”
“I’m not grumpy,” I muttered.
“Well, if it’s because of all this, I apologize—really,” she said. She headed for the door. “I’m going to get a snack. Hang out and go through the e-mails. Pick one and answer it, and we’ll print it tomorrow. I’m telling you, I really think we could be on to something positive here. Your friends need help… Her voice trailed off as she shuffled down the hall.
My friends? I wondered, feeling disgustingly sorry for myself.
I slumped down in her chair.
Well, Naomi was certainly right about one thing. The kids at Roosevelt—friends or not—did need help. I almost prayed Celeste wasn’t among them. They all sounded like candidates for institutionalization. I LIVE IN A TOILET AND PAPA WEARS BANANA HAMMOCK BRIEFS? Good Lord. Was there a PCP epidemic at school I didn’t know about? I grabbed the mouse and clicked on the message.
Time: 3:34 pm
Subject: I LIVE IN A TOILET AND PAPA WEARS BANANA HAMMOCK BRIEFS
NAOMI!
PAPA SAY I SHOULD SEE YOUR DOCUMENT FIRST BUT IF YOU OFFER ADVICE I SHOULD LIKE TO RECIEVE IT. SORRY THAT IS RECEIVE. I BEFORE E EXCEPT AFTER C! I SHOULD LEAVE MISTAKE IN A CORRESPONDENCE TO SHOW THAT I TRY TO LEARN ENGLISH! CORRESPONDENCE IS A BIG TERM , NO? I KNOW A FEW SLANGS SUCH As <
SINCERELY YOURS
HOSPITAL GIRL
I tried to read it again, and then gave up about halfway through. All the capital letters made me dizzy.
So, I thought miserably, this is what it means to be an advice columnist.
I almost considered calling Joel Newbury and asking about the school’s policy regarding plagiarism, because this e-mail reminded me a lot of a book Naomi had lent me over the summer by a fairly young author who was being touted as the Next Big Novelist of Our Time. One of the characters spoke and wrote in horribly broken English. Reading that had made me dizzy. But it was definitely a lot more enjoyable than reading this. There was just no way it could be true. (The parts I could understand, at least.) It was too tragic, too silly… too over-the-top.
As far as I could tell, Hospital Girl was trying to rip off this famous young author’s style. And she wasn’t doing a very good job. For one thing, her “slangs” had been outdated for about as long as Vanilla Ice’s career had. (Vanilla Ice being the only person actually known to use the phrase “word to your mother.”) The more I thought about it, the more I figured one of those cynical lit clubbers had written it as a gag—the Olga Romanoff crew, those chicks who think that they’re the only people who read books, who drink coffee at the dump on Fourth Street and Avenue A and dress like they’re sitting shivah for Goth rock. Maybe Olga herself had written it. Maybe she was trying to make an anti-advice-column “statement.” Whatever. I clicked on the next message.
Time: 3:35 pm
Subject: frightened of new york
Dear Naomi,
I know everyone says this, but The Big Apple is making me paranoid. I’m convinced that a) every single bike messenger knows me personally and wants to run me over, b) the falafel guy on the corner charges me twice as much as he charges everyone else, and c) nobody at Roosevelt wants to be friends with me.
Yes, I’m new. But so are about 200 other kids. Every single freshman is new, right? What’s wrong with me? It’s not like I smell. I’m positive of this, because I just switched to a new brand of deodorant. I’m using stick instead of roll-on! There really is a difference. So what do I do? I’m shy. Do I move to Jersey?
—FONY (stands for Frightened of New York, and rhymes with pony but hopefully doesn’t mean “phony”)
Much to my surprise, I found myself smiling.
I At least this e-mail seemed genuine. It made me think of Celeste, too—the being new in school part of it, anyway. It couldn’t be her, though; FONY was a freshman. And it definitely sounded too young for a senior. No … young is mean-spirited. Young is an adjective Olga Romanoff would pro
bably use. It sounded funny and naive in that freshman sort of way. It sounded honest.
Unfortunately, it also made me realize that I’d never find Celeste by trolling for her e-mails. And that was pretty depressing, considering she was the only reason I’d agreed to this nonsense to begin with.
I leaned back in the chair.
I could hear Naomi puttering around in the kitchen.
I supposed that I could just answer FONY’s letter. It would take about two minutes, tops.
I could also go to my room and wallow in loneliness. I’d been getting very good at that in the past few days. I’d hit a rhythm with it, an endless, monotonous rhythm, like those seventies Shaft-style funk songs Mom and Aunt Ruth loved so much … you know, a song with a title like “Dave Rosen Is Stuck in a Bad Funk”—with “Bad Funk” meaning two things (one positive, one negative), the way all those classic Shaft-style funk titles did.
Or I could call Cheese.
No. No freaking way It was up to him to call me. True, this was the longest we’d ever gone without talking since we were six. (Even when we went on vacation, we still called or e-mailed each other, mostly to complain about the food outside New York.) But if Cheese thought that he could somehow punish me with the silent treatment just because I wouldn’t hand over my guitar to some stupid kid I didn’t even know … well … well, maybe it was best not to complete that thought.
Forget it. I clicked on the REPLY icon.
I was not going to obsess anymore about this Cheese BS. Nope. I had things to do. I had to counsel a perfect stranger who called herself FONY, for God’s sake. I had a life, too.