HE MAY HAVE BEEN THE NEWSPAPER nerd, but I felt like the reporter the way I chased him down with a hundred questions. “‘Trouble in a training bra’ is your sister?”
“I didn’t tell you that?”
“No, you didn’t tell me that. Is she older or younger?”
“Physically, she’s older by ten months—my parents were freaks—but mentally she’s still in diapers.” He stopped at a classroom where a couple of students sprinted in just as the bell rang. “This is you. Don’t worry about being late. You’ve got your hall pass. It’s good all day.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Come by the J-Room after school?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then, “I mean no.” Mom wanted me home right after school for some kind of, I don’t know, conference call. Attendance mandatory.
Shadows crossed Eli’s face. That same twitchiness from before.
I said, “I’ll come by tomorrow. For sure.”
He nodded, two quick, jerky motions. “Okay.”
It would have to be. Maybe I owed him for the locker room save, but I wasn’t about to piss off Mom.
When she’s mad, Zach Lynch and his crew had nothing on her.
Rest of the day = status quo.
“We have a new student, class. Would you like to stand up and tell us about yourself?” some teacher would say, like I had a choice.
This was my favorite part of the new school experience, because it gave all your classmates a chance to size you up and decide how much of a threat you were. Totally fun. In Opposite World.
The first couple of times I had to do it, I was still in middle school, so the backlash was minimal. There’s very little at stake with seventh and eighth graders.
Last year was my first high school experience as the New Kid in Idaho. The cliques had been established, the social hierarchy set. In comes me, fresh off a growth spurt, too skinny to threaten the farm boy football players, but an instant enemy of the garbage varsity basketball team. Obviously, the tall black guy had come to take somebody’s starting spot.
In all fairness to their stereotype, I probably could’ve.
What they didn’t realize was being a b-ball star went against the whole “stay low-key” thing. I never planned to try out. Not that it mattered once their girlfriends noticed me.
Like I said, this was the varsity team. Juniors and seniors. I was a freshman, but still of instant interest to their women. The New Kid always is as long as he’s not butt ugly. No ego or anything.
Things went south fast for me in Boise. Not first-day fast like here, though.
I introduced myself as Nick Pearson, gave my cover, hit the replay button. While the reception wasn’t exactly warm—my history teacher dozed off while I was talking—there was no further violence that day. Final bell rang at two thirty. One hour until the call.
I learned to avoid buses a few years back, after an altercation in San Diego. So I rode a Huffy ten-speed to school. If I stepped on it, I could make it home in five minutes. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t going to be late—Mom’s wrath and all—but there was no point in being early. There’d still be plenty of boxes to unpack and tension to ignore whenever I got there.
My house was east of Stepton High. I went west, tried to pretend I was riding for the fresh air like I did in Texas, but couldn’t pull it off. There was a chemical plant on the edge of town, its thick stacks sticking up over the trees like a giant chain-smoker’s cigarettes. They pumped storm clouds and gave the air a scent you could taste. I kept thinking I now knew what it’d be like to lick a matchbook.
I turned onto streets without checking signs, and tailed cars that had interesting license plates through a business district that I should’ve called something else. Half the establishments had soapy windows with faded For Lease signs wedged in the frames. Veering into residential territory, I came across a lot of lawns gone wild where rusted chain-link fences had the task of keeping the vegetation contained to the deserted properties.
In the occupied homes, more than a few yards were brown, the grass dying beneath tireless cars and sagging, rain-filled wading pools. As I coasted down one street, a front door burst open, rattling against the home’s outer wall. An oily-haired woman exited with a baby on her hip and a toddler by the hand. She cursed into the doorway while backing into the yard.
A dirtier man in a yellowed T-shirt staggered into the daylight carrying a half-empty forty-ounce beer. He cursed back, threw the bottle. It thudded off the grassless lawn but didn’t break, missing her legs just barely.
My new cell vibrated in my back pocket. I grabbed it, checked the caller ID even though I knew it could be only one of two people.
I held my handlebars with one hand as I pedaled by the angry couple. A police cruiser rounded the corner with its flashers on, stopping near the title fight. From the corner of my eye, I saw the dirty man jump off the porch, retrieve his forty, then smash it on the hood of the cop’s car, still not breaking the invincible bottle. What the hell?
Then the whole scene was gone. Or I was, cruising east.
My phone kept shaking. For the briefest moment, I thought, Don’t answer, keep riding.
Of course it was stupid. A kid on a bike. Thirty bucks in his pocket. No contacts. That would last about as long as it took to eat two pizzas and a value meal. It was still tempting. I hit Talk.
“You forget the time?” said the man who had me contemplating how far I could make my short money stretch. The man responsible for getting us stuck in this crappy town where drunk a-holes threw bottles at women, children, and cops. The man who’d ruined the lives of his family in a way that was almost awe inspiring.
Through gritted teeth, I said, “I’m on my way, Dad.”