Naturally, Didi Steinberg had no idea on earth who I was that day she sat with her parents in the reception area at the oncologist’s where I was waiting by myself while my parents consulted with the doctor. Even though Didi and I had several classes together, she was unaware of my existence. I was suffering through my senior year at Pueblo Heights High School in total anonymity. I had made one friend, Nita Carabajal. Nita had been assigned to be my physics lab partner. All we had in common was that neither one of us had any other friends. Everyone knew who Didi Steinberg was. She occupied a space that was a unique blend of legend and outcast.
Didi was the coolest person I could imagine because one look at her told you that she didn’t give a shit about much of anything. Stories of her general wild-ass behavior had even reached me way out in my social Siberia. I’d heard about how she was sent to the principal for wearing a top that officially met dress code regulations because it wasn’t spaghetti straps, but was so short the bottom half of her tits showed. I heard how she’d put on a tuxedo and taken herself to the prom the year before, then danced all night with the busboys. I’d heard that she called her car the Skankmobile and got stoned in it every day before school. That her father was a disc jockey and she’d had her own show on his station for a while. Mostly, though, I’d heard that Didi Steinberg was the Groupie Queen of Albuquerque.
That day, however, slumped in a chair next to her father, she looked like any teen trying to become invisible when she’s with her parents. Mr. Steinberg reminded me of Daddy. His clothes, his skin, his eyes, they all looked borrowed from a bigger person, the person he’d been before he’d gotten sick. Even in the best of health, though, Mr. Steinberg would have been old enough to be Didi’s grandfather.
A nurse in lilac scrubs with a bright aquarium print opened the door to the reception area and called out, “Mort Steinberg.” Mr. Steinberg breathed heavily as Didi and her mother helped him up. He had a goatee, thick, gray muttonchops, with only a few strands of hair on top. A black turtleneck and a silver ankh around his neck completed the ancient hipster look.
I was surprised that Didi’s mom stayed in the waiting room and let her husband go back alone with the nurse. My mother had not left my father’s side in the past four months, ever since he’d developed the cough that wouldn’t go away. Mrs. Steinberg was the most exotic woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t decide if she was Mexican or Asian. She looked like an animé Natalie Wood with big eyes and a broad, doll-baby face. She gibbered away to Didi in rapid-fire Spanish.
Didi ignored her mother, pretending to be interested in an article in Golf Digest. This gave me a chance to study Didi Steinberg. She made me think of one of those celebrities who swear in People magazine that they were dorky and unpopular as teenagers and you don’t believe them until you see the old yearbook photo and understand how out of place they would have been in a normal life. Didi was like that, bigger than life, at least normal life. The hard planes of her face, the harsh flare of her nostrils, her high, slanted cheeks and wide, ravenous mouth were too masculine for a girl, too unsettling. Not pretty, not ugly, something more compelling than either of those classifications. The word that popped into my mind was arresting because of the way she put your attention behind bars. Didi Steinberg was made to be looked at and not just because she wore more liner than a mime around her paisley-shaped eyes, and she had three diamond studs glittering in her right nostril, and she’d dyed her hair black then done the tips the color of a lime popsicle. You would have stared at Didi Steinberg even if she’d been wearing Chap Stick and jeans from Wal-Mart like me. Even back then, Didi always seemed like there should be a bank of footlights between her and the rest of the world.
If you’d taken a picture of Didi Steinberg and looked at the negative, what you would have seen would have been me, her exact opposite. My family had moved to Albuquerque from Houdek, Texas, at the start of my junior year. My mom had taken one look at the brilliant swoops of gang graffiti and metal detectors at Pueblo Heights High School and announced that no child of hers would ever set foot in such a place. She homeschooled me until Daddy got sick, so when I entered Pueblo Heights at the start of my senior year, I didn’t know a single person. In addition to not having one friend, I had two names, Cyndi Rae, and a Texas accent.
The first thing I had learned when we moved to Albuquerque was that pretty much everyone in New Mexico hates Texans. On top of that, I had a gruesome collection of consonants for a last name, Hrncir, so every time a teacher called on me, I had to conduct a little seminar in Czech pronunciation, HERN-SHUR. The best any of my teachers were ever able to do was make a sound like they had a chip stuck in the back of their throats, Hrr-KURR! Few teachers called on me more than once. I had more than the usual teen quota of reasons to do what came most naturally to me, which was keep my mouth shut and try never to be noticed.
Didi suddenly looked up from Golf Digest and caught me staring at her. She shot me a look that my mother would have said “coulda killed Aunt Katie.” My mother had lots of country sayings that no one else understood. Except my father. Probably because they’d grown up on farms next to each other in Houdek, a little town north of San Antonio populated mostly by members of their two Czech families. Everyone back home had thought my father was a giant rebel when he took a job with Circuit City and drove forty miles into San Antonio every day and a complete extraterrestrial when he got a big promotion and moved us to Albuquerque.
It was a hard move for my mother. She’d never lived more than two miles from her parents her whole life and even after she was married always ate either breakfast or lunch with them every day of the week and dinner every Sunday. In Houdek everyone knew that my mom, Jerri, was high-strung. That was how she’d been her whole life. It was the reason she’d never finished high school in spite of having straight As and being a math genius. She couldn’t sit still for an entire class. Sitting still made her so nervous, she took to plucking out, first, a big patch of hair above her right ear, then all her eyebrows. When she started in on her eyelashes, everyone agreed that Jerri would be better off at home.
In Houdek my mother’s high-strung peculiarities were “just Jerri’s way.” No one ever asked my mother’s parents if they’d thought about Ritalin or seeing a psychologist. People in Houdek tended more to say oddball behavior was just someone’s “way” and let it go. Still, everyone agreed that it was a blessing when my mother married my father, easygoing Emil Hrncir. Daddy, all reddish blond hair and freckled from the sun, was the opposite of high-strung. Quite content to spend his days rumbling around on the back of a tractor and his weekends hunting dove or deer or whatever was in season, Daddy was so low-strung, in fact, that he verged sometimes on being unstrung. I always wondered what had brought two such different people together. Maybe Daddy thought my mother’s relentless buzz of energy would rub off and energize him, that they’d balance each other out. Or maybe it was just because my mother was pretty, really, really pretty, with wavy, strawberry blond hair, delicate features, and skin like a baby’s. Everyone said I favored her but had Daddy’s height, though I never saw the resemblance.
I never questioned the world I was born into. That, in our house, the radio and television always had to be kept at a whisper-soft volume. That all dishes had to be removed from the table immediately upon finishing a meal. That friends were never allowed to visit. That when my mother’s migraines struck, I would stay home from school to bring cups of flat 7Up to her. I never questioned it and never took it too seriously because Daddy didn’t. Whenever Mom would tell me to stop turning the pages of my magazine so loud, or insist that she couldn’t stand to even look at any food that wasn’t white, or when she’d get so wound up, her hands balled into tight fists that oscillated beside her head, Daddy would always catch my eye and wink. Then we’d lay low together. I’d take my magazine and sit up in the cab of the tractor with him and we’d pretend to plow until we saw the light in my mom’s bedroom go out. Or we’d take off early in the morning and leave a note saying we’d gone to fish or hunt snipes, then we’d sit all day in the Dairy Queen in Helotes and drink coffee and Cokes. We had great times together. His favorite thing was teasing me by asking how “Sometimes Y” was. Sometimes Y was his name for the pretend boyfriend he claimed I had. It came out of his joke that I would fall in love with the first boy with a lot of vowels in his name. “A, E, I, 0, U, and Sometimes Y, right?” he’d say. I told him to stop it. I was too shy to even talk to a boy, much less ever have a boyfriend.
We were all right in Houdek where everyone accepted that Jerri Hrncir was a little too tightly wound and that Emil Hrncir was the best thing that could have ever happened to her. We were a small-town family, designed to do what generations of Hrncirs before us had done: farm, raise soybeans, sorghum, a little cotton. After Granddad’s stroke, Daddy took over and might have made it if the price of diesel along with everything else hadn’t kept rising. After Mom’s nerves got too bad for her to handle the bookkeeping, I was the one who itemized all the expenditures. Like my mother, I was good with numbers. It was never anything I worked at, just something I was born with. It was my “way.”
When I told Daddy the bad news the numbers had for us, he got a job with Circuit City. At first it was just to tide us over. But the numbers told another story: he’d never go back to farming. The transfer to Albuquerque was a shock to Jerri that she never recovered from. We left Houdek right after the last day of my sophomore year, when the creeks were still running and the fields were still green and succulent. We drove a U-Haul truck loaded with our stuff to Albuquerque and parked it in front of a house Daddy had flown out earlier to rent for us. It was flat on top and squared off as a shoe box with red lava rocks where a lawn should have been and one spindly desert willow out front that didn’t cast enough shade to cool off an ant. Mom took one look at the shoe-box house and burst into tears. She folded her arms across her chest and locked Albuquerque out as much as she possibly could. Everything about the city frightened her, annoyed her, or dried her skin out.
Daddy got a giant-screen TV as a return from Circuit City and Mom kept it turned on night and day. Every time there was anything on the news about someone being taken to the West Mesa and raped or a drive-by shooting in the south valley, Mom stepped up our home security system. She had bars put on all the windows, triple dead bolts on the doors, and an alarm system wired to a special private security service. I think she’d decided to homeschool me before she even saw Pueblo Heights, but the armed cop at the entrance and the sight of more brown than white faces sealed the deal for her.
The one good thing for me about homeschooling was that I discovered an incredible online math program that let me go as far and as fast as I wanted in calculus, trig, some statistics. The only people I met my junior year were other homesehoolers and the geeks I competed against in Math Olympiad. It was through the homeschooler group that Mom connected with HeartLand, the weirdo church she ended up joining. The major emphasis of HeartLand seemed to be to remind women that they were “subject” to their husbands and to try to return to what they imagined was a simpler time. None of the women from Mom’s new church cut their hair and they all wore clothes that they thought small-town people wore. But no one I ever knew back in Houdek would have been caught dead in a long denim skirt and high-buttoned blouse like a five-year-old would wear to a piano recital.
All the burglar bars and buttons in the world, though, couldn’t keep out the one thing Mom should have been afraid of. Daddy had the cough for months before he finally went to the doctor. It was cancer. Daddy acted like it was no big deal. Still, it was decided that homeschooling on top of taking care of Daddy was too much for Mom’s weak nerves, and for my senior year I was enrolled at Pueblo Heights.
Daddy joked about the chemo and radiation, said he was doing it just to “humor the tumor.” Even when he got so weak he had to use a wheelchair, he was still able to convince Mom and me that the thing growing inside of him was merely a passing annoyance. The day I met Didi was the day even Daddy had to stop pretending.
When my parents came back out to the oncologist’s waiting room where I sat watching Didi Steinberg act like she was reading Golf Digest, the expression on my mom’s face scared me. The way the nurse in her tropical fish smock held the door open for her to push the wheelchair through scared me even more. It was too kind, too solicitous. My eyes met my father’s and everything he’d tried to hide from me for the past four months was there. The fear and panic were so big that they made him a little boy who just wanted someone to rescue him. My mom looked at me in the same lost, scared way. But there was nothing I could do for her, for either one of them. When Mom realized that no one would be coming to rescue her, that nothing would change what the doctor had just told her back in his office, her face started squirming around. At first, it didn’t seem she was about to cry, more like she was going to say something but couldn’t remember the words. All I cared about in that moment was that she was going to do something embarrassing in front of Didi Steinberg. Like talk.
She did something worse, though. My mother fainted. One instant she was standing behind the wheelchair, pushing my father toward me, the next she went down so fast I thought she’d stepped into a hole.
Didi, who only truly came to life when the adrenaline was flowing, reacted faster than anyone, even the nurse. She was helping Mom to a chair before I could figure out what had happened. My father tried to hoist himself up to help her, but Didi was already in charge.
“Make sure he stays put,” she ordered me, pointing to my father as she helped my mother bend forward to put her head between her knees. She looked at the nurse and barked at her, “Get us some water. Stat.”
Everyone followed her orders. Her calm, authoritative manner combined with using the medical word, stat, made us all believe that, in spite of the lime-popsicle-colored hair, she just might be an intern, a medical student, someone who had answers and could help us. That, I would later learn, was Didi’s greatest gift. When she wanted to, she could read your deepest needs and turn herself into whoever could fill them.
“Cyndi. Rae. Honey.” My father huffed out one word on each laborious exhalation. “Get. The. Keys.”
I picked the car keys up from the floor where Mom had dropped them. “I’ll. Drive. Home.” He held out his palm.
“Are you tripping?” Didi asked my father, plucking the keys from my hand.
Mom didn’t object. Whatever unimaginable news the doctor had given my parents had stolen the little bit of fight she had left.
“You”—she pointed to my father—“need to get into bed. Stat. You”— she pointed to my mother, who was staring at the cup of water the nurse had put into her hand as if she were trying to figure out how to work it—“should not be behind the wheel of a car. You”—my turn—“need to be in the backseat of the car monitoring your father. I”—she thumped her chest with an open hand—“will drive.”
Didi blurted something in Spanish to her mother. She used the word papi a lot so I assumed she was telling her mother to take her father home. All Mrs. Steinberg did was shrug and nod vaguely. Then Didi took the handles of my father’s chair and propelled him forward. I helped my mother get up. Her body was damp and clammy against my own. Didi seemed so crisp and strong marching ahead of us, so dark and well defined. Mom and I with our identical wispy, strawberry blond hair, blue-veined skin, invisible eyelashes and eyebrows, had always run together like two underdone cookies melting into one blob on the baking sheet. I hated the touch of my mother’s doughy body.
Didi drove us home, helped Daddy into bed, then refused Mom’s halfhearted offer of a ride home. Instead, she said she needed the exercise and ran off.
The next morning, without any plan being made, Didi pulled her dad’s Mustang into our carport and honked until Mom gasped, “Well, I mean, that is the rudest thing I’ve ever heard. Go make her stop before the neighbors call the police.”
I crunched across the rocks that were our front yard, wishing I had a pair of the cool low-rise jeans Mom had forbidden instead of the dorky ones with a waist she insisted on. Didi yelled out her open window, “You going to school today?” Just like it was optional. Just like I might be considering not going that day.
“Uh, yeah,” I answered. “Give me a second.” I rushed into the house, certain that if I gave Didi more than ten seconds to consider what she was doing, she’d be gone. I grabbed my books and the box of animal crackers I took every day to eat on a bench in the patio so I wouldn’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria at lunch. I ran back to the car pretending I didn’t hear Mom yelling that she didn’t approve and that I was to get back into the house this instant.
The Mustang, fingernail-polish red with white leather upholstery, rumbled as we roared down Carlisle Avenue. I wondered what it would be like to have parents cool enough to buy a red Mustang with white leather interior. On the back window, written in swirly script, was SKANKMOBILE. Didi smoked Eve cigarettes, occasionally waving the smoke out the tiny slit she opened in her window. Piercings had appeared in her lip and eyebrow that I didn’t recall being there just the day before.
“You have a theme song?” she asked.
“Am I supposed to?”
“Here’s mine. Check it out.” She shoved in a CD and an oldie blared out: “Dirty Deeds.” I looked at the case to find out that the band was AC/DC, some guys dressed up like British schoolboys.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking, No rap? No hip-hop? Where’s Snoop? Why’s she like this old-school shit?”
That wasn’t remotely what I was thinking, but I loved having a conversation with Didi Steinberg that didn’t require my participation.
“Well, old school still rules! There’s a reason it’s called rock. Cuz it rocks!” Didi sang along with the CD, hitting the chorus hard, yelling about doing dirty deeds dirt cheap. She turned to me as if I were sitting on a stool next to her at a bar instead of careening down a road and explained, “That’s how I got my nickname, Deeds.”
We headed east, toward the mountains, toward the rising sun, which was turning the Sandias the watermelon color they were named for. Morning light flooded into the car. Didi had the visor down so only the bottom half of her face was illuminated. Her mouth was golden as she sang.
With a screech, she opened the ashtray, snuffed the cigarette, and plucked out a half-smoked joint. I knew what it was only because back in Houdek Sheriff Zigal had visited our class in seventh grade with a briefcase filled with drug paraphernalia. He’d told us a joint could be called a blunt, a spliff, a number, a nail, a stick, a stake, a spike, a rod. I think Sheriff Zigal made up some of the names. Didi pinched the joint between her lips as she fumbled through her purse until she dug out a box of matches.
“Take the Skank,” she said, nodding toward the steering wheel as she removed both hands to strike a match. It took me a split second to process the fact that there were no hands on the wheel before I lunged over and grabbed it as we bumped onto the median. Didi laughed when we sideswiped a newly planted catalpa tree. She got the joint lit and sucked in a long hit before holding it out to me.
I waved it away and tried to keep the Skankmobile in its own lane.
Didi shrugged. “How does anyone do Pweb straight?” she asked. Pweb. I liked her name for Pueblo Heights. “Gotta keep consensual reality at bay.” She inhaled until there was nothing left to burn, then popped the still-smoldering roach into her mouth and took the steering wheel from my death grip. “You’re not a bad wheelman.”
I made myself lean back, but lunged forward the instant Didi closed both eyes and joined AC/DC singing, “Call me anytime. I lead a life of crime!” She laughed when I grabbed the wheel again. “Wow, someone who’s interested in keeping me alive. You could be just what the doctor ordered.” She giggled a giggle that made me remember another one of Sheriff Zigal’s names for a joint, giggle stick.
Didi’s new piercings, dozens of tiny silver rings, glinted in the sun. “When did you get the piercings?” I yelled over the music, keeping my hands on the wheel.
She ripped one of the rings out. It was a fake clip-on. “No tattoos, no piercings. That’s the rule. Have to be ready to change at a moment’s notice. If it’ll grow out or wash off, fine, but I’m not gonna be sitting in the old folks’ home covered in saggy ink and Ubangi piercing holes.” Even the diamond studs in her nose were fake. “Nothing permanent. I’m not into permanent.”
Not into permanent. That was the first line in the manual I started composing that day on how to be Didi Steinberg’s friend.
She took the wheel. “Hey, you study for the test in Mith Myth?”
Mith Myth was what everyone called world cultures since the teacher, Ms. Smith, even more than most teachers, taught what she liked best and that was Greek and Roman mythology. Hence her nickname, Mith Myth.
“Yeah?” I said, cautiously, not knowing how dorky she would think studying for a world cultures or any test was.
“Brilliant? I’ll sit next to you. I’m not into the whole test-regurgitation thing.”
Not into the whole test-regurgitation thing.
She pulled into the Pueblo Heights High School parking lot. It was guarded by the school mascot, a giant hornet painted on the wall of the gym. The Pueblo Heights Hornet was a snarling bully with a sailor cap pulled down palooka-style over one eye, his hornet dukes up waiting to sting all comers into the next century. Students milled around beneath our hostile hornet.
“Well,” said Didi, popping down the visor and tugging her eyelid tight so she could outline it in black pencil. “I see all the Whore-nut cliques are out in force. You’ve got your skate punks in their traditional place, east side of the gym, all properly scabbed and stoned, recounting face plants and road rashes for their skuts.”
As Didi moved on to the lower lids, I checked out the skate punks in their black knit caps and giant shorts that hung off their butts and below their knees. Skuts, I guessed, were skate sluts, the girls in spiky pigtails, striped tube socks, and shredded camou cutoffs who revolved around the punks, pretending to care about skateboarding.
“Next farther out, the gamers.”
This was an all-male group that didn’t really have any uniform fashion look other than pasty skin and slumped shoulders. All they cared about was what level they’d gotten to on Doom and what the new cheats were for Quake.
“And even sadder and more pathetic, our Goth friends, who all, somehow, have the exact same desire to express their really intense individuality through dyed black hair, creepy flowing black clothes, blue lipstick, devil horn implants, and goat’s-eye contact lenses.”
The Goth kids congregated the farthest of any group from the bellicose bee. They seemed nervous and, Didi was right, sad.
“But the scariest of all the groups? The Abercrombies.” She pointed her eyeliner toward the clique who occupied the area directly in front of the hornet as if by divine right. They looked like they belonged front center—cheerleaders, football players. All the popular kids, the ones who could afford to buy stuff from Abercrombie & Fitch.
“Ew, backward caps? Cargo pants and fleece?” Didi pretended to shudder in horror. “Give me a Goth anytime over those Whore-nuts.”
I snuggled more deeply into the white leather. The Mustang had come to feel like a cave to me with us on the inside, all snug and dry, and everyone else on the outside being drenched in the downpour of Didi’s caustic comments. I noticed that, for the first time, the knot that had tied in my stomach when we left Houdek, then tightened when Daddy got sick, had loosened so much that I could actually take a full breath. I took one, then another, marveling in the simple pleasure of breathing. I never wanted Didi to stop talking about everyone who wasn’t us. I never wanted to leave the Skankmobile.
“Hey,” she said. “I just thought of something. How are you in math?”
“Sort of, well, brilliant?”
The bells on the rings Didi wore tinkled as she slapped her hands together like she was praying. “Thank you, Jesus!” Then to me, “You are so what the doctor ordered. Depew would just stroke out if I actually turned in an assignment.” She reached back, fished an algebra book from the pile scattered on the floor, and opened it to the homework assignment she hadn’t done.
“Cool beans, factoring polynomials! I haven’t gotten to do that for years.” The words, unbelievable in their dorkiness, popped out before I could stop them.
“Hey, knock yourself out.”
While Didi worked on her hair, getting the lime popsicle tips to stick up in a cunning way, I zipped through her assignment. Dorky as it was, it was true, I did love factoring polynomials. We both finished a few minutes later. Didi snapped the visor back up, tipped her head back, squeezed one drop of Visine into each eye, and turned to me. “So, how do I look?” She didn’t look like anyone else under the hornet.
She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever known before. The word whispered out of me before I could worry about how dorky I would sound. “Beautiful.”
Didi smiled. It was the right answer.