The following week, there was a chance thaw and for a period of five days the thermometer shot up to the mid-forties during the day. A lot of the snow melted, and the frozen ground turned to a muddy mess of dirt and slush.
One afternoon, Ben, who was slowly getting his energy back and no longer had to take a nap after school, borrowed his father’s car and drove over to Ilona’s house, where the drifts piled around her jeep had melted enough to access the back of the vehicle. It was unlocked, as he had expected it might be, and there were no other cars in the driveway. He changed the flat on her car and put the donut on, regretting that he didn’t have the know-how to actually fix the tire or the cash to replace it.
He was just finishing up when she came outside onto the porch. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said. She was wearing a red-and-black checked hunting vest over dark green skinny jeans.
He smiled. “No shit.”
“Come in and have some juice.”
He followed her inside, down the dark hallway, and into the room where they spent twenty-four hours watching TV the week before. She poured him a dark brown tumbler full of orange juice. Ben held up the glass and clinked it against Ilona’s. “Just juice?”
“You want something stronger?”
“No, juice is good.” He looked around the kitchen. There were several days’ worth of dirty dishes stacked up in the sink and a pile of clean, or maybe dirty, laundry sitting on the couch. The dining room table, visible over Ilona’s shoulder, was covered with old editions of the Easton Tab, the local free weekly—some still in their plastic sleeves—and other assorted mail.
“Want to play Boggle?” Ilona asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because I’m going to whip your ass and make you cry like a baby, that’s why not.”
“Huh.” Ben said, “I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be.”
He stayed until dinnertime, playing round after round of Boggle. Ilona was pretty good, but he held his own and managed to win a few games too.
“I should go,” he said after checking the time. He had told his dad he’d have the car back by dinnertime. He thought about his parents, who were probably cooking dinner and listening to NPR or the bluegrass station on Pandora. He tried not to think about it in comparison to the dirty dishes or the empty refrigerator at Ilona’s house. “See you tomorrow?”
“Yup,” Ilona said.
She caught up with him the next day before Kapstein’s class, which she convinced him to ditch. And just about every other day for the next week, he found himself playing Boggle and drinking or smoking a little weed with Ilona on her couch.
On Wednesday, as he was about to duck out of the building, he ran into Tyler. As soon as Ben saw him, he had the strangest urge to hide. Not because he didn’t want to see him, but because he didn’t want to be faced with the decision to include him or not. It turned out that Tyler was on his way to a dentist appointment and couldn’t have come anyway, but it left Ben with a funny feeling as he walked down the street to meet Ilona at her house.
He kicked a large chunk of ice, which skittered ahead of him as he walked, thinking that he should really know how he felt about this new friendship before it went any further. It was similar to his friendship with Tyler in that he felt really unself-conscious; he was surprised at how easily this had happened. But it was different too. Besides Ilona being a girl, he never felt like he owed her anything for being his friend. She wasn’t required to hang out with him because they had some long history together. This was the part that made him feel funny, because it was a new realization about his friendship with Tyler.
He let himself in and was just getting comfortable lying down on the couch when he heard footsteps in the hall. He assumed it was Ilona. So when Judy sat down on the couch next to him and reached for the green glass bowl, he jumped into an upright sitting position.
To his complete shock, Judy knocked the shwag out of the bottom of the bowl onto the coffee table and proceeded to pack a fresh bowl with Ilona’s weed. She lit it and hit it and then offered it to him.
“No thank you, Mrs. Pierce,” he stammered.
“God dammit, Judy,” Ilona said when she entered the room. “What did I tell you about smoking my weed!”
“Don’t curse at me, Ilona,” Judy said. She turned up the volume on the TV. It was an afternoon talk show—something about vaccines and autism.
“Damn is not a curse word, Judy,” Ilona said, her voice dripping with disdain. “Shit and fuck are curse words.”
“Ilona!” Judy said, but then she dropped it, like maybe she’d lost interest in the whole thing. She leaned back against the couch and put the bowl down beside her. “I’m trying to watch this,” she told the room.
Ilona rolled her eyes and beckoned Ben with her chin. “Let’s go upstairs.” Ben was glad to get out of the room. He never really knew what to make of Ilona’s volatile, disgruntled-roommate-type relationship with her mother.
Ilona’s room was at the far end of the hall upstairs, next to a small window seat overlooking the front yard. Ben tried not to look at the molding bread and a bowl of what might have been cereal decomposing on the faded cushions. “Ta da,” she said as she shoved the door open against a small mountain of clothes pressed between the door and the wall. The room was dominated by an enormous wrought-iron bed frame with peeling white paint. The bed, which was vaulted three and a half feet off the floor, was a receptacle for even more clothes, a pale pink comforter, and some twisted sheets coming up at the corners of the mattress. A stack of very unused-looking spiral notebooks and textbooks leaned precariously against the footboard. Two walls had windows. On the third there were two closets, both with doors ajar and spewing more clothes onto the floor, which was visible only in patches. On the wall above the bed, there was a large water stain and an unfinished mural. “Your work?” Ben asked about the mural.
“One of the Calvins did that,” Ilona said. “Stoners never finish anything.”
“Calvins? You have two friends named Calvin?” He felt a twinge of jealousy about these other friends who now had names. Other friends who had been in Ilona’s bedroom before him.
“Uh-uh,” Ilona said, “Twins. Harris and Elwyn. Harris painted it the summer before last. Judy was on a cross-country bike tour with her boyfriend, so they were pretty much living here.”
At the end of the bed, there was a dresser. The drawers were open and empty. “You don’t believe in them?” he asked of the under-utilized furniture.
“Nope, just lazy.” She climbed up onto the bed and pitched some of the books down to the floor. Ben sat on the floor and leaned against the mattresses for lack of anywhere else to go. Tucked behind a pile of clothes in front of him was a low bookshelf. He cocked his head to the side and read the titles. “You have the Lord of the Rings?” he said, unable to hide the excitement in his voice.
“No!” Ilona said. “They’re probably my brother’s. He ran out of room on his bookshelves and clearly doesn’t respect my domain.”
“He lives here?”
Ilona waved her hand. “No, he’s older-older. Done with college. Lives in DC, working his balls off for some save-the-planet group.”
Ben pushed the mound of clothes aside with his foot so he could pull out a rather fancy leather-bound edition of the first book in the trilogy. He flipped open to the title page. “ ‘For Haakon, from Dad.’ Your parents don’t believe in regular names,” he observed.
“Same mother, different dads,” Ilona explained. “But yeah.”
“So you’ve really never read this?”
Ben smiled. He opened to the first page and began to read. At first Ilona groaned and complained a lot—especially when a new character was introduced. “How am I supposed to keep track of all these people?” she grumbled.
“Hobbits, not people.”
“Sandwich and Froyo. It sounds like the food court at the mall.”
“It’s Samwise and Frodo,” Ben said. “Do you want me to stop?”
Ilona said nothing, so Ben kept reading. He read until his throat got hoarse. Ilona got him a drink from the tiny closet-sized bathroom tucked in next to the wall of closets. The water was cool, though the plastic cup tasted faintly of toothpaste. Ilona curled up on her side and seemed to be waiting for him to continue. He was sitting on the bed now, his shoes resting carefully on one of the exposed corners of mattress—not on the sheets or comforter. It might have felt weird had there been anywhere else in the room to sit, but there wasn’t. He read until the sun coming through the thick pine boughs outside her window cast an orange glaze against the wall. He heard the car door and the engine turn over when Judy left for work, but he didn’t stop reading. He peeked over Ilona’s shoulder a few times to see if she had fallen asleep, but each time her eyes were wide open, though her breath was steady and even. He didn’t stop reading until his mom texted, asking in a roundabout way where he was and if he planned on coming home for dinner.
“I should go,” he said. “The elves are about to sing again anyway.”
Ilona made a face. “He could have left that part out. I don’t care how much you geek out on this, you can’t tell me you think the elf songs are interesting.”
“I think it’s interesting that Tolkien went to all the trouble to create them. You know, he made up all the languages and everything. This whole place was real to him. You should keep reading.” He couldn’t explain to her how important the books were to him, not without her busting out laughing. He wasn’t even sure he could put it into words, but it was the importance of a quest—something bigger and more important than the boring everyday details of his life. There were rules to be followed and brave acts to be committed, and above all, there was the possibility of total destruction if the quest was not completed. No matter how many times he read the books or watched the movies, he was hooked by the journey of Sam and Frodo and, above all else, by their loyalty and, yes, love that withstood every trial. But no, he didn’t really think Ilona would get that.
“I won’t,” Ilona said matter-of-factly. “Unless you want to come back and read more. I could probably handle that. Pick me up at work tomorrow. I’ll get some money off Judy for pizza.”