“BEAR WITH ME.” Walter wipes the table with his napkin for the fiftieth time.
“I’m bearing.” I shove a tortilla chip into salsa.
“You wake up one morning and everything’s changed. Your mom isn’t your mom. Your room isn’t your room. The things you liked to do—robotics, Pokémon, skateboarding, physics—no longer give you a kick.”
“Physics has never given me a kick.”
“Strange protuberances appear on your body. Hair sprouts. You don’t recognize your own bedroom. I mean, there’s a poster with a cocker spaniel on it, for God’s sake. Things that used to be normal, like toothpaste and yogurt, seem poisonous and radioactive. It’s as if a priest has sprung out of your floor like a tree, and he’s giving you a sermon about your life, only it’s not your life. You’re getting a guilt trip for someone else’s life!”
“Where did the priest come from?” I finish the last chip. “I mean, priests don’t just grow out of the floor. Are you taking your medication?”
“The priest comes from reality.”
“There’s no priest in my reality.”
“Okay, Vern. A rabbi. A rabbi grows out of the floor.”
“You aren’t taking your medication, are you?”
Lila, the waitress, appears with a fresh basket of chips. For years, Sage and I have tried to figure out how old she is. She could be eighty, but her makeup... fake eyelashes, red lipstick. Looking at her, you’d swear you were in a bowling alley cocktail lounge instead of a Mexican restaurant. “You want to order?” she says.
“What’s the point?” Walter’s glasses are so thick, his eyes are magnified. “Food doesn’t help anything.”
Lila yawns. “No point.”
“I’ll have a black bean burrito, extra guacamole and sour cream,” I tell her.
“Like always,” she says.
“Walter’ll have a taco.”
“I guess this is Walter.”
“You’re a brain surgeon,” Walter says.
“I’m going to spit in your food.” She storms off.
“Did you notice her fingernails? They were, like, eight inches long,” Walter says.
“They’re fake.”
“She sounds Russian. What’s a Russian doing working in a Mexican restaurant?”
“Where was I?”
“Your mom isn’t your mom anymore?”
“I used to love my mom. I thought her suffering was touching. But this mom is like a weight on me.”
“That’s because you’re a teenager.”
“My point exactly. We’ve grown up. I’m not me anymore. You’re not you. I mean, you used to giggle, Vern. You were all skinny and flexible. Now, you look kind of buff, if you want to know the truth.”
“I’ve been lifting weights.”
“That’s what I mean. You’re not you.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Like, I don’t think a girl has been interested in me in all my years of high school. But the other day, when I got off the stage, Cassandra Parks rushes up to me and plants a wet one on my mouth! With a tongue! A tongue, Walter. Randomly.”
“That’s good, right? A tongue is good.”
“Cassandra is a babe in this fabricated kind of way. But her voice... Her voice makes me feel like there are bugs crawling under my skin.”
“I saw a foreign film where ants crawl out of this guy’s hand.”
“Let’s try to stay on topic. Me.”
“Here’s your burrito.” Lila brings the food.
“Thanks. You’re a doll,” I tell her.
“And your taco.”
“Did you spit on it?” Walter examines it.
“Why bother?”
Walter pushes the taco toward me. “Why did you run for president anyway?”
“Because Sage asked me.”
“Do you do anything she asks?”
“Pretty much. I’m her guardian angel. I’ve been taking care of her since she was four. I even saved her life a couple of times. And because... I am madly in love with her.”
“So, no Cassandra Parks.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should. I mean, Sage thinks of me as this big brother slash next-door neighbor. If she saw me with someone, maybe she’d think of me as date material. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Sage doesn’t seem like the other girls. She’s completely clueless, which is good. Because what the other girls are clued into is nasty stuff, like celebrity mating habits. Sage is real.”
And she’s got a thing for Roger Willis, I want to tell him, but I don’t want to murder his appetite any further. “Eat your taco.”
“Is Sage’s mom still a wacko?” he asks.
“Totally. One day she’s pleasant and seminormal, the next I can hear her screaming her head off at all hours. She makes you look normal. Eat your taco.”
Reluctantly, he takes a bite. “This is pretty good.”
“I’m supposed to be applying to colleges and planning my future, and all I can think about is Sage.”
“You know what you need?”
“I don’t mind if you swallow before you talk.”
“Seriously.” Lettuce drops out of his mouth.
“What?”
“A pet monkey.”
“You are so random.”
“They can cook their own meals and do chores. I saw one on TV that could knit. You gotta put it in a diaper, though. They are not into potty training.”