So I caved. I went to a Reach For The Top practice at lunch today. Farley was so excited, he did a little dance. Totally embarrassing.
When we walked into the room, Alberta was already in her seat. Today she was wearing a purple bowling shirt. The name Loreen was stitched above a pocket. She matched it with a pair of pink stretch pants. Even though I barely glanced at her, Farley whispered in my ear, “You like her.”
“Do not.”
“Do.”
“Do not.”
“Do.”
“Do not.”
“Do.” Et cetera, et cetera.
I sat beside Ambrose, who was wearing his ugly pom-pom hat.
“What’s your name again?” he asked.
“Henry.”
“Henry what?”
I hesitated. “Henry Larsen.”
“O or E?”
My neck muscles tensed. All it would take is a Google search – “Larsen Port Salish” – and they’d find out everything.
“Shore, early, nearly, sly, real, hole, heal, shone, share, shale, shy, rye, hen, hay, hare, has.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Duh. They’re anagrams,” he said, like it was obvious. “Using some of the letters in your name.”
“Oh.”
“Ambrose is a Scrabble champion,” Parvana piped up, stroking his arm.
“Oh.”
“I’m ranked twelfth in BC.”
“Oh.”
Mr. Jankovich entered. “Henry, nice to have you back. Let’s get started.”
These are the questions I remember:
1) What volcano is on the island of Sicily? (Mount Etna – we all knew that one, but Shen buzzed in first.)
2) What is the capital of Sicily? (Palermo. Koula.)
3) Sicily is surrounded by what body of water? (The Mediterranean Sea. Answered by yours truly.)
4) This actor has played Jack Sparrow, Ichabod Crane, and Gilbert Grape. (Johnny Depp. You can guess who answered that one.)
There was also a series of “Who Am I?” questions. We kept getting a new clue until we could figure it out.
Clue A: I grew up in Monroeville, Alabama.
Clue B: I was a tomboy.
Clue C: I was good friends with another literary icon, Truman Capote.
Clue D: I won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961.
Jerome buzzed in after the fourth clue and gave the right answer: Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Before I knew it, the bell rang and it was time to leave.
It wasn’t the absolute worst way to pass an hour.
After school, Farley followed me out the front doors and fell into step beside me. “I thought you lived up the hill,” I said.
“I do.”
“Then why are you walking this way?”
“I’m hoping you’ll invite me over.”
“I can’t,” I said. We hadn’t invited anyone over since we’d moved in.
“Why not?”
There were a million white lies I could have told, like, “I have way too much homework,” or, “My dad’s home sick.”
Instead I said, “The place is a mess.”
Lame.
Farley just grinned. “Not a problem. I love messes!”
So Farley walked with me to our apartment. We started out on tree-lined residential streets. Then, after a few blocks, we turned left onto Broadway. We walked past four produce stores, five coffee shops, three bookstores, and a gazillion sushi restaurants. We passed the billiard hall, where men in sweater-vests stood outside, speaking in Greek and drinking coffee from tiny cups. Farley was trying to tell me the entire story line from Season 1 of “Battlestar Galactica,” but I tuned him out.
Then I saw the Crazy Lady up ahead. She was outside the Vietnamese restaurant, wearing a purple dress, red kneesocks, and hot pink Crocs. She sang tunelessly while strumming on a plastic dollar-store guitar.
The Crazy Lady is there most days when I walk home from school, and the sight of her always makes me queasy.
“C’mon,” I said to Farley, “let’s cross here.” I didn’t tell him we’d have to cross back a block later. I do this all the time to avoid the Crazy Lady.
When we got to our dingy gray building, my stomach was in knots. I took Farley up the back stairs so we wouldn’t run into Mr. Atapattu. I unlocked the door, and we stepped inside.
Suddenly I felt ashamed. The beige carpeting is covered in burn marks. The white walls haven’t been white for years. Everything looks dingy and worn. Plus, we brought all the furniture from our three bedroom house and tried to fit it into a one bedroom + den, so it’s jammed with stuff that’s too big for the rooms. You have to squeeze your way past the big brown leather couch and the big brown leather La-Z-Boy and the big oak coffee table to get to the galley kitchen.
But Farley just said, “Wow, what a cool apartment!” Then he made a beeline for the shelf that held my PS3 games. He grabbed Call of Duty 4 off the shelf. “Wanna play?”
“Sure.”
As I loaded up the game, he said, “What happened in here?” He pointed to a particularly large burn mark on the carpet, which we’d tried to cover with the coffee table.
“Rumor has it, the previous tenant had a meth lab,” I told him. “He got caught because he started a fire one day.”
“Wow. You’re living in a former drug den!” He sounded impressed.
Confession: Playing Call of Duty 4 with Farley was fun. I hadn’t played with a real live human being in ages. After a while, Farley said, “I need to use your facilities.” It took me a moment to realize he meant the bathroom. I felt ashamed again because my dad and I haven’t cleaned in there once since we moved in. I might keep my own room neat and tidy, but cleaning toilets is not my thing. Also, the toilet seat has a crack in it – if you need to sit down, you have to be very careful or risk getting your bum pinched.
Sure enough, a few minutes later I heard a yelp. But when I went down the hall to investigate, Farley wasn’t in the bathroom anymore.
He was in my bedroom.
My heart started pounding. Where else had he been? What else had he seen?
He was staring at my Great Dane poster. “You’re a GWF fan, too!” he exclaimed. “This is incredible. We have so much in common, we could practically be related. Separated at birth or what!” I was speechless. There were so many ways that this made no sense. “Except my favorite is Vlad the Impaler,” he continued.
“Vlad the Impaler?” I blurted. “Are you nuts? That guy is pure evil.”
“Exactly! Every time he steps into the ring, you know it’s gonna get interesting. Vlad means drama. Did you see last week, when he clotheslined Jett Turbo?”
“Duh, of course I saw it!”
We argued for a few more minutes about the Great Dane versus Vlad the Impaler, then Farley saw the time on my alarm clock. “Yikes, I’ve got to go. Maria will start worrying.”
“Is Maria your mom?” I asked as we headed back to the living room.
“No, she’s my nanny.”
I laughed because I thought he was joking.
“My parents live in Hong Kong. Maria lives here, with me. She’s from the Philippines.”
“You’re serious? You don’t live with your parents?”
He nodded. “They bought the house here two years ago ’cause they wanted me to go to school in Canada. And also because having property here is a good investment. Maria was my nanny in Hong Kong, too, so she moved here with me.” He grabbed his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “That’s something else we have in common.”
“What?”
“We’re both onlies.”
I looked at him blankly.
“I’m an only child; you’re an only child.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
Once he was gone, I had to sit down.
In Port Salish, Mom had an entire wall devoted to family photographs: Jesse, tall and skinny and brown-haired like Mom, and me, short and stocky with bright red hair like Dad, burying Dad up to his neck in sand at the beach; Jesse, Mom, and me around the fire on one of our camping trips; Jesse and me and Dad holding up an enormous salmon we’d caught fishing; plus all the ugly school portraits that tracked us through the years.
Dad and I haven’t unpacked those pictures yet. They’re in our storage locker downstairs. In fact, unless you know about the shoebox, there’s hardly any evidence in our apartment that Jesse ever existed.
This is fine by me.
After all, if your brother is dead, you technically don’t have a brother anymore.
So I guess I didn’t lie to Farley when I said “Yeah.”
I am an only child. Jesse saw to that.
11:00 p.m.
INTRIGUING FACT: Cremations were done as far back as the Stone Age. They just burned their corpses on open fires.
These days, most cremations are done in computer-controlled steel ovens. I know because I’ve read all about it online. A body is put into a coffinlike container made of particleboard, then slid into the chamber like a really big roast beef or something. Temperatures reach around 1000°! The corpse takes about one and a half hours to burn.
When it’s all done, about three to five pounds of bone fragments remain. Those bone fragments are put into a “cremulator,” a machine that grinds them into ashes.
Some people buy a nice urn to hold a loved one’s ashes. Other people sprinkle them into the ocean, or under a special tree. Some, like “Star Trek” creator Gene Rodenberry, have their ashes shot into outer space. Seriously, he did that.
Jesse’s ashes are under my dad’s bed.
I guess that makes us sound like awful people. But, really, we have no idea what to do with him. Put him in an urn and stick him in the living room, so we have to be reminded of him and what he did every single time we’re in there? No, thanks. Sprinkle him in the ocean, so he can be eaten by fish? So that maybe a tiny bit of Jesse could be served to me one night in my salmon? No way. Bury his ashes in a cemetery? No. Jesse was mildly claustrophobic; that would be cruel.
So, for now, he lives under Dad’s bed in a shoebox. It’s kind of like purgatory, I guess. Not heaven, not hell, but a place in between.
Come to think of it, I guess we’re living in purgatory, too.