Gus was in the kitchen before me, filling up his silver go-cup with coffee, milk, and four sugars. Gus has been drinking coffee since he was five, but it never stunted his growth. He’s so much taller than me that one time he talked us into an R movie by saying that he was my babysitter. He eats breakfast with us every day because his mom leaves early for work, and it’s embarrassing to still have a nanny, which he did until last year. His dad lives on the East Side with a new wife Gus calls Buffy even though her name is Helen.
“Oatmeal?” Gus said, raising his eyebrows.
Normally, you can’t pay me to eat oatmeal. (Okay, I guess you can. One summer, my dad told me he’d give me five dollars for every bowl of oatmeal I ate, saying it would help me grow, and I ate two weeks’ worth, bought an Xbox game, and never looked back.) Oatmeal, basically, is foul.
But now I wanted oatmeal the way I want pizza on a Friday night on the way to the movies. “I’m freezing,” I said, which is weird because our apartment is so overheated you can wear shorts and a T-shirt when it’s twenty below outside. “I think a nice bowl of oatmeal will warm me up. I want those little rivers.”
“You know, how the brown sugar melts into little rivers before you add milk?”
Gus shook his head. He was around for the cash-for-oatmeal summer. He’s been around for everything. He’s been my best friend since he moved into my building in first grade.
Or at least he used to be. Last term he got pulled off the eighth-grade basketball team to play on varsity, and now he sits with the basketball team at lunch. Gus used to hate to go to East Hampton with his dad and Buffy on weekends, but now when they’re out there, he plays basketball with Trip Hall, who is a sophomore, and whose family has so much money that even after his dad went to prison for insider trading, they still have a beach house with two swimming pools, and a big apartment on Eighty-eighth Street, right around the corner from school. Gus hangs out in that apartment now after practice, and he gets invited to parties there. On Valentine’s Day, Siobhan Clarke, a girl in tenth grade who is one of Trip’s friends, sent Gus a carnation with the message: “Guess who?” Here’s what I got at school on Valentine’s Day: a carnation from Gus with a card that said, “You owe me two dollars for the flower.” Ha-ha.
Sometimes I wish Gus wasn’t funny. Then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad that he’s slowly stopping being friends with me.
He put his hand into the box of chocolate crunch cereal. “Since when do you eat oatmeal?” he said.
“Since now,” I muttered. I mutter a lot to Gus these days. I don’t want to talk to Gus about his ditching me at school—it’s too embarrassing. But it’s hard for me not to act like I’m mad at him for no reason.
“I thought you hated it.”
“Did you know my grandpa died?” I said.
“Grands? Oh my gosh.”
“No, the other one.”
Dad started bellowing from the hall, “Okay everyone, it’s time to go!”
“I didn’t even know you had another grandpa,” Gus said.
“Well, I did.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“Let’s go!” shouted Dad. He sounded normal, but he looked kind of weird. Pale. His hair was messed up, like he’d run his hand through it and hadn’t smoothed it back down.
Gus grabbed his coffee and headed for the hall. I still had to brush my teeth and my hair, which, when I caught a glimpse of it in the microwave door, was ridiculous. I wear my curly hair long because it stands up on top of my head and makes me look taller. But my dad is right about it. Today I could’ve been Ronald McDonald, except with brown hair instead of red. And I hadn’t had time to take a single bite of oatmeal.
By the time I rushed into our front hall, where the elevator comes, carrying my half-finished earth science poster, my book bag, my cello, and the oatmeal that I’d decided I would try to eat in the cab, my dad was holding the elevator door, and Gus and Julia were waiting inside. Julia’s hair was slicked back, her shoulders straight under the backpack that holds all her important fat textbooks that she has no problem remembering to bring home every day, a fact my dad reminds me of constantly. I noticed for the first time that Gus had grown taller than Julia. How could he keep growing and growing, while I never budged past five feet?
Just as I was having that thought, I heard the high-pitched screeching that is supposed to let you know it’s time to close the elevator door. The annoying sound coupled with the annoying cold feeling made me feel, well, annoyed. How was I going to get away from this? I wanted to put my hands up to block my ears, but my hands were full—I’d slung the cello strap over my shoulder, the poster board was rolled up under my arm, I was carrying my book bag in one hand, and I’d balanced the bowl of oatmeal in the palm of the other. I tried lifting the arm holding the oatmeal up to my face. Great idea, right?
The bowl slipped instantly out of my hands, and hit the tile floor, breaking—duh—down the middle. As oatmeal oozed into the cracks between the tiles, my backpack, which had fallen next to it, started to get wet. I was stepping on the earth science poster board, and the cello strap had slipped down my arm and was digging into the inside of my elbow. The elevator had moved from screeching to a bleating sound that reminds me of the foghorn they blow at soccer games when Gus has scored so many goals they’re sending kids like me in for substitutions. My head was pounding. My dad’s eyes traveled from the oatmeal on the floor to my face. “Court,” he said. “I have to be in court.”
“Will. Someone,” I shouted. “Stop. That. Infernal. Noise.”
Everybody stared. It was the yelling. I don’t really yell. And the word “infernal.” I guess no one expected me to know what it meant. Now that I think about it, I don’t.
After a second, Julia and Gus stepped out of the elevator. The doors closed and the clanging stopped. Julia said, “I’ll get a towel,” and ran for the kitchen. Gus said, “Here,” and lifted my cello from my shoulder and set it down by the elevator door. I was still really cold, but having the cello moved was a big help.
“I have something of importance to impart to you,” I heard myself whisper to my dad when Gus’s back was turned. Of importance? To impart? These weren’t real words. They were vocabulary. “I’m going to leave home someday,” I hissed. “And you’re going to spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have loved me more. The question will keep you alive. And the question will kill you. Are you prepared for that?”
My dad’s small brown eyes grew large. It was almost painful to look at him. But I was distracted by the cold feeling that was getting worse. And by the fact that I had no idea what I was saying. What does “impart” even mean?
But I didn’t have time to think about the strangeness of what I said, because now the cold was growing extreme. Was there a window open? Was the cold coming from the elevator? I felt like I was standing near something dangerous. Maybe the elevator was a giant tunnel of cold, and I could get sucked into it if I took so much as a step toward it.
“Michael,” my dad started, but before he could continue, Julia was crouching down between us to wipe up the oatmeal, and Gus was picking up my earth science poster board from the floor. “Michael,” my dad said again, but the moment had passed—his voice had lost its I’m-figuring-it-out tone, and gone back to a you’re-in-trouble tone. He grabbed the poster from Gus with one hand, and my elbow with the other. “Downstairs,” he said. “Now.” His cheeks were burning bright red, like Julia’s when she danced Cinderella even though she had the flu.
Dad was still holding my arm while George the doorman hailed our cab. “No Xbox,” Dad said through gritted teeth. “No Game Boy. No allowance. No TV. I don’t know what is going on with you today, but I’ve just about had it. This is my house, and if nothing else, you will respect me in it.”
“But Dad—,” I started. I wanted to tell him that I was freezing, that it wasn’t my fault, that I took back what I’d said. I wanted to tell him he hadn’t said anything about Grandpa. But as soon as he let go of my elbow, I felt myself beginning to warm—a little. I slipped into the backseat of the cab between Gus and Julia, feeling warmer still. My dad slid the cello across our three laps and closed the door without saying good-bye.
“What is going on?” said Julia as the cab shot forward one block and stopped at a red light. “Michael, are you okay?” I looked straight out in front of me. I didn’t want to explain what I’d said to my dad, those strange words that didn’t feel like something I’d been thinking. I wanted to wait to talk until the cold feeling went away completely.
But it didn’t. The road through the park dipped down into a trench that cuts through the sunny green lawns of the park. All we could see out of the cab windows were old stone walls on either side, and above us, the bare branches of trees, and a low, gray sky. I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering.