JUNE’S PARENTS WERE AT SOME BUSINESS THING, so she made her own dinner: a cheese and green pepper omelet, a handful of Ritz crackers, and a kosher pickle. She put the food on a blue plate and set it on the table. The yellow and green omelet and the orange crackers and the dull green pickle stared back at her. Suddenly, it did not look like food; it looked like a very bad painting. Her appetite deserted her. She scraped the omelet into the trash, put the crackers back in their box, and returned the pickle to its jar.
Later, she worked her way through a tray of chocolate chip cookies as she flipped through television channels. At one point she paused at an infomercial for Sani-Made, the company that had hired her father as a consultant. Sani-Made had started out as a diaper service, then branched out into other baby products like cribs and toys and pacifiers. In the infomercial, they were selling Gerald Genius, a $49.95 CD set that supposedly would make your baby smarter.
June’s father was a workout specialist. It had nothing to do with working out, as in exercising. Elton Edberg was hired by companies that were in trouble. He helped them work their way back to profitability. Most of his jobs only lasted a few months, which was why June had lived so many places.
The infomercial showed an animation of a baby listening happily to his brightly colored Sani-Made CD player, then toddling over to a whiteboard and scrawling out a complex mathematical formula. She could see why the company was in trouble.
The first thing her dad had done when he’d started at Sani-Made was fire half the employees. Then he’d gone into his usual shtick about moving forward, always forward, never looking back, creating a viable future, thinking outside the box, thinking positive, thinking wealthy. He liked to say, “If we can dream it, we can do it!”
June clicked the remote. World War II documentary. Click. Law & Order rerun. Click. Leave It to Beaver. June Cleaver, the perfect 1950s housewife, was making a nutritious meal for Wally and Beaver.
June ate another cookie. Click.
One thing Wes hated about himself was that he was always rethinking things he’d said or done, and then figuring how it should have gone. It drove him crazy. For example, he kept thinking about talking to that girl, June, and blurting out that he had to go home to babysit his sister. He was sure she had known he was lying. He should have said, “The B and B has excellent éclairs.”
She would have said, “Let’s go!”
And he would have said, “I’m afraid I’m not able to today, as I have other obligations. Perhaps another time?”
That would have been better. Except he didn’t really talk like that.
Or, when she had asked him to guess her thoughts, he could have said something besides “double bacon cheeseburger.” He could have said, “Molecules.” Or, if he’d brought some money with him to school, then he could have offered to buy her an éclair. Better yet, if he hadn’t stopped to tie his shoe, then he wouldn’t have had to deal with her at all. The last thing he needed was another girlfriend. The whole idea of breaking up with Izzy was to get some freedom. And besides, the reason he hadn’t brought any money to school was so that he wouldn’t spend it on something stupid like éclairs.
And why had he told her his middle name was August? He hoped she got it, that he was kidding.
He was still thinking about all that when he got home, so he went straight to the garage to admire the results of his cleaning project. Over the previous three afternoons he had swept, scrubbed, and organized every part of the garage — even to the point of painting the floor light gray. Wes sat on one of the stools and let himself be soothed by his surroundings. An island of orderliness and cleanliness.
He kept thinking about his conversation with Aqua Girl, and the more he thought about it, the more unhappy he became. He didn’t even like her, not really. But for some reason he kept seeing her face, those too-wide eyes and blond hair and big lips — not fakey lips like from collagen injections, but lips just a fraction bigger than you would expect, like her eyes. And that little scar on her chin.
After a time he succeeded in forcing his thoughts away from her and onto another vexing problem, that of Jerry Preuss. If Wes wasn’t careful, Jerry would have him putting up lawn signs, or walking around wearing a sandwich board. Still, Jerry had been his friend since kindergarten, so Wes couldn’t just blow him off. He might have to actually do something. Wes stared at the perfectly clean, freshly painted garage floor and focused his mind on the problem. A few minutes later he went to the house, where he found Paula sitting at the kitchen table eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich.
“You’re going to spoil your appetite,” he said, parroting their mother.
Paula stuck a peanut butter-coated tongue out at him. Wes picked up the phone and dialed Jerry’s number.
“I’ve been thinking about your problem,” Wes said when he answered.
“I have a problem?”
“Yeah, you want to get elected president.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“T-shirts.”
Jerry did not immediately reply.
“T-shirts cost money,” he said at last.
“Donations,” Wes said. “You ask people for money, then offer to do them special favors if you get voted into office.” When Jerry once again did not immediately reply, Wes added, “It’s brilliant.”
Jerry said, “You know that girl June?”
Wes was confused. “What about her?”
“I was telling her about me running for class president. She had an idea too. She said I should promise people a four-day school week.”
“Just promise it, I guess, then worry about how to do it later on. Like real politicians.”
“Oh … so … are you into her?”
“I don’t know,” said Jerry. “Maybe.”