In twelfth grade, Robert was the oldest student on a school bus crowded with elementary kids swinging their lunch boxes and middle school creeps carving their names into the seats and throwing paper. The driver pulled over at least once a week and screamed at his passengers to sit down and shut up before he swerved off the road and got them all killed. The high schoolers who could afford cars zoomed around in Jeeps and Civics. Mira Wohl, arguably the school’s most popular girl, drove a hand-me-down BMW everyone knew she’d nicknamed Stella. Mira gave her three best friends and her boyfriend, Alex Winters, a ride every day. They all jeered and gave the bus the finger. Robert couldn’t help but feel that those digits were raised at him.
Robert ambled off the bus and met Joey Kovach crouching by the bike rack, locking up his rickety dirt bike, a secondhand one not likely to tempt any thief. Joey was a squat kid, a foot shorter than Robert at least, a stumpy bulldog to Robert’s slim greyhound. They were always in the slow classes together, but unlike Robert, Joey never knew the answer to anything.
“Man.” Joey sighed and stood up. They slapped hands, gripped hard, slapped again. “Can’t believe it’s Monday.”
“What? We have school today?” Robert cracked.
They wandered into the building. Yannatok High School held only about 375 students, nearly all of whom had attended classes together since kindergarten. Even though Robert and Joey had been friends since elementary school, Robert hadn’t ever invited Joey out to the trailer. He’d never seen Joey’s place, either, so Robert guessed that was just how guys were sometimes.
They shared their first two classes, through which Joey mostly slept and Robert doodled on his shoes. Then Joey had Strategic Reading and Robert had Scientific Concepts. The slow-kid classes. The ones where you almost have to try to fail. And in a school as small as Yannatok High, if you failed, odds were you would have the same teacher again next year. Often, Robert’s teachers didn’t want to punish themselves with another year with him, so they bent over backward to pass him: inventing extra-credit assignments fit for a third grader, taking work months late, scratching out requirements, and just plain ignoring his mistakes and missing work. Finding that magic point to bump his F to a D− and shuffle him off to their next unfortunate colleague.
Joey and Robert reunited for the early lunch, at a ludicrous ten fifteen. Still, they both shoveled in all the french fries a free lunch ticket could buy and slurped down chocolate milk.
“Did you read the article for Ms. Tell’s class?” Robert asked.
“Naw, man.”
“Me neither, but we talked about it today,” Robert told him. Several times Robert had flung his hand into the air to ask a question, until Ms. Tell had finally told him that many of the answers could be found in the article. Might he want to read it? He’d gone back to drawing Martians on his shoe’s white rubber edge. “It’s about living on Mars. People could go to Mars, set up colonies, but never come back. Ever.”
Joey’s brow furrowed. “If you could get there, why couldn’t you get back?”
“Take too long. You’d die on the way,” Robert explained. “And you’d have to find some way to make fuel on Mars, ’cause you couldn’t transport it. Weighs too much.”
Joey grunted noncommittally. Robert continued. “So she has you write about whether or not you’d do it.”
“Naw. Food probably sucks. And it’s hot as balls.”
Robert looked out over the cafeteria, at the guys wadding up straw wrappers and winging them at each other, the girls crowded around someone’s pink cell phone. “I don’t know. If I could take my dog, I might seriously consider it.”
“You would. I’m gonna start lifting,” Joey said. He flexed and his T-shirt sleeve barely shifted, a flag signaling surrender on a windless day. “Get big.”
“I should, too,” Robert said, reluctantly abandoning thoughts of a hypothetical Martian colony. “Get ready for the army.”
“I’ve got a busted-up bench at home.” Joey spun his milk cap like a coin. It tottered and fell. “A jump rope, too.”
“You can use water bottles for weights,” Robert offered. His mom sometimes pumped water-filled sixteen-ounce Diet Coke bottles while she watched TV. Had to be able to rein in those feisty horses. Somehow this seemed embarrassing, even though Joey wouldn’t have had a clue, so he added, “I saw it on TV.”
Mira Wohl drifted in. The crush of girls around the phone parted to make her its new center. What was the word? He’d heard it in science, every year since seventh grade. Nucleus. Making everyone else protons or something. What if Robert just went over there and talked to her? Asked her if she would, theoretically, ever go to Mars?
Mira piled her hair, strawberry-hued like Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man, on top of her head and then let it fall again, like a red wave.
“Good call.” Joey flicked his milk cap again. Robert tried to set his spinning, too, but it only wobbled once and fell to the table. Joey returned his tray, and Robert sat alone for the last few minutes of lunch. He glanced at Mira. Now all he could see of her was a swatch of that glossy hair. He could answer his own question. Mira Wohl would never want to go to Mars.
After a few more tries, he twisted his wrist in just the right way, and the milk cap spun like a top, like a propeller.
That afternoon, they had an assembly about taking the SATs. Barry took to the stage and explained registration dates and test centers and score reports. Robert hid in the back. He jiggled his knees and wondered if Barry was still riding motorcycles. The district was so small that he had an office in both the middle and the high school; Robert couldn’t seem to escape the guy.
Barry said, “Everyone should take the test at least once, no matter what you think your post-graduation plans are. Just to see what happens.”
No way was Robert going to come to school on a Saturday and bubble in a Scantron for three hours just to see what happened. He knew what would happen. He’d bomb the test and then his mother would be pissed she’d wasted the registration money.
Post-graduation plans. What the hell would be left for him on Yannatok when he was finally unleashed from this box of a building? He usually couldn’t think one hour into the future, let alone years. Would graduation roll around, and after a few photos in his dorky cap and gown and dinner at Red Lobster, he’d just go back to the trailer with his mother and play on the computer? Where could he possibly get a job? Bagging groceries at Shipley’s? Would he walk there every day, dodging tourists snaking down the no-shoulder roads, stocking shelves in a fluorescent-lit cavern? Deb had inherited the trailer. Would he be willed it, too, one day? Was his life sentence already in the making?
His knees shook. He clamped a palm over each one. Why hadn’t he thought of any of this before?
After the assembly, Joey sidled up beside Robert at his locker. Robert started to take a step away—why had Joey gotten so close?—but then he realized that Joey was showing him something that was just nudging out of his pants pocket. The childproof top of an amber pill bottle. “Check it out, man.”
“Cool,” Robert replied. He didn’t know what else to say or what Joey’s point was. Joey smoked weed, but drugs barely interested Robert. He was too poor to afford anything that would get him high. He shoved the SAT papers into his locker.
Joey leaned in again. “Adderall, dude. You got some more, right? Give them to me and I’ll cut you in. I’m selling mine for two bucks a pill.”
So that was why Joey’s schoolwork had been even worse than usual.
“You need to be popping those yourself, bro,” Robert said. Joey rolled his eyes and Robert tried to joke. “You’re getting dumber every day!”
“Whatever. I’ll find somebody else who wants to make money.”
“Hold up, man,” Robert said. At least one nearly full bottle haunted a kitchen cabinet, behind a family-sized bottle of Aleve and some expired antibiotics.
He needed that money. If he put every penny toward a car, then he could get off this island and away from that trailer, looming like one of those aboveground crypts.
After school, he hunted in the kitchen cabinets for his old bottle of Adderall. All that turned up was miscellaneous junk: rubber bands, safety pins, dead batteries, loose change. Robert pocketed the nickels and dimes and wound a thick rubber band around his wrist. He continued with his quest, snapping it against his skin as he wandered the trailer, Hulk fast at his heels.
He wondered if Deb had hidden the pills to prevent him from the very scheme he was trying to pull off.
Robert didn’t make a habit of going through his mom’s stuff. Her possessions were either boring or horrifying. They already lived with the mutual indignity of a shared indoor clothesline, leaving his boxers and Deb’s bras to stretch across the living room, a banner of embarrassment he had to duck under to reach the computer. Her closet floor was littered with battered Sue Grafton paperbacks and mismatched shoes. Sparkly, strappy clothes she never wore. Zero interest to him.
But when he opened the bottom drawer of her narrow nightstand, he hit the jackpot. Instead of the one bottle he expected, three rattled around the drawer, soldiers alive and well, all prescribed to him. Some had only a handful of pills filled at the Ready Drug, way back when he was in middle school. Robert shook a bottle like a maraca. The blue circles were tinted sea-green through the amber plastic.
Why was his mom collecting Addies the way other mothers collected Tupperware?
Maybe she kept them at the ready, in case of an eighth-grade-level academic code red.
But that didn’t seem like Deb, who’d been so insistent that Robert stay unmedicated back in middle school, when his grades had been at their most dire. And hadn’t quite a few do-or-die, hanging-off-the academic-ledge-by-a-curled-pinkie situations already come to pass, without any suggestion of pharmaceutical intervention by his mother?
Maybe she had plans to sell them herself.
Maybe she’d looked at the prescription and seen the cash to buy a horse, a new truck, a shiny new pair of boots.
He thought about flushing the pills down the toilet and leaving her to discover the empty bottles. Put her in a pretty bad spot, since to accuse him of taking her secret stash she’d have to cop to having had it in the first place.
Robert took out a pill, rolled it between his fingers. The tablet left the faintest chalky residue in the whorls of his fingerprints. His hands must be sweating.
But who would his mom even sell to? The other ladies at dispatch? Seemed unlikely. Her horse buddies? Robert had heard that Addies killed your appetite, and that was why girls bought them.
Was Deb taking them herself to try to lose a few pounds? His mom was already pretty thin. And she was so insistent that Robert not be a “druggie.” But then he thought about her late nights on the phones and her long days at the stables.
Pain had begun to radiate from the center of his forehead. He returned the loose pill to its bottle and pocketed it. Then he slammed the drawer shut.
He slipped the pills to Joey at the bike rack the next morning.