“He can’t be that specific,” said Lexie, jumping to his aid, but Raoul clicked, and said: “None. You didn’t even put up your hand.”
Kjersten looked at me, and grinned.
“All right, Raoul wins,” I admitted. “He’s amazing.”
“And the crowd goes wild!” said Raoul.
“Can we just order?” said Lexie, running her finger across the Braille menu. Maybe it was my imagination, but she was moving her finger a little too fast for her to actually read it. I’ve seen Lexie read before. I knew the pace of Braille—or at least her Braille. Kjersten was watching me watching her, so I looked away. Maybe a double date with Lexie wasn’t a good idea after all.
“They’re flying me out to Chicago next week,” Raoul said. “To do a national talk show.”
At that, Lexie closed her menu a little too hard. The sudden clap made Moxie rise to his feet, then sit back down again.
Raoul reached out, gently rubbed his hand along her sleeve, and then took her hand. “What’s wrong, baby?”
I grimaced at that. I couldn’t help myself. If you knew Lexie Crawley at all, you knew never to call her “baby.” That, and the fact that he was holding her hand, just kind of gave me mental dry heaves. I mean, sure, I was dating Kjersten, but I think the human brain isn’t designed to deal with situations like this.
I looked over at Kjersten, who noticed my reaction, and again I looked away.
“You don’t have to accept all those TV invitations,” Lexie told Raoul. “And you don’t have to echolocate for people all the time. You’re not a sideshow act.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well, you should.”
Suddenly I found my menu to be a place of safety. “I’m thinking maybe the ribs,” I said. “How about you, Kjersten?”
“Isn’t this a seafood place?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t like seafood.”
That’s when Kjersten’s phone rang. Even her ring tone was cool. NeuroToxin’s new hit. She pulled the phone out of her purse, looked at the number, then dropped it back in. “Not important,” she said, although the look on her face said otherwise.
The waiter took our orders, and once he was gone, small talk became big silence, until Raoul said, “I can echolocate the number of people in the room—wanna see?”
Lexie stood up suddenly. “I need to freshen up.” Moxie rose when she did, but she went off without him.
Even though Lexie knew this restaurant inside and out, there were enough people moving around to make navigating to the bathroom like flying through an asteroid field. I got up to escort her.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to Kjersten, who smiled at me politely. “I gotta go to the bathroom anyway.”
As Lexie and I neared the restroom, I heard Kjersten’s phone ring again. I glanced back just long enough to see her answer it.
“I like Raoul,” I told Lexie. “He’s kinda cool.”
“If he ever stops talking about himself.” We were at the restroom doors, but Lexie didn’t make a move to go in. “Having a special ability is all fine and good. But there’s got to be more to a person than sonar.”
“Yeah . . . I guess if he didn’t have that, he’d be pretty boring, huh.” I thought about how the conversation was all about him and his uniqueness back at the table, and I realized it wasn’t because he was conceited; it was because he had nothing else to talk about.
“Kjersten seems very nice,” Lexie said. “I’m happy for you . . .” I knew Lexie well enough to know there was an implied “but” at the end of that sentence. I waited for the but to present itself.
“But . . . there’s something about her,” Lexie finally said. “I don’t know, it’s not quite right.”
“You barely said a word to each other—how can you tell anything?”
“I have a sense about these things.”
“Being blind doesn’t make you psychic,” I said, sounding more annoyed than I intended to. No—actually I intended to sound exactly like that.
“There’s something in her tone of voice,” Lexie said, “something in the silences. It’s . . . off.”
“So what? She’s got family stuff going on, that’s all,” I said. “Her brother’s illness.”
“That may be part of the reason.”
“The reason for what?”
“For why she’s going out with you.”
I didn’t like the way this conversation was heading. “Maybe she just likes me—did you ever think of that?”
“Yes, but why does she like you?”
“Why does she need a reason? She just does! What—you think it’s strange that a girl who’s two years older than me, really smart, and looks like a supermodel would want to date me?” There are some things you just shouldn’t say out loud. “Okay, maybe it is strange. But what’s wrong with that? So she’s strange. So am I—so are you—since when was there a law against that?”
“Maybe it’s not you she likes. Maybe it’s the idea of you.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Well, maybe you should take the idea of yourself into that bathroom, because I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
She stormed into the bathroom without anyone’s help, and with the grace of someone who knew exactly where they were going. Any human asteroid in her way had better watch out. Well, I wasn’t going to walk her back. I pulled aside the busboy who couldn’t pour water right and told him to escort Miss Crawley back to the table when she was done.
She was jealous. That was it. Had to be. Just like I was jealous of her and her clicking celebrity boyfriend. But that would pass. Things were just getting started between Kjersten and me, and I wasn’t going to let Lexie ruin it.
When I got back to the table, Kjersten was putting on her coat.
“What’s the matter? You cold?”
“I’m sorry, Anthony. I’ve got to go.”
My first response was to look at Raoul. “What did you do?” I asked, figuring maybe he clicked her cleavage, and told her the size of her bra.
“Nothing,” said Raoul. “She had a phone call.”
“It was my father. I’m grounded.”
I just looked at her for a while in stunned denial, like the time I was a kid and my mother told me we’re not going to Disney World, on account of the airline suddenly decided to go out of business.
“What? You can’t get grounded in the middle of a date. That’s like . . . that’s like against the law.”
“I was grounded before the date,” she admitted. “I’m not supposed to be out, but my mom doesn’t care, and my dad wasn’t home.”
“Exactly—he’s never home, so that voids the grounding, right?”
“He’s home now.” She zipped up her jacket, sealing away the view of her amazing dress from me and the paparazzi.
“Can’t you be like . . . rebellious or something?”
“I was rebellious—that’s why I’m grounded.”
I found myself wondering what she had done, and coming up with things that were probably much more exotic than what really happened. Then I said in a voice far more whiny than I meant it to be, “Can’t you be rebellious with me?”
She looked at me, and I could tell that she really did want to stay. But I could also tell from that look that she wouldn’t. Then she kissed me, and by the time I recovered from the kiss, she was gone. The waiter, totally clueless, brought the meals and set them down, but right now it was just me and Raoul—and it was anyone’s guess if Lexie would come out of the bathroom after what I said to her.
I sat down, dazed by the crash-and-burn of it all, and Raoul says, “So do you want me to echolocate the number of people in the room, or not?”
10 Collateral Damage, Relative Humidity, and Lemon Pledge in the Dust Bowl of My Life
I want to make it absolutely clear that what happened to Gunnar’s neighbors was an accident—and for once, I get to share the blame with someone else.
With our dust-bowl due date just a few days away, Gunnar and I
were under a time constraint, and we were working too hard on this Steinbeck project to get marked down for being late. I have experience in that department, and know for a fact that there are teachers who measure lateness in microseconds on that world clock they got in England. And there’s no bottom to this pit. I actually once got a Z-minus on a late paper. I pointed out to the teacher that she coulda marked me even lower if she used the Russian alphabet, on account of it has something like thirty-three letters instead of twenty-six. She was impressed enough by the suggestion that she raised my grade to a Z-plus.
To avoid letter grades in the lower half of the alphabet, Gunnar and I needed to kill off the plants quickly to get our dust bowl rolling, so we used a lot of herbicide. Now Gunnar’s next-door neighbors were all ticked off because their yards were smelling like toxic waste. It was Sunday morning. The day after my not-quite-a-date with Kjersten. I really didn’t want to be there and have to face Mr. Ümlaut, who I held personally responsible for ruining my evening. And I didn’t want to face Kjersten just yet, because it was too soon after the walkout. But I had to go through the house to get to the backyard. I was hoping Gunnar would answer the door, but he was already working out back.
Kjersten answered the door.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Nice day.”
“Sunny.”
“Sun’s good.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway . . .”
“Right.”
I tried to put an end to the misery by moving toward the back door, but she wasn’t letting me. Not yet.
“Sorry about last night,” she said. “We’ll do it again, okay?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem.”
“No,” she said. “I mean it.”
And I could tell that she really did mean it. Deep down, I had kind of felt that a ruined evening meant ruined hopes. It was good to know that another, better date was still on the horizon.
“When’s your grounding over?” I asked.
“As soon as I get the grade back on my chemistry test tomorrow—and my father can see I didn’t need to skip my tennis tournament to study.”
I smiled. “And here I thought you cut school for a wild ski trip.” Which was one of my tamer scenarios. I took her hand and stood there for a long moment that, believe it or not, didn’t feel awkward at all, then I went out to the backyard.
There was all this cardboard in the yard, because today’s project was a cardboard shack for Steinbeck’s starving farmers. At the moment I arrived in our little dust bowl, Gunnar was being scolded by his next-door neighbor over the fence. “Look what you’ve done to my yard! It’s all dead!”
“It’s that time of year,” I offered, pointing out the dead leaves around her yard. “That’s why they call it ‘fall.’”
“Oh yeah?” she said. “What about the evergreens?”
She indicated some bushes way across the yard that had gone a sickly shade of brown. Then she looked bitterly down at some thorny, leafless bushes in front of her that could have just been dormant if we didn’t already know better—because if the herbicide had made it all the way across the yard, these nearby bushes were history.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve cultivated this rose garden?”
My next response would have been a short and sweet “Oops,” but Gunnar has last week’s vocabulary word, which I lack: eloquence.
“‘Only when the Rose withers can the beauty of the bush be seen,’” he told her. It shut her up and she stormed away.
“What does that even mean?” I asked after she was gone.
“I don’t know, but Emily Dickinson said it.”
I told him that quoting Emily Dickinson was just a little too weird, and he agreed to be more testosterone-conscious with his quotations. He looked over at the neighbors’ yard, surveying the ruins of the garden. “A little death never hurt anyone,” he said. “It gives us perspective. Makes us remember what’s important.”
I hadn’t been too worried about the about the neighbors’ plants dying until now. Collateral damage, right? Only this was more than just collateral damage—and only later did we realize why. See, guys all have this problem. It’s called the we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-directions problem. Gunnar and I had bought half a dozen jugs of herbicide, coated the plants with the stuff like we were flocking Christmas trees, and we were satisfied with the results. We could have done a commercial for the stuff . . . However, if we had read the directions, we would have seen that the stuff was concentrated—you know, like frozen orange juice: we were supposed to use one part herbicide to ten parts water. So basically we sprayed enough of the stuff to kill the rain forests.
Now all the lawns around Gunnar’s house, front and back, were going a strange shade of brown that was almost purple. Our dust bowl was spreading outward like something satanic.
When I got home, my mom wasn’t with my dad at the restaurant, like she usually is on Sunday afternoons. She was home, cleaning. This was nothing unusual—but the sheer intensity of the scouring had me worried—like maybe the toxic mold was back, and this time it was personal.
Turns out, it was worse.
“Aunt Mona is coming to visit,” Mom told me.
I turned to my sister Christina, who sat cross-legged on the couch, either doing homework or trying to levitate her math book. “No—tell me it’s not true!” I begged.
Christina just lowered her eyes and shook her head in the universal this-patient-can’t-be-saved gesture.
“How long?”
“How long till she comes, or how long will she stay?” Christina asked.
“Both.”
To which Christina responded, “Next week, and only God knows.”
It’s always that way with Aunt Mona. Her visits are more like wartime occupations. She’s the most demanding of our relatives—in fact, we sometimes call her “relative humidity,” on account of when Mona’s around, everybody sweats. See, Aunt Mona likes to be catered to—but lately the only catering Mom and Dad have been able to do is of the restaurant variety. Plus, when Aunt Mona arrives, all other things manage to get put on hold, and we’re all expected to “visit” with her while she’s here—especially those first couple of days. With the dust bowl due, tests in every class before Christmas vacation, another date to schedule with Kjersten, and Gunnar’s illness hovering like a storm, Aunt Mona was the last thing I needed.
Just so you know, Aunt Mona’s my father’s older sister. She has a popular business selling perfume imported from places I’ve never heard of, and might actually be made up—and she always wears her own perfume. I think she wears them all at one once, because whenever she visits, I break out in hives from the fumes, and the neighborhood clears of wildlife.
She’s very successful and business-minded. Nothing wrong with that—I mean, my friend Ira’s mom is all hard-core business, and she’s a nice, normal, decent human being. But Aunt Mona is not. Aunt Mona uses her success in cruel and unusual ways. You see, Aunt Mona isn’t just successful, she’s More Successful Than You, whoever you happen to be. And even if she’s not, she will find a way to make you feel like the pathetic loser you always feared you were, deep down where the intestines gurgle.
Aunt Mona works like 140-hour weeks, and frowns on anyone who doesn’t. She has a spotless high-rise condo in Chicago, and frowns on anyone who doesn’t. In fact, she spends so much time frowning and looking down her nose at people, she had a plastic surgeon change her nose and Botox her frown wrinkles.
It goes without saying, then, that Aunt Mona is the undisputed judge of all things Bonano—even though she changed her name to Bonneville because it sounded fancier, and because Mona Bonano sounded too much like that “Name Game” song. I’m sure as a kid she was constantly teased with “Mona-Mona-bo-bona, Bonano-fano-fo-fona.” And as if Bonneville wasn’t snooty enough, she added an accent to her first name, so now it’s not Mona, it’s Moná. I refuse on principle to ever pronounce it “Moná,” and I know she
resents it.
It turns out that Aunt Mona was considering moving her entire company to New York, so she was going to be here for a while. She could, of course, afford one of those fancy New York hotels, where the maids clean between your toes and stuff, but there’s this rule about family. It’s kind of like the Ten Commandments, and the Miranda rights they read you when you get arrested: Thou shalt stay with thy relatives upon every visit, and anything you say can and will be used against you for the rest of your life.
So Mom’s Lemon Pledging all the dining-room furniture until the wood shines like new, and she says to me, “You gotta be on your best behavior when Aunt Mona comes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I tell her, having heard it all before.
“You gotta treat her with respect, whether you like it or not.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And you gotta wear that shirt she gave you.”
“In your dreams.”
Mom laughed. “If that shirt’s in my dreams, they’d be nightmares.”
I had to laugh, too. The fact that Mom agreed with me that the pink-and-orange “designer” shirt was the worst piece of clothing yet devised by man somehow made it okay to wear it. Like now it was an inside joke, instead of just an ugly shirt.
I picked up one of her rags and polished the high part of the china cabinet that she had trouble reaching. She smiled at me, kinda glad, I guess, that I did it before she asked.
“So, do I gotta wear the shirt in public?”
“No,” she says. “Maybe,” she adds. “Probably,” she concludes.
I don’t argue, because what’s the use? When it comes to Aunt Mona, the odds of walking away a winner are worse than at the Anawana Tribal Casino. Anyway, I suppose wearing the shirt was better than Mom and Christina’s fate. They’d have to wear one of Aunt Mona’s perfumes.
Right around then the doorbell rang, and Mom looked up at me with wide eyes and froze. I know what she was thinking. Aunt Mona never showed up when scheduled. She would come early, she would come late, she would come on a different day altogether. But a whole week early?