When we walked away from them, Mom looked back over her shoulder to make sure Mrs. Shaeffer and Rebecca were out of earshot, and then she said, “If you’re too sick to attend school, how can you be in the mall gorging on Chinese stir-fry? It’s disgusting the way she lets her daughter put on so much weight and blames asthma. So much of life is mental, Nanette. Remember that. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about your mind—or your physique. How did we get so lucky?”
“Why did you push Mrs. Shaeffer so hard to remodel her kitchen?” I asked, and just as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted saying them, fearing that my mother would take it as an attack.
Without missing a beat, Mom said, “I bring beauty, class, and style into the homes of otherwise unremarkable women. Help their self-esteem. Did you know scientific research has proved that a married couple’s sex life improves after a home is redecorated? It’s true.”
It was obvious that my mother completely believed this and was now selling to me, so I didn’t say anything else, even though I secretly wanted to live in an old, outdated home that felt lived in and full of mystery and history and magic—unlike our home, which was sort of like living in a regularly updated catalog. I didn’t want to imagine what that did or didn’t do for my parents’ bedroom experience.
My dad does something with the stock market for a living, but I’m not exactly sure what. He’s always talking about the ups and downs of the various economies around the world the way other people talk about the weather, and I get the sense that the “global economy” is just some never-ending story adults tell themselves. I understand the basic stock market principle of “buy low and sell high,” but that’s about it, even though my father has tried to get me more interested in my portfolio.
I started playing soccer when I was five years old. All the girls in my neighborhood were on a team called the Rainbow Dragons. I liked the smell of grass and being outside and eating orange wedges at halftime. It was nice that everyone came to watch, and it was fun to kick the ball as hard as you could. For some reason, I could kick the ball more accurately than everyone else, and I started to score just about all of the team’s goals. I became a fast runner, and I wasn’t afraid to head the ball, either, even when the coach punted it high up into the air and everyone else would run away. I would always run toward the ball and strike it before it could strike me.
And so my dad made up this game where he’d invest one hundred dollars into my portfolio every time I pushed a soccer ball past the opposing goalie and into the net. When I was little, I had no concept of money or the stock market or anything else. But my father went absolutely nuts every time I scored. He’d practically do cartwheels down the sidelines while screaming his head off. It used to make me laugh when I was little because it was so surprising. My father barely ever smiled, let alone whooped and yelled and danced around.
I liked making Dad go wild.
Whenever I scored, we would sit at the computer together later that night, transfer money from his account to mine, and make stock market trades, investing the money I’d earned by scoring goals. I didn’t really care about my portfolio, especially since I was never allowed to take out any money to spend, so what was the point? But I liked sitting on my dad’s lap and listening to the enthusiastic way he spoke whenever the subject of money came up. Some kids play Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders with their dads, and I played the Dow Jones and Nasdaq. That’s just the way it was.
My dad worked a lot, and I mostly saw him—apart from nightly dinner—only at my soccer games or when I was invited into his home office to invest my goal-scoring money. Because I loved my dad, I tried to score as many goals as I could just to keep our relationship alive.
7
It Would Have Been Horrible to Say All This
My family took a few road trips north and south to visit colleges. One thing that bothered me was that my parents scheduled the trips without really asking me whether I even wanted to go to college. It was just assumed that I did. I thought I would actually go to college back then, but their never even asking upset me a little bit nonetheless.
I talked to Booker about this in his living room, on his itchy plaid couch that looked as if it were made out of old-man pants, and he said, “The fight’s on, sister. It all starts now. You have to make some real-life choices.”
“What choices?” I asked.
“What type of person are you going to be?”
“What types are there?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. You know very well that there are two types.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well, there’s the type of person who says there are certain types of people and then tries to be one type or the other. And then there are others who say bananas to the whole concept of types and won’t allow themselves to be filed neatly away under some sort of ridiculously limiting category.”
“What type are you?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t believe in types.”
“But you just said there are two types!”
“Those who believe in types and those who don’t.”
“You’re making my head hurt!”
“Bananas!”
“What?” I said, and then laughed.
“The point, Young Nanette, is not to wear a type like a set of prison shackles.”
Later, as I sat in the leather backseat of my mom’s Mercedes-Benz SUV on my way to my first “unofficial” college visit, I kept feeling as though I were actually shackled—like I was being carted off to market. These universities wanted my feet and my lungs and my thighs and my shins and my stomach and my forehead, and they wanted me to sweat for them and chase a ball around on a grass field and do whatever it took to get it into a net. It seemed sort of barbaric when I broke it down like that. There was an auction going on. My goal-scoring body was up for sale.
In the front seat, my parents talked a lot about my future—all the possible majors I could choose; the places I would travel if I played soccer for this or that college team, some of which even scheduled internationally in Europe and South America; and the lifelong benefits of belonging to certain alumni associations.
I kept getting mad at myself because I realized that there were many kids my age around the world who didn’t have enough food to eat or access to clean drinking water, and here I was, feeling imprisoned in a fifty-thousand-dollar luxury car en route to top universities that wanted to educate me for free.
Comparing myself to a slave.
Seriously?
I kept berating myself for being ungrateful, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a trick somehow.
I knew I was privileged, but what good was that if I still didn’t get to make my own choices? Was it a privilege to be secretly miserable my entire life?
And when we were at the universities meeting with admissions officers and soccer coaches and players, I mostly kept quiet and observed my parents as they chatted with everyone about me as if I weren’t even in the room. Sometimes they’d say, “Isn’t that right, Nanette?” and I could tell they wanted me to speak more and pretend that I actually wanted to chitchat with all these strangers. But I didn’t find the landscaping as beautiful as my parents did, nor did I see the “storied history in the buildings.” Nor did I find the list of classes as intellectually stimulating, or the coaches’ philosophies as impressive, or the potential teammates as congenial as Mom and Dad did. And yet I knew it would have been horrible to say all this, so I said nothing. Instead, I smiled and nodded until the muscles in my face and neck cramped.
My parents kept asking me what I thought and I kept stalling, saying, “I don’t know. There’s so much to consider.”
“Well,” my father said in the car once our college tour was concluded, “after visiting five schools that all but promised you academic and athletic scholarships next year, I really don’t think you can make a bad choice.”
“I envy you,” Mom said.
&
nbsp; So I just stared out the window and bit down on my tongue until it started to bleed.
8
Speeding Up the Process a Bit
Out of the blue one day, the first week of August, just before my senior year began, Booker told me he knew another teacher at another high school about a half hour’s drive away. “Just one more lonely kid who read my book at the right time, wrote to me, and then became an English teacher.”
I asked him if he had fans teaching at every high school in America.
He smiled. “There are a lot of lonely kids in this world, but the problem is that they don’t know about each other. If the lonely kids could just team up, a lot of good things would happen, but the world is incredibly afraid of lonely people teaming up, and so it does its best to keep them apart.”
“Why?”
“Because lonely people often have great ideas but no support. People with support too often have bad ideas but power. And you don’t give up power. No one does, regardless of whether they have good ideas or not. No one gives up power without a long, bloody fight—one that usually involves foul play. Lonely people typically can’t stomach treachery, and that’s another problem. They tend to tell the truth and fight fair. So we need art and music and poetry for the lonely people to rally around.” Booker looked at me for a moment, smiled knowingly, and then said, “I think you should meet this kid who’s been sending me poetry. I like his words. You two would get along. He calls himself Little Lex. He was a student of the teacher I just mentioned. She gave him a copy of my book, just like Jared Graves gave it to you. He also became obsessed with Wrigley. So you already have that in common.”
“Are you setting me up? I’ve never dated anyone before, you know.”
“He’s a talented poet. Reminds me of you.”
“How so? I’m not a poet.”
“Well, I like him a lot. I like you a lot. Do the math!”
“What does he look like?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course!”
“Well then, let me see. He has three heads, seven eyes, one nose, two forked tongues, scales all over his body, a tail, and—”
“Seriously.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him in person. He doesn’t send me pictures. But he’s coming for dinner this Saturday night, and so are you. I’ve told him all about my Nanette, and I have a feeling you might end up marrying each other and making future babies.”
“Stop it! I can’t believe you’re setting me up on a blind date!”
“It’s dinner. Don’t be so dramatic. We’re going to eat. Drink coffee. Talk about the weather. Maybe he’ll read you one of his poems. That’s not going to kill anyone, is it? Why label the event as a date? Why can’t it just be a discussion among three people?”
But when I arrived at Booker’s that Saturday night, I immediately realized I had absolutely been tricked into going on a blind date. Candles flickered on the dining room table, scratchy classical music spun out of an antique record player that looked decades older than me, and an arrangement of chocolate-covered strawberries served as the centerpiece. A very large boy with enormous hands and shoulder-length blond hair was seated at the head of the table, and he kept cracking his knuckles, which made me trust him for some reason.
Booker put his arm around me and said, “Nanette, this is Little Lex. Little Lex, this is Nanette. Speak amongst yourselves as I prepare our feast.”
When Booker left, Little Lex said “Hey” from behind a curtain of hair.
I sat down.
“I don’t know what Booker told you, but—”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know I’m out of my league here.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged and then looked out the window.
“You like the Buk?” I asked, and pointed to Lex’s T-shirt, on which Charles Bukowski’s almost-werewolf-like head screamed in black and white over a plastic cup of bloodred wine.
He looked down at the old poet’s face and said, “Love him.”
“You’ve been sending Booker your own poetry?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice. So then you’re an official poet?”
“Booker has me trying to avoid labels.”
“Me too.”
I looked around the room for a few moments and heard Little Lex tapping his black Chuck Taylor sneaker too rapidly.
“You read The Bubblegum Reaper, right?” I said.
“Of course.”
“Lena Thatch.”
“What about her?”
“You’re tapping your foot like she does. When she’s in the cafeteria and Wrigley is watching her. Wrigley’s true love. It’s Lena, right?”
“Could be Stella,” Little Lex said, meeting my eyes for the first time.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, here’s the thing,” he said, and then told me a few of his theories.
We talked about The Bubblegum Reaper for a good half hour, and I soon learned that Little Lex had memorized all the same quotes that I had and that he had been having the exact same experience with Booker’s novel—only his sophomore-year English teacher had given him a photocopied version and not a real paperback, and he thought Stella was Wrigley’s true love and I believed in Lena. Somewhere during the conversation, I discovered that I was enjoying myself immensely, that time was flying by like pelicans over the sea while you stretch out on a towel during a hot summer’s day. I had had access to the wonderful, amazing world of The Bubblegum Reaper for the past eight months but no one to share it with because I didn’t know anyone else who had read my favorite novel except Booker, who had forbidden me to speak about it, and Mr. Graves, who was officially gone. Sharing it with Little Lex now was a way to experience it for the first time again—through another’s eyes.
“When I first read the ending,” Little Lex said, “and Wrigley says he understands Unproductive Ted and that he’s quitting, when Wrigley’s floating in the creek—that’s when everything clicked into place in my mind.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I realized I could quit.”
“Quit what?”
Right then, Booker came in with a large bowl of spaghetti, mushrooms, and spinach. “Italiano!” he said in a funny accent, and then began to scoop his creation onto our plates. When he was finished, Booker sat and said, “I think I may have heard talk of a certain book that has been banned in this house.”
Little Lex and I glanced at each other.
“Enough of that,” Booker said. “Little Lex, why don’t you read us some of your radical, life-altering, vivid poetry?”
“Now?” he said as his face went red.
“Oh, he’s just being modest,” Booker said to me. “After all, he brought his briefcase with him, and I’m pretty sure it’s full of poems. He simply cannot wait any longer. The poet must sing!”
“You made me bring my poems. You said you wouldn’t let me in without them!” Little Lex said.
“Wouldn’t you like to hear a sample of Little Lex’s poetry, Nanette?”
“I would,” I said. “But please don’t feel obligated.”
“I’ll make her a copy after dinner, and she can read it later. Is that okay?” he said to Booker.
“It’s your poetry,” Booker said. “No one can tell you what to do with your own art unless you let them.”
“Is your teacher still teaching?” I asked Lex, trying to change the subject because I was beginning to feel sorry for him. Booker was obviously pushing all of us into situations we weren’t ready for.
“Which teacher?”
“The one who gave you my book, she means,” Booker said.
“Yeah. She is.”
“Lucky you,” I said.
“The teacher who gave you the book we shall not name isn’t?” Lex asked.
“Nope. I scared him away,” I said, surprising myself.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” I lied
, suddenly realizing what an uncomfortable conversational road I was going down. When Lex squinted at me and cocked his head to the right, I added, “I was just kidding.”
“How’s the food?” Booker asked, changing the subject once more, only for my benefit.
Little Lex and I both raved about the meal, even though it was cold and tasteless. We pushed it around on the plates a little and ate all of the warm, heavily buttered crusty bread, and then suddenly Booker was washing dishes in the kitchen and Lex and I had little cups of espresso in front of us, and the lights had been dimmed and the chocolate-covered strawberries were in our bellies.
“So you hang out with Booker all the time?” Little Lex asked.
“He’s sort of like the grandfather I never had. Well, I actually have two grandfathers, but I never see them. What about you and Booker?”
“He’s been writing me these letters. I have a hundred and four in a shoe box at home. Put them all together and you have enough words for another Booker novel. Although I’ve been forbidden to show anyone what he’s written, of course. He actually said I’d ‘die a slow, painful death if I ever break my solemn vow.’ I’m pretty sure he’s serious, because he’s sent me pictures of his secret samurai sword collection.”
We both laughed, and then Little Lex said, “My teacher gave me The Bubblegum Reaper after some bad stuff happened.”
I made a note to ask what happened to Lex but let him continue. The caffeine had him talking more and with great speed.
“When I came in raving about the read, she told me to write Booker a fan letter, and then somehow Booker and I were writing almost weekly.” He looked over at the kitchen doorway, lowered his voice, and said, “I was sort of worried at first, like maybe he was after something, because why would he take the time to write a kid like me? Although I couldn’t figure out what he could possibly want. Now I think he’s just a lonely old man. Maybe he would have started corresponding with anyone who wrote a fan letter.”