I had been here before, stuck in between worlds. Last spring, I was stuck in court limbo while the judge and the D.A. and Hughes threw dice to decide my fate. I’d spent weeks in Bethany limbo, wondering if she liked me.
Come to think of it, all of high school had been limbo—middle school, too. As soon as my zits popped—wham—drop Tyler Miller in limbo. Change the rules daily so he never knows how to act or talk or dress. Nail him with the longest, slowest puberty mankind has ever known. Let’s see how much damage one dumb jerk will put up with before he snaps. That sounds like a fun game, doesn’t it?
I translated ten pages of L’Étranger for French. They were absurd. I read the Constitution, too. Tried to translate it into French. That was ridiculous.
Yoda didn’t kick my door. He knocked politely after the last bell rang, then opened it and stuck his head in. “Want to go to the mall?”
“With you and Hannah? No, thanks.”
“She has weightlifting.”
“And so you want to go to the mall alone? You never go to the mall alone.”
“That’s why I’m asking you. Come on. I need the moral support. I have to get a job.”
He needed a job because my sister was expensive. She was still grounded, so he couldn’t take her anyplace. Instead, he bought her presents. Lots of presents. His bank account was almost tapped out.
Yoda drove. He never shut up, going on and on about the road trip he was going to take with his parents, looking at colleges.
The mall looked like one of my mother’s Christmas fantasies on steroids. The constant caroling made a headache stab at my brain stem with a collection of stainless-steel kitchen knives, $49.95, on sale.
Yoda collected applications from two department stores, a shoe store, the bookstore, and the kiosk that sold sausage and orange cheese. I thought that the people who handed him the applications were totally blowing him off, but he didn’t think so. He was the polite job candidate, with copies of his transcript, four statements from personal references, and two recommendations from teachers.
I paged through one of his packets as we walked away from the kiosk. “Why didn’t you ask Mr. Pirelli for a reference?”
“He hates me because of the equipment I broke.”
“No, he doesn’t.” I flipped to page three as we stepped on the escalator. “Nobody cares that you were a freshman library aide.”
“Yes, they do,” he said. “It shows initiative. You should try it some time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m hungry. Taco Bell or King Wok?”
He bought four burritos with the extra-hot sauce. I bought something that had cheese in it. No hot sauce. My stomach was already on fire. My headache hovered around a Terrorist Threat intensity.
“Can we go?” I asked after he finished the second burrito.
“I’m not done yet.”
“You could eat it in the car.”
“Or I could eat it here.” He unwrapped another one. “What’s wrong?”
“That is the funniest question you’ve ever asked me. ‘What’s wrong?’ I’ll have to remember that.”
“You know what I mean. Things are crappy, yeah, but I was asking, is there anything crappier than the rest?”
His phone rang. It was Hannah, so I ceased to exist for him.
I poured all of the hot-sauce packets onto the tray and sprinkled pepper in it.
Yoda laughed into the phone.
I studied the beams that arched high over the food court. A lost balloon floated up and bounced between them. A kid wailed.
I could see myself hanging from a rope tied to the beams, tongue sticking out, legs dangling in the air. But it would be hard to get up there without anyone noticing.
“Hey!” Yoda waved his phone an inch from my nose. “Wake up. Want to talk to your sister?”
“No.”
The kid pointing to his balloon stomped his feet and cried louder. He had a snotty nose and was stuffed into a winter jacket. His mother was focused on cramming as much pizza into her mouth as humanly possible. The red balloon bounced along the ceiling.
“Come o-o-o-on,” Yoda whined. He shoved the phone in my face again. “Talk to her or she’ll be mad at me.”
I smacked the phone out of his hand. It hit the floor and skittered to the wall. The battery popped off.
Yoda didn’t move. I stood up, walked over, picked up the two pieces, and brought them back to the table. I replaced the battery and turned the phone back on. I didn’t look at him when I gave it back.
“Still works,” I said. “Sorry.”
He rubbed a scratch on the cover of the phone with his thumb. “Why did you do that?”
The kid alternated between wailing and sobbing.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m just trying to help.”
“Yeah, well, don’t. It just makes it worse. Everyone acting like everything is normal, you laughing on the phone, handing out résumés.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Erase the last ten days of my life.”
“Impossible, that is.”
I stood up. The boy was punching his mother’s leg and screaming so loud I thought all of the glass in the mall would shatter.
“Can’t you shut that kid up?” I hollered.
Everyone in the food court stopped talking and stared at me. A new song came on the loudspeaker, “Silent Night.”
Yoda put his last burrito in the bag and picked up the tray.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re going home.”
“Make up your mind. You want to stay. You want to go. What’s it going to be?”
He carried the tray to the trash can, pushed the papers in, wiped up the hot-sauce mess with a napkin, and put the tray on top. He walked back to my side of the table. People had stopped staring. Now they were whispering to each other.
“I’m trying to help you,” Yoda said quietly.
“You’re trying to stay on my good side so you can get into my sister’s pants.”
He took a deep breath. He flipped open his cell phone, brushed off some dust that wasn’t there, then closed it and stuck it into his pocket.
“At some point, you’re going to feel like a real asshole for saying that to me,” he said. “When that happens, you give me a call.”
As he disappeared down the escalator, that stupid kid finally stopped crying.
61.
Yoda and his parents left for Kent State, Case Western, and OSU on Wednesday. Hannah and I rode the bus to school.
She did not sit with me.
I spent most of the day reading the entire US Gov textbook. I highlighted it, too. What were they going to do? Suspend me? Arrest me?
Mr. Salvatore dropped by during his lunch break and explained Faustus. I told him that Marlowe should have written it the way he explained it. Mr. S. thought that was funny. He pointed to a line in the play, towards the end, when Dr. Faustus is about to sign over his soul to the devil. “Do you know what means?”
“Homo, fuge? That he’s gay?”
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s Latin. Homo means man, fuge, fly, so ‘fly, oh man,’ or ‘fly away.’ God is speaking to him, dropping a giant hint that he should take off, follow the light, if you will; do something positive instead of sealing the deal with the devil.”
“So this is really important?”
“You could say that, yeah.”
I made a quick note of the page number. “Why did the guy write it in Latin? He’s making the most important stuff the hardest to understand.”
“But you won’t forget it, will you?”
“Huh?”
“Because it’s in Latin, because it’s different and hard, you’ll remember it. A friend of mine in grad school had that tattooed on his arm. Kept him out of trouble, he said.”
“No offense, but you had some weird friends.”
“It was grad school, what can I say? S
ee if you can write that essay now.”
Somebody put a doughnut on my table when I was in the john taking a leak. It was a peanut-butter-and-jelly doughnut. It could have been either Joe or Toothless. Dopey didn’t share.
I must have nodded off doing calculus, chair leaning against the wall, arms crossed over my chest, thin strand of drool on my chin. It was hot in there. No windows.
I woke up when I heard the door open, the slow cli-click of the handle turning, the latch releasing. I opened my eyes and wiped my chin.
I froze.
Bethany was standing just outside my door.
She was wearing a pair of faded jeans, a light-blue turtleneck, and a baggy gray Warriors hoodie. Her hair was in a braid down her back. Her left arm was curled around a stack of books. Her blue purse was over her right shoulder. She didn’t have on any makeup or earrings. She looked like she was twelve.
Imagine you’re sitting in your living room watching ESPN, and you look up and a deer has wandered in. She’s shaking. Her legs are like twigs and her eyes so big you can see yourself in them. You’re afraid that if you move, or say anything, she’ll panic and run through the sliding-glass door, but if you don’t move, or say anything, she’ll walk away again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
I sit silent, a rock.
She sighs. “You’re still mad at me. I don’t blame you. I was a bitch.” She wipes the tears off her face. “I hope someday you’ll forgive me….”
I stand up, throw the chair aside. I walk towards her.
She didn’t say a word. She didn’t even come in, just stayed there in the hall with her hand on the doorknob.
I almost said something, but the bell rang.
Officer Adams showed up again at eight o’clock that night, and we all assumed our positions: cop in the chair, me on the bench, parents on the couch.
Dad was sitting square under the van Gogh print this time, directly across from me. He frowned. The creases in his forehead deepened into canyons.
Adams asked the same questions and I gave the same answers for ten minutes.
We were all confused when Mom left the room and came back holding her purse. That wasn’t in the script. She whipped out another one of her lawyer’s cards.
“The interview is over,” she said. “Call this number if you have any other questions.”
Adams took the card.
“Let me walk you to the door,” Mom said.
After the cops left, Dad poured himself a scotch. He made a gin and tonic for Mom, who had curled up on the couch with the remote and a photo-supply catalog.
“No, thanks,” she said, turning a page.
“What?” Dad said.
“I don’t want one.”
“You don’t want a drink?”
“Actually, I do.” She stood up and tossed me the remote before she walked into the kitchen. “Peppermint tea.”
I almost volunteered to take her G&T. Why not? I was back where I started in May, squarely screwed by the criminal justice system. Any day now the newspapers would call, and because a pretty white girl was involved, the national news trucks would park on our lawn and point their satellite dishes at the sky above our house and beam me around the world. That called for at least eighty proof.
Dad felt me staring at him.
“Don’t you have homework?” he asked.
62.
The weird part was that my classes were getting easier now that I wasn’t actually in them. My teachers were sending along assignments, notes, links to research Web sites and worksheets. The one thing that kept kicking my butt was English. It was hard enough writing a paper once. Mr. Salvatore wanted at least three drafts, with correctly spelled words. And it didn’t matter how many times I reread the definitions, I could not figure out the difference between symbols, motifs, and themes. Apparently, this was important. So important that Mr. S. wrote a note on my Faustus essay that I should come in after school to go over it with him one more time.
At first I wasn’t sure if he was serious; I mean, what if he was just going to bitch at me for an hour? But I was getting a little desperate for human contact, and I didn’t think he hated me as much as some people I could name, so I went.
“Motif. Symbol. Theme.”
Salvatore covered the board with the definitions and gave a million examples from our books.
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. You could tell by looking at him how into this stuff he was. And he took the time with me after school when he could have been at the gym or looking for the future Mrs. Salvatore, so props for that.
But I didn’t get it.
He spent every minute of that hour trying to cram stuff into the concrete block I called my head. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t have a jackhammer.
I put my pencil down when the late-bus announcements started. “I got to go.”
“Right,” he said. “Wow, it’s dark already. Don’t you hate how that sneaks up on you?”
“Yeah. They say it happens gradually, but I don’t believe them.”
“It’s a conspiracy on the part of the meteorologists,” he said.
“I don’t think meteorologists are in charge of sunsets.”
“Well, whomever, then. I wasn’t very good at science.” He pulled a backpack out from under his desk and started sticking his books in it. “How are you doing, Tyler?”
“I think I’m passing,” I said.
“No, not that. The other stuff.”
“Oh.” I stacked my books. “Okay, I guess.”
“You don’t have to lie.” He set his backpack on the floor and perched on the edge of his desk. “Some of us are convinced you didn’t do it, you know. It’s unfair that you’re being treated this way…. We wish we could change that.”
“Oh, well, thanks. I guess.”
“I heard the police are looking at a number of suspects.”
“Yeah.” I stood up. “But I don’t see anybody else living in suspension. Thanks, Mr. S., I gotta go.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Cool. Happy motif or whatever.”
He was chuckling as I closed the door.
My freaking locker stuck again. My jacket was in there and it was freezing out, so I fought it and kicked it. By the time I got it open and grabbed the jacket and sprinted to the front door, the late buses were gone.
Crap.
It wasn’t that the walk was so long it would kill me. I just wasn’t in the mood.
The car started following me a couple blocks away from school. I tried to sneak a glance over my shoulder, but the glare from the streetlights made it impossible to see who was inside. They sped up and passed me.
Four and a half blocks later, just before I turned the corner, I noticed the sound of the car doors slamming, but I didn’t really notice, if you know what I mean.
The footsteps were fast and heavy.
I rounded the corner and there they were. Three guys surrounded me, their arms out. They were my size, more or less, and wearing Halloween masks. I spun around. There was no room to run.
I wanted to pee my pants.
Instead, I launched myself at the guy right in front of me. He wasn’t expecting it and stepped back. Just before my fist connected with him, something covered my head. I pulled at it. It was blanket, or a piece of a blanket. It smelled like a dryer sheet.
No more time to think.
It started. Not the beating of a lifetime, not bad enough to put me in the hospital, but painful. A fist to my head, kicks to my legs. I spun around, trying to stay on my feet. One of them laughed. It sounded like Parker. I was tackled. Someone was punching my stomach. I panicked, kicked, trying to get the blanket off my head so I could breathe. He finally got off me and I puked in my mouth a little. I swallowed it.
It stopped. Just like that, it was over.
One of them said something, but all I heard was a rumble, the beginning of an avalanche. The blanket was still on my head. More rumbles. The avalanche pi
cked up speed, momentum. I blinked, could only see the dim streetlight through the weave of the blanket.
A dark shadow moved and I flinched. Someone giggled.
The shadow came close and whispered, a familiar voice. “That’s what you get for hurting my sister, you perv.”
A car engine started. Doors closed. They turned up the bass.
The avalanche faded away down the mountain.
I took off the blanket. It was pink and edged with satin. I spit and hawked and spit again. I folded the blanket, tucked it under my arm, and walked home.
63.
Dark house.
Hot shower until the water ran cold.
Nothing was broken, I was sure of that. One of the advantages to being beaten up by a group of suburban jocks was that they wore sneakers, not boots. If they’d had boots on, I would have been bleeding to death from internal injuries.
I couldn’t let myself think of the sound of Chip’s voice in my ear, because it made me think about borrowing Dad’s gun and going for a walk. I took a couple swigs of NyQuil, a bunch of ibuprofen, and slowly made my way to the kitchen.
When my parents came in from their therapy session, I was sitting at the kitchen table, watching my Lucky Charms dissolve into a bowl of milk.
Mom swooped in. “Oh my God, what happened? Who did this? Oh my God, Bill. We have to get him to a hospital. Oh, Tyler, look at your poor face.”
“It’s just a busted lip,” I said.
“Just?” she shrieked.
She launched into a rant filled with Mom-things, asking a lot of questions and not waiting for the answers. Dad said Dad-things, which were the same as Mom-things except with a lot of swear words. I wanted to tell them to be quiet because they were making my head hurt, but my head hurt too much to say anything.
I have to admit, it felt good to have Mom fussing over me. She checked out the bruises, she studied my pupils, she called the doctor, she made me lie down on the couch in the family room, she covered me with the afghan, she did it all.