Weird Girl and What's His Name Read online

  three

  THAT SUNDAY WAS ONE OF THE first really hot days. Andy closed the store at six, and I met him back at his place. We put our shorts on and took a pair of black inner tubes and a six-pack down to the river behind his house. I waded slowly into the cold, trailing the six-pack on a rope. Andy dove right in. He scared me, doing that.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll hit your head on a rock?” I asked when he surfaced. He shook his head, flopping his wet hair back with his hand.

  “Nah. It’s deep right there. Here,” he clapped his hands, and I threw him an inner tube. He fell back into it with a splash.

  “This is the life,” he sighed. I eased myself into the bigger of the tubes, sinking down heavily into the water. The sun was setting, filigreed behind the trees, and I slapped a mosquito on my arm. It would be summer soon. I imagined us down here every evening, swimming off the sweat. Swimming toward each other. Our legs touching beneath the water where no one could see.

  “What happened to that beer?” Andy looked around.

  “I’ve got it. You want one?” I pulled at the yellow rope tied around the plastic six-pack yolk, and the beer cans bobbed to the surface. “I don’t think they’re cold yet.”

  “Leave it, then. I’ll have one later.” Andy, thankfully, wasn’t much of a drinker. He just liked a cold beer now and then on hot days. Which was good, because one drunk in my life was enough to deal with. Andy closed his eyes and leaned back until his hair dangled in the water. I watched him. Noticing the trim lines of his biceps. The white threads of his cutoffs trailing against the dark hair on his legs. Noticing the things I liked about him that maybe nobody else even noticed at all. His farmer’s tan from being outside so long on his hikes. The little crinkly lines around his eyes when he smiled or squinted into the sun. The gray hairs starting to show up in his sideburns and in the hair on his chest. He hated those gray hairs. I guess I’m weird, but I found it kind of hot. Older guys with a little gray in their hair.

  “I can feel you watching me,” he said, his eyes still closed.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, feeling myself blush.

  “Why are you sorry?” He squinted up at me. When he smiled, his eye lines crinkled in the exact way that made me sort of lightheaded. Andy had pretty much the world’s cutest smile. “There’s nobody around,” he assured me. “You don’t have to be sorry here.” I didn’t say anything, but that wasn’t what I was sorry about. I didn’t care about other people. I was sorry I was just staring at him. Sorry to realize I was pretty shallow. That I liked just looking at his body; that there was a part of me that didn’t care how smart he was, or how successful his bookstore was. I just wanted to watch him, see him, look at how beautiful he was. In my head I wanted old-fashioned romance, courting, love letters, poems, and flowers, but the rest of me was too impatient. I was sorry for wanting to be a gentleman and turning out to be just a boy-crazy boy.

  Andy slipped off his tube and tossed it back up onto the bank. He swam over to where I was, gliding beneath the water like a smooth-skinned fish.

  “You scared?” he asked, after he surfaced.

  “Scared? Of what?” People seeing us? Probably not as much as he was.

  “Scared of the water.” His hands slipped against the rubber. I slid off and felt my feet against the silty river bottom. Felt my toes slip against mossy rocks. Andy put his arms around me, and we kissed.

  “That’s better, don’t you think?” He pulled back, looking at me.

  “Yeah, I reckon.” It was better that my big fat gut was underwater, that’s for sure. Andy hooked an arm over my inner tube so he wouldn’t have to tread water. I half-floated, half-stood there, the water grazing the bottom of my chin.

  “You’re right. It’s deep here,” I said. The current wasn’t strong. In some parts of town, the river was barely even a creek. Andy was lucky—here in his backyard, it was like a private pool.

  “I told you. Watch this.” Andy dove down into the water and came up with a slick, flat rock. He popped up and, in a quick, flicking motion, skipped the stone five times along the surface of the water before it sank.

  “Hey!” I was impressed. “Five skips!”

  “I can usually skip it seven or eight. It’s harder to do when you’re in the water.” Andy paused, looking at me. “What is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That look. You’ve been thinking about something all day long. What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  I looked at him. “I was just thinking. You must be a really great dad.”

  Andy frowned. I didn’t usually bring up his family.

  “I am a great dad,” he said, his voice halting. A little angry sounding. He hooked his arms on the inner tube again.

  “We could have kids,” I murmured. “We could adopt, or use a surrogate. We could—” I stopped. Andy’s jaw tightened. He didn’t have to say anything. He had said it before. You’re only seventeen years old. You don’t have any idea what you want.

  “Or,” he said slowly, “we could just swim.” He dove underwater again, but this time he shot toward me underwater, jerked my swim trunks down, and swam away. I kicked the trunks off and they floated up to the surface while I dove underneath, my eyes open, kicking again to catch up.

  “WHAT’S ON YOUR BRAIN, THEODORE?” LULA peered at me. We sat at Janet and Leo’s big Lucite-topped dining room table, making flash cards for the Chemistry midterm.

  “I dunno.” I reached for another three-by-five card and a different-colored marker from the one I had. Maroon. The thought of dropping one of these on the white carpet was making my palms clammy.

  “Aren’t you, like, totally overwhelmed at the uselessness of this entire operation?” Lula uncapped a green marker. “I mean, do I look like I’m ever going to become a chemist? The only people interested in this stuff are the kids who want to start meth labs. Do you think Mulder and Scully had to take Chemistry to get into the FBI?”

  I didn’t answer. I don’t know why not, just lag time between my ears and my brain, I guess. The funny thing was, Lula was actually acing Chemistry. I was the one who needed flash cards. Lula was nice enough to call this a study session instead of a tutorial.

  “I mean, obviously, Scully had to learn chemistry to become a doctor. But does balancing chemical equations have any practical application? Seriously. What’s the point?” Lula sighed, resting her chin in her hand. “Speaking of Mulder and Scully,” she continued. “I was thinking about the Guide. What if we did like a Mystery Science Theater-type thing? Remember, that show with the snarky robots? It could be us, talking back to the screen. We can try it and see what it looks like. Leo’s got a video camera.”

  Oh yeah, the Guide. Short for SpookyKid and BloomOrphan’s Incomplete Guide to The X-Files, our blog that was actually pretty popular among the denizens of the XPhilePhorum. What with school and work and everything, I’d almost forgotten about it. Lula was the brains behind the operation, anyway. But our goal was to write reviews of all nine seasons before we graduated. We were only doing it for fun, for ourselves and our friends on the Phorum, though I knew that Lula secretly fantasized that Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, would someday stumble across our frighteningly thorough Guide and hire us to become part of the X-Files’s “inner sanctum.”

  “What happens when we get to the inner sanctum?” I asked her once.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But we could be in charge of, like, destroying script pages, or leaking false information about new movies to the press. The Obfuscation Committee. Something like that.”

  “You really think Chris Carter has an Obfuscation Committee?”

  “You never know.”

  Some of the reviews—the ones we wrote together—were more like arguments between us, debating the finer points. Lula let me write the “Scully-in-Peril” episode reviews, but her reviews always got the most comments from the other fans on the Phorum. She came up with the “Best Mulderism” award and the “Scullyome
ter,” which rated Scully’s skepticism level on particularly out-there cases. She also rated “FBI Fashion” (you can imagine the Mulder-in-a-Speedo episode got high marks there), and “Lone Gunmenosity,” which gave high praise to any episode featuring her favorite supporting characters, Byers, Langley, and Frohike, aka the Lone Gunmen. They’re a trio of paranoid conspiracy theorists who publish a newsletter called—you guessed it—The Lone Gunman. Mulder goes to them for help on top-secret stuff that he can’t get away with at the FBI—computer hacking, code breaking, surveillance. Lula had recently written a Lone Gunmenosity/FBI Fashion crossover essay about the delightfully bizarre wardrobe choices of Melvin Frohike; she wrote it as if she were Frohike, giving fashion criticism in a column of his own called “The Cranky Hacker.” It was really funny and the Philes, needless to say, loved it. I think that if The Lone Gunman were a real newspaper, Lula would be trying to get an internship.

  “Earth to Rory?”

  I looked up at Lula.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I snapped the cap on a blue marker, looking at the chemical equations written out on the study sheet in front of me. I wished I could shift my molecules somehow. Be something else. A different element. Part of a different compound. Not some sad satellite electron, drifting through my mother’s drunken fog. I wished I could be orbiting around Andy instead. That I could live with him in his house by the stream, that we could be a new family. Bonded together, complete. With new electrons orbiting around our nucleus.

  “Hey, Lula? Can I ask you something?”

  “Uh-oh. You’ve got that ‘this isn’t just about Chemistry’ tone in your voice.”

  “It’s no big deal. I was just wondering . . .” I flipped over a flash card, trying to seem nonchalant. “Do you ever think about being a parent?”

  “Being apparent?” She laughed. “You mean you can’t see me? I’m sitting right here.”

  “I mean . . . being a mother. A mom. Do you ever think about it?”

  “You mean, like, teenage pregnancy?” Lula arched her eyebrow at me. “Seeing as how I’m perpetually boyfriend-free, it’s not exactly an issue that’s keeping me up nights. What are you getting at, Theodore?”

  “Well, I was just wondering if you’d ever think about—not now, but maybe, like, in a few years, after college, when we’re grown up and everything—if you’d consider being a surrogate for me.”

  “A surrogate?”

  “A surrogate mother. We wouldn’t actually sleep together. I looked it up. I just figured, you know, instead of going through a whole egg-donor thing, since you’re my best friend—”

  “We wouldn’t actually . . . sleep together . . .” Lula repeated.

  “No! It’s totally scientific. We wouldn’t even have to be in the same room.”

  “Gee, Rory, you really know what to say to a girl.” She looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was amused or insulted. “Why are you even bringing this up?”

  “It’s been on my mind a lot lately. I guess because . . .” I actually almost bit my tongue, trying not to say anything about Andy, about how serious I felt about him. About us. “I dunno, I guess those pre-college-admissions meetings with Mr. Peeler have got me thinking about all that rest-of-my-life stuff. College, marriage, kids. I know, I haven’t even decided which colleges I’m applying to yet. But I know I want to have a family. And I want you to be a part of it somehow.”

  “But you want me to . . . you’re serious. You want to get me knocked up, but in a sterile laboratory setting.” Lula laughed. “How sexy, Theodore. You want to have a test-tube baby with me.”

  “Actually, I’d have a baby with . . . with whoever my boyfriend is. Or, hopefully, my husband.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Depending on what state we live in. But you’d be the birth mother. You’d still be a part of the kid’s life. Like an aunt or something.”

  “Wow. This is kind of weirding me out a little.” Lula pushed her chair back from the table. “This is kind of a heavy life decision to have to make while I’m trying to study for the Chem midterm.”

  “I’m not talking about doing anything right now. I just mean, theoretically. Someday. In the future.” I looked down at the bright letters of my flash cards against the white. ORGANIC COMPOUNDS. Lula stood up and walked over to the white couch, where her book bag sat slouched open, spilling notebooks and binders.

  “Forget I said anything.” I kept talking. “I just really want to be a dad, and it’s going to be different for me, that’s all.”

  “I know. I just think maybe . . .” Lula’s muttering trailed off as she rummaged through her notebooks. She found what she was looking for and sat down again at the table. More Chemistry notes. This midterm was going to kill us.

  “Listen, Rory.” She opened the notebook matter-of-factly. “I think you’d make a great dad.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. I mean, at least you actually want to be a dad. You wouldn’t just run out on him. Or her.” Lula frowned, flipping notebook pages quickly. Then, very abruptly, she stopped flipping and looked up at me, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Sure, I’ll do it. I mean, why not? I’m flattered. They’ll harvest my eggs, just like on X-Files. We’ll start a race of supersoldiers. Alien-human hybrid clones. World domination will be ours. The possibilities are endless.”

  She gave a little laugh. But there was a strange silence in the room, and I felt like I shouldn’t have asked. I felt like I’d given something away, like Lula could tell now. Tell what? I hadn’t said anything about Andy. But I felt like there was something loud and irreversible sitting on the clear Lucite table now, something buzzing and humming that we were both trying to ignore.

  “I only have one requirement,” Lula announced abruptly. “If we’re going to do this baby thing.”

  “You name it,” I said, tentatively.

  “If it’s a boy, we’re totally naming him Fox.”

  “Fox?” I asked. “But I had my heart set on naming him Melvin Frohike Callahan.”

  Lula snapped the cap back onto her highlighter and threw it at me, trying not to laugh.

  four

  I CAME HOME FROM OUR NEXT X-Files session to find Rick, my mother’s client from Denver, slouched down on our couch with his shirttail half out. Mom was mixing cocktails on the hall table, which she’d set up at an angle in the living room, like her own little bar. She had changed out of her work clothes and into her familiar green bathrobe and black ballet-style slippers. Her Patty the Pickle costume, I called it. And that’s Pickle as in pickled. Pickled as in drunk.

  “Hey there, squirt!” Rick called out. Damn . . .

  “Teddy Bear!” my mother exclaimed. I was trying to make it to my room without her seeing me, but it was too late. “Get in here!”

  I slunk into the room. Even in her happy-drunk mode, my mother was embarrassing. Lurching around, waving her hands carelessly. I guess it’s not really dangerous. It’s not like she’s going to beat me up or anything. But it’s stupid. She’s like a big, dumb, oversized baby or something. She can’t even stand up straight. It’s humiliating, if you want to know the truth. Humiliating for everybody but her.

  “Teddy Bear, guess who made Regional Sales Manager of the Month?” She held up a shot glass full of something, like she was making a toast, but she didn’t wait for anyone else. She downed it in one gulp.

  I looked around. Rick thumped his hands against the coffee table in an off-beat drum roll.

  “You did?” I ventured.

  “Ta-da!” Rick hollered. “Squirt wins the prize!”

  “Yes, I did!” She set her empty glass down on the bar. “And did they give me a bonus? Yes, they did!” My mother pinched her fingers together. “A tiny, teeny, tiny bonus. But a bonus,” she held up her finger, making an important point, “is a bonus. Don’t you agree, Ricky Rick?”

  Rick burst out laughing. Rick was marr
ied, by the way. But he stayed overnight when he came to town on these little business trips. I guess it didn’t matter, because my mom dated other guys, too, when Rick went back home to Denver. So it’s not like it was true love. Rick called me squirt, shorty, or pee wee. Which he thought was hilarious, because he was about half a foot shorter than I was. I called him Rick the Dick, but never to his face.

  “Ricky Rick!” My mother was laughing her head off, too. “That’s your . . . that’s your rap star name! You’re a rapper!” She was gasping for air.

  “Ricky RICK!” Rick bellowed, Flavor Flav-style.

  “Congratulations,” I said finally, when there was a lull in the hysterical cackling. “I’ve got some homework to do, so—”