Weird Girl and What's His Name Read online

  “Homework? Homework on Friday? Oh, no no no, Teddy. We’re celebrating! Stay here and celebrate with us! Have a drink. You wanna vodka tonic? Whiskey sour? Martini? Dirty martini? Cosmo? You name it, kiddo, I’m mixing.”

  “You don’t have to drink that pink shit,” Rick offered helpfully. “With cherries in it. You want a beer, son? There’s a twelve-pack of Bud Light in the fridge.”

  Most kids would probably be psyched if their parents offered to let them drink anything they wanted. If their parents were always trying to be the life of the party. But, trust me, it’s not as cool as it sounds.

  “No thanks, guys. I’m pretty tired. I’m just gonna—”

  “Dammit, Theodore!” That was it. Now my mom had gone from Big Baby Drunk to Mean Old Lady Drunk with her usual speed. It only got more fun from there.

  “How’d I get stuck with such a buzzkill of a kid? Huh?” she asked Ricky Rick, pointing at me. “Lookit how he’s always ‘Ooh, no, I can’t have a drink. I have to study.’ He’s all, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much, Mom. It’s a weeknight, Mom.’ Blah, blah, blah. Lissen, mister. I work hard for this family. I’m the goddamn Seasonal Sales Manager of the Month.”

  “I’m happy for you, Mom. I really am—”

  “Oh, you’re happy for me.” Now she was more like an old bum, staggering toward me, a vodka bottle in her hand. I couldn’t help but cringe. “One of these days . . .” she nodded her head knowingly. She got as close to my face as she could, being so much smaller. “One of these days, Teddy Bear. You’re gonna understand. It’s very stressful to be in my position. One of these days, you’re gonna have a family to support. And then, my friend.” She looked very seriously into my eyes, to make sure I got the point. “And then. Boy. Are you gonna be sorry.”

  Rick the Dick started laughing again. But my mother wasn’t laughing. And neither was I.

  I walked out. I wished I could call my Aunt Judith, but she was off studying yoga at this place in Nepal with no phones, no Internet, even. Aunt Judith, my mom’s older sister, helped me do an intervention once a few years ago, after my grandmother had died and Mom’s drinking got really bad. It was a whole big weepy scene, and Mom stayed sober for a few months. But then she got her new job, and she started drinking again. First when she went out with clients. Then she started having a drink when she got home from work. Then several drinks, and so on. She said it was part of being in business, especially for women. You had to show that you could hang with the boys. I didn’t get how selling communication system setups to random companies required getting totally bombed every weekend, starting on Thursday nights, but maybe she had a point. I didn’t understand the stress she was under. And maybe I should just be glad she was working and paying the bills. So what if a few of them were late from time to time?

  At the top of the stairs, I heard my mother laugh again. She was already over it. I closed my bedroom door and sat there for a minute in silence, waiting for the music that would inevitably start. Aaaand . . . there it was. Hall & Oates, or whatever the fuck it is she listens to. One on one, I wanna play that game tonight. Like clockwork. God, it was revolting. I shut my eyes and opened them again. My room wasn’t like Lula’s, crowded with posters and action figures and stuff. I tried to make it my sanctuary, plain and calm. Last summer, Leo helped me build extra shelves for my books—my collection was growing all the time. I kept them arranged just the way I liked them, in sections only I understood. There were “All-Time Favorites,” “Classics,” “Poetry,” “Gifts from Aunt Judith,” “Still Haven’t Read Yet,” and, on the shelf next to my bed, “Andy.” Those were the books Andy had given me, books like Ceremony and Desert Solitaire and Blue Highways, books he said I should read because they were important, or just because they were the books he loved.

  But I was too restless to read. I turned my computer on and logged in to the XPhilePhorum. The regulars were particularly argumentative, and I wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes I didn’t give a shit if nobody liked when Robert Patrick came on the show or—sorry, spoiler alert again—if it’s way beyond the realm of possibility, even for The X-Files, for Mulder to have come back from the dead in Season Eight, because no amount of alien antivirals in the world can change the fact that a man’s been embalmed and buried for three months and so on. Lula and I knew the show wasn’t always perfect. But we were watching this for fun. There was enough to fight about in the world without dragging our favorite TV show into it.

  So I logged out and loaded a DVD instead. Sense and Sensibility, with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. I put on my headphones, plugged them into my computer, and turned the monitor so I could watch it in bed. Maybe if I fell asleep watching it, I could dream myself there. Dream of a world where men tipped their hats and behaved like gentlemen. A world where, okay, things weren’t perfect, and being female pretty much sucked, but at least there was chivalry and manners. Maybe Lula was the lucky one. Maybe her mother had ditched her, but maybe that was better than if she was downstairs blasting “Maneater” on her shitty-sounding CD player and trying to put the moves on Rick the Dick. I yawned. I wished I could wear a double-breasted tailcoat and knee-high riding boots and look suave like Alan Rickman. That guy was cool.

  IT WAS UNUSUALLY EARLY ON SATURDAY morning when Lula called on the landline.

  “You’re out of minutes again,” she announced without saying hello.

  “I forgot to go by the place.” I let Lula think that my cell phone minutes ran out because of my own laziness, not because I’d decided to spend the money on organic groceries instead. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed. I didn’t want Lula to worry about me. She already knew that I’d bought myself a crappy pay-as-you-go phone because my mom kept forgetting to pay the bill on my old one. My mom’s cell phone was paid for by her company, so she didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t know what her excuse was for not buying groceries, though. I guess it was that she ate out so much with her coworkers, she kind of forgot to stock the fridge. But it’s not like I was starving or anything. And I was trying to do this new high-protein diet plan Andy had suggested, anyway. So that was why I didn’t have minutes on my cell phone that week. Because I’d rather eat than talk, even if it did interfere with Lula’s and my ongoing game of answering our cell phones with Mulder and Scullyisms.

  “Hey, what happened on the Chat last night? You logged out without saying good night.” She sounded wide awake.

  “I know. Sorry,” I apologized. “I dozed off. Did I miss anything good?”

  “Just a sudden groundswell of pro-Monica Reyes sentiment. PendrellLives was, like, militant. I kept waiting for you to chime in with your whole ‘Doggett and Reyes Aren’t So Bad’ manifesto.”

  “Guess I’ll have to follow up next week.” I coughed. It was a quarter to eight. “What’s going on?”

  “Are you ready to hear something really weird?”

  “This isn’t that Mexican goatsucker thing, is it?” I sat up in bed, yawning.

  “No, not that weird,” Lula laughed. “But close. Leo wants to borrow your car.”

  “Do what now?”

  “Leo wants to borrow the Beast. Remember Trey Greyson?”

  “The Burnout?” I rubbed sleep junk out of my eyes. “What did he do now, drive the lawn mower into the Caddy?” Trey Greyson, aka John Harrell Greyson III, aka the Burnout, was once, literally, a poster child for excellence. His family owned Greyson Pork, and Trey was the cute blond kid who sang the Greyson Bacon song in those commercials with the dancing pig. (I know—now the jingle is going to be stuck in your head for days. Sorry.) In addition to being a bacon heir, Trey was a star basketball player and scored so high on his SATs that our school district used a picture of him in their ads for Raise Those As!, their county-wide incentive program to get us mere mortals to stay in school and “A-chieve!” But, in the end, Trey Greyson flunked out of Princeton during his sophomore year. He’d fried his brain on LSD, which, apparently, he’d been doing since his sophomore year of high school, alon
g with a whole buffet of alcohol and drugs I’d never even heard of before. After all that “A-chievement,” he ended up back in Hawthorne mowing lawns, including Janet and Leo’s, for a living.

  “He walked off the job last week,” Lula explained. “He said Leo ‘harshed his mellow.’ Leo got so pissed he said he’d do the yard his own damn self, but he just got the Caddy detailed, so he doesn’t want to get the trunk all dirty with manure or whatever.”

  “So he wants to put a bunch of manure in the trunk of my car?”

  “He said he’ll pay for you to get it washed afterward. Whadda ya say, Theodore? Up for an outing?”

  “Sure. Let me throw on some clothes.”

  “Right on, man,” Lula drawled in her best burnout voice.

  The house was quiet. Mom and Rick the Dick were still sleeping it off, so I left a note and went over to Lula’s. Janet insisted on feeding me pancakes first. And sausage.

  “Janet wants us to go organic,” Leo explained as I drove us to Walmart. “She just read some damn book about reducing our carbon footprint. We’ll see what she has to say about our carbon footprint when the whole front yard turns brown and dies.”

  “We could have a Zen rock garden,” Lula piped up from the backseat. “You can rake it every morning. It’s very relaxing. Your blood pressure will go down.”

  “My blood pressure’d go down if that damn lawn hippie hadn’t up and quit on me,” Leo groused from behind his aviator shades. Lula and I caught each other’s glance in the rearview mirror. We were both holding in laughs. Lawn hippie. “How in the Sam Hill is having to rake the lawn every morning going to make my blood pressure go down?” Leo asked.

  “Leo,” Lula sighed, as if it were obvious. “That’s the mystery of the Zen.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Leo get this look on his face like he always did when Lula was goofing on him. Like he wanted to be pissed off but was also trying not to laugh. Not that Leo laughed. It was more like a “humph” noise and a slightly-less-pissed-off-than-usual look. It was strange to me how a guy like Leo can actually be really nice, beneath his gruff exterior, while my mom could seem like she’s being nice and pleasant and even fun, but then she turns around and cuts you down with some comment about what a burden you are, or why don’t you get your lazy fat ass in gear and clean up the kitchen after you cook dinner, or whatever. Sometimes I wished Leo and my mom could switch places for a day. But I wouldn’t want Lula to have to deal with my mom.

  I pulled into a spot close to the Garden Center and gave Leo the keys. He wanted to try on golf pants while we were there. We were also supposed to remind him to pick up some low-sodium chicken broth and Scotch Tape. Lula pulled me along with her to the Electronics section to scope out the Blu-ray player she had her sights on. She was convinced that the eventual Blu-ray release of Lord of the Rings was going to be the ultimate viewing experience of her life thus far, and she wanted to be prepared, but Leo wouldn’t buy the player for her. Tech nerd that he was, Leo said something better was probably just around the corner, and he wasn’t convinced yet that Blu-ray wasn’t going to be this decade’s answer to Betamax. Whatever that meant.

  “So, that’s about ten more golf games I have to caddy to be able to afford the mind-boggling high definition of Blu-ray,” Lula sighed. Leo had gotten her the golf course job, driving carts for the old duffers and hauling golf bags that were almost as big as she was. He always used to take her along during his golf games, when she was a little kid and Janet had a day job. So Lula actually knew a ridiculous amount about the game. Still, I asked her why she didn’t just work in the pro shop, where all you had to do was stand around in the air conditioning, handing out towels and baskets of balls for the driving range. Lula said she liked being out on the links.

  “You wouldn’t believe the dirty jokes these old guys tell,” she confided giddily. “Filthy. Absolutely the worst. Also, they think it’s adorable when a short girl carries their bags, so I get big tips.”

  None of the DVDs were catching my eye, so I wandered over to the CDs. I browsed the titles, looking for something Andy would like, but it seemed like it was all Country, Heavy Metal, and Top 40. There was a greatest hits of Buddy Holly CD—Buddy Holly was sixties, right?

  “Hey, Ronnie. It’s Ronnie, right?” I looked around. It took me a minute to realize that someone was speaking to me, and that the person was Sexy Seth Brock, our school’s requisite hot quarterback. Not that I was interested. I wasn’t really into jock types, and Seth had a girlfriend, besides. But I have to admit, he was pretty easy on the eyes.

  “Me? Uh, it’s Rory, actually.” Or just good ol’ What’s His Name. Whatever works.

  “Oh yeah. Rory. Weren’t we in Mr. Tanner’s Biology class together last year?”

  “Um. Yeah. I believe we were.” He borrowed test notes from me. Twice.

  “I knew I remembered you. I just couldn’t remember your name.” Sexy Seth flipped his shaggy surfer-hair out of his eyes. “Things were kinda crazy last year. It was my first year on varsity.”

  “Oh.” Yeah, I bet being a gorgeous, popular football player made life really difficult for you, Seth.

  “Find anything good?”

  “What?”

  “CDs.” He motioned to the ones in his hands. “I’m gonna try this new Foo Fighters. I was into the early stuff, but then it kinda got too metal-y for me. I was looking for the Pavement reissues, but then I remembered, hey, I’m at Walmart.” Seth kind of laughed. “Schoolkids Records it ain’t.”

  “Yeah,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about. Rock music wasn’t my thing. I jammed the Buddy Holly CD sloppily back in the racks. “Not much, um. Cool music. Hey, uh. I like your T-shirt.”

  “Pretty awesome, right?” Seth pulled at the hem. The T-shirt had a sketch of a human head, like something out of an anatomy book, and said I AM A SCIENTIST. “It was my brother’s. You’ve heard this album? Bee Thousand? GBV?”

  “Actually, no, but I was thinking, uh—I have a friend who would be really into a shirt like that.”

  “Tell him he can probably find one on eBay. It’s from back in the day. I think it’s a collector’s item now.”

  “Seth, honey.” An older, petite, blond woman clipped down the aisle in a jogging suit, pushing a shopping cart. “We better go meet Dad. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Honey, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” Seth’s mom asked.

  “Mom, this is Rory. Rory, my mom.”

  “Hi, Rory. And what position do you play?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s not on the team, Mom,” Seth explained. “We were in Biology together last year.”

  “You’re not on the team?” Mrs. Brock exclaimed. “But you’re so big!”

  “Yes, ma’am. I know.” And thank you for pointing that out, Mrs. Brock. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here in Home Electronics, dying a slow death of embarrassment.

  “Well, Seth, you should get him on that team.”

  “I’ll work on him.” Seth gave me a look that said: Parents. What can you do? “We better go rescue Dad from the tire department.”

  “Nice to meet you, Rory.” Mrs. Brock gave me a beauty-pageant smile. I could see the family resemblance.

  “See ya ’round, man.” Seth gave me a little wave. I drifted back over to Lula, who was digging through the discount DVD box.

  “All these old Star Treks are only six bucks,” she said. “Where did you get off to, anyway?”

  “I just had a close encounter with two extraterrestrial biological entities,” I reported. “Their teeth were unnaturally white.”

  “What?” Lula laughed.

  “Have you ever heard of the Pavement Reissues?”

  “No, but I’ve heard of a band called Pavement. Midnight Pete used to play them on his radio show before he bailed and we got stuck with Midnight Steve.”

  “How about a CD called . . . something Be. Be something .
. . ”

  “Let It Be? It’s by a little band from Britain you might have heard about, Theodore. They’re called the Beatles.”

  “No, no . . . hang on, I’ll remember it in a second.” Okay, so maybe I was a little bit swayed by the jock type. Now I could kind of see how he got the nickname. A few minutes of talking to Sexy Seth, and, without even realizing it, he puts the whammy on you. “And Schoolkids—is that the place in Chapel Hill?”

  “The cool record store? Yeah. What’s with the sudden interest in music, Theodore? I thought that aside from your odd affinity for the oldies station, you were a ‘whatever’s on the radio’ kind of guy.”

  “Just trying to stay open to new ideas.”

  five

  IT WAS TUESDAY NIGHT AND THE gym was packed as usual. I was doing leg presses when this guy in a Fighting Eagles (our mascot) shirt came up to me.

  “Hey, you go to Hawthorne High, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I grunted, not paying much attention to the guy. I’d never seen him before. I didn’t know if he was giving me hell or trying to pick me up, or what.

  “What’re you, six feet, six-two? You go ’bout two-sixty? Two sixty-five?”

  “What?” Was all I managed to say. If I was cool and I had the nerve, I’d have told the guy to fuck off. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.

  “Your weight.” The guy realized I was looking at him funny, because he sort of stopped, then smiled. “Sorry, I’m Morris. I’m the offensive coordinator for the varsity football team over at Hawthorne.”

  “Oh.” I finished my last rep and let the machine chunk back into place. I swung my feet to the ground and wiped the sweat off my face with my towel. I wasn’t sure what this guy wanted from me. Then I remembered Sexy Seth’s mom telling him to get me on the team.

  “I go about two-eighty,” I told him finally.

  “I thought so. I saw you running on the treadmill a little earlier. How long have you been working out here?”