by Andrew Smith
I already knew I’d gone too far; I’d caused a flood and I was caught in it, drowning. Finn Easton’s self-taught disaster.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
“Sorry I said that.”
“You made your mother cry.”
I caught myself before my fourteen-billion-year-old teenage atoms let my mouth say something horrible—that Tracy wasn’t my real mom, even though she was the only mom I remembered.
“She shouldn’t have been standing there. I just want to be left alone.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen.”
I planted my elbows on my knees and propped my chin in my hands as I stared down at my feet dangling above the floor.
My dad took a cautious step toward me. I wasn’t looking at him; I could sense him moving closer.
He said, “Come on, son, I know exactly how it feels—”
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
Dad turned toward the door.
“Okay, Finn. I’ll leave you alone. I’ll let Cade know the Dunston trip is off.”
“Don’t tell him that. Maybe I just need to go away or something. Give you a break from me.”
“Your mom and I don’t really think it would be a good time for you to go, Finn.”
“You and Mom can’t do anything about what happened to me. I’m tired of being the broken little kid, the fucking epileptic. I’m tired of the way you and Mom and everyone else look at me, like the slightest little fucking wind is going to break me in half again.”
“You’re broken right now, Finn.”
“And your point is what? That I’m never going to be able to stand on my own? That I’m going to have to wait and see what kind of ending Easton Michaels dreams up for poor Finn?”
“No.”
My father sighed and shook his head.
“Look: I’m sorry for what I said to you, and how I acted. I—I’m just sad about the way things turned out for me. But if you make me stay home now, it would be the worst thing you ever did to me. Sorry. I’ll straighten up, Dad.”
I felt like shit, and I wanted him to leave before the dam broke.
Look: You’re allowed to do that at some point when you’re a teenager, right? I mean have a meltdown on your parents. Everyone I knew did those things; it just hadn’t happened to the epileptic boy until Julia Bishop went away.
We stowed all our gear for the trip inside the camper shell on Cade’s truck. On Friday morning, I said my awkward and muted good-byes to Dad and Mom and Nadia, Laika, too. I knew I had been bad, and I had passed off my own personal shit onto my family, but I was a teenager, stubborn, and I wasn’t about to give in and blubber my apologies to them, especially not in front of Cade Hernandez.
So Dad was uncharacteristically quiet. He didn’t say all those things I’d come to expect: about keeping my phone charged, about using my credit card, about not drinking, about letting him know what I thought about the school, checking in every day, and making sure Cade Hernandez called him if his little epileptic boy blanked out.
Seventeen years is almost eleven billion miles traveled together. That’s a long enough trip to get to know these things even if they go unspoken.
I guess that’s a sign of growing up: When your dad shuts up but you can hear him anyway. Maybe he was the incomer instead of me. Maybe he was fucking with my Wernicke’s area.
That day, Cade Hernandez and I crossed the line into Arizona.
The epileptic boy had finally broken out of the prison of California.
THE BERLIN WALL
I said, “I have never been out of the state of California in my life.”
“It’s about fucking time you said something.”
I had been silent and moping for hours, glancing down from time to time in nervousness at the screen on my phone. Dad checked in with three text messages before we’d crossed the Colorado River. After the third, I sent him this: Everything is okay.
And Julia and I had been texting too. I wanted to hear her voice so bad, it was making me crazy, but I was afraid, and I didn’t want to talk to her in front of Cade.
Her last message to me was this: I miss you so much. I love you.
“I guess I was waiting till after we got to Arizona to say anything.”
“That’s the dumbest conversational plan I have ever heard in my life.”
“You’re probably right.”
Cade Hernandez spit tobacco into an old plastic water bottle.
Then he nodded and reached across the center console and poked my back with his pointer finger.
“Well, I’m glad the dam finally broke.”
Neither of us was wearing a shirt.
And Cade said, “Dude with four balls popping a boner ’cause he’s in Arizona.”
“Uh, I don’t think I would like to have four balls, Cade.”
“Yeah,” he said, “a guy would probably never get to sleep.”
“Hard enough to sleep with just two,” I said.
Cade spit again. “You know what Oklahoma used to be called?”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“What?”
“Indian Territory.”
“Oh.”
“K-L-A-H-O-M-A,” Cade sang.
“And that’s the dumbest thing anyone has said to me in, like, my entire postlingual life, Cade.”
“I didn’t say it, bitch. I sang it.”
Ever since we’d left Burnt Mill Creek, Cade Hernandez must have been calculating some method for successfully extracting an “Oh” from me, and when it finally happened he musically pounced.
Cade laughed and patted the dashboard. Then he held up his right hand and extended his finger toward the steering wheel; kind of like the way a kid might pretend to be holding a gun.
“Go west,” Cade said, pointing past the steering wheel.
“Huh?”
I glanced out Cade’s side window. I didn’t know if he meant we had missed some turn we were supposed to take. But there were no turns here; only undulating straight highway and desert.
“No. It’s the map of Oklahoma. It’s shaped like a hand with a finger pointing west.”
“Are we done talking about Oklahoma yet, Cade?”
“I think I’ve used up all my material.” Then he braced his knee against the steering wheel, pointed his left hand somewhere into the empty space in front of the dashboard air vent, and said, “I guess we’re about here.”
“You are a human map of the United States,” I said.
“Who drives with his knee,” Cade added.
My phone tickled in my pocket: Dad and the nonstop status checking via text message. I squirmed in my seat and tweezered my fingers into the pocket of my shorts.
“My dad’s texting again,” I said.
“Let me see that.”
I glanced at my screen just to be certain it really was Dad texting me. No kid wants his best friend to see text messages from a girl who’d broken his heart.
Cade read my father’s check-in message, shook his head, then tossed my phone out his window, into the Arizona afternoon.
“Hey! What the fuck?”
“That’s exactly why I left mine at home in my bedroom. Your dad is going to drive us crazy. He needs to let you go, dude.”
“You left your phone back home?” I was horrified at the thought of not having a single cell phone between the two of us.
Cade added, “Whatever. That’s why you have insurance. Tell them a crazy guy threw it out your car window. You can get a new one when we go back home.”
“What if something happens?”
I was mad.
Cade shrugged. “Something will happen. You don’t want to miss it just because you have a cell phone jammed up your ass.”
• • •
Cade Hernandez and I slept in a forty-five-dollar-a-night motel room somewhere east of Gallup, New Mexico, that smelled like cigarettes and Comet cleanser.
There was a phone wi
th a dial in the room. It had a cord, too. I wondered if I would actually have the nerve to call my dad with it in the morning and confess I’d “lost” my cell phone. If I didn’t check in soon, I was certain Dad would be notifying the FBI or Homeland Security, or whatever agency is actually in charge of apprehending interstate fugitive epileptic kids who probably came from some other planet.
The motel was called E-Z Rest.
It was the first time I had ever stayed in a motel room.
Imagine that.
And although I never actually remembered the particular details of the months and months I’d spent in a hospital after that dead horse fell a hundred sideways miles and crushed my life, staying in the E-Z Rest brought something back to me that I couldn’t exactly express in words. I felt the numb isolation of those days when I was just a little motherless kid, emptied of words, waiting to come through my door and be born.
The man working at the front desk of the E-Z Rest wore a plastic name badge that said MARTIN pinned to his stained blue polo shirt.
Cade Hernandez said this to him: “We need a room for the night, but we are not gay.”
Martin looked at Cade, then me, then back at Cade again, without answering.
So Cade continued. “In fact, Finn here is actually a virgin. Can you believe it? I know, right? What guy Finn’s age is still a virgin?”
Martin, unimpressed, said, “It’s forty-five dollars. As long as you don’t steal the towels, I don’t really give a shit what the two of you do in there. I need a credit card and a driver’s license.”
So we checked in to the E-Z Rest.
• • •
“Sometimes I really hate your guts, Cade Hernandez,” I said.
After I inserted the key card to unlock the door to room 211, which was where Martin had put us for the night, the first thing I noticed was the room had only one enormous, king-size bed. Martin apparently did not appreciate Cade Hernandez’s energy level.
“Uh,” Cade said. “Remember, as long as we don’t steal the towels, everything else we do is okay with the management.”
“Um.”
Cade shrugged. “I’ll go fix it with Martin downstairs. Get him to switch to a double room.”
“I think you should leave him alone. He’ll probably throw us out. It’s late, and I’m tired.”
“I have a cooler full of beer in the truck. Let’s get drunk.”
I thought about it, then nodded.
“You go get the beer while I construct the Berlin Wall.”
Look: The Berlin Wall is this: It is every available pillow and sofa cushion in the room, all lined up directly down the center of the king-size bed where Cade Hernandez and I were going to spend the night. I believe the construction of such barriers is instinctive—like dam building among beavers—when it comes to teenage boys sleeping together in the same bed.
As I put the final touches on the East–West blockade, Cade thumped his way through the door bracing a heavy, sloshing cooler against his knees, and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Ridiculous.
• • •
“Why do I have to live in East Berlin?” Cade whined.
We were drunk. To be honest, Cade was drunker. I only managed to finish two beers. The remote control didn’t work, so Cade left the television tuned to a sports channel with the sound turned down. The Dodgers were playing a home game, and Cade and I were lying on the bed, drunk, in our underwear.
I had to think for a moment about the location of the highway, which direction the E-Z Rest faced, but Cade was right: He was walled off in East Berlin.
“Be grateful you have electricity and beer, comrade. Germany has no plans for reunification before sunrise.” I turned over and shut off the nightstand lamp on my side of the bed. “I’m going to sleep. Good night.”
“I’m not tired yet.” Cade opened another beer. Then he said, “I’m going to stay up and read awhile.”
That was ridiculous. Cade Hernandez reading.
“Yeah. Right.”
“Little Bitch.”
“You’re just jealous because I have a bullfighter name and you don’t.”
I rolled over and shut my eyes.
“My bullfighter name is Cinco Dólares. Duh.”
But as I lay there, something remarkable happened. I heard the sound of Cade Hernandez actually opening a book, thumbing through pages. Despite the heavy musk of cigarettes, sweat, cleanser, and beer in our room, I could actually smell the sweet paper scent of a book.
I fought the impulse to look at him, telling myself, Do not open your eyes and look at what Cade Hernandez is reading. You know it’s going to be porn or something awful and embarrassing.
But it was too much for me to take. I had to look.
When I sat up and peered over our wall, I said, “You have got to be fucking kidding me, Cade.”
Cade Hernandez was reading—in the middle of—The Lazarus Door by Easton Michaels, my dad.
It was awful and embarrassing.
“Yeah, I know. Ridiculous, huh? Am I the only person in the world who hasn’t read this thing yet?”
“Uh.”
“I started it a couple days ago, after you quit talking to everyone.”
Cade took a swig of beer and continued. “When you think about it, it’s kind of pathetic—I realized I don’t have any real friends except for you and Julia and Monica Fassbinder, and I got so bored ’cause there was nobody to talk to and no one for me to hang out with this week, so I decided to actually read a fucking book.”
He turned the page. “So don’t bother me. And if you’re going to stay up and stare at me while I read a book, you should be quiet and have another beer, Little Bitch.”
“Okay, Cinco Dólares.”
My head was spinning.
Cade reached down into the ice chest he’d wedged between his side of the bed and the wall. He pulled up a dripping brown bottle of beer.
“Here,” he said.
I sat cross-legged in West Berlin and drank.
“Dude,” Cade said, “you’re in this book.”
“I know.”
“Do you eat anyone?”
“No.”
“Do you get killed?”
“It’s not really me,” I said. “My dad just named the kid Finn.”
“And the incomers just happen to have different-colored eyes and that same thing on their backs as you.”
Cade peered over the top of the Berlin Wall. Unblinking. Staring at the heterochromatic alien boy in the bed next to him, craning his neck to see my naked back.
“If I wake up in the middle of the night and you’re chewing on my thigh, I’m going to be pissed.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Cade.”
I turned on my light.
“There’s a hell of a lot of sex in this book.”
“I know. I’ve read it. You’re only halfway through. Just wait.”
“It’s kind of creepy—thinking about your dad thinking about sex.”
“Then don’t think about it.”
“You got to wonder about a guy who thinks up a story about angels who eat people after they have sex with them, and then puts his own kid in the book.”
“It’s not me, dumbshit. It’s just a story. Fiction.”
Cade said, “But I never knew your dad thinks up shit like this. He is seriously fucked up.”
I sighed. “Everyone says that to me. It’s just a book, okay. He’s a writer; he makes shit up. People take it way too serious. There’ve even been some wackos who said they wanted to kill him for writing that book.”
“I thought about killing the fucker who wrote our calculus book.”
I nodded. “Yeah. So did I.”
“That asshole probably never thinks about sex.”
“Calculus is as effective a deterrent to sex as castration.”
Cade nodded thoughtfully. “You got an A in it. Virgin.”
“Uh. So did you, Cade.”
Cade took
another drink and shrugged. “Still, if I was all into the Bible and going to church and shit, I’d probably be pissed off at your dad too. He’s got balls to fuck around with making fun of angels and God and shit. People go to war over that shit.”
“Whatever.”
I lay down and stared up at the smoke stains on the cottage-cheese ceiling.
“Well, I can’t wait to see what happens to you in the book.”
“It’s not me.”
“Do you at least get laid ?”
“Shut up.”
“Did you ever get pissed off at him for putting shit about you in the book?”
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
I said, “Yes.”
TRUE GRITS
In a motel room east of Gallup, New Mexico, as we lay separated by the Berlin Wall that cut lengthwise down our king-size bed, I told Cade Hernandez the story of The Boy in the Book—the shadow play Julia Bishop imagined for me on the night of my seventeenth birthday. Despite all his assumptions about what may have gone on sexually between Julia and me that night, it was the first time I’d ever said anything about it to my best friend.
Cade said, “Your dad was the monster.”
“I think it was a tiger.”
“Dude. She’s, like, magic or something, for knowing that shit about you.”
“I know.”
• • •
In the morning, I used the cord-and-dial telephone in our motel room to call my father. I felt awkward and guilty about avoiding him, as though every sorrow in my universe had spilled out of his pen, and that he was to blame for everything. But it was Saturday, after all—our usual morning to have coffee together—and I knew I’d have to get it over with and talk to Dad sooner rather than later.
Cade Hernandez, accomplished sleeper that he was, snored throughout the entire conversation, his face buried beneath a portion of the wall, a somnambulist’s unfinished escape tunnel out of the Soviet sector on our king-size bed.
I told Dad I’d lost my phone in Arizona; that it must have fallen out of my pocket. The story was so close to actually being the truth that I did not feel like a liar for saying it. Still, Dad sounded especially doubtful when I added that Cade had forgotten his phone back home in Burnt Mill Creek.
