by Scott Brown
Depressing because I was so grateful to him for it.
And it was costing him, I could see. Spesh looked solid, serene as an off-duty aircraft carrier resting in harbor. But his eyes were dancing like the world was on fire. I could see it: he was fidgeting to be gone, to be back under the boards.
Like I said: deprazing.
There’d been a time when I didn’t have to read Drew’s body language. That time was back when there’d been less body language to read, and less Drew overall. Back when we’d been flying at the same altitude. When we’d been happy just to be the brothers we weren’t. When nobody had to feel grateful for anything. That was age ten.
When he’d started. And I’d stopped.
“William Daughtry,” Drew said, backslapping me, “you look like five Benjamins.”
“Why, thank you, young man,” I said, recovering from the impact and playing my one card. (I’m two months older.) “I’ll let you know what fully licensed driving’s like. And congrats to you, too: you’re pushing three and one-half Benjamins yourself, adjusting for inflation.” (Drew and I misspent our youth building this massive rotation of beyond-dumb riffs on the phrase You look like a million bucks.)
“I’ll be honest, dude: I slipped you an extra Benj ’cause it’s your birthday. But if you’re going to be a pube about it, I’ll have that back.”
Laura clucked at Drew for pube and put down the cake. I blew out the candles. Everybody clapped.
Nobody asked what I’d wished for. Nobody needed to.
Laura brought a knife over; Brian pulled up a chair. I cut the cake and saw Drew glance at his phone. Yeesh. Time to mercy-kill this sad-ass ritual.
“Thank you all,” I said. “Thank you so much. To my family, to my agent, to my pediatrician, who inspired the whole idea. She said, ‘What if you got older every year and eventually turned sixteen?’ And I said, ‘That’s brilliant, I’m in.’ ”
“This guy, this guy!” Brian guffawed daddishly. “What a comedian!”
Hooboy. I wanted out of this lovefest, pronto.
“In short”—Jesus, did I just say that?—“I’m very proud. And I love you guys. And now I gotta get to school.” I didn’t, actually. I’d wangled a first-period study hall.
“Now hang on, hang on.” Brian held up a presiding hand. “Aren’t we skipping a key stage of hominid development?”
Huh? Brian wasn’t above a random lecture, especially where hominids and behavioral biology were concerned. But this seemed really random.
“Mobility,” said Brian. “Mobility’s big with diasporic hominids. And you’re sixteen…and a birthday…implies a present….”
And then, out of this word salad, he pulled out…the Keys.
I blinked. With my whole Brain and Being. Wait. Is this…
Drew, grinning, gestured toward the door like a game-show host. “Shall we?”
I walked outside in a kind of daze. The door swung open in slo-mo, sunlight filled the foyer at the speed of honey, and…I saw it. I saw it before I saw it. Past my climbing sycamore, sitting in the driveway radiating an electric-blue sheen that made the air around it vibrate—
A car. My car.
There was just one problem. One…small…problem—
Where was the rest of the car?
“It’s a…Fiat!” I said, in a way that I hoped sounded thrilled, rather than complicated. Because this felt complicated. I didn’t want it to. But it did.
My first car…was a clown car.
Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be? Little man, little car. I mean, how absolutely and totally bobblehead ridiculous, how Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! would I look in anything bigger than a Fiat?
“Fiat Ovum, in Orbital Blue!” Brian practically sang. “Color didn’t even exist when I bought my first Tracer! They didn’t have blue, much less Orbital Blue!”
But they probably had another five feet of car, I thought.
What I said was, “Oh…wow…you guys…so awesome…thank you!” because saying anything else would’ve been the dickest Dick Move of all Dick Moves.
The truth is, any more car, and I’d probably have had trouble with blind spots. Brian had thought of this. Brian designed habitats, after all. For creatures great and small.
I approached the Fiat as if it were rigged to blow, while my mind chattered, I love these people. These are all the people I love most (with two notable absences), and they have done something wonderful for me, and I love what’s happening here in theory, and yet I’m also totally, irrationally furious at these wonderful people for buying me a jacked-up Rascal—
I opened the driver’s door slowly. No special pedals please no special pedals—
No special pedals. I relaxed. Not noticeably, I hoped.
“They’ve made big improvements to the roll cage,” said Laura. “This model year’s Ovum is safest in its class.” Laura, obviously, had conducted the helicopter-parent portion of the car research. She snapped away with her phone, posted some shots to “Poca Resaca Mom Mafia.” I hoped I was smiling convincingly in them. Safest in its class. Which class was this car in? Pre-K?
Brian gave my shoulder a meaty shake. “Orbital Blue!”
Hey. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been a Rollerblade. Could’ve been a Beatrix Potter mouse wagon, freakin’ acorns for wheels. Or nothing. Could’ve been nothing. Probably should’ve been. Instead: hugs all around, and the wonderful, terrible moment passed.
“Remember,” said Brian, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and my brain wisecracked, What comes with a Fiat? A magnifying glass? because my brain is an asshole, apparently.
Drew, sensing my inner weirdness, threw me an assist: “Hey, drive me to practice? I like riding with the elderly. You guys get all the good parking.”
“AAAAND…FOR THE sixteenth year running…the award for Most Awkwardly Brian Person Imaginable goes to…Brian!” Drew made a vuvuzela sound.
I let a smile squeak through, but it was a tight one, a rubber band ready to snap. I was driving—seat ratcheted up nearly to the steering column so my foot could work the pedal—and I could feel Drew reading my bad simulation of a grin. Smoking me out. Waiting for it. What’s wrong?
So I gave the ol’ shake-it-off shrug. “Just too old for parties and candles and cakes, shit like that, is all.”
“But this new ride’s okay, huh?”
“Oh, the ride is amazing.” Half car! Half car! screamed Ass Brain. Freakishly abbreviated! Just like YOU!
“Whatcha gonna name it?”
“Huh?” Half caaaaaaar!
“Gotta name your ride,” said Drew, fake serious. “It’s a rule. How about…the Yacht?”
“Like…short for Fiat?” Oh, wow. Super dumb. I snorted approvingly.
“This car’s short even for a Fiat,” Drew came back, grinning. “HEY-O!”
Aha. That’s what Drew was up to: kicking off a dumb-joke race to the bottom. I was game.
“Okay, how ’bout: if this car were any shorter, it’d be a dolly.”
“Dude, if this car were any shorter, it’d be a ca.”
And so on. Dumber and dumber, for miles. The morning was getting better.
The whole thing could’ve been worse. Brian and Laura could’ve performed the full birthday ritual. The ritual we’d skipped since Drew and I were thirteen. Out of mercy.
You see, birthday ceremonies used to conclude with…the Doorframe.
The parade would move from the kitchen table to the pantry doorframe, the holy mystic Tape Measure and Sharpie would be brought forth on velvet cushions, and, lo, we would measure. As families have measured for millennia, since there have been families, since there have been doorframes.
My marks start getting closer and closer together until they start running into each other, rear-ending until they form a k
ind of mutant caterpillar, this fat pupa of Sharpie. It looks like some little kid’s trying to draw the same line over and over, never getting it right. The dates fan out on the side; there’s no room for them between lines.
Then they stop. Just stop.
Drew’s marks, in the upper door-o-sphere, stop at the same time, out of respect for the minuscule.
Growth spurt is not a good term. It sounds, I’m sorry, like jizz. That’s probably not a mistake. The teenage years are a very jizzy time for the human male, and whoever came up with growth spurt was, most likely, a human male. Personally, I prefer chondrocyte proliferation, hypertrophy, and extracellular matrix secretion, organized by complex networks of nutritional, cellular, paracrine, and endocrine factors, but that’s just me. I may have done a little too much reading on the subject. Everyone else seems totally fine with growth spurt.
Sadly, this jizz-sounding term was my last hope for a normal life.
The whole family held out hope. After a while, it was like a religion: the Church of the Spurt. Built around something so improbable, it required serious faith.
“I think the Church of the Spurt may be shutting its doors for good.”
Drew set his mouth funny. Didn’t like the sound of this. “Meaning?”
I let out a big exhale, went for it: “Nobody even made a move for the tape measure this time.”
Now Drew got it. “Will…”
“Because obviously we don’t measure anymore, because depressing, right?”
“Will…”
“But usually somebody goes for the tape, y’know, like, out of habit, then tries to play it off. Usually Brian. Oh, I was looking for the dry-roasted peanuts! This time? He never made a move.”
“Will…”
“Never even looked at the pantry. It was almost like he was trying not to. Look, Drew, it’s fine: they’ve given up. Good. I’m glad. They should give up. I mean, I gave up—”
“Will…”
“—like, last year. Time to start working with what we have, right?”
Drew squirmed in his tiny bucket seat. Drew was not meant for this car, and he did not like this conversation. He was stuck in both for me and me alone.
“You all done?” he asked.
“Uh. Yes.”
“Okay, so nobody’s ‘giving up’ on anything. Nobody’s expecting anything, either, and nobody’s not expecting anything. Everyone’s expecting you to be you, and that’s it. No conspiracy, no church—just us, man.”
It was a really, really nice thing to say. I’d go further than nice, actually. I’d go noble. That was Drew. Noble. Always worried about me, about Monica, about the people in his orbit, which was a powerful orbit. There was something else, too, something…a little sad, maybe? I’m not sure what the sadness was, or how there could even be room for it, with all the winning and the worrying about others Drew had on his plate. Maybe it was just the shadow somebody as great and good and noble as Drew naturally casts. Maybe it’s just the way flags look nobler when they’re lowered out of respect.
Or maybe I was projecting. Maybe I was the sad one. The one who needed a flag lowered.
“Know what you need?”
Drew wasn’t asking. He knew. So did I.
“BoB, my blood brother, BoB,” he said, and he was smiling again. “I know, I know. We’re a few hours early. Change of plan.”
I grinned at that. “A change of plan? From Spesh? The shot caller? My God! It is truly the End Times.”
“Slight change of plan, wiseass. Just drive.”
* * *
—
BoB.
It was a secret, too good to share. So we kept it. We happy few.
BoB happened one wild, wonderful afternoon. But really, like a lot of things, it started happening before it happened. There’d been stages. The first was a nightmare.
When I was eight, my mother died of a rare, aggressive bone cancer that the doctors at UCSD had never seen. That had never shown up outside of mining towns, apparently.
The day she died, I was at basketball camp. Brian came to get me. He was crying. It had been “sudden.” Unexpected. I mean, obviously. If it had been “expected,” I wouldn’t have been at goddamned basketball camp.
I remember holding a basketball and watching my father cry. I remember thinking, I have to get rid of this ball, but there was no one to pass it to, and dropping it seemed wrong for some reason. So my father cried while I just stood there with my feet planted, ready to pass.
I cried, too. Of course I did. But later. It seems like nothing back then happened when or how it should. Mothers shouldn’t die young. If they do, their sons should cry, and cry right away. Right?
My clearest memory of Mom, after it got bad but before the very end: She’s in her hospital bed, propped up, but crooked because she can’t get comfortable. Her hair hasn’t fallen out from the chemo yet, but it looks stringy, wilted. Her skin’s the same bad-milk color as the hospital wall, like she’s fading into it.
At that point, the doctors were still saying things like cautiously optimistic. They were also saying things like TACE inhibition and GHBP production and epiphyseal lesions, and I suddenly needed to know what all those things meant. I started reading biology textbooks that were way over my head, trying to catch up with the thing that was eating my mom, eating her life, eating mine. That, I guess, was my way of being cautiously optimistic.
Still is.
And then she was gone.
Two months after the funeral, this kid I’d met at basketball camp, Andrew Tannenger, shows up with his bike and says, “You want to ride?” And strangely enough, I did, for the first time in weeks.
Drew and I were camp friends, and good camp friends, but only camp friends. He was small, like I was, and aggressive, like I wasn’t, but also generous with assists. He practiced harder than anyone. That’s how we became friends: I’d go to the gym to avoid some kumbaya social event—back then, shyness was my biggest problem—and I’d find Drew in there, practicing. We’d shoot around for hours, and shoot the shit for hours. It wasn’t the deepest friendship, maybe, but it was steady. And somewhere in there, we discovered we lived in the same basic region of the Poca Resaca burbs, and we said what kids always say at the end of camp: We’ll keep in touch.
Drew actually kept in touch. And he did it—reached out—at the most important moment, for both of us.
While we were riding, Drew told me his dad had left to fill a prescription for antidepressants…and then left. As in, left-left. Called from Belize. Yeah. The country. He’d “met someone.” He wasn’t coming back. It’d been a year.
Drew told me that story, and nothing else. He didn’t ask me what I thought of it. He didn’t ask me if I “identified.” Drew didn’t generally have a speech prepared. When he did say something? He meant it.
I remember just one specific thing about what happened next: the hill where Shalina Boulevard meets Magic Avenue. Steep old bastard. Kids’d ride a half mile out of their way to avoid it.
But Drew said, “Shall we?”
I looked at the hill. It hadn’t gotten any flatter since the last time I’d avoided it. “Let’s go around.”
Drew leaned on his handlebars, picked at a faded sticker on the frame with his thumbnail, some cartoon hero whose face had worn off in the rain. He said, “Here’s the plan.”
The plan? We needed a plan? No. We needed to go around.
“We do it in zigzags,” said Drew.
“Like…switchbacks?”
“Yeah, that,” he said. “Less steep.”
I just looked at him.
Then Drew said, “And we don’t think about them. Until we’re at the top.”
Them.
And then I got it. Then I knew we had to do it, climb it, just the way he’d said.
So we did. Accor
ding to plan. In zigzags. All the way. And at the top, we just kept going, didn’t look back at what we’d just conquered, didn’t even slow down. We rode. I don’t remember where. I don’t remember coming back.
I remember Laura was there when we did. Laura and Brian, in the driveway. They were worried, but not worried-worried. Laura looked at me and Drew, saw something—if you want to call it a “bond,” go right ahead—something we hadn’t even seen yet, and said to Brian, “Guess we should have each other’s numbers?”
That’s how, two years later, our surviving/remaining parents—Brian and Laura, who’d gradually become feed-each-other’s-cats friends, and then more—married each other. And Drew and I became brothers. No, better: blood brothers, which was epic. We cut our palms with pocketknives, cut them right along the lifelines, and swapped hemoglobin out behind the swing set in Drew’s old yard. Did it the same day we watched our parents swap vows at the San Diego county clerk’s office.
Then we all went to Chili’s.
And somehow, even though everything was ruined, even though everything was wrecked, even though everything had ended…everything went on. And was sort of okay. More than okay, in some ways: without knowing it, we were on our way to BoB.
Not too long after our families blended, when Drew and I were ten, we started expanding our bike range over Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, then bushwhacking into Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve, which is one of those rare places in Southern California where you can still pretend you’re the first to see the Pacific. So suddenly we were explorers, and the world was bigger, and the days were longer, and so was our leash.
You can see whales from Torrey Pines—gray whales, for the most part, but in the last couple of decades, more and more blue whales, too. They come for the krill, which for some reason (thanks, climate change?) show up here in greater numbers than they used to. Blue whales—the largest animals ever to take lunch on this planet—are something you really, really want to see in this life, just instinctively. Which is why millions of people come to San Diego to do just that.
