by Pete Hautman
Blocked
The day Gaia told me she was leaving, I got back in Mom’s car and drove, around and around, going nowhere, carrying with me a storm in my head. That was the day the moonfaced cop gave me the ticket. I texted Gaia over and over again, and all that night, but got no response until five thirty the next morning: Number unavailable.
She’d blocked me.
I think I went a little crazy. I took my mom’s car without asking her—she was still sleeping. I didn’t even change out of the sweats and T-shirt I’d slept in.
The sun hadn’t risen yet, and Gaia’s house was dark. I rang the doorbell. Nothing. I banged on the door. Nothing. I walked around the back and banged on her window. I went back to the front door and started kicking it. A light came on inside. I waited.
Derek opened the door. His hair was all messed up, and he had on his pajamas.
“Gabel,” he said. “What the hell?”
“Sorry if I woke you up.” I forced myself to speak clearly, although all I wanted to do was scream in his face. “I need to talk to Gaia.”
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone.”
“To Wisconsin?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Not really. She said she was going to stay with Maeve. But I don’t have the phone number there. Or an address. Or anything.”
Derek pressed his lips together the way Gaia did when she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear.
“I’m not going to get in the middle of this,” he said after a moment.
“In the middle of what?” My voice cracked.
“Sorry.” He shut the door. I stared at it for a second, then kicked it, twice, really hard. The door swung open.
“Gabel, if you keep kicking this door, I’m going to come out there and kick your ass.”
The way he said it was weird, like he wasn’t really mad; he was simply, wearily, stating a fact. I believed him, and when he closed the door, I turned and walked back to the car. My legs felt like wood. I drove home.
Naturally, my mom was furious about me taking her car without permission, but I didn’t care. I sat through her whole what-were-you-thinking routine without feeling a thing. I watched her talking at me, and it was like watching a video, as if I was seeing the world through a screen. I didn’t hear anything she said until she got right in my face and yelled, “Look at you! You’re not even dressed for school! You’ll miss your bus!”
I looked at the clock. “I already missed it,” I said. “Anyways, I’m not going.”
“Not an option,” she said. “I won’t have you lazing about the house all day long on your second day of school. I’ll drive you.”
It was easier to go along with it than it was to argue, so I went to my room and changed out of the sweats and tee into jeans and a different shirt.
When we got there—the whole trip spent in icy silence—Mom waited in her car and watched to make sure I went into the school. Once inside I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t have my schedule. I definitely wasn’t going back to Nestor’s calc class. I thought about walking back out. Instead I went to the office and told them I’d gone home sick the day before, and I was dropping calculus, and I had nowhere to go.
• • •
In a way, life is easier in the zombie zone. You just go where people tell you and pretend to do whatever it is they want you to do. I sat in the office until second period, then went to American Literature, then biology, then to the cafeteria, where I bought a bag of chips and sat with Garf and listened to him tell me about some new comic book artist he liked. After a few minutes he gave me a funny look and asked me if I was okay.
“Yeah, why?” I said.
“You seem sort of . . . not there,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“So you really dropped calculus?”
“Yeah. I replaced it with a class called Practical Math.”
“That’s what all the jocks take, right?”
“I guess.”
“Like, if you’re on the twelve-yard line and you gain forty yards on a passing play but get a ten-yard penalty, how far do you have to kick the ball for a field goal?”
“Exactly.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I finished my chips. I figured he wanted to ask me about Gaia, and I didn’t want to talk about Gaia, so I got up and went to my next class, something called Theories of Justice. I didn’t remember signing up for it, and I had no idea what it was about. An hour later, when the bell rang, I still didn’t know, and I didn’t care.
• • •
Gaia met another guy. A guy smarter than me and better-looking and taller and who would drink a Black Mamba and never complain. Or it was that day when I wouldn’t sit on the bench or tell her why and I just walked away. Or Gaia’s dad sent her away because he hates me. Or Gaia thinks I’m stupid because I wanted to climb up onto the big blue chicken. Or I have really bad breath and she couldn’t bear to tell me. Or she never really liked me; she just hung out with me because she was bored. Because she felt sorry for me. Because I’m so pathetic. Gaia thinks I’m a wimp because I couldn’t save her from Ben Gingrass. Gaia is a secret lesbian and she’s in love with Maeve. She thinks my Darth Vader collection is stupid. Somebody told Gaia something about me that wasn’t true. I’m too boring for her. I’m not arty enough. I’m creepy and weird. I have no friends except Garf, and he’s weird too. When she thinks about me, she rolls her eyes and shakes her head. She’s telling Maeve what a loser I am. I wasn’t nice to Maeve. She—
“Steven Gabel!”
I looked up. Mr. Hallgren was laser beaming me with his squinty black eyes.
“What are you doing?”
I was sitting in study hall with a dozen other losers. Last period of the day. Everybody was looking at me.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Precisely,” Hallgren said. “This is not stare-vacantly-into-space hall. This is study hall. At the very least you could open a book and pretend to read.”
I shrugged and opened a random book to a random page. Everyday Mathematics—Making Numbers Fun. The chapter was called “How to Balance a Checking Account.” Fun! Who uses checks anymore? I flipped forward, all the way to the back, where I found a section called “Interesting Numbers.” The section had been misnamed, unless you happened to be interested in things like the number of acres of cornfields in Iowa, or the age of the oldest living hippopotamus. One thing did catch my eye. In the United States there are 105 teenage males to every 100 teen females. It did not say how many Stiggys there are for every Gaia.
I let the words blur. I talked to Gaia for the first time on May 7. I got us kicked out of Wigglesworth’s three days later. We had sex on the Fourth of July. I add up the days. Fifty-eight days from talking in the McDonald’s to getting naked in my room. Practical Math. Sixty-three days later, here I am staring at a remedial math book, and she is gone. One hundred twenty-one days total.
Fun!
“America”
Simon and Garfunkel
3:37
The motel clerk pokes my shoulder, and I wake up with a start. At first I think only a few minutes have passed, but then I feel how stiff my neck is and realize I’ve been asleep for a while.
“Time to move on, son,” he says.
The clock behind the desk reads 5:41. It’s still dark out. I stand up and stretch.
“My shift’s up in twenty. Can’t have Carla show up and find a vagrant camping in her lobby.” He smiles to show me he’s kidding. Sort of. I guess I am sort of a vagrant.
“You want to take a cup with you?” He gestures at the coffee machine.
“Sure. Thanks. And thanks for letting me camp out here.” I fill a paper cup with coffee.
“Supposed to be a nice day. Chilly last night, but it’s warming up now.”
I stir in a creamer and a couple of sugars.
“I been there,” he says.
“Been where?” I really don’t know what he’s talking about.
“In between. Still there, in a way. Columbia. You know what Columbia is? Halfway between Kansas City and Saint Louis. In between. Which way you going?”
“Kansas City,” I say.
“Good luck.”
I’m in the middle of Missouri, I’m running low on money, and I have no idea whether I’ll find Bran and my car when I get to Kansas City. For all I know, he drove it to Florida or California—but I’m feeling pretty good. It helps that the motel clerk was nice to me. Maybe my asshole magnetism isn’t working.
• • •
The bus shows up right on time. Several passengers get out, and I get on. I pick a window seat in the middle. A minute later the happy guy from the restaurant gets on, only he doesn’t look so happy. His face is slack, and his eyes are red and framed with dark circles of bruised-looking flesh. He is carrying a large cup of coffee and a small overnight bag. He sits across the aisle from me and doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he’s noticed me. He seems pretty focused on drinking his coffee, so I leave him alone.
The passengers who got off the bus to use the restrooms and buy snacks get back on, and a few minutes later the bus rolls out of the parking lot. It’s only a third full. I rest my forehead against the window and stare out at the world passing by.
We’ve been on the road for about half an hour when I get this crawly feeling like a bug is about to land on me. I turn my head and see Jack smiling at me.
“How you doing?” he says.
“Pretty good.”
He leans across the aisle and holds out his hand. “Dave Quigley.”
“Stiggy.” I shake his hand. “I thought your name was Jack.”
“Jack?” He seems confused.
“Uh, yeah. From that restaurant last night?”
“Oh!” He smiles. His smile is twenty-four karat, but it looks like it hurts. “Sure! You had that burger and fries! Sorry. Rough night. I just told that waitress I was Jack so we could be Jack and Jill. She liked it. Real name’s Dave, though. You going to KC?”
“Prairie Village, actually.”
That makes him laugh. “Perfect Village!” he says. “Should’ve known, with that polo shirt and the KC hoodie. You look like a Cake.”
That was what Bran called me.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Cake. When I was in high school, that’s what we called guys from Prairie Village: Cake Eaters.”
“Yeah, well I’m not from there. I just have to pick up my car.”
“You got a car? How come you’re riding the big gray dog?”
“This guy borrowed it. Without permission.”
“Stole it, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He laughs. I don’t see the humor in it, but I laugh too.
After that we don’t talk. Dave stares out his window and I stare out mine, looking at the different colors of the fields: some green, some brown, some yellow. I try to figure out what the crops are. The only one I know for sure is the corn. After a while I fall asleep and don’t wake up until we pull into the Greyhound station in Kansas City.
Shoes
One day—this was three weeks after Gaia left—I just didn’t go to school. I took the bus, but when I got there, I couldn’t make myself go inside. Instead I walked. I walked to places I used to go with Gaia. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I even drove out to the mushroom caves one afternoon, but I didn’t go inside. I went back to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden too, and stood in front of that bronze woman stepping out of a dead wolf and tried to see it the way Gaia had seen it.
I guess you’d call it wallowing. Slogging my way through the miserable muck inside my head. The day I decided not to go back to school, I walked over to Wigglesworth’s, determined to order a Black Mamba and drink the whole disgusting thing. Of course, the same girl was working, and as soon as she saw me come in, she whipped out her phone, so I left.
The odd thing was that a part of me welcomed each little jolt of pain.
Back in the eighth grade I had a friend named Aiden Invie who was into stabbing himself with this safety pin. He always carried that pin with him. He’d even do it in school, poking his thighs through his jeans, always walking around with bloody dots on his pants. Back then I didn’t get why he would stab himself, but I guess now I was doing the same thing—hurting myself to cut through the numbness, to make the aching vacuum stop for just a moment. Aiden moved to Saint Paul in the ninth grade, so I don’t know if he bled to death or what.
After Wigglesworth’s I walked over to East River Park and imagined I was my father. I moved from bench to bench and forced myself to sit on all of them and look out over the river and think about how it had looked to him in February. I was pretty sure I knew which bench he’d picked—the one with the best view—but when I sat on it, it felt the same as all the others. Cold dead metal.
I walked from there to Gaia’s house, but I didn’t stop. Didn’t even look at it except out of the corner of my eye. I circled the block and walked past it again, and again.
I must have walked twenty miles that day. When I got home, I had a huge blister on my right heel. I popped it with a safety pin and watched the water trickle out.
Mom had left a note for me. She was at her Zumba class. I didn’t know what Zumba was. Some sort of exercise.
I went out to the garage and started the Mustang and listened to some N.W.A. I imagined myself backing out of the garage onto the street and going. Just driving. The fact that I didn’t have any place to go didn’t bother me—it was kind of the whole point.
I turned the car off and went to my room and started filling a cardboard box with all my Star Wars junk: my lightsaber, the TIE fighter Geoff had busted, the variously sized Darth figurines including the big one Dad had given me for my eighth birthday, and Wonder Woman. I threw in my PlayStation, too. Then I called Garf.
• • •
Brain Food was only eight blocks away, but the box was heavy and I had to set it down a bunch of times to rest. When I got there, Garf was waiting out front with his skateboard, practicing ollies, trying to jump the curb. Garf had been trying to master the ollie for years. He wasn’t very good at it.
I noticed he was wearing a brand-new pair of Adidas skate shoes. That surprised me because Garf was not big on spending money.
He saw me coming and kicked up his board.
“You sure you want to do this?” he said.
“I’m sure.”
“I told Tobias you were coming. He’s in a mood.”
“Tobias is always in a mood,” I said.
We went inside. Tobias was definitely in a mood.
“More junk,” he said. “Just what I need.”
• • •
It took Tobias half an hour to go through everything. He rejected the PlayStation. “Three years old? I could pick that up at any garage sale for a buck.” He went through all my Vader stuff, setting the figurines aside one by one, saying, “Junk. Junk. Junk.” He paused when he got to the TIE fighter, examined it, saw the crack, set it aside. “Junk.”
Wonder Woman was a different story. I could see his beady little eyes light up.
“Well, well, well,” he said, fondling the unopened box.
“It was my mom’s,” I said.
He sat back in his chair and said, “So, what do you want?”
“What will you pay me?” I asked.
“It’s mostly junk.” He waved his hand dismissively. “But then, I’m in the junk business. Four hundred for the lot.”
“Four hundred!” Garf said. “The Wonder Woman alone is worth more than a thousand!”
Tobias snorted. “In your dreams, kid.”
“It’s mint!” Garf said.
“Mint, schmint. At auction you might get a thou, but probably not. Keep in mind you got to give 30 percent to the auction house. And I got my markup to consider. I put it on display here, I might ask six hundred, and most likely it’d sit on
display for a year before some collector spots it and offers me four.”
“What about all the Star Wars stuff?” Garf said.
“Dime a dozen.” He puffed out his cheeks and said, “Tell you what. You guys have been coming here a long time. I could go five hundred for the lot.”
“Don’t do it,” Garf said to me.
“How about for everything except Wonder Woman?” I asked.
“Not interested.”
“Don’t do it,” Garf said. “Seriously.”
“How about for just the Wonder Woman?” I asked.
Tobias shrugged. “I could go three.”
“I’ll give you four,” Garf said.
I looked at Garf, completely surprised. “Since when do you have four hundred bucks?”
“I have money,” he said. “Investment capital.”
“What the hell?” Tobias said, his face turning pink. “You come in here asking me to buy your junk, and now it’s a bidding war?”
Garf said, “Well, you won’t pay what it’s worth.”
Tobias jumped to his feet. “Get the hell out!” His face had gone from pink to a scary shade of red. “Both of you, and your junk, too!”
Outside, Garf stopped and took off his shoes and socks. He stuffed the socks into the shoes.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“New shoes.” He tied the laces together and hung them over his shoulder. “I want the soles to stay sticky.”
“I ever tell you you’re weird?”
“All the time.”
On the way to his house, I tried to talk him into buying all of it.
“You could sell the Vaders online,” I said.
“So could you.”
“Yeah, but I’m leaving.”
“Yeah, right.” He didn’t believe me.
We got to his house, a rambler on Tenth Street, and went through the side door into his bedroom. One thing about Garf, he had the neatest, most organized bedroom I’d ever seen. He put Wonder Woman on a shelf next to his BB-8, then took a cigar box from his dresser drawer. He opened the top. It was full of money.
“Garf! Dude! You’re rich!”
