“Stupid is as stupid does.”
“My dad and I had talked about that kind of stuff, and I wanted to prove a point.” I paused, thinking. “You just called yourself stupid.”
“Moi?”
“You wear the T-shirt,” I said. “Stupid rules for stupid people, right?”
“Got me. I just don't have the willpower to fix the system,” Theo said.
I looked at my feet. “It was sort of stupid, I guess. Immature.”
“No. It wasn't. Was your dad there?”
“Yeah. They just happened to be having a meeting when I came in.”
He laughed. “What a coincidence.”
“Yeah. I did get Mr. Avery to squirm, though.”
“Seeing a fat man squirm can be an ugly thing.”
I smiled. “I suppose so. He seemed pretty nice, really.”
“He is, and that's the problem. It would be easy if the purveyors of social inequity were all assholes, but they're not, and what makes it worse is that they really think what they're doing is right. You can't argue with complete and total institutional thinking.”
I shook my head. “He understood exactly what I was doing. He just thought it was silly. I could tell.”
“Ever read 1984, by George Orwell?”
“Yes, and I told you I'm not a revolutionary.”
“It's my favorite book. The only problem is that he didn't explain how the world ended up that way. That book was called 1983.”
I knew there was no 1983. “How, then?”
“A million little things piled up to make a big thing. Just like today.” He looked at my chest, then pointed. “You know that ID card you have around your neck?”
I looked down at the plastic thing. “So?”
“It's not just an ID card. Not for security, anyway.”
“I thought it was a dog collar.”
He shook his head, serious. “There's a microchip in it.”
I looked down at it again. My name, picture, ID number, and a bar code for the cafeteria were on it. “A microchip?”
“Yeah, and I'm not shitting you. They instituted it after the Trade Towers were hit. You know, the paranoia thing since Benders High has had so much trouble with terrorists roaming the halls.”
“A microchip? No way.”
“Yes, way. Know what it does?”
“What?”
“It gives complete access to your entire record, including local law enforcement and medical records. It also includes all of your personal files and information concerning school.”
I sat there, thinking about it. “I've heard about some national ID card like that.”
He nodded. “There's more. Have you ever noticed those little boxes above the doors of each class? They're transmitters. They track you. The school knows where you are at all times, and if you aren't where you're supposed to be, it sends a red flag to the office. Your schedule is plugged into the computer and if you aren't tagged within ten minutes in your class, it sends a message that you're a criminal to be hunted down and incarcerated without access to an attorney. They're in the bathrooms, in the cafeteria, the gym, everywhere. Even outside.”
“No way.”
“Fine, don't believe me. We were one of the first schools in the country to do it. Everybody was so happy we were one step closer to robots, the city council funded part of it.”
“You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”
“I'll tell you what. We'll play a game on Monday and we'll see what's conspiracy and what's not.”
“And the rules of the game?”
“Simple. We trade cards next week and see what happens.”
“Deal. What are you doing this weekend?”
He shrugged. “Lazing around being a slacker. You?”
I took a breath, remembering his comments about fitting in at Benders High. “Practicing for choir.”
He squinted at me. “Choir?”
“Yeah. I'm in it.”
“I thought you were anti-establishment.”
I corrected him. “You said I was anti-establishment.”
“You're a hard one to figure out, Poe Holly.”
I shrugged. “Oh well.”
He pondered the neighborhood for a minute. “That's not a bad thing. I just…”
“You made assumptions about me just like all the people you have contempt for who make assumptions.”
He leaned back, putting his hands over his heart. “Mortal wound. Ouch.”
“Sad but true.”
He sat back up. “You're right, but I never said I was any better than them.”
I laughed. “You ooze contempt for people, Theo. Get off it.”
“Yeah, but I have just as much contempt for myself, so it's okay.” He smiled, giving me a smirk. “So there.”
“Want to do something tomorrow?”
“Yeah. My parents are having a cocktail party. You're invited.”
“Ooh. On the good people list already. I can't wait.”
“It's like going to the zoo. Looking at the monkeys through the bars. Bring a bag of peanuts and they'll do tricks.”
“You never let up, do you?”
He stood. “No. I'll come over at around five. Deal?”
“Deal.”
I was in my room an hour later when Dad came in the front door. I stared at the music I'd been studying, thinking about what was going to happen. I didn't know how far I could push him, but I knew he'd probably be mad.
I waited for the sounds of his steps up the stairs, but they didn't come. I needed to learn the music, but I couldn't concentrate. Every time I looked at the sheets, fifteen seconds later I was reminding myself to study, forcing myself to focus.
I couldn't get used to this. To him. The waiting. The patience. It was like he'd handed me a platter of freedom when I got here, and now, as I sat in my room, it was almost like I wanted him to take it away. To do something. Any thing besides calmly ask distant questions about philo sophical aspects of why I was a loser. I wanted him to be pissed off.
I found him in the kitchen, a bag of groceries on the counter and the fridge open. He took a sack of tomatoes from the bag and put them in the vegetable bin, and even that made me edgy. Everything had to be perfect. “Why do you have to put everything where it belongs?”
He turned. “You mean the tomatoes?”
“I mean everything. Everything needs to be perfect around you.”
He shrugged. “I don't think that's true.”
“You're kidding, right? You scrub the grout lines with a toothbrush. You wash every dish five seconds after you use it. You alphabetically organize the magazines in the den. You iron your jeans. You leave for work at the exact same time every morning. To the minute. It's driving me crazy.”
“What is?”
“Dad, when you slice carrots, they have to be the same size. I've seen you. You throw away the ones that aren't right.”
He looked out the back window, then nodded. “Perhaps I am that way.”
“Understatement of the year. Don't you ever get mad? Don't you ever throw things or leave messes or get drunk or do anything that says you're a human being?”
He looked at me. “What are you getting at, Poe?”
“I'm getting at you not getting pissed in Mr. Avery's office today. Or now. It was like you weren't even there. Just… nothing. You aren't even mad about it, are you?”
He shook his head. “No, I'm not.”
“Why not?”
He took a breath, then exhaled. “I'm not your mother, Poe. We're different people.”
“I know you're not my mother, but I guess it would be nice to know that you're somebody. I mean, it's like you don't even …” I shook my head and looked away.
He folded his arms. “Please, go on. It's like I don't what?”
“No. If you don't care, I don't care, and I can go talk to a plant if I want to.”
“I do care.”
“About what? You say you're not mad about what I did t
oday, but I didn't see you defend me in his office. It's like you actually did just happen to be in there. Like you were a lamp or something.” I rolled my eyes. “Dad the lamp.”
“What would you like me to do?”
I sighed, frustrated. It was like talking to a gallon of homogenized milk. “Never mind. I'm going out.”
“Okay.”
I turned to leave, stared at the front door down the hall, then turned around again. “See, that's it! Okay? You say okay?” I yelled at him. “What does that mean? Where's the, ‘No, you can't,’ or, ‘Where are you going?’ or, ‘Be back by ten,’ or, ‘Call me so I know where you are’? It's like the world just slides right on by with you standing on the outside looking in!”
He stood there looking at me like I was an alien. Like he'd just listened to a diatribe in a language he didn't understand. “Am I supposed to say those things?”
I realized then that he really didn't get it. It wasn't that he didn't care, he was just a complete and total social idiot. No wonder Mom left him. “No, you're supposed to tell me to go out and do whatever I want. To get high and have sex and drive drunk and hang out with convicted felons. Sorry, I got it all wrong.”
“I trust you.”
“You don't even KNOW me!”
“I feel that I do know you, Poe. Or at least that I'm getting to know you.”
“Well, you don't, and I'm starting to think you don't know how to know anybody.” I grunted. “It's not like you were around anyway, huddled away in your perfect little house for sixteen years while I wondered where the fuck my dad was.”
His cheeks pooched out as he exhaled. “Now you just want to hurt me.”
“What? You don't like the truth? That's what it is, DAVID! You ignore everything that's not perfect, don't you?”
“I think you behaved improperly today.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, that's a start, counselor. Any other mind-bending revelations for me?”
“I don't know that you're in the mood to talk about this.”
“I was talking. You were standing there being a lamp again.”
His eyes sharpened. “Don't mock me.”
I leveled a wicked flat stare at him. “Or what?”
He looked away, flustered. “I don't see that baiting me will solve this. If you want to talk in a constructive, adult manner, I'm willing. But I'm not going to fight with you.”
I stomped my foot. “I'M NOT AN ADULT! You sat there in that office and didn't say a word! Like you totally forgot that we talked about that kind of crap the other night!”
“I was letting you handle the situation.”
“Yeah. Just like you let Mom handle the situation.” I crossed my arms. “Maybe she was right, you know? Maybe you just don't have the fucking courage to stand up for anything.”
He shook his head. “You're diverting, Poe. This doesn't have anything to do with your mother or why we split. It's about you questioning the rules. And your language doesn't solve anything, either. We can have a civilized conversation about this without profanity.”
“FUCK FUCK FUCK!” I screamed.
He turned away, looking across the room. “I think a cooldown period would be best right now.”
That capped it for me. “WHY? So you can figure out how to hide how you feel? So you can figure out how to pretend everything is perfect? Fuck you.”
“I'm not hiding anything, but I'm not here to antagonize the circumstance, either. Please stop swearing.”
“Why are you here, then?”
He faltered. “I…”
“You don't know, do you?”
“I'm here to talk about what is bothering you.”
“God, you are nothing! Just an invisible nothing!”
I saw something turn in his eyes then. Something good. Something angry. He set his jaw. “What would you have me do? Tell you that you were immature and childish today? Tell you that when your goal now is to simply hurt and destroy and bully, it reminds me of your mother? This is why I left, Poe! THIS!”
Silence for a moment, dead and still as a corpse. I looked at him. “Maybe she went insane with you because you're too chickenshit to stand up for yourself. And maybe now I understand why there was no way you could be with Mom. Or anybody.” My eyes seared into his, and I couldn't stop myself. Something in me wanted this to go on, because I was disgusted. But he was right. I was just like my mom. Search and destroy. Find the weakness and rip it to shreds.
So I left.
Chapter Thirteen
Saturday rolled around with the melancholy of bad relations in the house. After our one-sided fight, I had walked around Benders Hollow six times in four hours. I hated this place. I wanted Los Angeles. I never wanted to know him again.
David avoided me, spending all day doing yard work. I watched Velveeta shoot things with a paintball gun, pretending trees and rocks and plants were God knew what prey, then watched David pick weeds. I didn't understand him, and thinking about our argument the night before, I didn't even understand me. I'd used him as a punching bag, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew that sometimes people needed to be punching bags. Just like Velveeta.
I don't know what I was so cranked up about. It was like he was a lamp, and every time you tried to get close to him, he turned his little switch off and used fancy say-nothing talk to keep himself apart from things. To be on the outside. That's what I didn't like. He could talk about feelings and the truth and getting to know each other until he was blue in the face, but the second you wanted to get personal, he couldn't handle it. He'd sat in that office like I was a stranger.
I thought about our first conversation after I got here. The one about what we saw in each other, and knew it was the truth. His language was just like the school. Distant and impersonal, like an analysis, and I didn't know what to do.
So I called Mom. Mistake. Deep in the jungle somewhere in South America, she'd told me to call only for emergencies. She had some sort of GPS super-duty military cell phone that got reception anywhere, but it cost something like ten bucks a minute to talk. Ninety grand for a Mercedes, okay, a hundred bucks for a phone call from your daughter, not okay.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom.”
Static on the line. “What's wrong? Are you okay? Poe, are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just calling.”
“Poe, what's wrong?”
I wanted to say my dad was impossible and that I wanted to go home. I wanted to tell her to come home. I wanted, of all things, to tell my mom she wasn't that bad. “How's the jungle?”
“Poe, I told you this line is for emergencies. I thought we talked about this? I go to the city every week and check my e-mail. You haven't even sent one, by the way, and I was disappointed.”
She hadn't sent one, either. “Oh.”
“Listen, I have an emergency appendectomy in five minutes. I'm going to be late, and I can't have this young woman burst on me.”
“Sorry.”
Her tone softened. “How are things? Good? Your father?”
“Yeah. Great.”
“Good, good. I knew things would go well. Gotta run. Bye.”
“Bye.”
So much for that.
• • •
At five-fifteen, Theo skated down the street to pick me up for the cocktail party, and I waved through the window. David was on his hands and knees at the sidewalk digging dirt out of the cracks with a butter knife. He'd told me it keeps the weeds away. When I told him to squirt gas in them and light a match, he thought I was joking. I wasn't.
I hopped down the steps and met them. David stood, brushing his hands on a handkerchief, and they shook hands. “Going out for the evening, Poe?”
I nodded, indifferent. “Yeah.”
He hesitated. “Where?”
“Theo's house.”
Theo smiled. “Probably dinner, too, Mr. Holly.”
Dad nodded. “Very well.” He stood there awkwardly for a second, then cleared his throat an
d met my eyes. “Be home by nine, Poe.”
I searched his eyes, and there was an edge in them. “Sure.”
“Bye,” he said, then bent down to the sidewalk.
At the corner, Theo shook his head. “What was that all about?”
“What?”
“Your dad. The way he … I don't know. It was just weird.”
I smiled. “We got in a fight last night.”
“About what?”
I chuckled. “How to be a dad.”
• • •
We walked the mile to Theo's house. On the other side of town and near the outskirts, his family had several acres of land and a fountain outside the circular driveway. The whole place had a rich but ranchy feel to it, like the mansion on that old eighties show Dallas, with J. R. Ewing and his stupid cowboy hat. The house was huge, with double doors leading into an entryway as big as our living room. Theo walked in, stopped, and spread his hands out. “Welcome to Rancho Happy Happy. If there's anything you need, click your heels three times and a neurotic and totally high fairy godmother will appear to do your bidding.”
“She can't be that bad.”
“She still cuts the crusts off my sandwiches.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, that bad. Follow me.” Theo led me through the guts of the house, and we came to the kitchen. Platters of snacks and appetizers blanketed granite counters. He picked up a huge cocktail shrimp and stuffed it in his mouth. “Hungry?”
“Sure. What time does the party start?”
He looked at the clock. “People should start arriving in the next few minutes. Of course, the higher your status, the later you have to be. It's a ranking system.”
I picked up something green rolled in strips of tortilla and munched. “Mmm. Good.”
“Rabbit meat inside.”
I stopped chewing.
He laughed. “Joking. My mom got bored one year doing nothing for a living and took a cooking class. The instructor checked himself into a psychiatric ward by the time she finished, but she learned how to be a gourmet appetizer maker.”
I didn't know what to expect when I met her, and I didn't know if I even wanted to, but with a half-dozen shrimp eaten and several more green rolled things gone, Theo's dad walked in. Dark eyes, black hair, and a rugged middle-aged face with jowls greeted me. He looked like he could be on The Sopranos, and I saw the resemblance to Theo in his eyes. Shadowed and intense.
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