The Boomerang Effect

by Gordon Jack

  TWO

  My friends Adam, Will, and the two Nates passed me the vape pen when I met them in the student parking lot after school. Whoever designed this device must have seen us filling our parked car with smoke and thought, “There’s a problem that needs fixing.” The vaporizer could be filled with pot, provided you liquefied it down to its essential THC goodness. The gadget was also shaped to look like a pencil, so when you took a long drag, it appeared as if you were chewing on the eraser while struggling to compose your next line of poetry.

  I inhaled like a drowning person reaching the water’s surface and leaned back against my car. What a relief to have that disciplinary hearing over and done with. The stress it caused was considerable, I’ll tell you. It wasn’t everyday stress either. It was “your life could become seriously fucked if you don’t fix this” kind of stress.

  I waited for the guys to ask me about the meeting, but they were too busy looking at their social media feeds to notice anything except the vape pen when it was passed their way. I was pretty sure I told them about my expulsion hearing. Our friend Alex had just been kicked out of school a few days ago. They must be wondering if I was the next one to be voted off the island.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Will said, “Alex is waiting.”

  “Who’s the designated driver?” I asked.

  “You are,” Adam said.

  “But I . . .”

  “You’ll be fine,” Will said, opening my car door. He hurled my copy of The Odyssey into the backseat, where it was tossed around much like Odysseus is in the story. We had been reading the book in English and I was totally into it. Most of the books we’re assigned in class were written to make us better people. Frankly, I prefer reading about guys who battle one-eyed giants and have sex with hot witch goddesses.

  I started the car and reversed out of my parking space. Will plugged in his iPod and cranked the latest from Da ReFlux. The thumping bass pulsated through the car like an amplified heartbeat. The guys rapped along, broadcasting their complaints about ghetto life to the residents of our upper-middle-class white community. I wasn’t feeling especially gangsta today, so I took another hit off the pencil and tapped my fingers against the steering wheel.

  “So, I had my expulsion hearing,” I said.

  “Oh, right!” Will said. “How’d that go?”

  “They gave me mandatory community service.”

  “No Quiet Haven?” Nate asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Stone said one more fuckup and I’m outta here.”

  “That sucks, man,” Adam said, offering me the vape pen. I declined.

  “Alex thinks he’s going to be the only Asian there,” Will said.

  It wasn’t often that you heard of Asian students getting expelled, unless you counted that badass from Malaysia who got kicked out for stealing people’s Adderall, but Alex had always bucked his cultural stereotype. He was the one who first got me high when he saw me alone at the Art of Origami show at the Asian Art Museum. I was staring at a beautifully detailed beetle, trying to mentally unpack all its tiny folds, when Alex sauntered up and asked, “Dude, are you high?” When I shook my head, he asked, “Do you want to be?” And that was it. We sneaked outside, rolled a joint using the origami paper I always carried with me, and I never looked back. My dad was happy I had made a new friend who wasn’t, to use his word, “different.” Mom was happy to see that my “compulsive” origami folding had been replaced with an interest in Led Zeppelin.

  I was happy too. Two years into middle school and I had begun to realize that origami wasn’t going to win me any popularity contests. In seventh grade, I’d tried to start an origami club after being encouraged by a well-meaning art teacher. Two girls showed up and promptly left after I handed them each a paper crab (“You gave them crabs!” Alex howled when I told him this story.) But pot smoking connected me to all kinds of cool people. Through Alex, I met Adam, Will, and the two Nates, and we had been a solid crew ever since we started at Meridian.

  Now here we were, coming to say good-bye to the guy who brought us all together. Alex was currently under house arrest until his transfer to Quiet Haven went through. He was having the time of his life though, alone at home with access to the family liquor cabinet and online pornography. When I pulled up in front of his house, he stepped outside with a beer in hand and waved us in. My friends spilled out of the car and raced to join him. When he saw me hesitate, he shouted, “C’mon, Lawman. Just hang with us for an hour.”

  My hand hovered over the door latch. I had a ton of homework to do and I should really follow through on my plan to become a more responsible person. But then I thought about going home to an empty house with its cold, polished floors and giant abstract paintings my mother made during her years of postpartum depression and thought, Fuck it. One beer by the pool couldn’t hurt.

  I woke up four hours later on an Adirondack chair next to Alex’s pool. The sky had turned the shade of pink I associate with undercooked chicken. I was alone, except for a couple of squirrels perched on the fence that surrounded the Trans’ vegetable garden.

  “Didn’t you learn anything from my pamphlet?” one of the squirrels asked. I didn’t recognize him without his sunglasses and leather jacket.

  I dug around my pockets, looking for the info Lunley had given me. I must have lost it somewhere between the counselor offices and my car. “Shit,” I said.

  “You’ll never be accepted into the squirrel community unless you get your shit together,” the other squirrel said.

  “But I’m not a squirrel,” I moaned.

  “Oh, in that case, blaze it up, homie.”

  I sat up and stared at the fluffy-tailed creatures. What was I doing with my life that I was alone at someone else’s house, hungover at 7:00 p.m. and talking to squirrels?

  A leaf floated down and rested on the surface of the Trans’ pool, a clear sign that summer had ended. I leaned over and puked onto the Trans’ immaculate lawn. It was time to go.

  I walked over to the sliding glass doors that led to the Trans’ living room. The lights were on but it was empty. Had Adam, Will, and the two Nates gone home already? Maybe they were smarter than I thought and arranged rides home with more sober drivers.

  Before opening the door, I walked over to the kitchen window to assess the situation. I didn’t want to stumble into the house and be confronted by Alex’s parents asking me all sorts of uncomfortable questions about why I chose to come to their house after school to take a stoner’s nap.

  Staying close to the stucco wall, I peered into the kitchen window and saw the Trans squeezed around a kitchen table eating dinner. Mom and Dad were listening to Alex’s little sister, a cute girl in pigtails, talk excitedly using wild hand gestures. Even Alex, who normally doesn’t respond to the adorable, seemed engaged in her story. Maybe she had stood up to a bully or performed the winning move in the school’s four-square tournament. When the girl was finished, both parents shook their heads in mock disapproval, but you could tell by the way they did it that they were proud of their plucky little daughter. The mom refilled the girl’s glass with milk and tucked a loose strand of hair behind the girl’s ear.

  I blinked in disbelief. This was not the portrait Alex painted of his family when he talked about them to me. Part of the reason we bonded was because we both felt abandoned by our hardworking parents. At least Alex’s parents made time in their day to eat with him. Here he was, a convicted felon, and the dinner scene looked like something you’d see in a sitcom, the kind where the sane family lived with a wacky grandfather or had crazy neighbors visiting throughout the day. I glanced back at my puke on the Trans’ lawn and quickly came to the conclusion that I was that crazy neighbor and left quietly by the side gate.

  My car was chilly when I got in, so I cranked the heat. Before I pulled away from the curb, I caught sight of my reflection in the rearview mirror. On my forehead was the word “LOSER” printed in black Sharpie. I had to hand it to the guys. They knew enoug
h to write the letters backward and reversed so they would look right in the mirror.

  THREE

  I pulled into our garage just before eight. As soon as I entered the house, my dad pinged me with a message saying he was working late. He’d installed surveillance cameras throughout the whole house so he and Mom could “stay connected.” I threw my backpack on the kitchen table and waved to the camera above the refrigerator. A few seconds later, my phone rang.

  “What’s on your face?” Dad asked.

  Oh shit. The Sharpie. I forgot to scrub it off. “Nothing,” I said. “Just some prank my friends pulled on me.”

  “Your friends are idiots.” My dad’s enthusiasm for Alex and the others had waned considerably since ninth grade, when none of us made varsity anything. “How was your meeting with the principal? Did he like my letter?”

  “He did not. What did you say to him?”

  I could hear the sound of ice clinking against glass as my dad took a sip of something. Probably Scotch. “I informed him that suspending you for a harmless prank would jeopardize your education and that was something my firm took very seriously.”

  “It wasn’t a suspension hearing,” I corrected. “It was an expulsion hearing.”

  Dad harrumphed. “It was a waste of time is what it was,” he said. “Nothing was going to happen. Not if Stone knows what’s good for him.”

  “Well, I’m now a member of the Buddy Club.”

  “What’s that?”

  I explained the mission of the club as best I could.

  “Sounds like you’re a dog walker,” Dad grumbled.

  “My counselor says I need things like this for colleges.”

  “I’ll talk to someone about getting the name changed to something that might actually impress someone. Something like ‘Leadership Team’ or ‘Operation Rescue.’”

  “Sounds great, Dad.” I didn’t see what either of his proposed titles had to do with the club’s purpose, but I didn’t feel like arguing.

  “Your mother left you a video message on the website.”

  “Ugh.”

  “You better respond or things will get ugly.”

  “I will. I’m going to eat now.”

  “Tell Estrella to leave mine in the microwave. I’ll heat it up when I get home. Oh, and Lawrence?”

  “Yes.”

  “No more screwups. This year is too important for college. If you don’t get your shit together, we will send you to Langdon Military Academy.”

  I gulped. Langdon was a year-round boarding school in North Dakota, which actually used the term “correctional facility” on its About Us page. According to their website, they specialized in helping troubled teens find acceptance with themselves and elite colleges. My parents had been threatening to send me there since August. “Don’t worry, Dad,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  I opened our family website to watch Mom’s message. She was in New York promoting her book The Connected Clan: A How-to Guide for Virtual Parenting, and looked stressed out and tired. Apparently, she had run into a bit of criticism from the hosts of the morning news shows. “These people refuse to accept reality,” she complained from her hotel room, checking her email on her phone. Even on camera she couldn’t stop multitasking. “If you want a relationship with your kids, you’ve got to meet them where they live. Am I right?” I would have to respond to this question with my own video, which would require scrubbing my face clean first.

  Estrella, our cook, brought me my dinner, which I ate at the bar that separates our kitchen from our living room. She looked at me strangely, probably trying to figure out the meaning of RESOL and why I had the word printed on my forehead. I felt bad for giving her another reason to hate the English language, but I didn’t have the energy to explain the prank. Instead, I told her about my plans to mentor underprivileged youth.

  “Voy a ayudar a un chico nuevo en mi escuela,” I said.

  Estrella did that thing she always does when I share a piece of good news—she moved her finger in a crosslike fashion across her massive chest and began talking to God as if he were sitting with a beer on the couch in the next room. After thanking the Lord for this blessing, she turned to me and asked, “¿Quién es el chico?”

  “No sé,” I said. “Creo que es un poco . . .” I didn’t know the word for “weird” so I used the closest word in my Spanish vocabulary. “Estúpido.”

  Estrella pressed her doughy hands against my cheeks and kissed me on my forehead. “Tú eres un buen hijo, ¿sabes?” I nodded and politely excused myself from the table.

  I went upstairs to my room and closed the door to block out the sound of Estrella’s telenovela. Sometimes I watched the shows with her. Our favorite was Secretos Subterráneos, a soap opera set somewhere in Chile. Every week an unfortunate miner gets trapped two hundred feet underground and needs to be saved by a rescue team, headed by the sexy scientist Lana Elena Graciela Jimenez Rodriguez.

  Before cracking the books, I went to the bathroom and used a sandpaper sponge to wipe off my face tattoo. Even after repeated scrubbings the lettering didn’t disappear completely. Looks like I was stuck with this label for the next couple of days.

  It was too late to Skype Mom, so I recorded a video message telling her about the expulsion hearing and my sudden interest in philanthropy. “I’m really looking forward to giving back to my community,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. This took a couple of takes. Like, thirty. When I was satisfied with the results, I posted the video on our website for Mom to watch tomorrow.

  I closed my laptop and emptied my backpack on my desk. The Odyssey landed on top of the pile of textbooks, handouts, and notebooks, which I took as a sign that the gods wanted me to prioritize English over math. I grabbed the book and hopped on my bed to continue reading.

  They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.

  Sometimes a writer is so good it can feel like he’s talking directly to you. Homer was basically describing my day here. My friends and I were Lotus-eaters. All we did was sit around, smoke pot, and play video games. Lunley was trying to get me off this island, only with less aggressive tactics. Maybe what I needed was for someone to tie me up and drag me under a bench. That is essentially what Stone did to Alex by transferring him to Quiet Haven. For the first time since we got in trouble, I was a little jealous of Alex’s punishment. Now that he was kicked out of school, he had no choice but to get his shit together. As long as the decision was up to me, I would always take the easy way out.

  I needed to be more like Odysseus—a man with a purpose. Odysseus overcame the obstacles in his life because he had to get back to Penelope. What purpose did I have? I hadn’t a clue. All I knew was that I was never going to find it hanging on this friggin’ island with all these lotus plants. I needed something else to focus on.

  Glancing over at my desk, I saw the slip of paper Lunley had given me wedged between my trig and Spanish textbooks. I reached over and pulled it free and saw Spencer’s name and phone number. Here’s a small step in the right direction, I thought. Colleges love to see applicants devote themselves selflessly to community service. Maybe Spencer would have some terminal disease that I could turn into an inspiring personal essay.

  I dialed the number written below his name and hoped the call went to voicemail.

  “Hello?” a dull, monotone voice said.

  “Is Spencer home?”

  “This is Spencer.”

  “Really? You sound like you’re forty.”

  “I’m fourteen.”

  “I’m your mentor. From Meridian High.”

  “Excus
e me?”

  “Your mentor.”

  “I didn’t ask for a mentor.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I guess they’re just assigned. Like lockers.”

  Silence. I hated talking on the phone.

  “So, I was wondering if you want to get together tomorrow.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Oh, sorry. My name is Lawrence. But you can call me Lawman.”

  “I think I’ll call you Lawrence.”

  “That’s cool. So, tomorrow? How about lunch?”

  “Okay.”

  “In the cafeteria.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, I’ll see you then.”

  “Okay.”

  “See ya.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I leaned back and started folding the piece of paper with Spencer’s name on it. I wanted to come up with the right symbol for my mentee, something that would represent the metamorphosis he was about to experience through his work with me. A tadpole was an easy shape and would allow me to get back to my homework sooner. But tadpoles change into frogs, which didn’t seem like much of an upgrade. Caterpillars required more complicated folding and changed into beautiful, soaring butterflies—the perfect metaphor for my little protégé. I worked on the piece for nearly an hour. Origami always relaxed me, like pot without the paranoia. When finished, I took it to the shoebox in my closet and gently placed it with the other works of art I keep hidden from my parents. With a clearer focus, I returned to my reading to see what troubles Odysseus encountered next.

  FOUR

  Mom pinged me with one of her surveys the following morning as I was leaving for school. She sends me these questions throughout the day and will respond with a phone call or a website link depending on my answer. Today’s question was: Are you experiencing shortness of breath or choked feelings? I clicked the “no” option to avoid the follow-up questions, added a smiley face emoji, and got in my car. I imagined her showing my response to a skeptical reporter covering her book tour. “See?” she’d say, holding up her phone. “He’s fine.”