Faster, Faster, Faster

by Jonah Black

  Actually the big news is that Dr. LaRue has shaved off his mustache! He no longer looks like one of the Muppets. In fact, he looks a lot younger and better looking.

  “Hey, you look great, Doc,” I said, when I sat down in the big armchair across from his desk.

  His hand went to his face. He rubbed his upper lip and smiled, like he was embarrassed that I’d noticed and pleased at the same time. “Why, thank you, Jonah,” he said.

  I noticed there was also a new plant in his office. This giant cactus. It seemed like the worst idea in the world, to put a cactus in a room where people are trying to tell you about their problems. Cactuses aren’t exactly soothing.

  Anyway, today he wanted to know all about Sophie and Molly, and I told him that I like Molly but I don’t like the way she teases me. Like, how she brings up sex just so she can remind me that she doesn’t want to do it.

  “And you think sex is important?” Dr. LaRue said. “Important to your relationship with Molly, I mean.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, as if this was the dumbest question in the world. “She claims to have done it lots of times before, so why can’t we do it?”

  “Do you think you will be able to keep going out with Molly if she won’t sleep with you?” Dr. LaRue asked.

  “We’re not even really going out yet! All we do is talk about what it’s going to be like once we are going out, and we get into these stupid fights where I feel like I’m this bad dog who’s peed on the rug. But she’s the one who started it.”

  “Is it that you feel that Molly doesn’t think you’re worthy? Do you feel put down, Jonah?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. That’s the thing about therapy. You can think about things in ways you wouldn’t normally, but sometimes it can feel like words are being put into your mouth. It’s kind of unnerving.

  Dr. LaRue fingered his upper lip, except now there wasn’t any mustache to finger.

  “And how does Sophie make you feel? Does she make you feel the same way?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “How does Sophie make you feel?” he repeated.

  I looked over at the cactus. It looked prickly.

  “She admires me,” I said. “She says I’m her hero.”

  From outside I could hear the sound of an airplane flying overhead, probably making a landing at the Pompano Airport. I wondered if the blimp was back yet.

  “Is that why she’s important to you?” Dr. LaRue asked me.

  “Maybe,” I said, annoyed that he’d made me admit this. “It’s nice when someone thinks of you that way.”

  “But is that a good reason to pursue a relationship with her?” he said. “Is that a good reason to jeopardize your relationship with Molly?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “No.”

  Dr. LaRue smiled. “Very good, Jonah,” he said. “You’re learning, aren’t you?”

  I thought this was sort of a condescending thing to say, but then he stood up and added, “Will you excuse me just a second? I have to go to the men’s room.” And then he left the room.

  At least he didn’t make me listen to it that time. Maybe Dr. LaRue is learning something, too.

  Jan. 26

  Today I went over to First Amendment Pizza to talk to Mr. Swede. When I first told him my bike got crushed, Mr. Swede said not to worry, he’d hold my job until I could buy a new bicycle. I haven’t really been in any hurry to get one, though, because what I really want is to get my driver’s license so I won’t need a bike anymore, and if I go out and buy a new bike it’s sort of like admitting I’m never going to pass the test. I haven’t even scheduled another one yet. I guess I’m scared of flunking it again.

  To be honest, I kind of hate delivering pizzas and videos anyway. So the little vacation from my job was totally fine with me.

  Anyway, Mr. Swede called while I was out yesterday and he told Mom that he wanted to see me. So I went over there because I figured he wanted to give me the money he owes me. Which he did. He handed me the envelope with $72.75 in it. And then he fired me.

  “Yonah, you buy new bicycle?” he said. He came out from behind the counter and was wiping his head with a big white cloth.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Are you going to buy bicycle? Tell the truth!”

  Mr. Swede is always really sweaty. He kept dabbing at his sweaty head with this marinara-stained cloth. If I was hungry and went into First Amendment for some pizza, just looking at Mr. Swede would take away my appetite.

  “I keep meaning to,” I said, but it was a lie. I didn’t ever want another bicycle. I wanted a Ford Focus, or better yet, a BMW.

  “Yonah, I have boy with car, wants job. Dooba cannot deliver all by self. Pizzas get cold! Customers mad!” He smacked his hand on the countertop, which kind of scared me. I’d never seen Mr. Swede so mad.

  Doober, the other delivery guy, was sitting at one of the booths, smoking a Camel. I think the reason the pizzas were cold was that Doober was sitting there smoking instead of putting them in his Toyota pickup and making the deliveries. But if I said something, Doober would just look pissed off and say, “Hey, man. I’m on a break.” Doober is always on a break.

  “Yonah, I need delivery boy. Now, is he named Yonah?”

  “I just need to buy a bike, Mr. Swede. I’ll get around to it, I promise. Things have been pretty crazy for me lately,” I told him.

  “I call boy with car. You, Yonah. You finished.”

  I realized I was getting fired.

  “I’ll go out and get a bike tomorrow, if you need me to—” I told him.

  That was kind of a weird thing to say since I didn’t really want to work at First Amendment anymore. But I hated being fired. I wanted to quit. Getting fired made me feel like a total loser.

  “Good-bye, Yonah!”

  Mr. Swede opened the door and I walked through it. I was sort of in a daze, like I had nowhere to go. I felt disconnected from everything. As I was walking, this girl stopped me on the street and asked me for the time. I hadn’t even seen her until the second she opened her mouth, that’s how spaced out I was. The girl was small and blond and thin and she was wearing a black tank top, a black denim miniskirt, and a strange leather hat on her head.

  “What?” I said, startled.

  “The time?” she said and smiled at me.

  “The time,” I said. “Right, the time.”

  “Jonah,” Sophie says, pulling the flaps of her hat down over her ears and buckling it under her chin. It’s an aviator’s cap, and she’s wearing a bomber jacket, too. The wind is blowing her hair around. “It’s me.”

  “Sophie,” I say. “I didn’t even recognize you!”

  She just shakes her head and smiles like I’m kind of stupid, and I wonder, am I stupid-stupid, or am I smart-stupid? Then I remember that she wants to know what time it is so I look at my watch. The hands are frozen at four o’clock. There are even little icicles hanging from the hour hand.

  “I think it’s four,” I say, shivering in my T-shirt. It’s really getting cold now. “But my watch is broken.”

  “I don’t mind,” she says. “Four o’clock.” She thinks this over. A big strong gust of wind blows in from the ocean, and her hair streams out behind her. “That still leaves us lots of time.”

  “Time for what?” I say.

  “Time to fly, Jonah,” she says, and leads me across the runway to this big old plane. It has two big propellers and on the side of the plane it says Lockheed Electra. Sophie climbs on board, and a white scarf flutters around her neck in the harsh wind. Suddenly I get a very bad feeling. Something in me says, Do not get on this plane.

  Sophie puts her hand out to me. “Come on,” she says. “Don’t you want to fly?”

  It is a very hard question to answer.

  “What’s so hard about it?” the blond girl said. She pointed at my watch. “Why don’t you just look at your watch?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, complete
ly embarrassed. I wondered how long I had stood there, staring at her like an idiot. I looked at my watch. It was working fine. “It’s just after four,” I told the girl.

  “Thanks,” she said, kind of laughing to herself. And then she walked away. I don’t know what was so funny.

  Anyway, I started walking again and I hear the buzz of an airplane overhead. I look up and see that Sophie has taken off without me. I stand on the ground, watching her fly farther and farther away.

  (Later.)

  Just got off the phone with Molly. We’re going out on an official date on Friday. Which means, according to Molly, that as of Friday we’re officially “going out.” We had this whole conversation about it.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Molly said. As usual, she’d called me. It’s not that I don’t want to call her; she just always calls me first. “It’s time to move on to Phase Two.”

  “We’re in Phase One now?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Molly said. “Phase One is when we talk about going out.”

  “What’s Phase Two?”

  “Phase Two is when we go out,” she said simply. “Actually, I thought we’d go out to dinner at Toasters. Talk for a while, maybe eat some hot food. Afterward maybe we could go dancing or something.”

  “So Phase Two is dinner and dancing?” I said. It didn’t really sound all that great.

  “You got it.”

  “How many phases are there?” I asked. “Is there a Phase Three?”

  “There are at least nine phases. Let’s not worry about the others yet,” she said.

  “So this means we’re actually going out?” I said. “Once we begin Phase Two.”

  “Definitely. We’re an item. A couple.” She sounded really happy about it.

  “And how is going out going to be different from what we’ve been doing so far?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” she said, in a teasing voice.

  It’s weird, for a person who claims that telling the truth is so important, sometimes after I talk to Molly I don’t feel like she’s been honest with me at all. Sometimes what Molly says is even more obscure than what Thorne says, and he makes shit up constantly. At least with someone like Thorne you know where you stand.

  Jan. 27, 5:15 P.M.

  Honey is leaving on her Harvard road trip tomorrow, and I am definitely looking forward to having her out of the house for a while. For the last week she’s been tinkering in her room with this big pile of metal. I asked her what she was doing, and she said, in this kind of irritated, aren’t-you-an-idiot kind of voice, “What do you think, Wet One? I’m building a robot.”

  I stood in her doorway watching her untangle a big pile of wires at her desk. There was a soldering iron on the floor, and a suitcase was lying open on her unmade bed, with nothing in it.

  “You’re building a robot?” I repeated.

  “Hey, Electra, there’s an echo in here,” Honey said to the pile of wires.

  “Electra? That’s its name?”

  Honey looked up at me through these Plexiglas eye-protector things she was wearing. “Her name,” she said.

  I just looked at the pile of wires. It didn’t look like Electra had much of a body or anything. She was just a bunch of wires and transistors and circuit boards.

  “Why are you building a robot?” I asked.

  Honey picked up the soldering iron and jiggled it. “Two reasons. First, ’cause we have to do these stupid-ass senior projects. This one’s mine. Second, because I can.”

  I looked at the mass of wires again. “What does she do?”

  “Do?” Honey said. “Do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s her purpose.”

  Honey shrugged. “She says stuff,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  She put down the soldering iron and connected two loose wires. There was a kind of spark, and then this disembodied, breathy voice said, “A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.”

  Honey disconnected the wires and the voice stopped.

  “Jesus, Honey,” I said. “No wonder you got into Harvard.”

  She stood up and glared at me. “Would you shut up about Harvard already?”

  “I see your packing is going really well,” I said, looking at the empty suitcase.

  “You want me to pack?” she said. “Fine, I’ll pack.” She picked up the whole pile of wires and circuit boards and threw it in the suitcase, along with the soldering iron and a screwdriver. Then she went to her underwear drawer and opened it. “You think they wear bras at Harvard?” she asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “The girls do, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right. Probably everybody wears goddamn bras.” She pulled her underwear drawer out of her bureau and dumped its contents into the suitcase. Then she threw the drawer on the floor, and zipped up the suitcase. “Okay,” she said. “Now I’m packed.”

  “Hey, Honey,” I said. “Can I just say one thing?”

  “What?” she said. She was really pissed off at me. It was kind of entertaining.

  “If you don’t want to go to Harvard, why don’t you just tell them you don’t want to go? Why don’t you do what you want to do?”

  “Yeah, okay, fine,” she said. “I’ll just e-mail the admissions office right now and tell them I’m not coming because what I really want to do is hang out with lowlife losers in Pompano and sleep in a trailer.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “You don’t have to go to Harvard.”

  “But that is what I want to do,” she said. “Don’t you get it?”

  “You really do want to go to Harvard?”

  “No, Pistachio Nuts. I really do want to lie around Pompano in a trailer with lowlife losers. That’s what I like to do. Hang out with my friends and watch television. Eat Doritos. Play cards. But you’re not allowed to do that if you’re me. Oh, no, you have to go to goddamn Massachusetts and learn Latin and Swedish for four years.”

  “Honey,” I said. “You already know Latin. You’re fluent in Latin.”

  “I know,” she yelled. “I’m fluent in goddamn Swedish, too. You think I like being smart? Jesus!”

  “I’m just saying you don’t have to go to Harvard,” I said. “It’s your life.”

  “And I’m saying you’re wrong. It’s not my life. I do have to go.” She glared at me again, all annoyed.

  I knew Honey didn’t mean what she was saying. If she had to stay in Pompano next year, she’d go crazy. I think Honey really does want to go to Harvard. I think she can’t wait to go there. For once in her life she’s going to fit in. Here in Pompano, Honey is a world all her own. None of her friends have half her brains, and none of the geniuses in her special classes are into the stuff she’s into. But maybe Honey’s afraid that at Harvard everybody’s going to be just like her, and for once in her life she isn’t going to be special. Maybe she’s scared.

  There was a voice from inside Honey’s suitcase. “Brzzzrp,” it said. “Help me! Please help me!”

  It reminded me of Sophie. Everything reminds me of her.

  Jan. 28

  Well, today was a pretty big day. I had that date with Molly and we had a fight. A big one. I’m not all that surprised, but it still makes me feel bad. I don’t think we’re going to be seeing each other anymore.

  We met at Toasters, which is this new theme restaurant where every table has a little toaster oven on it, and you order your meal and they give you all sorts of stuff you can make in the toaster while you wait, including toast (of course) and Pop Tarts and waffles. Meanwhile, they’re playing all this Dixieland music or something. The cheeseburgers were supposed to be really good so we ordered them, and a second later the waitress came by with hamburger buns.

  “Okay, kids, you know what to do! Stick your buns in the oven and toast ’em!” she said. She was wearing a red checkered shirt with a name tag that said Judy, and her hands were incredibly small, like little paws.

  Molly was wearing a sparkly dress that
was way too formal for Toasters, and she’d put her hair up on top of her head. I think she’d spent a lot of time preparing for this date, which made me think that maybe Molly doesn’t really go out with guys very often. Maybe her whole act about being so sophisticated and everything was just a big fat lie.

  It wasn’t the best thing to be thinking when we were supposedly moving from Phase One to Phase Two.

  “You know what I’d name a restaurant, if I had one?” Molly said when we sat down.

  “What?” I was hoping she was going to say something nice, something that would get me out of the mood I was in and put us both at ease.

  “Who Farted?” she said. Then she started laughing like this was hilarious. “Don’t you think that’s funny?” she said. “A restaurant called Who Farted? Wouldn’t you eat there? I would!”

  Something about the way she was laughing really annoyed me. I don’t know. I just kept thinking that if Sophie were there instead of Molly we’d be looking into each other’s eyes and not talking at all.

  “Oh, no,” Molly said. “There you go off to Mars again. You know I hate it when you suddenly leave for outer space and leave me sitting by myself on earth. It’s lonely.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You didn’t like my joke.”

  I shrugged. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’m just kind of spaced out that’s all.”

  “Sexual frustration. All that testosterone has blocked up your system and messed with your head,” Molly said. She kind of smirked when she said that.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the other side of the restaurant, and I thought, I don’t look so bad. Why is she being so mean to me? I was wearing a new button-down short-sleeved shirt I got at Pac Sun and a pair of jeans. I’d just shaved. I mean, I didn’t look like a rock star or anything, but I thought I looked like someone a girl would want to be seen with. But Molly was making me feel bad. Even the way she’d dressed up so much made me feel like I hadn’t made enough of an effort.