by Jonah Black
“They say testosterone makes boys think about sex every fifteen seconds. Is that true Jonah?” Molly continued.
I smiled, but it was a totally fake smile. I didn’t feel like smiling. All I could think about was how Sophie, as weird as she was, was never mean to me. I remembered when Sophie and I were in the hotel in Orlando and how her hair smelled when she leaned her head against my chest.
“Maybe every ten seconds?” Molly said.
I didn’t say anything.
The toaster went off and Molly took out our hamburger buns. She put one on her plate and nibbled the other one. “Mmm,” she said. “What delicious buns you have, Jonah!” She held up her bun. “Would you like to have a bite of mine?”
I picked up the bottle of EZ Squirt green ketchup and suddenly pointed it at Molly like it was a gun. I imagined giving it a big squeeze, and the green ketchup spewing all over Molly’s sparkly dress. I didn’t do it, but Molly, of course, knew exactly what I was thinking. We just looked at each other for a second, surprised.
Then I stood up and said, “I’m going.” I hadn’t even known I was going to do it until I did it, but once I was on my feet I knew it was the right thing.
“You’re going where?” Molly said. “You don’t have a car. You don’t even have a bike.” She smiled. “Since I crushed it.”
“I’m walking.”
I turned away and started walking through Toasters. Molly got up and followed me. “Wait,” she said. “Jonah Black. Stop. What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” I said.
She followed me outside. “Jonah,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to upset you. I was just being myself. You know me. I can be kind of a jerk sometimes.”
“You got that right,” I said. All I wanted was to be away from her.
“But I don’t mean it. You know I don’t. Jonah, please stop and look at me,” Molly begged.
But I didn’t stop and look at her. I was tired of her telling me what to do all the time.
“Jonah, you’ve lost your sense of humor!” she said, and laughed, but her laugh sounded kind of sad and desperate. People in the parking lot were staring at her. She looked totally out of place in her spangly dress in the parking lot of a Toasters restaurant. For a second, I felt sorry for her. What I was doing seemed really mean all of a sudden. But I kept on walking.
“I don’t want you to walk away,” Molly said, her voice choking. “Jonah, please don’t go.” I knew she was about to cry, and I’d never seen her cry before. But still, I didn’t stop.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and that was the last thing I heard her say. I kept walking until I got all the way to the beach and started heading toward home. It was a long walk.
As I walked up the beach, I looked at the waves churning in the moonlight and listened to the ocean roar. I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t just done something wrong.
Let’s say Molly really was full of it and she really had put on this whole act. The reason she’d done it was because she was unsure of herself. And there’s nothing abnormal about that. Maybe I was being totally unfair. The truth is, I don’t even know Molly that well. I’ve never been to her house or met her parents or any of her friends. I guess that would have been part of Phase Two, but now that’s not going to happen. I don’t know. How is it possible that you really like someone one day and then the next day, everything about them suddenly bugs you?
It was kind of weird to be walking by the ocean with my jeans and shoes on. I took my shoes off and let the surf rush up and around my ankles, until the bottom three inches of my pants were soaked. The water was really cold, but I didn’t care. It felt good.
I walked past the Dune, and smiled as I thought about Posie knocking Kassandra’s plane out of the sky. Posie and Lamar had a little fight about Kassandra after the diving meet, but they’ve cleared things up. It’s nice that she and Lamar have each other, I guess.
Then I thought about Amelia Earhart, and Sophie looking out the window of Maggins wishing she could fly. I realized she’d written me all these letters and I hadn’t written her back once. Every day she probably checked the mailbox and it was always empty.
As I walked by Niagara Towers, I suddenly decided to stop in and see Pops Berman. It had been a while since we’d talked. The receptionist buzzed me in and I asked her which apartment Pops Berman lived in. She said to go up to the twelfth floor.
I got up to Pops’s floor and walked down the hall. I hated the way the place smelled, like floor wax and disease and loneliness. Pops calls it Viagra Towers, but it didn’t seem like anyone in that place was taking too much Viagra. It seemed like a place where people go to die.
I rang Pops’s bell and he opened it quickly. “Hey, Chipper,” he said. He didn’t look as bad as I’d thought he would. He was wearing a white bathrobe and his Red Sox cap and these strange Japanese slippers. He looked me up and down. “Oh, no,” he said. “You’ve done it again.”
I walked into his apartment. “I’m all right,” I said. I looked around his living room, and it was nothing like what I expected. It was really nice! He had an Oriental rug and lots of pictures on a mantelpiece above a gas fireplace. There were old baseball photographs on one wall. I’d been expecting dirty dishes in the sink and one bare light bulb hanging down on a wire.
He went to the kitchen and got us both glasses of milk, then he sat down next to me on the brown leather couch. “Got milk?” he said, without smiling.
“Pops—” I said.
“Three glasses a day,” he said. “You need calcium. I’m not kidding you. Three glasses.” I picked up my glass and sipped.
“Mmm,” I said. I hate milk.
“Shut up,” he said. “You don’t like it, pour it down the toilet. You want your bones to snap like little twigs, go ahead. I don’t care.” He leaned forward. “Now tell me what’s what.”
“You seem better,” I said. “I was really worried about you for a while.”
“Better, worse,” Pops said, and shrugged. “What’s the difference? I’m not hockin’ up balls o’ mucus anyway. That’s something.”
“Well, good,” I said, taking another sip of milk.
“Now tell me. What’s what?”
“Well, I’ve been sort of seeing this really smart girl named Molly,” I explained. “She can be nice and I thought I really liked her, but she has kind of a mean streak. And she has this big thing about always telling the truth all the time. If she thinks you’re telling her a load of crap, she goes nuts.”
“Oh, yes,” said Pops Berman. “I used to call them girls Blue Fairies.” He drank about half the glass of milk and licked his upper lip so he wouldn’t have a milk mustache. “You know, Pinocchio always used to get hit on the head with a rolling pin whenever he told a lie. And Blue Fairy would always bail him out, but he had to promise her not to ever lie to her.” He finished the rest of his milk and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You gotta watch out for girls like that. A lot of the time these girls who only tell the truth are more full of crap than the liars are.”
I nodded. “I think I’m starting to figure that out.”
I looked over at the wall of baseball photos again, and suddenly I realized. The guy in the pictures was Pops. In a Red Sox uniform.
I sat up. “I didn’t know you played with the Red Sox, Pops,” I said. “That’s really you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. What, you’re all surprised I wasn’t always some broken down old windbag?” he said.
I stood up to look at the pictures more carefully. Pops got up and stood next to me. I could hear him breathing heavily.
“So, how long did you play ball for?” I asked him.
“I was in the majors three years. Minors for five. I broke my wrist. Then I joined the fire department.”
“What position did you play?” I said, still amazed.
“Shortstop.”
Pops didn’t look all that different in the photos. His hair was brown, but his face was
all wrinkled and leathery even then. One of the photographs showed him sliding into base with a big cloud of dust around him. It was pretty cool.
“She walk your doggy yet, Chipper?” Pops asked.
I shrugged.
Pops wheezed into his hand and pounded his chest with his fist. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not again.”
“Molly says sex isn’t important,” I said, like that explained everything.
Pops kept wheezing, his face was turning red. “Not—not important?”
He sat back down on the couch.
“That’s what she says.” I sank into the couch next to him.
“You believe that?” Pops asked me.
I turned to look at him. It was funny, he looked a lot younger now. Maybe seeing those pictures of him made me see him in another light. “No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think it’s the most important thing in the world, but I do think it’s—”
“The hell it’s not important!” Pops said. He slapped me on the leg with a bristly hand. “You hear me?!”
“I hear you,” I said. Probably half the people on his floor could hear him.
“What about the basket case?” Pops said. “The mopsy top?”
“Sophie,” I said.
There was a long silence. I heard someone else coughing in the apartment next door. I wondered if everyone in Niagara Towers was sick. It gave me the creeps. Even though Pops’s apartment was nice, it still a lonely, depressing place. I thought about Pops standing out on the balcony, watching the ocean night after night, and wondered what he thought about. His dead wife, probably. The only woman he ever loved.
“She still shut up in that rich kid’s nut-hatch?” Pops asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“She still wanna walk your doggy?”
“She says she does,” I told him.
“You gonna go and see her?” he said.
I looked out the window. There was the cold, January Atlantic, almost black now as the clouds covered over the moon.
“Jonah,” Pops said. I think it’s the first time he’s ever called me by my real name. “Listen,” he said, and his voice was very quiet now. I could hear the ticking of a clock on his mantelpiece, the waves outside crashing on the beach. “Listen to that little doggy. You can’t hear him because you’re such a rockhead, but he’s there.”
I kept looking out the window and watching the water. I thought about Sophie’s house in Maine. A lighthouse flashing through fog.
“Are you listening?” Pops said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You hear him? Your little doggy?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well all right then,” whispered Pops.
I stood up. “I have to go,” I told Pops. “I’m sorry. I have to—”
“Don’t apologize.” Pops clapped me on the shoulder. “Okay, Chipper,” he said. “Good luck.”
Soon I was walking up the beach again. I got home about an hour later. Honey was leaning against the side of her Jeep, looking at her watch. “Thank God,” she said. “I was about to give up on you.”
“Why?”
“Come on,” she said. “Get your stuff. I told Mom you were coming, too. She’s excited for you.”
“You told Mom? But I didn’t even—I mean, how did you—?”
“Aw come on, Squirrel Nuts. You’re easier to read than Dr. Seuss. Come on,” she patted the front seat of her Jeep. “Kiss Ma and jump on in. Assuming you can pry her off of Robere.”
I walked into the house in a total daze, thinking about how everybody seems to knows me better than I know myself. Mom and Mr. Bond were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Mr. Bond was holding Mom’s breasts again. “Chong!” he said. “CHONG!!!!”
“Mom—” I said.
“Sshh, Jonah,” Mom whispered. “I’m on deadline.”
“I just wanted you to know—”
“It’s fine, Jonah. Honey told me. You go have fun,” said Mom.
“Okay,” I said. It’s weird, but I kind of wanted her to want me to stay. “You’re sure this is okay? I’m going to miss some school.”
“Jonah,” Mom said, crossly. “You’re distorting the energy!”
“CHONNGG!” said Mr. Bond with his eyes closed. It looked like he was squeezing Mom’s boobs kind of hard.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call you from Dad’s house.”
“I love you, Jonah,” Mom said. “Remember to be nice to yourself!”
“Okay,” I said. “I will.”
I went into my room and threw some things into my backpack. The last thing I grabbed were the cans of peaches and the crushed tomatoes, so I could do my broken-arm recovery exercises on the road.
I went outside and got in the front seat next to Honey. She was already behind the wheel with the engine idling. A cigarette dangled from her lips. The moment I pulled my door closed she backed out of the driveway at like, ninety miles an hour.
I noticed the crushed azaleas in the front yard, and I had a quick, sad thought about Molly. I hoped I was doing the right thing.
“Road trip,” screamed Honey, revving into fifth gear. As we approached the drawbridge, the warning lights started to flash. The bridge was going up. “Yeah, right,” Honey snarled, and drove straight on through the flashing lights. Other cars honked at her, but she just kept on going, and we made it to the other side before the drawbridge even started to rise.
Honey hunted around on the floor for a CD. “Cradle of Filth,” she said, and stuck the disc in the slot. Sick music poured from the speakers. I put my sun visor down. We were off.
Jan. 29, 1 P.M.
On the road with Honey, North Carolina. We’re back in the car and driving north after spending last night in a motel near Daytona Beach. It was a pretty gruesome place, too—a little dive next to a bar. Honey thought it was the greatest place on earth, and we actually had to pass three or four much nicer hotels before she found one that disgusting. There were cockroaches crawling around in the shower, short curly hairs on the sheets, and lots of surly-looking guys on motorcycles out in the parking lot all night. I had to listen to them revving their Harleys until dawn and really only got some sleep this morning in the car after we left.
I woke up right as we were crossing the border into North Carolina. It’s greener here than in Florida, and a lot less flat. There are mountains but no palm trees. And there are horses everywhere.
Honey looked over at me and said, “Good morning, Merry Sunshine.”
She turned up the volume on the CD player and we drove on listening to the music for a while. If you can call it music. I liked looking out the window and watching the world go by. It reminded me of this trip we took to Yellowstone Park before Mom and Dad got divorced. I liked driving cross-country a lot more than being in the park itself.
“So tell me this, Stringbean,” said Honey after a while. She turned down the music. “What are we going to do about Tiffany?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “She’s Dad’s wife. We don’t have to do anything about her.”
Honey frowned. “I thought you said she was a cretin.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You told me she’s like, twenty-five years old. She rides horses. Has lots of rich-girl hobbies. What else does she do? Redecorates the house every month, that sort of thing?”
I shrugged. “She’s not so bad.”
Honey smiled her evil smile. “You know what, Jonah, I think she is that bad. The only question is, What are we going to do about her?”
“You’re really determined to make a good impression on Dad, aren’t you?”
“Well,” Honey said. “He’s definitely knocked himself out reaching out to me, hasn’t he?” She punched in the cigarette lighter and stuck a Camel into her mouth.
“What do you want from him?” I said. “He’s moved on. Just like Mom.”
“Jeez, aren’t you Mr. Understanding,” Honey said. The madder she got, the faster she drove. I wasn’t so sure I wan
ted her to get madder.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“You know what I think? I think you’re more pissed off at Dad than I am. You just won’t admit it,” Honey accused.
“What am I supposed to admit?” I said.
“That you resent him. Because he ditched us,” she said, and lit her cigarette.
I looked out the window. We passed a billboard for something called Indian Spirit Caverns. I thought about that trip to Yellowstone. On the way back from the West we’d visited Mammoth Caves. It was very cool. There’s a picture somewhere of me and Honey and Mom and Dad standing by the stalactites in this blue light.
“Maybe he did ditch us,” I said. “What are we supposed to do about it? I mean, it happened. They got divorced. Now we live in Florida and Dad lives in Pennsylvania, and he’s married to Tiffany and Mom’s dating Mr. Bond.”
“I’ll tell you what we’re supposed to do about it,” Honey shouted. She pushed the accelerator to the floor and the Jeep roared even louder. We must have been going over a hundred. “We make them pay,” Honey said, between her teeth.
I didn’t say anything more and finally Honey eased up a bit on the accelerator. She reached down between the seats and got out a book and handed it to me. “Hey, Jonah, look through this book. Tell me if we’re near anything.”
The book was titled The 100 Strangest Places in America. It was a big list of all these places you could visit, like the World’s Biggest Coffee Pot and the Monkey Orphanage. In Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, was the Home for Retired Ventriloquists’ Dummies. “There’s Indian Spirit Caverns,” I said. “That’s only about twenty-five miles away.”
“Caves? Nah. Caves don’t do anything for me,” Honey said, waving her cigarette in the air. “Do you like caves?”
“I don’t know. They’re all right, I guess. Hey, do you remember that time we all went to Mammoth Caves, on the way back from Yellowstone?” I asked.
