Breakfast with Neruda

by Laura Moe

  Annie’s face lights up. “Wow. Where’d you get that?”

  “It was inside one of the book bags. Earl said I could keep some of the stuff.” I had planned on keeping the iPod, but how would I keep it charged up? I hand it to my sister. “It’s for you.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, and I got you something else too.”

  She raises her eyebrows. I can almost hear her mind screaming, Not more stuff!

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It doesn’t take up much space, and you can throw it out.” I pull out one of the books I got from the lockers and pass it to my sister.

  Her face breaks into a grin. “The Arabian Nights!”

  When my sister’s dad, Bob, was still alive he used to read stories from The Arabian Nights to get us to sleep.

  “Sorry it’s kind of beat up, but it was a freebie from the school lockers.”

  She holds the book against her chest. “Thank you for this. I won’t throw it away. I’ll toss out something of Mom’s to make room for it.”

  Our mom’s stuff has accumulated enough to start spilling into my sister’s room. And Mom freaks if you throw anything out. Oddly enough, as much crap as there is in the house, she notices when things are missing. It wasn’t always like this. We used to move every few months, but about five years ago, when Mom married Tomas, we moved here. He’s long gone, but the junk multiplies.

  Jeff got lucky. He lives with his dad and his new family. Since they live nearby, Annie and I see Jeff at school all the time. Rooster, Ohio, is a small enough place, and everyone goes to one of three high schools in the county. Jeff’s dad gave me my car. Not that he knows I live in it. At the time, I just needed a car to get to work and back. I moved out even before I got expelled because Mom’s piles of crap had buried my bedroom.

  Annie started keeping her clothes in a dresser drawer on the back porch about a year ago so she won’t smell like the inside of the townhouse. Even in cold weather she changes clothes behind a curtain she devised from a blanket.

  “I started sleeping out back,” she tells me. We walk to the back door and I see Annie has rigged up a folding lawn chair with some cushions. “I can’t breathe inside this house.”

  “You're always welcome to sleep in the backseat of my car,” I say.

  “I might take you up on that if things get any worse.”

  I give her a quick hug. “Thanks for the sandwich.” I pick up my bag and carefully trek my way up to the bathroom. Keeping a usable bathroom and a somewhat functional kitchen were the sole triumphs my sister had negotiated with our mother. So far. I just wonder when Annie will be shoved completely out the door too.

  I drape the shirt over the shower door, hoping the steam straightens it out.

  When I get back downstairs, Annie is sitting on the porch reading from the book. She looks up when I step outside. “Remember The Fisherman and the Genie?”

  The Fisherman and the Genie was one of our favorites as kids, probably because it was Bob’s favorite.

  “Thanks again for the book,” Annie says.

  “No problem.”

  She picks up the iPod and charger and hands them to me. “Here. You don’t have any way to listen to music,” she says. “I have the radio or my stereo. Plus I already have an MP3 player.”

  “Are you sure?” I say.

  “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  • • •

  I get off work around 10:30 and stop at Kroger to buy a box of crackers (bread molds too quickly in this summer heat), a jar of Jif peanut butter, and a squirt bottle of honey. In the school library I read an article in Outdoor Life about surviving hikes and getting lost in the woods. It said peanut butter and honey are perfect foods because they’re nutritious and don’t spoil when they get too hot or cold. According to the article, a jar of honey can last 3,000 years, so I’ve been pretty much living on peanut butter and honey and fast-food dollar menus since I moved out of Mom’s house. I buy a couple bananas and apples. I almost never eat salads or vegetables because they spoil quickly.

  I count my leftover money: $13.12. Hopefully I’ll find some more cash in the east wing lockers tomorrow.

  I drive around the Graham Park neighborhood close to the school, but not so close I’m actually on the lot. I have to wait for the night custodians to leave at eleven; usually the school parking lot is empty by 11:15. The few minutes I charged the iPod at Mom’s didn’t last, and my phone is also dead, so I still don’t know what time it is.

  I sometimes sleep near my mom’s, but now that I have to be at school so early, I park the car on or close to the school grounds to make sure I get there on time. I don’t want to screw up this community service gig.

  I could park the car anywhere I guess, but there are parts of town where I don’t want to be seen, and also parts of town that scare the crap out of me. It’s so hot inside the car I won’t sleep for long stretches anyway. Tonight I settle in a dark spot near the football field, behind the training room. The heat forces me to sleep with the windows and the tailgate open.

  Chapter Two

  The first thing that wakes me is the light. The sun rises early in summer and hits me in waves. Next thing I notice, of course, is the heat. My T-shirt and boxers are stuck to me. The third thing is the smell of something burning. A cigarette. But I don’t smoke. What the hell? I jolt upright.

  “Morning, sunshine.” Shelly is sitting in the open tailgate of my car, smoking. “Nice place you have here,” she says. “And such a good neighborhood.”

  I run a hand through my hair and wipe my eyes. I grab a pair of shorts and slide them on over my boxers.

  Shelly laughs. “Don’t be embarrassed. I know about morning wood.”

  I’m actually more embarrassed that she found me sleeping in the car. “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Six-thirty or so.”

  I try to conjure the reason that my car is parked behind the school at 6:30 in the morning when our sentences don’t begin until eight. “I worked really late last night,” I say, “and I didn’t want to be late and have Earl turn me in to the court.”

  “Oh,” she says. She glances at the stacks of clothes and stuff everywhere. “Sure,” she says, as if she sees through my lie.

  I slide out of the back of the car. “I work right after school, so I change clothes in here a lot.” Good cover, Michael, I tell myself. I turn away from her and pee along the back fence.

  She reaches into her purse and pulls out a twenty. “How about breakfast?” she says. “Steak ’n Shake?”

  “You’re buying?”

  “Technically my dad is buying. But you’re driving.”

  I envy her money. I’m also envious that she has a father, especially one who will give her a twenty with no questions asked. I clean the debris off the passenger seat and toss it all in the back. The door groans as she opens it and gets in. She glances around at the stuff littering the backseat.

  “I am way overdue for going to the laundromat,” I say. Piles of my dirty shirts and pants are tossed on the seat next to my columns of books.

  We drive in silence for a couple minutes, and then she fiddles with my radio. “It only gets AM,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “It’s old, and it didn’t come with FM. The antenna broke off a long time ago, so even what I do get is scratchy.”

  She snaps off the radio. “That’s okay. I’ll just let you tell me why the hell you’re living in your car.”

  My face grows hot. I barely know this chick who, like me, lives on the south side of the law. “First, you tell me what the hell you did to get sentenced to community service.”

  “I already told you. Got caught smoking.”

  “That only gets you a few detentions or Saturday schools,” I say. I shoot her a glance. “I mean, look what I did. And it’s a lot worse than inhaling too many packs of Kools.”

  She crosses her arms. “I smoke Marlboros.”

  “Whatever. I know what you did is at least as bad, if not wors
e, than me almost accidentally annihilating the school building.”

  She fumbles through her enormous purse. “It’s kind of a long, boring story,” she says.

  I give her a charming grin. “The radio doesn’t work, and I’m not very interesting, so . . .”

  “Fine. We’ll flip for who has to spill their guts first.” We pull into the restaurant parking lot. I glance in the window and see a few kids from school, including my ex-best friend sitting next to my ex-girlfriend. “Not here,” I say, and back out of the parking space.

  “Frenemies?” she asks.

  “Something like that.”

  She glances at her phone. “I guess we don’t really have time to get waited on anyway. It’s like ten after seven already.” I drive down Rocket Road and pull into the drive-thru at McDonald’s.

  I order the Big Breakfast platter with extra butter, an extra biscuit, a large Diet Coke, and an apple pie. Shelly glances at me. “Sure you don’t want a side of beef with that? Wouldn’t want you to starve.”

  I stifle a laugh. “If I’m telling you my life story, you have to feed me first.”

  Shelly just orders an Egg McMuffin and small mocha. She hands me the twenty, and I pay the girl at the window. It’s Krissy Jones from my AP English class last year. She acts friendly enough, but her eyes dart between the two of us as if she’s a little afraid. I take the change and am tempted to pocket it, but Shelly holds out her hand. I smirk, dribble the coins into her palm, and place the bills in her lap.

  “Shall we flip now?” she asks.

  “Can we eat first?”

  We pull around and park by the exit lane. I open the bags. The uncommon smell of hot breakfast food fills me with glee. Normally all I eat in the morning is a few handfuls of dry cereal and a banana. I hold the plate in my hands like it’s a silver platter and take a giant whiff. Shelly snickers and shakes her head as I stab at the eggs with the plastic fork and practically inhale them.

  Shelly watches me as she slowly nibbles at her sandwich. She waits until I have finished the eggs, sausage, and hash browns and start to butter my biscuit before she says, “Heads or tails?”

  With my mouth full of biscuit, I say, “Heads.”

  She flips one of her quarters. “It’s tails.” She smiles. “Okay, buddy. Spill the story. Why the hell did you want to blow us to smithereens? And why do you live in your car?”

  I glance at her. I wonder how much of the truth I want to share. She already knows how I got in trouble, which doesn’t really relate to how I left home.

  “First of all,” I say, “you are not allowed to say you’re sorry for me, or about anything I plan to tell you. Is that clear?”

  She chuckles. “Okay.”

  “Okay.” I cram the second biscuit inside my mouth and wash it down with a big gulp of Diet Coke. I belch. “Tell me what you think you know about me,” I say.

  “Well, not much, except they actually found enough firecrackers in your book bag to burn down a chunk of the building.”

  “True so far.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  I stare out the windshield, half watching the morning traffic build up on Rocket Road. “I wasn’t planning to blow up the school.”

  “Why the firecrackers then?”

  “It’s complicated,” I say.

  “Did getting expelled get you booted out of your house?”

  I shrug. “Yeah. Kinda.” I let the lie linger. I don’t want to tell her about my mom’s hoarding. Nobody knows about that except Annie and Jeff and me, and none of us is talking. I think Rick suspected too, because I stopped inviting him to my house.

  “Isn’t there some other relative you could live with?” Shelly asks.

  I could have stayed with my grandmother for a while, but she’s crazy too, in her three-pack-a-day, bottle-of-whiskey way, though at least her apartment isn’t filled with useless junk. Grandma Barb lives in a senior apartment facility and has just the one bedroom. I could probably go there in an emergency, like if we get a blizzard this winter, but I can’t live there since I’m not fifty-five-plus.

  “No.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s not in the picture,” I snap. Unlike Jeff, who actually lives with his dad, and saw him every weekend before he moved in with him, I have never met my own father. I don’t even know his name. Flynn is my mother’s maiden name.

  “But you still haven’t told me why you had explosives in your book bag,” she says.

  I slump back in the seat and take a breath. “Do you know Rick Shraver?”

  “Marginally.”

  “Yeah, well, he was my target. Not him, exactly. I was just going to blow up his car.”

  I glance at her but I can’t read her reaction. “Anyway, he and I used to be friends. Since grade school we were tight. But junior year I started seeing Ashley Anders . . .” It’s hard to think about her now. Ashley Anders, with her butter-colored hair and ocean-colored eyes.

  “Go on,” Shelly says.

  “I never should have let Rick get to know her. I started seeing Ashley year before last, and we also hung around Rick sometimes. We’d go to the movies and stuff. A couple times when I had to work, the two of them got together and hung out. He was my best friend, right? I mean, shouldn’t he be the one guy I trusted with my girlfriend? “

  “You’d think.”

  “Yeah. Well, I couldn’t get off work on prom night last March. And by then . . .” I was about to say I had been living in my car for several months, but I wanted Shelly to think my moving out had to do with the bomb disaster. “I needed money for my car insurance and couldn’t afford to risk getting fired, and nobody would trade with me.”

  “Sucks,” she says.

  I nod. “Ashley and Rick stopped by the theater before dinner so she could show me her prom dress. And those two looked really good together, you know? At ease and in sync, yet nothing odd clicked in me. Yet.

  “I remember she wore this cobalt blue gown and her normally pale skin was sprayed with a fake tan. Not a gross fakey one, but just enough color to make it look more like the beginning of June instead of the end of March. People in line at the concession stand all stared at her, as if she had just come from the Academy Awards.”

  I shift in my seat and look at Shelly. “Have you ever had one of those ESP kind of moments, like it’s the best time in your life, but you know this is the last best moment of your life, and soon everything will turn to shit?”

  She nods.

  “Well, this was one of those times. I mean, Rick didn't hold her hand or anything, and they didn't appear to be acting like a couple, but there was this invisible energy between them, something that maybe even they weren’t aware of. Maybe he was, but Ashley came up and kissed me, which right there in front of all those people made me look damn good. Anyway, somehow I knew that kiss was the last one. I had this unspoken dread, and that dread followed me through the rest of my shift. When I got off, I was supposed to meet them at the after-prom at Main Lanes Bowling, but they weren’t there. I drove around, and didn’t find them at his house or her house. And I’m wondering, what the hell?

  “So I cruised around all night, worrying, thinking. I stopped and slept for a couple of hours, and drove around again. I woke at seven in the morning and I drove past the Red Roof Inn, and that’s when I saw them, coming out of a room.” I picture it now: Ashley’s hair all messed up in a knot on top her head, she and Rick holding hands.

  “And something in me just snapped. I feel sick remembering it all now. How I wanted to mash my foot on the accelerator and crush them with my car. The only thing that stopped me was a little kid who came out of the adjoining room, so I just sped off.”

  “And you plotted your revenge?” Shelly says.

  I nod. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Wow,” Shelly says. “Sorry about that.”

  “You said you weren’t going to feel sorry for me.”

  “I’m not sorry for you; I’m sorry with you.”
She lights a cigarette. “One question, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How did you get caught? Did you tell someone what you planned to do?”

  “No. When I was stuffing my bag in my locker before homeroom, one of the firecrackers, an M-80, which looks like dynamite, fell on the floor and a group of girls freaked out and started screaming, 'OMG, he has dynamite! He’s going to blow up the school!' A couple teachers ran out of their rooms, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  “How were you planning on blowing up his car?”

  “I was going to skip study hall and plant the fireworks,” I say. “Funny thing is I hadn’t brought any matches, which kind of helped my case.”

  Shelly laughs and shakes her head. “I’m surprised you didn’t make ‘Morons in the News’ on Bob & Sheri.”

  “I made the national news, though.” All the networks ran the story. And the YouTube clips of my arrest will live online forever.

  “So what did you do with your time off after they booted you out of school?” she asked.

  “Worked at the theater. Read a lot of books.”

  Shelly glances at her phone. “We better go.”

  “Wait. You have to tell me your story.”

  “We’ll save it for lunch.”

  We get back to the school with enough time for me take what my sister calls a “whore's bath” in the men’s room, and report for duty. Earl has brought in a plate of peanut butter cookies. I’m liking him more and more.

  By lunchtime, Shelly has evaporated. Hess tells me she had a court date. That sneaky bitch. She knew all along she wouldn’t be here.

  • • •

  It reaches 100 degrees today, which means my car is 250 degrees inside when I get off work. Or rather, work detail. The AC in the Blue Whale hasn’t worked since the beginning of time, so I soak my hands in water from the outside spigot so the dark blue plastic steering wheel doesn’t char my skin. I start the Whale up and use my 4-70 air conditioning, which is where I open all four windows and fly down the freeway at seventy miles an hour to cool her off.

  My phone buzzes just as I pull off at a rest area. Mitch has texted and wants me to come in early. One good thing about this weather is the movie theaters are crowded. I text back, Give me an hour.