Tell Me Three Things

by Julie Buxbaum

  “What the hell, Rachel? It’s just a fucking dinner,” my dad says, and that’s when I know it’s serious. My dad rarely curses, opts instead for the faux cursing favored only by ten-year-old girls and Southern women and Dri: shut the front door, holy sugar, eff off. “I need to study.”

  “It’s an important work dinner, and it’s not unreasonable of me to want my husband there. We’re married, remember? This is important to me,” Rachel says, and I wish I could see through the door. Are they standing or sitting? Is Rachel the type to throw things, to smash the thousand-dollar accessories that litter the house? But who needs a six-foot-tall white porcelain giraffe anyhow? “Forget it. Maybe it’s better if you don’t come.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. It means nothing.” Oh, the passive-aggressive type. Says things without saying them. Agnes would hate her. “You and I both know this is not about you needing to study. You already told me you can take that test in your sleep.”

  “Fine. I’ll admit it. I wanted one night to myself. One night when I did not have to be judged by all of your friends. Do you think I don’t see how they look at me? How you look at me when they’re around? I even let you take me shopping so I can dress the part, but come on! Enough,” my dad says, and now my cheeks flame. No doubt, I feel out of my element at Wood Valley, but it never occurred to me that my dad would have trouble adjusting to life in LA too, that all this fitting-in stuff doesn’t end in high school.

  “No one is judging you,” Rachel says, and her voice turns coaxing, soothing. “They all like you.”

  “So sue me that I don’t want to watch some indie movie about a Bengali leper who plays the harp with his toes. And you have some nerve correcting my drink order the other night, like I’m a child. I wanted a beer with my steak. Not an overpriced glass of cabernet. Sorry if that offends your high-class sensibilities. That sort of stuff doesn’t matter to me.”

  “I was just trying to keep you from embarrassing yourself,” Rachel says, and her voice starts to quaver. Tears are imminent. I don’t feel sorry for her. “At a place like that, you don’t order beer. You just don’t. I was just trying to signal to you—”

  “I don’t need signals. I’m a grown man, and just because I prefer burgers and beer to organic freshwater fancy-ass fish doesn’t make me a barbarian. You knew who you were marrying. I’ve never pretended to be anyone else. Anyhow, I thought it was cool to be different out here. Isn’t that why you bought me those ridiculous sneakers? It’s like you’re training a pet.”

  “It’s one thing to have simple tastes. It’s another to be downright antiintellectual. Would it hurt you to read a book once in a while?” Rachel asks. Turns out I was wrong. She’s not going to cry. She’s doubling down. She’s rearing back.

  “Seriously? You’re insulting my intelligence now? I’ve never seen you read a book. All that’s on your night table is Vogue. Actually, the only person who reads around here is Jessie. She’s the only sane person in this house.”

  “Jessie’s the only sane person in this house? Wake up, Bill! She has no friends. None. I was thrilled to send her to Wood Valley, but aren’t you worried about her? Teenagers are supposed to go out and have fun,” Rachel says.

  Oh, so I’ll be the one who will end up in tears. Of course, that’s the way it goes these days. I want to yell back, right through the door. I’ve made friends! I’m doing my best. I don’t need help. It’s not my fault my mother died, that we moved here. I’ve had to start all over from scratch in every way that matters. My dad chose her, and even more inexplicable, she chose my dad, and I didn’t choose either one of them. Sure, my dad’s a nobody pharmacist from Chicago, but he’s smart, damn it. Brilliant, even. So what if he loves WWF and action movies? My mom loved poetry, and even though my dad never did, they made it work. She let him be himself.

  My life is a shit sandwich, with a side of jizz veggie burger. I don’t have the strength. My eyes are blurry with tears, and I slide down the wall to the floor. Theo looks at me.

  “She talks crap when she’s mad. Ignore her,” Theo whispers. “She just likes to get her way.”

  “You’re one to talk about parenting.” My dad’s voice. “My kid is amazing, so don’t you dare. Have you looked at your kid lately? The way Theo gallivants all…” My dad stops, thank God. Oh, Dad, please don’t say it.

  “All what?” Rachel asks. “My son is gay. So the hell what?”

  Rachel is goading him now. It sounds like she wants to fight. For a moment, I think it would be preferable to listen to them have sex. This is somehow even more intimate, more raw. Even worse than witnessing her midnight tears. I don’t want to be so close to these grown-up things. It’s all so screwed up.

  Suddenly, I wonder if this is what happens when people meet on the Internet. A connection without context. A good first impression so much easier to make because it can be manipulated. But they met in an online bereavement group, not a place normal people click for a hookup. It’s hard picturing someone like Rachel turning to the Internet to help with her grief. She’s always so put-together. The opposite of needy.

  As much as I’m not a huge fan, I’m starting to see why my dad was attracted to her. Despite being dealt the bad hand of widowhood, Rachel’s getting an A-plus at life. She’s successful and reasonably attractive and rich. But why did she marry my dad? He’s not ugly, as far as middle-aged men go, I guess, and he’s kind—my mom used to say she was the luckiest woman in the world to have found him and to have built her life on such a stable foundation—but I’d imagine there are a million men like him in LA who come with fewer complications and more of their own cash. Why did she have to pick my dad?

  When my parents used to fight, I would slip away to my room and put on headphones. I didn’t listen, especially because I knew the fight would last for days—two or three at least—when both of them would use me to talk to each other, one of the downsides of being an only child: Jessie, tell your father he needs to pick you up from school tomorrow; Jessie, tell your mother that we are out of milk. They didn’t fight often, but when they did, it was explosive and unpleasant.

  Everything passes, Jessie. Remember that. What feels huge today will feel small tomorrow, she once said, right after a big fight with my dad. I don’t remember what they were arguing about—maybe money—but I do remember that it ended out of nowhere, four whole days after it started, when both of them just looked at each other and started cracking up. I think about that often—not only how that fight broke, but what she said. Because I’m pretty sure she was wrong. Not everything passes.

  “Let me just make something clear here.” My dad’s voice gets low and growly. He’s calm, almost too calm, which is what he does when he’s really angry. Runs cold. “I’m not some ignorant homophobic hick, so stop talking to me that way.”

  “Bill!”

  “Forget it. I’m going for a walk. I need air and to get far away from you,” my dad says, so Theo and I scramble quickly down the hall. Surely my dad knows they’ve been yelling, but better for him not to know about our front-row seats.

  “Good. Go!” Rachel screams. “And don’t come back!”

  —

  I’m in Theo’s room now. I’ve only been in here once, when I told him about my new job, so I take advantage of the opportunity to look around. He doesn’t have anything on his walls, not a single framed picture on his desk. Not much to see. Apparently, he’s a minimalist, like his mother.

  “You think they’re going to get a divorce?” Theo asks, and it surprises me that my heart sinks at the thought. Not because I particularly like living here, but because we have nothing to go back to. Our house is gone. Our Chicago lives. And if we were to stay in LA and move to some sad little apartment, my dad couldn’t afford to keep sending me to Wood Valley. I’d have to start again somewhere else. I’d have to say goodbye to my silly crush on Ethan, to my friendship with Dri and Agnes, to my whatever with SN. When Rachel told my dad to not come back, did s
he expect me to leave too? Are we kicked out?

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Would make things easier,” Theo says.

  “For you, maybe. I have nowhere to go.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I say, and stand to leave. I’ve had enough of these people.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it. Was your dad going to call me a…Never mind.”

  “He wouldn’t have. He’s not like that.”

  “Whatever. Want to smoke up?” Theo reaches for his rolling papers.

  “No thanks. And for real, he wouldn’t have called you anything bad.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I know my dad. He was going to say flamboyant. Which, come on, you kind of are,” I say, and wonder if I’ve overstepped my boundaries. I hold eye contact with Theo, to let him know that I am not trying to be hurtful, just honest.

  “I knew in, like, kindergarten that I’m gay, so I figure I should own it, you know? Give the people what they want,” Theo says, and starts digging through his drawers. “No one should be spared my fabulousness.”

  “Lucky us,” I say, but I smile. I’m starting to have a new appreciation for Theo. He approaches life with manic enthusiasm, an antidote to most of Wood Valley’s laconic teenagerness. There’s a layer of kindness underneath him too, and he’s authentic in his own over-the-top way.

  “So who are you texting with all the time?” he asks, and again it occurs to me that he could be SN. Maybe he wanted to help me without having to face our bizarro new family situation. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted; maybe SN’s flirtation was actually just Theo’s enthusiasm. I hope not.

  “None of your business,” I say, which doesn’t seem to bother him in the least.

  “Since you don’t smoke, wanna stress eat instead? I have some emergency Godiva somewhere around here,” he says, and finds what he’s been looking for: a giant chocolate bar.

  “I’m in,” I say.

  “So you think your dad signed a prenup?” Theo asks, and I hate him all over again.

  CHAPTER 16

  SN: three things: (1) had waffles this morning in your honor. (2) when I graduate, I really want to disrupt the beverage industry. I mean water, coffee, tea, juice, soda, and a few weird hybrids. WE CAN DO BETTER. (3) I used to dream about my sister all the time, and I’d wake up all shaky and it sucked, but now I don’t dream about her at all. turns out that’s worse.

  Me: (1) I don’t dream about my mom anymore either, but sometimes I totally forget that she’s gone. I’ll think, oh, she’ll love this story, I’ll tell her when I get home, and then I remember all over again. That’s the worst. (2) I didn’t have waffles this morning. I had some sort of organic wheatberry granola from Whole Foods that the stepmonster loves, and tho it was delicious, I still have no idea wtf a wheatberry is. (3) I’ve never used the word “disrupt” in relation to any industry. What does that even mean? Are you sure you’re 16?

  SN: 17, actually. and I now have my billion-dollar idea: wheatberry juice!

  Me: You are so Wood Valley. What? A MILLION-dollar idea wasn’t good enough?

  —

  I head straight to work after school. I’m not avoiding home. Not really. But what if my stuff has already been packed up again into my duffel bags—Gloria would do it carefully and respectfully, take the time to fold my bras, ziplock my shampoo bottles—and the whole Rachel-Dad experiment is over, just like that? Poof. What will happen to me?

  At breakfast, I was the only one sitting at the table, and when Theo stopped in to grab a juice, he just raised an eyebrow and shrugged. Apparently, he’s as much in the dark as I am. A few minutes later, Rachel came in, and she did that busy thing she does, where she talks out loud to no one in particular, or maybe to herself, a whirling dervish of nervous energy and rhetorical questions.

  “Coffee! Where’s the coffee?” she asked, though it was exactly where it always is. In the coffeemaker, brewed by Gloria or an automatic early-morning timer, I’m not sure which, though I put my money on the former. Gloria is amazing at doing things without you seeing her do things, and also doing all the things you didn’t even know you needed done in the first place. If we have to leave, I might miss Gloria the most. She calls me Yessie and folds my pajamas under my pillow and insists I eat chocolate calcium chews. “And keys. Where are you, keys? In my bag. Damn it, where’s my bag?”

  Like all of Rachel’s belongings, apparently, my dad was also MIA, and for a second, I panicked that maybe he’d taken off without me and headed back east. When the worst thing you could possibly imagine happens to you, you think maybe other previously inconceivably bad things can happen too. But no way would he ditch me. Of course, I never thought he’d lie about a convention and come back remarried instead of loaded up with samples to give to his middle-age friends like a normal person, but still. Except for the last few months, he’s been a good dad.

  “Sunglasses?” Rachel asked, which made me realize just how rattled she must have been by last night’s fight, because she started patting down the empty white countertops, as if her sunglasses would appear out of thin air. Sunglasses are not usually part of her morning soliloquy.

  “On your head,” I said.

  And then she jumped a little and looked up at me, as if my voice caught her by surprise and she was just noticing I was sitting here. She looked sad for a moment, or disappointed. But then she pulled her glasses off her head and put them on, and just like that, most of her face was covered, and I couldn’t read her at all.

  —

  Liam’s sitting on the desk when I get to work, playing his guitar and singing to an audience of zero. Turns out I was right: Book Out Below! doesn’t get a whole lot of customer action. A few regulars here and there, one guy who thumbs books in the self-help section but never buys, and that’s about it.

  “ ‘Imagine,’ huh? A classic.” I’m surprised by Liam’s voice. It’s soft, earnest, almost sweet. He looks different with a guitar. Dri’s crush makes total sense.

  “Sorry. Didn’t hear you come in.” Liam swings Earl off his shoulder and slides him back into his purple fur-lined case. It’s a graceful move, one I’m sure he’s done a thousand times.

  “You don’t have to stop on my account.” I wonder if I can somehow slip my phone out and secretly record him for Dri but then realize that’s just too weird and invasive. “You’re good. I mean, for real.”

  “Thanks. I wanna go to Berklee College of Music next year, if I get in, but my mom doesn’t want me going so far,” he says.

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s in Boston, right?”

  “Yup. Honestly, what I’d really like to do is skip college and try to hit it big with the Oville guys. But my mom would go postal. I keep telling her that’s what Maroon 5 did—they’re from Brentwood School, you know—but she’s all, ‘Maroon what’?”

  I laugh, try to think of what to say next.

  “So are you coming?” he asks, saving me from my embarrassingly blank brain.

  “Excuse me?”

  “To my gig. At Gem’s party.”

  “When is it, again?” Of course, I remember when it is. Dri and Agnes have already convinced me that we should all go, and have even picked out my outfit. They claim Crystal and Gem will be so wasted they won’t even notice I’m there.

  “Next Saturday night,” Liam says. “Okay, so it’s not a real gig at a club or anything. But it’ll be fun. Promise.”

  “Cool, I’ll definitely try to make it.” Liam pats the desk, an invitation for me to sit next to him. I jump up and sit cross-legged but turn so my back rests against the wall. I scan the children’s section behind his head, check out the bright covers of the books, which are shelved to face outward. They are not shy at all.

  “Are you working today too?” I ask.

  I hope not. Working with Liam makes me uncomfortable; it’s hard to make conversation for three hours in a row. There are only so many times he can tell me about the food at his Googl
e internship, which apparently was really, really good. I mean, we don’t talk the whole time—thank God for my iPhone, which I pull out whenever I feel awkward, but that only gets me so far. Now that I know the basics here, I’m not sure why we would both need to be on duty. It’s not like there’s anything to really do anyway.

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind. I need the cash, so…”

  “Oh, I mean, do you want me to go, then?” I ask, and my heart sinks. Dri and Agnes go to Coffee Bean every day after school. As sad as it sounds, I need Ice Blended money.

  And also this: I don’t want to go home.

  If my dad and I have to move again, will SN and I still write to each other? Will he finally tell me who he is?

  “Nah, I figured we could both work. My mom doesn’t care.” I wonder if he feels sorry for me, looks down on me the same way his girlfriend does, and that’s why he’s letting me stay. I’ve noticed the scholarship kids at Wood Valley—you can tell by their clothes and how they stick together in nondesigner clumps. No one seems to pay any attention to them. The other day, some girl wore a T-shirt that said GAP across the front. Gem didn’t even nudge Crystal. For whatever reason, I seem to be her only target.

  “You sure?” I ask. Crap. I sound hopeful, even to my own ears.

  “I’m sure.” And then Liam picks up Earl again and begins to play.

  Dri: SHUT UP. He’s serenading you RIGHT NOW? FOR REAL? I’m coming there.

  Me: I think he’s playing original Oville stuff?

  Dri: OMG. Wait, if I come it will be too obvious, right? Right. Shoot! Can you call me and leave the line open?

  Me: Really?

  Dri: No. That’s too stalkerish. Even for me. AHHHHH.

  Me: You were right. He’s actually really good.

  Dri: You’re killing me right now.

  Me: If it makes you feel any better, I wish it were you here instead of me. I have calc homework. If only I got paid to do that…

  Dri: Admit it: he’s hot.