My final answer before falling to sleep: Jamie.
Nobody but Jamie. But then again, she would be too busy with SpongeBob, Rugrats, and Boy Meets World marathons to worry about me.
As for my friends, they would be upset at first, but then they would be too busy playing SOCOM or some other video game and would hardly even notice I was gone.
And of course, Lindsey would be happy. At least the house would be quiet so she could study. So that brought me back to Jamie, because other than her, I was essentially a kid without a home or family. She was, somehow, my only hope. Plus, more importantly, way more importantly, she needed me. She wasn’t capable of dealing with Jacob on her own. Without me there, he would have to turn his attention to her, and soon enough she would be banned from television or some other punishment that felt to him like he was saving her.
When my mother picked me up at Evan’s on Thanksgiving morning, she did all the talking, in her typical momlike way, rambling to no one in particular:
“Your father took Jamie into Manhattan to see the Macy’s parade—remember how good the view is from his office? Lindsey didn’t want to go, and I’m cooking—we’re having the Burnetts, and your aunt Randi, and two families from your father’s office. I’ve been cooking all morning . . . You know how you like stuffing? Well, this year, I wasn’t going to make it, then Elaine . . . Mrs. Burnett said she would take care of it and that she would bring a few pies, pumpkin and apple. Do you think we should stop for Häagen-Dazs? Or Ben and Jerry’s? Serita is coming at four to help out, but I will need your help before everyone gets here. Do you think you can handle getting the chairs out of the garage? Your father’s not going to want to do it. They should be home by three, which should give me time; the turkey’s been in the oven since seven and it’s unusually big, so I’m not sure how long to leave it. We’re not having sweet potatoes, do you think anyone will notice?”
“I dunno.”
Why wasn’t she talking about the boarding school? Why wasn’t she telling me that I didn’t have to go?
I wasn’t going to bring it up first. I wasn’t going to even talk at all. I didn’t have the strength. I was so completely tired.
Except. What was this about the Burnetts coming over? I figured that after the incident at school, we were done with them. So I asked, “Burn, I mean David. He’s still coming?”
“Yes, honey. After all, I did invite them. Months ago. Elaine is going through such a hard time, with her husband being gone, and then that boy, something’s not right about him, with his bipolar disorder and his other issues. You will be nice to him, won’t you? And Lindsey says that his sister’s not much better. Weird, that’s what Lindsey says about her. Lindsey thinks she has a tattoo, and, according to Elaine, she hasn’t made many friends since they came back to town. I did tell you that David was transferred to a school in Massachusetts that specializes in kids with emotional issues, didn’t I?”
“Roxanne” is what I said.
“What, honey?” She was distracted from driving, which she always did extraordinarily badly.
“Burn’s . . . David’s sister, Roxanne,” I said. “Actually she’s OK.” I was thinking about Roxanne and the few times I ran into her since the Burnetts moved back. She said the vilest things every time I saw her, yelling, screaming my full name at me, like it was a curse:
“CRA SHIN SKEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Not just to me. She was vile to virtually everyone, with absolutely no care where she was or who heard her.
She was so loud.
And almost everything she said was funny, so funny that you had to laugh, especially when she was making fun of her brother. Or my sister. Lindsey hated her, which gave her street cred as far as I was concerned. She would definitely make Thanksgiving more interesting. I pictured her doing her fake sneeze at the dinner table, sneezing out my last name, just like she did in the mall once when she bumped into me and my friends.
“CRA CRA CRA SHINSKEEEEE,” into her sleeve, all blinking with mock allergies. Over and over again. You couldn’t help but laugh. OK, you had to be there.
Jacob wasn’t going to like that at all.
Then it hit me.
Jacob.
DAVID.
ONE THING.
I was immediately exhausted again. Fuckme.
“I just didn’t know Dave was coming . . . ,” I said, realizing that Burn could be a major problem for me.
“What’s the problem?” My mom sensed my panic, but then her cell phone rang and she was turning left (one of her worst driving abilities) and answering at the same time (another thing that she didn’t do well at all while driving). And when she hung up, it was all “Look, Steven, I know he’s got issues, but it is Thanksgiving and they have nowhere else to go. It’s the right thing to do.”
My mom continued driving, playing with her cell phone again.
I’m watching a jogger on the side of the road, being very afraid.
“Your dad is helping them out,” she said, pulling into our driveway. “Investing for them, doing what he does . . .”
“Mom,” I ventured as she was getting out of the car.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Fine, Steven. Help me with the packages. Are you feeling all right? You aren’t coming down with anything, are you? You look run-down. I never should have allowed you to have three sleepovers in a row.” She leans over to feel my head with her lips, checking for temperature.
The seed was planted.
I told her that I wasn’t feeling well at all, that maybe I was getting sick, maybe I needed to rest. So I went to my room and lay down just for a minute, and tell you the truth, I actually wasn’t feeling too great at that point. Next thing I know, Burn is standing over me, looking down at me.
“Yo, Crash, you still alive?” nudging me into consciousness.
I sat up immediately and stared at him. I hadn’t seen him since that day in the cafeteria, and something was different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but he had a different look, like he was less likely to suddenly go into a rage, like maybe he was finally at peace with who he was.
“How’s it going?” I mumbled, concerned. Not for him, but for me.
“You look like shit. . . .” He sits on my bed, next to me as I get up.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
“I’d rather not talk about it,” he tells me, dismissively.
“Well, you’re gonna have to. Because my dad is threatening to send me away to a school like the one you’re going to.”
“Trust me. No way will your parents be sending you to the school that I’m going to.”
I couldn’t help but wonder why he was so convinced.
“Did you get any new games?” he asks, inspecting my collection.
By now I am up, across the room, closing the door. “Maybe you don’t get it, but my dad is planning to send me away. Like, forever.”
“You need a plan,” he said, and while he couldn’t have known, all I had been thinking about for the past three days was coming up with a plan. Pete couldn’t help me, Evan didn’t seem to understand, and Kenny came up with really stupid ideas that would more than likely get me kicked out of my house than keep me there. So it was refreshing to hear from someone who, at least, got the point. Someone who was, in spite of everything else, brilliant.
“Yeah, I need a plan” is what I echoed.
He busied himself with the Grand Theft Auto III box, opening it, not finding the disc, then searching, not looking at me, but talking. “Know this, Crashinsky” (sounding more than a little like his sister), “by the time they tell you that they are sending you somewhere, the process is pretty far along. They have probably talked to schools; my guess is they already chose the one that they think is appropriate for you.” I was nodding, and listening to him like I was Luke Skywalker and he was Yoda, as he bounced around my room still searching for the game.
“My mom was apparently prepared when she got a call from
your school,” he said. “They said I was a potential threat to other kids, which at first didn’t make any sense to me because I didn’t do anything. But then it hit me that there was this incident in my school in Chicago which, OK, was attributable to me. . . .”
He found the game disc, wiped it on his jeans, and placed it in the game console. I wanted to know what the Chicago incident was but couldn’t ask.
“I will acknowledge that in addition to Chicago, there might have been a few other things that they claim justify an evaluation of me as ‘high risk,’ whatever that means. They even brought up the McAllister thing. Isn’t that crazy? We were, like, eight.”
He set up the game as he talked.
“Also, the kids in Chicago were total asswipes. At least here there are a few cool kids. How’s the basketball team doing?”
“OK,” I answered reluctantly, not wanting him to know that I had his spot, afraid that he would get pissed off.
“So you got my spot then?” He laughed. “Better you than that cretin Bosco. He can’t play for shit. So I guess you owe me one.” He started from my saved point in the game, but I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t want him to play. After all, I owed him one.
“And of course, you will be forever in my debt if I can develop a scheme to keep you out of boarding school. Trust me, you do not want to go away, especially in the middle of the year. It has not been easy. Especially the school they picked for me. By the way, are you aware that your father has been advising my mom, and that it was because of his ‘financial acumen,’ as my mom called it, that she was able to afford to send me away? In fact, I understand that she consulted him at length before determining that I had to go away, and that he was instrumental in her decision to send me. So I will be sure to thank him for that.”
He played and I watched, mostly in silence. But then, I had to ask:
“What’s it like? The school?”
“Think Harry Potter, Hogwarts . . . from hell. Without Ron and Hermione, well, actually, that’s not true, imagine Ron and Hermione are there, only they are certifiably insane. There’s almost no sense of reality in the student population, and the instructors are essentially prison guards—are you familiar with the SS?”
I was not. “Are you able to learn better?”
He shook his head, like he couldn’t believe my question. “Crashinsky, don’t you get it? Don’t you know anything about me? I’ve already learned everything I’m ever going to learn in any school. That’s part of my problem. I’m way beyond their elementary textbooks and into an entirely other dimension of thought and learning. And they want to replace that ability with a computer chip that responds to basic rules without questioning them.”
He paused the game.
“I see things in a way that they don’t, and they don’t get it,” he said. “Doesn’t that sound familiar?”
“Why should it?”
“Because we share that in common, don’t we? C’mon, you do it too. I’ve seen you do it. Actually, my sister was the one who pointed it out to me. You see things that even I don’t see.”
“Your sister?” Was he saying that I was some sort of genius too? Because deep down, I understood what he was saying. I did, in fact, have the ability to see things in an entirely different way from my friends and my family, in a way that I could not verbalize and certainly couldn’t use on any schoolwork, but there was something I could access that I knew that people around me weren’t able to touch.
I nodded, not knowing how this was going to keep me from going to hell-school and not knowing whether Burn was actually making any sense. He was either mad crazy or the smartest kid ever, and I was feeling a whole lot smarter listening to him. Either way, it was good to have an ally.
“What does any of this have to do with going away to school?”
“Do you know what ‘axiom of choice’ means?” He was starting to sound like he did that day in the cafeteria, but without the edge of violence. “Of course you don’t. Axiom of choice is the ability of a mathematician to choose the elements of a set without determining which is correct. I’m oversimplifying it, but the point is that each of us has the ability to choose what he wants to learn, and in the end it all works out. And here’s the thing—” He turned to me, handed me the controller, finally giving me a turn, and said, “Everything you can imagine, everything you can think of, everything that makes up our society and our current state of consciousness, every single fact, conjecture, speculation, and thought is actually, for the first time in our collective existence, in one place.”
“Huh?” Me, not getting his point at all.
“On the internet,” he said smugly. “Just think what that means.”
He was way beyond me at that moment.
Then, from the hallway: “Steven, David, come down please.”
I immediately obeyed (remember the predicament I was in: one thing out of line).
David grabbed the controller back, shooed me away, and returned to the game, not caring to listen.
I went down to the living room.
“Carsh Insky.” Roxanne in a miniskirt thing, multicolored leggings, her hair jet black. Tight, tight belly shirt accentuated her body and revealed that she had pierced her belly button; definitely not Thanksgiving attire. My father was going have a field day.
“Rox Anne.”
“You are soooo cute. I wish you were my brother.” She gave me a pat on the head, turned to Lindsey, and said, “Do you want to trade?”
Lindsey had the usual look of disgust and dismissal on her face. It was the same expression that my father generally used whenever he talked to me.
“Oddly, no,” she said, shaking her head and doing her eye roll, and I knew that was a major dis of Burn and me at the same time. It was actually pretty funny. For Lindsey.
Roxanne stared back at her, and I realized for the first time that she was no happier being at our house than Lindsey was at the thought of having her over.
“Your mistake then,” she told Lindsey, “because if you picked my brother, you’d only have to see him on holidays. He’s in boarding school.”
“So will . . .” Lindsey started to answer, but stopped herself.
She knew. She fucking knew!
I was now staring at Lindsey with mind-reading intensity. I could feel my body warming with tension. If she knew, then everyone else knew, and I certainly would not put it beyond Lindsey to try and push my buttons to make it happen.
“Where’s David?” said Roxanne’s mother, and that’s when I noticed the others.
Actually, what I noticed first was this model, standing in the middle of our living room, sipping champagne. This dark-haired woman in black heels and a slender black dress with an expensive-looking necklace. This perfectly shaped goddess who lit up the room with a glow that was normally reserved for celebrities. Then I saw these two girl kids beside her. She was one hundred percent milf. The milfyest milf in history.
I immediately thought of Burn, sitting upstairs with Grand Theft Auto. When Burn saw her, he was going to go absolutely crazy. This was a guarantee, because among all of the kids in my grade, Burn was easily the biggest horndog. When he wasn’t searching the internet for “axiom of choice,” whatever that was, he was surfing for porn, and since he hardly slept, he knew every major porn site. He told me this during basketball tryouts. He even said, if he didn’t make the team, it would be OK, as it would give him more time for porn.
So this milf was in trouble, because no way was Burn going to be able to eat without staring at her the whole time.
“Where’s David?” Roxanne’s mother asked again.
“I’ll get him,” I said.
Back in my room:
“Dave,” I told him. “You gotta come down. There’s a major-league milf in my living room.”
Dave immediately went from undistractible to totally interested. “What’s she like?”
“I dunno, hot.”
“No, describe her.”
“Wh
y? All you have to do is come down.”
“First tell me exactly what makes her so hot. Is she blond?”
“No, actually she has dark hair.”
“Big tits?”
“Kind of.” I was out of my league with these questions. All I knew was “hot.” “Really, Dave, you are gonna have to see . . .”
What we didn’t see was Jacob standing in the doorway, listening to us. He walked in. He closed the door behind him.
And smiled.
It was not a happy smile. My father rarely had a happy smile. In fact, I only heard him actually laugh out loud like once, and over some political guy on TV. He never laughed at like Seinfeld or Family Guy or anything really funny, he just nodded, like he got the joke.
So seeing my father smile was not a good thing.
“Listen to me, you little assholes,” he said in a controlled whisper. “I have people from my company here, and the last thing I need is for either of you to make a mockery out of this holiday. Do you understand?”
Burn fake-smiled back. “This holiday is already a mockery. Its very purpose is to express gratitude for the harvest. Well, excuse me, sir, if I don’t express my gratitude as my father was incinerated in the World Trade Center and my mother has drugged me and sent me off to a school filled with psychotics, thanks to your advice. Consequently, there is no harvest for me.”
Fuckme, is what I thought.
That’s when Jacob turned to me. “Steven, this is on you. If he’s out of line, I’ll consider it your fault.”
Double fuckme.
He was gone in an instant, having nothing left to say.
And I was now in full panic mode.
And Burn was all smiles. “We got him just where we want him.” He laughed. “Now let’s go meet the milf.”
Turns out she wasn’t a milf, as she was neither a mother nor even a wife, but just a superhot woman who worked in my father’s office. The kids I noticed earlier belonged to another family from my father’s office. The milf was there with a stocky ex–football player type. Maybe he was in shape once, but not anymore, and he seemed as serious as my father and also, I thought, a whole lot older than the woman.
Crash and Burn Page 10
