“I was tired. Tired of living in my aunt’s house, tired of having to go to school with assholes who are only worried about who’s hotter than who and who’s taking them to the prom, tired of girls like your sister making snide remarks every time they passed me in the halls, tired of being called a slut and a whore because I have older friends and different interests, tired of listening to my mom complain about David, tired of David banging on his laptop all night and making weird sounds since he doesn’t sleep, tired of him having these incredibly angry tirades and tired of him bursting into my room in my house—no, my fucking aunt’s house—to tell me that he thinks nine-eleven was a conspiracy and that maybe our dad wasn’t dead at all, maybe it was aliens or something that transported everyone in the towers to another planet or another dimension or some other bullshit theory of the moment that he comes up with, tired of wondering what life would have been like if my father was on one of his business trips that week instead of in his office, tired of watching my mom go from one therapy treatment to another, tired of having her tell me that I had to be more like the other kids in school and that I wasn’t allowed to visit my friends in the city and that if I stayed out one more time past midnight I wasn’t permitted to come back home, tired of watching other people get fucked-up drunk and sloppy, tired of not being able to drive because my mom doesn’t trust me . . .”
By the time she finished, she was no longer whispering. Actually, she was getting louder and louder, with no shortage of anger coming from her voice, and everyone in the room was turned to listen, even as I turned to look at her too, thinking maybe I could stop her at that point, although she was finally sounding like the Roxanne I knew, which almost made me smile, except of course under the circumstances and all, maybe not. And then she said:
“So do you get it now, Crashinsky?”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to calm her down. “You were tired.”
This got her to laugh. At least she knew I was paying attention.
“I still don’t know what the frig you’re doing here.”
This was my opening, I figured.
I reached into my pocket.
And pulled out the plastic bag. “This is for you,” I told her.
“I’m not allowed to accept anything from anyone,” she started to say, even as I opened the bag to hand the beans to her. And at the same time, the two black men in the white uniforms were practically on top of us, grabbing the bag, but as they reached for it, I pulled it away so fast that the bag split in half, sending the beans popping up into the air and shooting into different directions, some spilling onto the couch, others flying across the room.
“He’s giving her pills!” one of the men said, trying to hold me down. Roxanne backed away.
“They’re not pills!” I said.
Roxanne picked one up and examined it. “What the fuck, Crash?”
“They’re beans,” I said, knowing that was maybe the stupidest thing I’d ever said in my life, and that this bean thing was the stupidest thing I ever did. Thank you, Felicia.
“Fucking beans?” said Roxanne and one of the men at the same time.
“Just beans,” I said.
“What the fuck, Crash?” By now everyone but me was holding a few of the beans, and I could see how they had confused them for pills. They did kind of look exactly like pills.
Then, Roxanne yelling at me: “This is a rehab clinic, for Christ’s sake! I’m not supposed to accept anything from anyone, not unless it goes through them”—pointing at the guards.
Again, thank you, Felicia, for sending me to a rehab clinic with a bag full of things that could be mistaken for pills and getting a suicide girl all worked up.
The other guy in the white uniform, the one not holding me down, had scooped up most of the beans. He held them out to me in his giant hand.
“How many?” he asked in a deep Caribbean accent.
“I dunno. Like twelve maybe.”
They recovered nine. I had to explain. To her and them.
“They’re supposed to be magic beans. I mean, they are. Magic beans . . . ,” I started to explain to the group. “Actually no, they’re just normal cooking beans, but my father’s girlfriend gave them to me and she told me that when she was younger, she tried to, you know, kill herself, and like these magic beans, well, not these beans, other beans, kind of saved her life, and so I thought it would be a good idea to give Roxanne some magic beans, which according to Felicia . . . my father’s girlfriend . . . if you make a wish and I dunno maybe plant them or something, your wish comes true and like how could we be sure that they aren’t magic, after all, they totally worked for her, for Felicia, and so I figured that maybe they would work for her, Roxanne.” Now I was looking at her instead of the guards, and I repeated, “Maybe they would work for you.”
And she was shaking her head in disbelief.
“Fucking beans?” she said again, and by now there were two other people standing over us, some doctor guy and a nurse lady. So we had a crowd, with two new people checking out the beans to determine whether they were, in fact, beans, and I actually began to wonder, just for a second, what if they weren’t beans at all, even though I knew of course they were. But what if either by mistake or magic, Felicia had given me something else?
I panicked a little. At least until I heard the voices around me.
“Beans,” said one of the black guys in the white uniforms.
“Beans,” said the doctor guy.
“Beans,” said the nurse.
“Motherfucking beans.” Roxanne was holding one of them and totally laughing now. “Motherfucking magic beans,” she repeated, in actual hysterics.
The two men in the white uniforms were also laughing now.
“False alarm,” said the doctor guy.
“Unusual,” said the nurse.
“Still, rules are rules,” said the man with the Caribbean accent. “Nothing from the outside world.” He took the single bean that Roxanne was still holding and folded it into his giant hand, where it took its place among the other beans. “You can have these when you leave,” he told her. “We wouldn’t want you growing a beanstalk and escaping from us.” He said this with a deep laugh. Which made all of the others laugh.
And we were soon by ourselves again and Roxanne was all smiles, like I made a difference, like something changed for her. For the first time since I got there she was looking at me like she was really glad to see me.
“Fucking beans,” she repeated. “They must be fucking magic, Crash, because right now I’m thinking that they are the best present I ever got in my life.” Then she switched to serious. “Tell me again about Felicia.”
And so I did, explaining how when Felicia was Roxanne’s age, she still lived in whatever country she was from and things got tough, and whatever else Felicia told me, I told Roxanne. And I explained that Felicia wanted me to tell her, Roxanne, that she got through it, that Roxanne would get through it. And then one day she would look back on the experience from an entirely different place, with different eyes and a different perspective.
And Roxanne said, “Yeah, she ended up with your dad. A fate worse than death, if you ask me, even though he’s an attractive enough man, I’ll give him that.”
Which caused her to laugh again, which caused me to laugh too, and it caused me to consider my own father in a different light, if just for a second. Did he have some kind of magic that I could actually learn from?
Then she said, “Speaking of a fate worse than death, I heard David was staying at your house.” And I told her that he had been, but not anymore, and she admitted that she didn’t totally trust her brother, not that he would do anything bad to her, that she tried to be close to him; and once in a while tried to talk to him about stuff, like during those nights when he kept the fox in the garage they would spend time talking together, but otherwise, he was either preoccupied with one of his obsessions or angry for no reason, or too inquisitive, asking her so many questions that she would jus
t give up trying, even though her mother often begged her to keep an eye on him.
And then I said something that made her laugh again. What I said was “I’m sure Lindsey says the same thing about me.”
“Yeah . . . Lindsey” was all she said.
Then it was time to go, as the limo driver was in the lobby now, looking for me and tapping his watch.
Roxanne walked me over to the front door and stood on her tiptoes and held my face in her hands as she gently kissed me and said this:
“I’m going to admit it, I’m glad you came. I didn’t think that I wanted to see anyone ever again, but I’m glad you came.”
I was going to tell her before I left that she was special too, but I couldn’t get the words out, and besides, just as I turned to get into the limo, Roxanne yelled out, “I’ll be out of here in a month. Maybe you should lose a little frickin’ weight by then, Crashinsky,” sounding exactly like the Roxanne I knew.
OK. Thank you, Felicia. For real.
My mom got me on one of those programs where they prepare special microwavable portions for all of my meals, which I pretty much stuck to during the day, and I stopped eating all of the hard pretzels, soft cooked ones, chips, nachos, cookies, brownies, string cheese, peanut butter and jelly on rice cakes, cream cheese on a bagel, pita chips, ice cream, Lunchables, Hot Pockets, Tastykakes, Funny Bones, Pop-Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, Frosted Flakes, Golden Grahams, Froot Loops, Waffle Crisps, Fruity Pebbles, and practically every other snack or cereal you could name.
And I started working out with Newman, who was all about going to the gym and running, like, miles after school, and he suggested that I join the track team to get back into shape. We all needed to work out and get into shape, because it wasn’t only me. Most of my friends had gained weight during the course of freshman year, being as we were always eating.
It wasn’t just eating after school that was the problem.
We had discovered something that made the poker more interesting, that made everything on TV more intense, that made every video game that we ever owned worth playing again, like it was for the first time, that made going to the movies like a day in the amusement park. Get the picture?
If so, you should have guessed by now:
We had discovered the magic of weed.
We were, in fact, lighting up every weekend night and sometimes during the week after school, which is what made all of the stuff I ate taste like it tasted the very first time. Plus it actually helped me study, so for the first time in my school career, I was actually getting B’s on my own. So in my mind, marijuana was the real magic bean.
Only I couldn’t tell that to Felicia and certainly couldn’t tell it to Roxanne, who, after all, was apparently a drug addict. That was what they were actually saying in school about her—that she was a drug addict slut who went with guys in the city for money, which I didn’t believe but didn’t ask her about. I couldn’t ask her about it.
A month went by and I was doing OK on my diet; OK except for not being able to stop myself from eating when I was blazed, so I didn’t even realize that a month had gone by until one Friday my mom picked me up from school and on the way home mentioned that Roxanne was coming back to school. I could tell by the way that she was talking that the conversation wasn’t about Roxanne at all, because she was going on about how Mrs. Burnett was going through a difficult time, and while Roxanne was better and the doctors assured her that Roxanne wasn’t going to do it again and was going to see a therapist, David was not doing well at all, as it seems he had completely disassociated himself from everyone and was withdrawing further into his own world and was not willing to see anyone and was blowing up at his mom practically all the time.
I stopped listening to her and played around with the satellite radio in the new Mercedes she got because she was doing superwell at work selling houses in the neighborhood, so I was scanning the stations when she asked:
“So can you take David with you tonight?”
Which meant the poker game.
No way were any of my friends going to let him play, but that wasn’t going to be a problem, because no way would Burn play. He had already told me that he hated cards. Except that he apparently had no choice, because his mother wanted him out of the house that night so there would not be any conflicts between him and Roxanne on her first night back.
Which is how he ended up going with me to Evan’s house that night. As in, my mother drove us both.
Of course, I called my boys in advance to warn them.
Pete looked ready for a fight when we showed up, like no way was he gonna take any shit whatsoever from Burn. Only, after one look at Burn Pete backed off.
Fist bumps around, even from Pete, welcome to the game, all smiles, and I wondered whether Burn even had any idea that Pete still hated him so much after the fox incident. Of course, Burn being Burn, he probably did know and it didn’t matter to him. Besides, from how it looked on that particular night, he was completely in his own Burn world anyways, even suggesting that he would watch, not play, the first game.
And so we started, cards being dealt around the table. Me, Newman, Bosco, Evan, Pete, with Burn on a barstool watching us, mostly me, sitting over my shoulder. Which, of course, made me extremely uncomfortable, to the point of complete annoyance.
We started with dimes, worked toward quarters. Kenny showed up, and I knew he was bringing stuff, which presented a problem, because while we would be able to sneak out of Evan’s house and go for our usual walk while we passed around a joint, what the fuck were we going to do with Burn?
I, for one, was itching for the weed by then. My hunger for it had been building all week, having had no opportunities since our last game. So between the weedlust and the fact that I could not concentrate on the game being as I could constantly feel Burn hovering over every move I made, and so even though I was on a superhot streak, with me winning every hand that mattered, I asked them to deal me out.
“You wanna take my place?” I asked Burn.
He shook his head no. Still no.
Kenny stepped in and sat in my seat. Pete made a nasty comment about me always winning, which had a tendency to be true, but when I looked over at him, I saw from the look on his face that his comment wasn’t about poker at all, it was like, what are you going to do about Burn?
And also, while they didn’t have to say so, Newman and Evan were looking at me like, he’s your problem, Crash. He’s always your fucking problem. Do something so we can get on with it.
“I’m going for a walk” is what I said, heading out the sliding glass doors into the backyard, not noticing that Burn had followed me, like a watchdog.
“Hold up.”
“What?” Me, all irritated, wanting him to know.
“What?” Like he didn’t know.
“Are you going to fucking play or not?” I asked. “If not, why’d you come?”
“You know why I’m here,” he said softly, like he was hurt or something.
“Still, as long as you’re here . . .”
“I’m not ready yet. Bosco is easy. Every time he has a pair or better, he taps his fingers on the table, like he’s playing the piano; the faster he goes, the better his hand. Evan makes this chewing face, like he’s ready to eat. Newman is harder, so you have to watch his eyes, but if he’s sure he can win, he nods slightly, just once, like he knows he’s being watched but is nevertheless compelled to do it, almost like a dare. I can beat them all.”
I was pretty impressed at this, but I was still mostly annoyed. “So?”
“So there’s still you. I’ve seen your cards, seen your picks, seen the way you bet, and none of it is, in any way, logical. Everything you do is, and I fucking hate this expression, totally random. Completely luck of the draw, as the saying goes. But that can’t be, since even the luckiest guy can’t win as consistently as you do. I’ve tried to calculate the odds on this; it’s impossible. You should not be winning at all. Yet you mostly do. And when you fold—an
d sometimes you fold even when you have good cards—you are almost always right. I have watched you do this twice. What the fuck, Crash?”
When he said this, he reminded me exactly of his sister, and I could see the resemblance again.
Still, I already knew about Bosco with his drumming hands but had no idea about the others. And the truth was, everything I did in the game was instinct. The only reason I never questioned it was that I kept winning.
“There is, however one little thing that you do. . . .” He smiled at me. And I knew he wasn’t going to tell me. He wasn’t, because he was probably just making it up to get under my skin, in a way that only he could actually do. But also, knowing how Burn was Burn, there probably was something he picked up. After all, if he picked up Newman’s tell . . .
I felt exposed. And more irritated, since he confirmed that he was watching me, which is what I thought in the first place.
“Fine. I’ll sit out,” I told him. “See what you can do without me.”
“No. I need you to play. No one wants me here. Most of the others hate me. Maybe with the exception of Newman.”
He was dead on. Except maybe for Kenny, who respected that Burn was a genius, and who, on a good day, could maybe even out-genius Newman. Point was, all three of them, Newman, Kenny, and Burn, had a smart thing: a never-spoken-about competition, but also a bond, which I was not unhappy about not sharing with them.
“Know what I think?” I asked him. “I think you’re afraid to play. I think you’re afraid you might have a good time.”
“Oooh, Mr. Psychologeeeeeeeeeee.” Burn laughed. “Do me a favor, save it for my sister.”
I looked at him but didn’t say anything. I wondered what he knew about my visit. We were out in the front of Evan’s house now, which gave the others an opportunity to sneak out the back and file into Evan’s garage.
Burn looked surprised that I was surprised. “Did you think I didn’t know that you visited my sister in the hospital?”
Crash and Burn Page 23
