by Adi Alsaid
“Shit, that was actually a good one.” Julia tossed her napkin at Brett.
“What ballot?” Dave asked.
“Welcome to the conversation,” Julia said, breaking off a piece of crust and dipping it in her side order of marinara sauce. “The campaign isn’t actually for prom king; it’s just to get voted onto the ballot. That vote is in April. Then people vote for prom king from the four or five people on the ballot at the prom.”
“If you wanted Dave to be prom king, you should have tried talking to other people for the last four years. People vote their friends onto the ballot, so the people with the most friends get on. Dave has one friend.”
“But she’s such a great friend!” Julia cried out.
“Hey, I have more than one friend.”
“Like who?” They both said at the same time.
“Jinx!” Julia cried out.
“No one plays jinx anymore,” Brett scoffed. Julia stuck her tongue at him. “You owe me a bibliography citing your sources. People definitely still play jinx. Oh, and by the way, no one ‘plays’ jinx. They adhere to the unmalleable rules of jinx, much like they do gravity.”
Brett rolled his eyes, though a smile remained. Sometimes, he and Julia joked around as easily as she and Dave did, though mostly they were the butt of each other’s jokes. “The point is, if you guys really want this to happen—and I’m still having trouble understanding why you’re all of a sudden interested in prom—you have to either make a ton of friends, or do something memorable that’ll have people thinking about Dave when it’s time to vote.”
“How are explosives not memorable?”
“Forget the explosives! It sounds awesome but it won’t work. A viral video could do the trick, provided it actually goes viral.”
“How do we get the video to go viral?” Dave asked.
“If I knew that I wouldn’t be here eating pizza with you. I’d be busy cashing in on Internet fame and all the groupies that come with it.”
“Gross,” Dave and Julia said at the same time, sharing a look at the second jinx of the conversation.
“There’s no formula you can follow. If it’s funny it’ll help, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. Some videos go viral, some don’t.” He took a bite of pizza, the excess Parmesan raining down onto his plate and sticking to his chin. The table next to them, a family of four, stood up to go, leaving their trash behind.
Dave watched them walk away and, like they often did, he and Julia got up to clean their mess. “Bunch of savages,” Julia muttered to herself when they rejoined Brett at the table.
“You guys are so weird.”
“Why? Because we clean up after savages that can’t do it on their own?”
“No,” Brett said, wiping his face with a napkin. “Because you did it at the exact same time, without saying anything to each other. It’s like you’re twins who can communicate telepathically.” He chuckled and then threw the napkin down on his empty plate, pushing it away from him. “Why are you guys doing this anyway? It doesn’t seem like you.”
“You’d never understand,” Dave said, giving Julia a look.
“Never,” Julia repeated, almost in a whisper.
“Never,” Dave said, even quieter. They kept going back and forth until they broke out laughing.
Brett stared blankly at them. “So weird. But seriously, why the sudden interest?” He looked at Julia. “Are you finally admitting that all you’ve ever wanted is to go to prom with the prom king?”
“That comment was so gross that I’m taking away all the credit I gave you for your Mark Twain zinger.”
“I don’t hear a denial.”
“Brett, you’re shaming the family name. Please stop,” Dave said.
In the back of his mind, Dave was thinking about prom, the long understanding that he and Julia would go together. It was silly to think about how Gretchen would affect all of that, ridiculous to already be thinking that far ahead. But there it was anyway, the thought taking root. A picture flashed in Dave’s mind, quick and without warning, of Gretchen with her hands around his neck, pulling him close.
“Shit, we’re late!” Julia said, rising suddenly from the table.
“Late for what?” Dave asked.
“It’s a surprise.” She collected the trash on the table and tossed it in the nearby trash can. “But we have to get going now or we’re not gonna make it in time.”
“You guys need a ride?” Brett asked.
“No, thanks. It’s at the Broken Bean. We’ll walk.”
“All right. Thanks for the pizza. Good luck making all your secret fantasies come true,” he said to Julia. He unlocked the doors to his pickup truck but instead of getting in he lingered, as if waiting for Julia’s retort.
o o o
Dave knew it was going to be an interesting night as soon as he saw the sign in front of the Broken Bean that announced it was slam-poetry night. But he didn’t quite understand how interesting it would be until they took a seat just as Marroney made his way to the stage.
“My God.”
“I know,” Julia said. “I’m already getting chills. Prepare to swoon.”
“You’re not gonna give up on this are you?”
“True love persists, my friend,” Julia said, starting to whisper, since Marroney was adjusting the microphone. He was wearing a maroon button-up shirt that had full sleeves, for once, and though his jeans appeared to have zippers all over them, he was also wearing a fedora that actually looked good on him, even with his mullet poking out the back. He ran a thumb and forefinger in opposite directions across his mustache, smoothing out the hairs or simply preparing for his performance. Then he pulled out a little red notebook from his back pocket and cleared his throat in that resounding way that only the middle-aged can. A shriek of feedback rang out through the coffee shop.
Then he closed his eyes and the coffee shop quieted down with anticipation.
“Everything about me was shaped by the boy who died.” He paused for effect, letting the silence thicken the room. “No, no, don’t be sad, this was a long time ago and all the tears that were meant for him have already been cried. I was little, too, a tiny blob of a human being, not yet formed, life’s pounding fists had yet to tell me who I was going to be. I’ve seen parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts die, but it was the first funeral I attended that taught me to love life.”
Marroney had the confident, assertive cadence of slam poetry down perfectly, which was bizarre to see from a guy who looked like Marroney. He was more animated than Dave had ever seen him, although Dave had never had him as a teacher, and it made him wonder if that’s what he was like in class. At one point the crowd let loose a round of applause, whistles, and Ohh!s that Dave knew happened only when the poet had said a really good line. Julia was smiling wildly, whooping along with the crowd.
Marroney snapped his fingers and the room quieted back down. “This is going to sound like a cliché, but what’s that matter when it’s true.” He snapped again. “It takes less than a second for the sound of the friction between my fingers to reach your ears.” Another snap. “That’s the line between life and death, and you can’t see it but you sure as hell can hear it.” Another snap. “Listen.” Snap. “To.” Snap. “Every.” Snap. “Second.”
When Marroney left the stage to the sound of applause, the emcee, a fat guy in a bowling shirt and a rainbow-colored tie read out the scores from the judges. Then he announced that they were going to take a short break and the last round of poets would have their turn. “First up after the break is Julia,” he said, reading from a clipboard. “So, Julia, get ready to slam.”
Dave turned to Julia. “You’re not.”
“Oh, I am.”
“You’re going to embarrass yourself, aren’t you?”
“Not at all. But
if Marroney doesn’t fall in love with me tonight, I might need to hire some outside help, because I don’t know what else to do.” Julia pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pocket. Before she unfolded it, it looked a lot like the Nevers list had, her loopy handwriting showing through on the back of the page.
Dave caught a glimpse of the title. “He’s going to file a restraining order.”
“That or a marriage certificate,” Julia said, grinning. “After his performance, I really wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t know if it was that good.”
“Dave, it was so good, you’re probably pregnant right now, just from the sexiness of the words.”
When Julia took the stage, with her bare feet and pink hair, she looked like someone who belonged at a slam-poetry reading. She was wearing a high-waisted skirt and a soft cotton gray T-shirt with the words PURA VIDA printed across the front. Dave glanced over to see Marroney’s reaction, but he didn’t have a good angle.
“Hi,” Julia said, making her voice a little lower and throatier, affecting a shy look in her eye that Dave knew perfectly well was meant to be seductive. “This one’s called Solve for X, or Why Mathematicians Must be Good at Sex.”
A few chuckles spread across the room, but Julia didn’t drop the act. She lowered her head, hanging on to the mic stand like a rock star, her pink hair hanging in front of her face like a curtain waiting to be pulled up. Someone shifted out of his line of sight, and Dave turned to see Marroney put a hand to his forehead to hide his face.
“There’s something about the slope of his”—Julia paused with a smile—“cosine that drives me to irrational equations. There’s something about how he can recite pi to forty digits that makes my...heart swell exponentially. If X is the point where two lines meet, let my tangent and his intersect and repeat.” Someone in the crowd let out a whoop. Dave sipped from his coffee, unable to hide his smile. “I plotted him on my graph, and he touches all my quadrants.”
A few more shouts let out, and one of the judges was nodding. Julia pulled the microphone from its stand and started speaking louder, not even giving the audience time to react before moving on to the next line.
“We’ll never be apart but he still calls me his x-axis because I’m always horizontal. When he’s near, I’m not multiplying or subtracting or dividing, I’m just picturing us with no added variables. I must be his prime number because there’s only room for him inside my equation.”
The crowd was starting to buzz. Even the soft clink of dishes being put in the kitchen had quieted down. Just a week or so ago, Dave would probably have felt humiliated that Julia could muster up a whole poem full of math sex puns aimed at Marroney when she had never felt as much as a pulse in his direction. But tonight, with Gretchen taking up his thoughts, Dave felt only pride at Julia’s cleverness. There was a certain letting go within him, like something inside his chest was literally relaxing its grip. It was time to appreciate everything about Julia without fretting about what she couldn’t provide.
Apparently, Marroney didn’t feel the same way. As Julia continued her performance, Marroney leaned over to whisper something to the redheaded woman sitting next to him, then grabbed his blazer off the back of his chair and squeezed past the people in his row, his cheeks a bright shade of red.
“And if—” She stopped as soon as she saw him leaving the coffee shop, and immediately her shtick fell away. She dropped the microphone to her side and bit her bottom lip. “Dammit,” she said. Then she shrugged and tucked the microphone back into its stand.
As she hopped off the stage, the crowd, confused at the abrupt ending, broke out into scattered applause. “Get that look off your face, David O’Neal Macbeth. He’ll be mine in the end.”
“You know what, Julia, I don’t doubt it. He’d be a fool not to take the opportunity.”
Julia laughed, then grabbed her Ecuadorean bag from the back of the chair she’d been sitting in. “When you say it like that, it actually sounds gross.” Julia slung her bag over her shoulder. “I know it’s a weeknight but you wanna have a sleepover? Feeling pretty good right now.”
“Always.”
“Actually gonna Skype with my mom, too. You can say hi.”
“Wow, moving up to Skype dates, huh?”
Julia couldn’t contain her smile. Dave understood more than anything Julia’s affection for her mom, though as long as he’d known her that affection had been tinged with disappointment, with longing. He could see the way it colored everything she did. The Nevers list had been written with her in mind, he knew, and it was now being acted out for her. Like a girl at the edge of the pool, refusing to dive in until Mommy looked, Julia wanted her mom’s attention. He would never say anything like that out loud. But it made him protective of Julia, of the next disappointment her mom would inevitably deliver. While Dave had nuggets of bittersweet memories of his own mom to return to and occasionally talk about with his dad—the day they’d all gone to the harbor, rented a boat on a whim, the fine white mist of the ocean rising up the sides of the boat—Julia had nothing of her mother to hold close. There was no past life that included her; there was only the longing for her. It was the only thing she’d ever had.
Later that night, Julia set up her computer on the kitchen island, chatting excitedly with her mom. Her mom had the same radiant blue eyes as Julia, and her hair was mostly auburn, with the odd gray hair shimmering in the light of her Mexico City living room. She wore a silver ring in her nose, and every now and then a guy would cross the room behind her, though she didn’t acknowledge his presence. Dave stood by the fridge, rummaging through mounds of Tupperware, opening each one, taking a taste, then leaving a Post-it for Tom and Ethan with his thoughts.
“What’s with the hair, Jules?”
“You like it?” Julia said, tugging a tress down in front of her face. “I did it ironically. We did Dave’s hair, too, but it turned out not so well.” She went on to explain the Nevers, all they’d done for it and all that was still to do. Dave listened, wincing at the naked longing in Julia’s voice, hoping that Julia’s mom wouldn’t disapprove, because he didn’t want Julia to lose interest. For whatever reason, without the Nevers Dave pictured things with Gretchen fizzling out, a return to normalcy that no longer included anyone outside him and Julia.
“Where are those fathers of yours? I wanna say hi,” Julia’s mother cut in, without any comment on the Nevers. Dave watched Julia try to hide the disappointment that, for him, was so clear to see. “I miss their faces. Plus, I have a little proposition for them.”
“They’re out. They’ve been stressed ’cause of restaurant stuff, so they went out to watch a movie and have ice cream. What’s the proposition? I’m pretty much the head of the household anyway.”
Julia’s mom’s laugh was throaty; it sounded like a few decades’ worth of cigarette smoke. “Very well, then, head of the household. I’m thinking about coming to visit.”
“Fuckin’ do it!” Julia said, her mood bouncing back immediately. Her legs started jittering, as if she were trying to keep the excitement offscreen.
“Nothing’s for sure yet. But I miss the Bay Area and there are some events on the West Coast this summer that I want to go to. I figured that, if it was okay with your dads, I’d come hang out for a week or so. Near the end of the school year.”
“Ooh! Are you going to be my prom date?”
“Easy tiger.” Julia’s mom laughed again. “I was thinking sometime around graduation. I have no interest in going to the event itself, because commencement speeches are the worst thing in the world. But maybe the after-party. Do your dads let you party?”
“I let myself party.”
“How Beastie Boys of you. Good. E-mail me about dates and stuff so I don’t forget, and I’ll keep in touch. Again, no promises. But I do wanna see you. I gotta run, kiddo.”
“Okay,” Jul
ia said. “Talk to you later.”
“Bye. Oh, and, Jules? That Nevers list? Awesome idea. Keep doing that. No point in living a life less ordinary if you don’t know what the other side looks like.” With a flair for the dramatic, Julia’s mom cut the call off. Julia shut her computer calmly, beaming.
She was so excited they’d stayed up talking until two in the morning, even though they had school the next day. The kind of conversation that quickly deteriorated into laughter, conversation that wasn’t really about anything other than the desire to not fall asleep. Finally, during a lull in laughter, Dave had looked up and seen Julia asleep peacefully.
He was sprawled out on the floor between Julia’s bed and her window, barely covering himself up in the ratty sleeping bag that he always used on their sleepovers. He was giving himself goose bumps thinking about Gretchen, looking at her name on his phone. Behind him, Julia was curled up near the edge of the bed, her face tucked beneath the covers, one bare knee poking out from the sheets. She was a sound sleeper, breathing so imperceptibly that after all these years Dave still sometimes sat up, checking to make sure she was okay.
Debbie was curled up at Dave’s feet, and a sliver of the moon was visible through a crack in the blinds. There was a stale smell to the sleeping bag, a smell that had always been comforting because there was only one place he ever smelled it. He used to fall asleep in this spot on the floor fantasizing chastely that Julia would simply climb off the bed and lay next to him, their noses and foreheads touching, hands clasped together.
Now, free of those daydreams, Dave looked at his phone. The message history between Dave and Gretchen was still completely blank, but he finally knew what he wanted to say.
Hi, Gretchen. It’s Dave. I think you’re great, too.
TREE HOUSE
THE IDEA TO do another Never came to Dave one morning at the same moment as he took his first bite of sugary breakfast cereal. He hadn’t outgrown kids’ cereals, or the simple pleasure of playing the games on the back of the box. It reminded him of his mom, truth be told, the way she’d let him pick out which cereal he wanted when they’d go grocery shopping together, the way she’d scowl as he slurped the leftover milk and its swirls of artificial coloring. Some days were like that still, everything a reminder. That no one ever brought her up in his house didn’t mean she was absent. It was actually in the silences that he remembered her most often, and today his dad hadn’t spoken a word, just poured himself a bowl of the same cereal.
