by Crystal Chan
The only other sound was the scraping of forks against our plates. Mom slowly pulled out a long, wavy brown hair that had fallen into the casserole. My nostrils flared, and I shook my head.
Mina watched Mom, then twirled a lock of hair around her finger. “I think I’m going to study two nights before the next spelling bee instead of just one night before. Maybe that’ll help.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Dad said.
I ground my teeth. His daughter is telling him how she’s going to rule the world one day, and he tells her not to talk with her mouth full?
• • •
Dad wasn’t always like this. For instance, he used to help me with my homework. Even though school sucked, Dad was there for me. Every night, Mina would zip through her homework, and there I was, stuck with my math and a whole lot of other subjects too. Dad and I would sit at the kitchen table, and he would lean over my math book, reading the chapter’s lesson, and then he would turn to me and we would go through my math problems, step by step. Somehow he would be able to explain the ideas to me, and somehow math sucked just a little less.
About two years ago now, soon after Dad got depressed, I was struggling with my math homework, again, and I asked Dad if he could help me; I was also hoping that that would get him out of bed.
“I can’t help you,” Dad said in this new, heavy voice; it was as if something had sucked the life out of it. Dad was under the sheets, and I couldn’t see his face.
“Please,” I said, standing in the bedroom doorway. “I don’t get what the lesson is saying.”
“I can’t help you,” Dad said again. “Go ask your mom.”
“She’s not even home from work yet,” I said. “Please, Dad,” I begged, and I went over to his side and touched him on the arm. “I need you. Who else is going to help me?”
“Don’t touch me!” Dad screamed.
I stumbled out of the room, seeing but not seeing, feeling but not feeling, my heart beating wildly in my chest. I didn’t know then that that was the beginning of my world falling apart. A couple days later I came home from school and went into my parents’ bedroom without knocking, and there Dad was again, a covered-over bump in the bed. I went to him and thrust my math homework in his face. On it was a big fat F.
“This is what I got,” I said quietly. If anything would jolt Dad back into helping me with my homework, it would be this.
Dad’s eyes fluttered open long enough for him to see my grade. Then he rolled over onto his other side so his back faced me. “Whatever,” he said.
“But, Dad,” I said, and tears came to my eyes, “you didn’t help me.”
“I don’t care.”
My heart broke as I stood there, watching him absolutely not caring about anything, not even me. I didn’t know what to do with my assignment, and I didn’t crush it into a paper ball—not then, not yet—instead, I put it on my parents’ dresser so Mom could see it when she got home. That same evening, Mina asked Dad to help her with her homework, and Dad refused to talk to her. That was when she started howling like a banshee, with huge tears rolling down her face, and that was when I told Mom what Dad had said to me. Mom went into their bedroom and talked with Dad behind their closed door, and that was the first time that I told Mina that I would help her with her homework, that it would be okay.
“But you’re not Daddy!” she said, wiping the tears from her face.
“I know. But you need help, and I’ll help you,” I said quietly. “I’m here for you.”
Little did we know how much of a beginning that truly was.
• • •
Mina dutifully nodded at Dad and swallowed her tofu-and-Spam casserole. Then she turned to me. “Ron-Ron? Could you help me run through my words for next week?”
“Sure, Min-o,” I said.
She beamed.
I gave a little smile. God, you can really love that kid sometimes.
“And, Ron-Ron?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you spend less time in the bathroom in the mornings?”
My fork froze in midair.
“You spend a lot of time in there.”
Dad cleared his throat.
I kicked Mina’s chair.
“Ow! What?” she said. She gave me a you just ate my small intestine look.
I stood up and grabbed the jar of sweet chili sauce from the refrigerator and smothered my tofu casserole with it. You can eat anything if there’s enough sweet chili sauce on it. Some of my classmates think that’s bizarre—but then they do the same thing with peanut butter or barbeque sauce. The thing is, that wouldn’t happen in my family: We don’t eat White People Food because, well, we’re not white. And I don’t tell people what mix of races we are or how my parents could have possibly met or answer other little prying questions because I hate those questions, it’s no one’s business, and the answers don’t matter anyway. I will say, though, that my family represents more countries at our dinner table than does a general session of the United Nations.
We were halfway through dinner when my phone beeped. It was Jello—again—begging me to come over. He knows that all he has to do is keep asking, and by the third time I’ll change my answer. Even on a Thursday. So I got up and announced I was going out.
“Not with all those animals floating around,” Mom said.
Dad didn’t look up.
“The last time I checked, a camel won’t do anything to me,” I said.
“I’m not worried about the camel,” Mom said.
“And I think you worry too much,” I said.
Mom’s back stiffened. Dad scraped his fork against his plate.
“Ron-Ron, don’t go,” Mina said softly. She tipped her face up to mine.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, more gently. “I’ll be back in a couple hours.” I paused. “It’s not like I’m going to run into an animal, anyway.”
“But you might,” she said, and her voice wobbled.
I paused. “If I do, I’ll put a rope around it and bring it home so you can train it.” I gave her a small smile. “Which do you want: a cheetah, a wildebeest, or a python?”
My parents were silent.
“A cheetah!” Mina said, kicking her legs happily in the air. “It’s orange.”
I tousled Mina’s hair just how she likes.
“A cheetah it is, Min-o,” I said.
Dad suddenly grabbed his glass of water and slammed it on the table. Water leaped out and soaked the napkins, pooled on the wood, splashed onto Mom’s shirt.
For a moment it was like we were all frozen, glued to our places. The only sound was water running in a stream from the table onto the floor. Dad looked at his plate, his hand still gripped around the glass.
At some point I found my voice. “You know, Dad, it would help if you took your meds,” I said. “Oh, I forgot: You aren’t.”
Mina’s eyes grew misty.
“I won’t be out too long, Min-o,” I told her.
Then I slipped on my shoes and left.
3
JELLO LIVED DOWN THE STREET from Marren’s Corner Store, where I used to steal chocolate bars until the old lady who ran the store with her husband found me out and ratted on me to my parents. I mean, get a grip, people. There are wars and insider bank thefts and warming oceans, and they’re gonna hang me for a couple ounces of chocolate? More proof that this world is messed up, bad.
Trees were down everywhere, and it was slow going, biking around all the debris and trying to stay balanced in the wind, which was already starting to die off. I went one house past Marren’s, threw my bike under a bush, and crept around the side of the small, yellow house until I saw a lit-up window in one of the basement wells. I jumped into the basement well, slid the windowpane sideways, and dropped in.
Jello was right where I knew he’d be, seated at his computer in front of his wide-ass double flat-screens, his back to me. His light brown hair was freshly cut, and his shoulders were wider than I remembered. Jello was
streaming the local news, which was lame. I mean, you could stream tons of cooler shit than the local Makersville news, which we don’t even officially have, by the way, because we’re such a small town. The news area is an eighty-mile radius mostly focusing on Bloomington, a city over an hour away, and the media are still desperate for anything newsworthy. Sometimes they even make news up. Once, the newspaper did this freaking long article on a bunch of Makersville kids who had decided to take a couch and put it outside on the sidewalk and sit on the damn thing for four days straight, getting up only to go to the bathroom. And when the reporter asked them why they were doing this, they said—and the reporter wrote it down—We wanted to get in the paper. End of story. That’s the kind of activity that goes on around here.
Jello was on his phone, texting away. When he saw me, he put his phone away quickly in his pocket and gave me a broad smile. “Took you long enough,” he said.
“You nagged long enough,” I said. I sat in the chair next to him and fake punched him on the arm.
Jello grabbed his arm and fake fell over.
“Serves you right,” I said. “What’s so urgent that you asked me three times?”
Jello’s face nearly shone like the sun—seriously, his pale face was flushed—he was so damn excited. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be Jello; the littlest things get him going. He pointed at his screens. “Look at this,” he said melodramatically.
I glanced at the newscast and groaned. “You gotta be kidding me. I hauled my ass over to your house to watch the stupid zoo outbreak?”
“There’s a ton of animals they haven’t found. A wildebeest. Panther. Hyena. Cougar. Ostrich. A lion. There’s a lot more, too.”
“Right. So let me repeat: I hauled my ass over to your—”
“Ronney, Ronney, Ronney,” Jello said, putting his hands behind his head and leaning back in his chair. “I’m going after them.”
“That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard all day.”
“No, I’m serious. Imagine the shots I’d get!”
“What, you want to be in National Geographic?”
He looked at me. “Why not? At the very least, my photos would be uploaded on all the national networks, with my name attached to them. What better way to get noticed?”
“It is said that normal people go to photography school, get an internship, and get a job.”
Jello shook his head. “You don’t get it. Imagine us going out and tracking down one of those cats. I can even get some night filters for my camera.”
“Us.”
“What?”
“You said ‘us.’ ”
Jello looked at me, a little hurt. “Well, yeah.”
I shook my head. I swear to God, sometimes he acts like a kid, jumping up and down with ideas like these—he was doing shit like this when we were best friends in kindergarten, and he hasn’t stopped. Jello’s not dumb; he’s just, well, a kid. He never had to seal the windows in the winter or go find his kid sister the day she ran away. Jello’s parents are actually pretty normal. Maybe having normal parents means you get the privilege of being a kid. Sometimes, if I let my guard down around him, his enthusiasm is contagious, and for a moment I feel like a kid, too. But then reality strikes, and I’m an adult in a teen’s body all over again. For Jello, I don’t think reality has ever quite hit him.
I scanned Jello’s basement room: His walls were plastered with his framed photos, and his photography gear, tripods, and shit were lined up against his walls all nice and neat. The thing was, if anyone could actually get a picture or two of these animals, it would be Jello. His photos were really pretty amazing, I must say. He was not some normal teenager dicking around with some expensive-ass camera that has two thousand features but he only uses the photo button. No. Jello actually knows what to do with those two thousand features. He’s a goddamn prodigy, sitting in the basement of some small town in the middle of nowhere, waiting to be found.
I looked at him again. Maybe he’s not waiting anymore.
“So you want me to go with you on a jungle safari,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Who else?” Jello plopped a grape into his mouth.
My eyebrows lifted. “Grapes?”
Jello shrugged his wide shoulders. “Toning up, man.”
I groaned. “Serious? You could beat the shit out of me any day.”
“You set the bar pretty low, R-Man.”
I fake punched him in the arm again, and he fake fell over again. It was true, though: Jello, contrary to his name, did not need to “tone up.” He could have all the girls he wanted, if he played his cards right.
Jello turned back to his screens. “Come on. Who else would I want to come with me? Think about it.”
“I already did think about it,” I said.
“And?”
“And if we were going to find said lion, or said wildebeest, or said whatever the fuck is out there, how are we going to stop it from eating us? It’s going to be kind of hungry.”
Jello got a thoughtful look on his face. “Huh.”
I was in shock. He hadn’t thought about this?
“And,” I said, on a roll, “how are we going to find these animals in the first place? Make lion calls? Wildebeest snorts?” I waved my arm in the air. “Hell, does a wildebeest even snort in the first place?”
Jello looked impressed. “Well, you are the brains,” he said.
“Common sense,” I corrected. “And common sense says that this is a no go.”
“Okay, okay,” Jello said, closing the streaming window. “Fine. Whatever. Don’t help.”
“Don’t be a dick,” I said. “Come on. This is your reality check.”
Jello opened a new browser window and started typing something.
I sighed inside. He was so sensitive sometimes. I let him pout while I grabbed a bag of stale chips from his bookshelf. Those animals were probably long gone, anyway. It’s kind of funny, the things that bug me out—aliens, cell phone satellites, sudden changes in weather. But those animals, not so much. I think everyone’s allowed at least two huge self-contradictions in their lives. For me, being not freaked out by wild animals of prey would be one of them. But that kid this afternoon. What did he mean, I took his jeans?
Jello was still clicking away and chuckled. “Here, look at this.”
I walked over and looked at the image on his screens. “What the—”
Jello’s shoulders squared up with pride. “Yup.”
“But how did you—”
He grinned. “It’s all in the timing, my dear Ronney.”
Jello knows I hate it when he says my dear Ronney, but right then I didn’t care. Before me was a picture of a squirrel falling through the sky, right into the camera; its forearms and legs were spread-eagle, and it had the funniest damn look on its face, a mixture of astonishment and squirrelly joy, like it was at an amusement park.
It was hilarious.
And it had 792,230 hits.
Jello paused a moment, then refreshed the screen.
810,102 hits.
Jello beamed. “I uploaded it two hours ago.”
“Two hours?”
“Yup.” Jello popped another grape into his mouth. “This is your reality check, R-Man. Help me out. This is what I can do with a squirrel. If I get a couple pictures of these animals, my career will be made.”
I found myself telling him I’d think about it.
4
THE NEXT MORNING I HAD another text from Jello.
Come on, help me, it’ll be fun.
Maybe.
Someone just reported a hyena in the Walmart parking lot. Imagine if I had gotten a picture of that. A crouching hyena behind an SUV. Maybe on top of it. Inside of it.
This sounds like a ton of fun. I’m sweating with excitement.
Come on. We’ll go down in history. Total fun.
Right.
I couldn’t think about Jello’s safari for too long, though, because first thing that
day, I had to go on the roof. It was what I thought: The windstorm had ripped off half our shingles. I cussed and threw open my parents’ bedroom door. He was in bed, just like I knew he’d be.
“You need to call in for me,” I said.
Dad groaned, like I was telling him he needed to push a Boeing jet down the runway with his two bare hands.
“If it rains, we’re screwed. They’re forecasting another storm in the next couple days.”
Dad turned on his back and put his good arm across his forehead. “You need to go to school, Ronney.”
The inside of my mouth turned bitter. “You going to call the roofers, then? You going to actually get dressed and wait for them to come?”
“You’ve been missing too much.”
My jaw got tight. “You didn’t answer either question.”
Silence.
I left their room and grabbed my phone to call Mike’s Roofing. The number was still in my phone from last year: Dad was too depressed and Mom was too anxious at the time, so it was up to me to call them when a tornado ripped through the county.
“Mike’s Roofing.”
“Mike, this is Ronney. I called you last year—”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. We know you, kid.” He paused. “Your dad’s doing better?” Mike’s voice was cheery, in a forced kind of way.
“Nope.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Mike coughed. “So the storm got you, too?”
“Can you come take a look? Lots of shingles down.”
“Kid, we’re slammed from the storm. Phone’s ringing off the hook. But yeah. Ten o’clock. We’ll be there.”
“No pressure, whenever you can.”
“We’ll be there—I got you on the list.”
I hung up, embarrassed. I knew Mike was feeling bad for me—for us—but I didn’t want pity. I wanted a goddamn roofer. Last year, after the tornado, Mike muttered something about how he’d never had a fourteen-year-old putting in a repair order before. He had totally seen what was going on and didn’t say a single word about it. He did give me a crazy-ass deal, though, almost half of what the guys in Listig, the other town over, had quoted me. Did one hell of a job, too.
Sometimes it’s lousy to wait all day for some repair crew, but it’s not as bad as it seems. In fact, I kind of enjoy fixing up the house, making sure stuff works. While Jello streams stupid cats on his computer, I’m glued to the do-it-yourself videos, the fixing and repairing and grouting and laying—how else am I going to take care of things? I memorized a couple of my parents’ credit cards a long time ago, and they mostly keep up on their bills, though with Dad sitting around, it gets tight. Before, we used to go to a really awesome water park at least two or three times each summer, and we even took a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon once when we were on vacation. But after Dad got fired from his job—it was within the first two weeks of his depression, because he stopped showing up—we started using coupons, and Mom started taking some of our favorite food out of the grocery cart and putting it back on the shelf. She talked more and more about money, and all of her talking made me worry, so I logged into their credit card accounts and saw that we were behind on our bills, which according to the credit card history, we never had been before. Of course, it only got worse once Dad landed in the hospital. That was when I started checking their credit card accounts maybe once a week. Mom doesn’t know, but I think she suspects.
