The Poet/Pirate nodded.
“Molly,” the kid said again, squeezing his eyes tight to keep in the tears. “I. Miss. Molly. I. Miss. Molly. So. Much.”
So I wasn’t alone. I hadn’t wandered into the wrong place. My sadness, my story, what had brought me here to this room—Penny—it counted. It mattered. I wasn’t the only one with a stomped-on heart.
A beautiful girl with long dark hair and light brown skin, pink lipstick and gold hoop earrings, the girl who shoplifted, stood and walked over to the boy in the killer shoes and offered him a Kleenex from her purse. He shooed her away. He was going to hold on to the fiction that he didn’t need to cry over Molly the way I’d held on to the rope in that boat.
I wanted to say something like I feel you, brother, but I didn’t want to speak. Instead I made a fist, stuck out my thumb and pinky and waved my hand back and forth between us.
He looked at me. “You too?”
I nodded.
“Molly?”
I laughed a little. “Well, not Molly,” I said. The kid had a dry sense of humor.
“What, then?”
I thought about where to begin. The day I first saw Penny across the courtyard at freshman orientation? The first time I kissed her, at Jonas’s party? The first time she let me—
“Coke? Oxy?”
Oh shit. Molly…the drug. Molly was not a girl. Molly was a drug.
“Adderall?”
I shook my head.
“So what, then?” He eyed me suspiciously. “Whoa…not…the Big H?”
I shook my head again. More emphatically.
Now he laughed. “I didn’t think so. So what is it? Is it…weed?”
I nodded, because it was easier than saying I was here for the issues my girlfriend said I had that I didn’t fully understand.
And at least I’d actually smoked pot.
Twice.
“Weed?” He laughed again. “Weed,” he said like he couldn’t believe it.
“Christopher,” the Poet/Pirate said. “We can’t compare our struggles or our vices to those of our comrades, so we mustn’t try. You know this.”
“Weed,” he cackled.
Everyone was looking at me. Waiting. It was my turn to tell my story.
And that is how I came to attend A Second Chance, on a bleak stretch of midcity Pico, to grapple with my nonexistent marijuana addiction, every Saturday night in the spring of my senior year—what should have been the best time of my life.
Penny didn’t show up at school on Monday.
There was only one reasonable explanation for her absence: she stayed home, in bed, sick with regret.
I’d barely made it to school myself. I’d hardly slept, imagining all the ways I might approach Penny when I saw her in the morning, or wondering if I should even approach her at all. Did I want her to see what she’d done to me? How she’d destroyed me? Or was it better to pretend I was fine? That I could face that Monday like any other Monday, with maybe the slightest hint of a swagger, the kind reserved for the guys who believed that the world, and the girls who filled it, were theirs for the taking.
I returned home late on Saturday night. The meeting at A Second Chance didn’t let out until eight-thirty, and then everyone hung out a bit out front on the sidewalk, some smoked cigarettes, and before I knew it I’d agreed to bring the snacks the following week.
The Poet/Pirate, whose name turned out to be Everett, asked me to step back inside for a “chat,” during which he asked if I’d been sent to the group or had come voluntarily.
“Voluntarily,” I answered.
“That’s great. That’s big. Recognizing you need the help and taking first steps…good for you. We’re glad to have you join us.” A big smile. Another long stare. “So just how serious is your problem, River?”
“How serious?”
“Yes. If you’re in dire shape, in the throes of addiction, this won’t be enough. The kids who come here are getting medical help elsewhere, or maybe they’ve already been through a residential program, and this is a place to come each week and just connect to other kids like them. To share our stories. We live in a vast city, River. As diverse as we are, it’s sometimes hard to find people just like us.”
Penny said I had issues. That I didn’t think about anything. Wouldn’t she be pleased if she knew I’d gone straight from that pedal boat to a support group for kids with problems? I was taking action. I was doing something.
I looked Everett in the eye. “This sounds like just what I need.”
“Great.” He handed me a yellow pamphlet. “We have rules, River, and you’re going to need to follow them if you want to continue to come to meetings. Read through this before next week, okay?”
I folded it into quarters and shoved it in my pocket. “Okay.”
It took me another two hours to walk home—I probably could have done it in an hour and a half, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I was going to fix this. Fix me. And fix us.
At red lights I flipped through Everett’s pamphlet. It outlined the sorts of rules you’d expect: Respect the privacy and boundaries of fellow group members. No intimate relationships. What happens at meetings is confidential unless there’s concern someone may harm himself or others. Be helpful and supportive. Keep criticism constructive. Tell the truth.
Mom and Leonard were sitting by the fireplace—Mom reading, Leonard going over some blueprints. We couldn’t actually light a fire, because we didn’t have a chimney, so Mom filled our faux fireplace with candles. She had a gift for taking something simple, or something lacking, and turning it into something special.
“How was the lake?” Leonard asked.
I’m sure they figured Penny and I had gone to dinner afterward, or to the movies, or that we’d gone back to her house, because that was where I spent most of my time. Her house was about four times as big as ours and afforded us the kind of privacy we used to crave. I know they didn’t imagine that Penny’d dumped me and that I’d walked all the way home from Echo Park with a brief stop to get support for my addiction to pot.
“Spectacular,” I said.
“Nice.” Mom looked up from her book for the first time, at me, but I guess I looked unchanged enough that she went back to reading.
“Maybe we’ll all go sometime,” Leonard said. “Do you think Natalie would like it?”
Natalie, my eight-year-old sister, has a major thing for aquatic mammals. “Natalie would love it. There are turtles, so…”
“Say no more.”
I spent most of Sunday shut in my room. I didn’t want Mom or Leonard or Natalie asking about Penny, because if I didn’t have to answer questions about Penny, to my family, she was still my girlfriend.
That brings me to Monday.
Penny picked me up most mornings, but not every morning—school was close enough for me to walk if I skipped a shower—so it didn’t raise any suspicion when I left the house on my own.
I hadn’t settled on what I’d do when I saw her. My senses were on high alert, my peripheral vision pushed to its extremity. I didn’t want to appear like I was looking for her, but I wanted to know exactly where she was, to be aware of her, so I could stay one step ahead of the game at all times.
By lunchtime it was clear she hadn’t come to school. Will, who had English lit with her second period, asked me if she was okay.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”
He didn’t ask any more because Will had had his fill of Penny. So had Luke and Maggie. It’s not that they begrudged me having a girlfriend, but there was a world that existed beyond our coupled bliss, and they let me know I was welcome to rejoin them in that other world whenever I felt like it.
“Cool.” Will returned to his sandwich.
Will and I met the second week of freshman year when his voice hadn’t changed and I still wore lame sneakers, Converse mostly. He’d grown up with a kid named Luke, sort of the way I’d grown up with Maggie, and we joined forces to become a foursome, a quadrangle, until Pe
nny came along.
Anyway, as the afternoon wore on, I became convinced that Penny’s regret had made her physically ill. I decided I’d go to her house after school with some soup from her favorite deli or maybe flowers, though the latter seemed the less thoughtful and more textbook gesture. To hell with it, I’d bring both.
I asked Maggie for a ride to the deli.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t walk to Penny’s neighborhood, but I was pretty walked out from Saturday.
“You didn’t eat lunch?” Maggie asked.
“I did, I just want to get some soup for Penny.”
“Of course. I should have figured.”
“She’s sick. I thought it might be nice to bring her soup.”
She took her eyes off the road to study me. “Is everything okay with you guys?”
I pointed to the windshield: Maggie was a pretty lousy driver, she couldn’t afford the distraction, and furthermore, I didn’t much want her looking at me.
“Everything’s fine. Why?”
“Well…I sorta heard today that you guys might be on the rocks.”
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Kendall and them.”
Like solving a geometric equation, I could see the lines and arrows that connected Kendall to Vanessa and back to Penny.
“Kendall’s a dimwit.”
“Totally. Anyway, I knew it couldn’t be true. Not you and Penny. No way.”
Maggie was right. Not Penny and me.
“And anyway, if there was trouble with you and Penny, you’d talk to me about it. You’d know that even if I give you a hard time sometimes about Penny, I’m your oldest friend and I just want you to be happy.”
“I know. Thanks, Mags.”
She dropped me in front of the deli and offered to wait and drive me to Penny’s, but I declined.
“Tell her I hope she feels better,” she called out as she swerved back into traffic without even a glance over her shoulder.
I went for the quart of chicken soup rather than the pint. That way Penny would have extra to bring in her lunch tomorrow and she’d be able to say to her friends, “River brought me this. Isn’t he the best?”
I walked a few blocks out of my way to pick up some flowers at the grocery store. Orange, her favorite color. They weren’t anything special, but they’d have to do. By the time I rang her doorbell, my pits were sweat-soaked.
Juana answered. Her face unreadable. “Hi, River.”
“Hi, Juana.”
“Penelope isn’t home.”
“She’s not?”
“No. She has a doctor visit today. The one for her glasses.”
Penny had terrible eyesight. She wore glasses as a little girl and switched to contacts as soon as she was old enough to put them in and take them out herself. Sometimes, when we’d hang around her house, she’d be too lazy to put in her lenses, and she’d wear these thick-framed black glasses. I wouldn’t have minded if she always wore those glasses, but she’d been wanting to get corrective eye surgery forever.
“She had the surgery today?” Suddenly my quart of soup and sad orange supermarket flowers felt woefully inadequate.
“No, the doctor is just looking at her eyes again before he can use the lasers.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t help but notice her noticing my sweaty pit stains.
“Do you want to come in? Wait for Penelope?”
“Any idea when she’ll be back?”
“Mrs. Brockaway said before dinner. But then she told me she wants dinner early. So I think they’ll be home soon.”
“Okay.”
Juana took my soup, put it in the fridge and put the flowers in a vase on the kitchen island.
“Can I get you anything, River? Something to drink?”
“Thanks, but no, Juana. I’m fine. Really.”
She eyed me. I think she could tell I wasn’t fine, that something was bothering me beyond my unsightly pit stains. Juana had a soft spot for me. She started at the Brockaways’ right around the time I came into Penny’s life, and sometimes I thought I was her favorite member of the family, even though I was just an outsider who spent most of my time there. It was a weird spot to be in, and we were both in it.
I went to find Ben in the family room, where I knew he’d be playing video games. That was pretty much all Ben ever did, which might have had something to do with why he was so chubby. I figured sitting with him would be only slightly less awkward than hanging out with Juana while she cooked dinner.
“Penny’s not here,” Ben said.
“I know. I’m waiting for her to come home.”
“You have sweat stains in your armpits.”
“I’m aware of that. Thank you.”
“Do you want to play FIFA 14?”
“That depends. Do you want to get your ass kicked?”
We played for a while, and he slaughtered me, and then I started getting too anxious to sit still so I went out to the backyard to throw a ball to Nuisance. He was an inspiration, that dog, fetching ball after ball without lagging, never letting his missing leg slow him down. And then suddenly, midfetch: he stopped. Cocked his head. Cocked it a little more. Then he turned around and bolted into the house, and I knew he’d heard the car pull into the driveway.
Penny was home.
Something told me to wait outside, so I sat down on the back steps. I took slow breaths in…and out.
She came over and sat down next to me. “River?” She didn’t need to say What are you doing here, it was in the way she said my name.
“How are your eyes?”
“They’re fine, thanks.”
“Good. So are you getting the surgery? I don’t think I ever told you, but I really like you in your glasses.”
“You did tell me you like me in my glasses. Lots of times.”
“I did? Good.”
“I think you need to go.”
“I brought you soup. And flowers.”
“Please, River. My mom is inside. And Ben. This is embarrassing.”
“I’m going to fix this, Penny. I’m going to be better.”
She stood up and walked back into the kitchen. I followed her.
“River, will you stay for dinner?” Juana asked. “I made extra chicken. And the potatoes you like. The crispy ones.”
“No, Juana,” Penny said. “River is not staying for dinner.”
“Oh, okay.” Juana turned back to the stove. I did love Juana’s potatoes. I loved all Juana’s cooking.
I gestured to the vase on the island. “Those are the flowers I was talking about.”
“I see them. Thank you. That was very nice of you.”
We stood and stared at each other. The only sound in the room was the sound of Juana’s potatoes frying on the stove.
“Well, I guess I’ll go, then.”
“Yes, you should go.”
“Good-bye, Juana,” I said.
“Good-bye, River. You come back soon.”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
It was all over school by the end of the week.
Penny and River broke up.
Most people thought I’d broken up with her, except for the people who really knew me and knew it would never go down like that.
We only had one class together, Penny and me: Spanish 2, which was muy, muy awkward. I arrived first on Tuesday and staked out a new seat on the opposite side of the room. Aside from those fifty minutes, from 12:55 to 1:45 each day, I didn’t see her at all.
By Friday afternoon I started to feel the weight of a looming Penny-less weekend.
“I should have gotten you a ticket to Tig Notaro tomorrow,” Maggie said. We were sitting in a diner sharing an order of fries. Maggie had to fight like a champ to get her share, but she was skilled in holding her own.
“What’s a Tig Notaro?”
She looked at me. “River. I’ve seen like every one of her shows at Largo. You know that.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you do, becaus
e I told you about them.”
“Oh, right. What does she play again?”
“She’s a comedian,” Maggie said. “She plays her wit and unbridled humor like a freaking violin. And she has cancer. Get this: she found out right after her mother died and her girlfriend left her.”
“She sounds like a real riot.”
“Trust me.” Maggie swiped the final fry. “She’s amazing. I would have asked you to go if I had any idea you’d be single by the time the show came around.”
I tried to ignore the dig. “I have plans Saturday anyway.”
“You do? Really?” She couldn’t hide her shock.
“Yeah, I do.” Since I couldn’t tell her I had to bring the snacks to the support group for my fake marijuana addiction, I said, “I’m going out to dinner with Leonard. Male bonding or whatever. He’s pretty much forcing me.”
“That’s nice.” Maggie did a little pouty face at me. Everyone loved Leonard, but Maggie loved him especially because she knew me in the years between when my dad left us and when my mom met Leonard, and let’s just say those weren’t the golden years for what remained of the Dean family. Mom struggled to balance her job at the nonprofit where she worked on global access to water with raising a boy who was often described, lovingly, as a “major handful.” I spent most of my formative afternoons at Maggie’s house baking cookies, having tea parties and letting Maggie give me makeovers until Mom could leave the office. Mom and I ate a lot of microwave dinners back then. We didn’t have a Juana.
“Maybe I’ll see you after,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe.”
—
Everyone knows that nobody walks in LA, there’s even a song about it—so I probably looked like a vagrant as I wandered along Pico Boulevard early Saturday evening weighed down by grocery bags. I’d picked up brownie bites, veggie chips and kettle corn; then right as I got to the front of the checkout line, I thought of Mason, and ran back to grab a plastic tub of fat-free meringues.
I still hadn’t told my family about the breakup; somehow I dreaded telling Natalie the most. Natalie loved Penny because Penny wore dresses and mascara, and Penny tied her hair up in a bun, and she carried this roll-on stick of perfume in her purse that she’d let Natalie try. Mom was your basic grown-up tomboy with a short haircut who never wore anything other than Levi’s and sweatshirts except when she took rich people to lunch to ask for money, and then she’d bust out a black pantsuit.
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