Boy

by Blake Nelson

  We got out of the car. Rachel and Ingrid were already inside from the looks of it. All the lights were on and a shiny Lexus SUV, with a bunch of snowboarding stuff in the back, was parked in the snowy driveway.

  We walked to the front door and knocked. Immediately we heard giggling and voices inside.

  It took a while, but the door opened. Rachel and Ingrid were both there. Rachel was even cuter than I remembered. She wore a red ski sweater and UGGs and black yoga pants. Ingrid was cute too. She was short, with long blond hair and small, delicate features.

  Claude and I stomped the snow off our boots. We went inside, and for a moment the four of us stood there in the entrance, grinning at each other. This was going to be fun. You could tell right away.

  Rachel had a bottle of white wine in the fridge. Claude and Ingrid and I followed her there. We got the wine open and talked and ate cheese and crackers and grapes. Claude and Rachel did most of the talking. They figured out where and when they had met at summer camp. It was during a game called Totem Poles, in which people hid behind different trees and you had to count out a number using the trees and then kiss whoever was behind the tree your number ended on. She teased Claude for not remembering. Claude insisted he did remember, but it was obvious he didn’t.

  While they reminisced, Ingrid and I snuck looks at each other. Ingrid seemed pretty shy. You could tell she generally let Rachel take the lead. But that was okay.

  • • •

  The four of us attempted to cook dinner. This was a disaster, but we ended up with some pasta that was edible, more or less. Then we walked down the road, to the tiny town of Edelweiss, which was basically an intersection with a gas station and a tavern and a hotel. We went inside the tavern and watched a folk-music lady sing and play her guitar. But then they carded us and kicked us out. So we walked more, along the snowy road, through the sharp, crystal-clear mountain air. Above the treetops you could see the stars. They seemed to come alive up there, if you stayed still and quiet and stared upward long enough. For a moment the four of us did exactly that, standing in the middle of the road, our faces turned upward, nobody speaking or moving.

  “Think of the thousands of years those stars have been up there,” said Ingrid.

  • • •

  Heading back to the cabin, Claude and Rachel lagged behind, whispering and teasing each other about the Totem Pole game.

  “You don’t even remember!” I heard Rachel say.

  “But I do remember!” Claude laughed. “I swear I do. . . . You were hiding behind a tree. . . .”

  “We were all hiding behind trees! That was the point of the game!”

  Ingrid and I smiled at each other as we listened to them. I didn’t think anything was going to happen between us. But Claude and Rachel seemed to be on their way.

  Back in the cabin we ate more of the mushy pasta. Claude and Rachel curled up together on the couch, where they alternated between talking loudly to us and having private whispery conversations with just each other.

  When it was time for bed, Claude came into our room.

  “I’m gonna . . . ,” he whispered, pointing to the upstairs, where Rachel’s loft room was.

  I nodded that I understood.

  He gathered his stuff and hurried up the stairs to Rachel. I could hear their low voices, whispering, teasing, giggling. Judging from the sounds that came later, everything proceeded smoothly from there. Ingrid was in a separate room downstairs. I don’t know if she heard what was happening. I guess she must have. If she was Rachel’s best friend she was probably used to it. Just like I was.

  • • •

  Our alarms went off early the next morning and off we went up the mountain. Rachel and Ingrid were both excellent snowboarders. Because we were so near the slopes, we got an entire hour when the runs were basically our own private domain. That part was fantastic: the early-morning sun, the stillness of the mountain, carving trails through the fresh snow. Claude and Rachel rode up the chairlift together every time, so Ingrid and I did too. She told me about herself. And vice versa. But mostly we watched our friends.

  Later, driving home in the BMW, Claude was in a very good mood. He told me about his night with Rachel, making it funny and sexy like he does. It was classic Claude. That stuff was always happening to him.

  I was happy for him, of course, but also a little surprised. I had thought that even if he did get another girlfriend, Claude would still be there for Hanna. At least until she got well enough to leave the facility. That’s how close they were. At least in my mind.

  But, in fact, after that weekend, Claude never mentioned Hanna again. Instead, he became totally swept up in Rachel Lehman. He wanted to be happy was the truth of it. He was selfish in that way. Rachel was super fun. Hanna was having serious problems. So what did you want him to do? Be miserable on purpose? Claude wasn’t born to be miserable. Claude was born to have the best of everything. And so he would.

  55

  I still thought about Hanna, though. Even if nobody else did. I had recently begun my first real photo project, Cars at Night, which involved taking pictures of cars parked on the street late at night. I shot them in profile. I took a string and put a paper-clip hook on one end, which I would attach to the door handle of the car I was going to shoot. That way I was always exactly twenty feet away. This made the photos all the same, like mugshots, or passport photos.

  I’d drive around in different neighborhoods looking for interesting cars. When I found one, I’d hop out and measure for distance, set up a tripod, and get the shot. Some nights I’d stay out very late. I wanted that to be part of the mood of the project. Things got very quiet on the street at three in the morning. It was just me and the raindrops and the cats. It was during those nights, driving around, looking for cars, that I would let my mind wander. I’d think about my friends, my parents, my future. And Hanna. God, poor Hanna. The golden girl. I still couldn’t believe what had happened to her.

  • • •

  The other person who still had Hanna on his mind was Bennett Schmidt. He wanted to see her. He had tried calling her family, but they wouldn’t speak to him. So then he asked me if the two of us could go. Could I work it out with the Sloans? This was probably not the best idea, but I went along with it. I called Mrs. Sloan myself, without mentioning Bennett. She gave me the number at the facility. I called and made arrangements for a visit.

  So we went, Bennett and me. I drove. Her new place was different from the hospital. It was a residential treatment facility, a big house basically, with carpets and fireplaces, but with the doors locked and security people and nurses on duty 24-7. We signed in and met Hanna in a library. Another woman, a nurse, sat with us and read a magazine while we talked.

  Hanna looked worse than before. Her hair was cut shorter and it looked limp and dried out. She kept sighing and breathing in a strange way, like she couldn’t quite get settled. She had become a little bug-eyed, probably from the medication she was taking.

  She also wasn’t that happy to see us. There were probably other people she’d rather be visited by than her ex-boyfriend’s tennis partner and the drug dealer she was sleeping with just before she lost her shit.

  She didn’t treat Bennett like a former boyfriend, that’s for sure. She didn’t treat me much better. She thanked us for coming and then fell silent. We ended up telling her random news from school, how the basketball team was doing and that Mrs. Jamison, the English teacher, was pregnant. Hanna began to yawn. After twenty minutes it was time to go.

  On the drive back home, Bennett didn’t say a word. I didn’t either. It was humiliating to visit someone who was that screwed up and yet was still completely indifferent to you. It was probably worse for Bennett, being in love with her. It was interesting, too, because in the months that followed, Bennett began to wind down his drug-dealing career. Maybe it was that the Sloans were so repulsed by him. Or maybe it was how Hanna dismissed him that night. Or maybe he just grew out of it. But by the end of senior
year, Bennett Schmidt was pretty much out of the drug business.

  • • •

  I shouldn’t say Cars at Night was totally my idea. The beginning of the idea was mine, to take photos of cars while they were “asleep.” But Richie had input too, like using the string with the hook. That was the secret to passport photos, he always claimed. Making them all exactly the same. Same distance. Same light. Same stool. Same backdrop. If you looked at discarded passport photos all day, which Richie and I did sometimes, you saw how the more standard and uniform you could make the format, the more noticeable individual peculiarities became.

  I didn’t see Richie very much that winter. He was trying to get better gigs now. He didn’t want to lose ground after his famous Elliot Square photo, so he wouldn’t take just any job. This was good for me. It meant I got all the boring assignments from Portland Weekly. I did something for them almost every week. Which meant I always had some extra money in my pocket.

  It was funny, too, because most of the editors at Portland Weekly didn’t know how young I was. They’d send me to some microbrew place or a new wine bar, and I’d have to bluff my way in. This wasn’t that hard. Nobody turned down free publicity. And if you acted like a pro, people didn’t stop to think about how old you were.

  When I did see Richie, it was usually at the shop. And then, after the holidays, I started working at Passport Photos myself a couple days a week after school, helping out his uncle when Richie wasn’t around. It was a pretty easy job. I’d clean lenses or do some of the basic repairs. Then at night I’d sweep up, close the cash register, and count the money, if there was any.

  • • •

  And then one night in February, just as I was locking up, Richie showed up at the store wearing a suit coat and a new white shirt. He pounded on the door and I let him in. He had this stunned, slightly horrified look on his face. I thought he might have been in a car accident.

  But no. He slammed a bottle of champagne dramatically on the counter and stared at me with huge eyes. “I just asked Nicole to marry me,” he blurted.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said yes.”

  “Dude.”

  “I know.”

  So then we had to celebrate. At first we couldn’t get the champagne bottle open. And when we did, it sprayed all over the place. We poured what was left into two of his uncle’s dirty coffee cups from the back. We toasted and drank. And then we stood there, in the quiet shop, and laughed a little and drank champagne. Richie was basically in shock. But he was “all in,” like he gets. That was Richie’s best quality. When he decided to do something, he did it. Not always perfectly. Not always gracefully. But he got it done.

  56

  “Antoinette wants to go snowboarding,” Kai told me one day after school. “She wants to know what all the fuss is about.”

  “How open-minded of her,” I said.

  “Will you take us?”

  “Sure I’ll take you.”

  “And Antoinette says you can’t make fun of her.”

  “I will try not to make fun of her.”

  I had not seen much of Antoinette since winter vacation. She had two independent studies that term, and a study hall, so she barely came to school on some days. It was impressive how she had turned her rebelliousness and bad behavior into extra off-campus privileges.

  When I did see her that spring, she was reading. Sometimes novels, but usually memoirs of famous women or artists or people you wouldn’t expect, like Eleanor Roosevelt. Antoinette told Kai that for girls, reading biographies of famous women was the only way to learn how to succeed in the world. And how to get what you want. They sure weren’t going to teach you that stuff in school.

  The main thing I’d noticed about Antoinette as a senior: She’d calmed down. She’d quit smoking. She was vegan for a while. She still wore her weird clothes, but she didn’t do it with the same attitude. She didn’t do it at you like when she was younger. She was more contained now, more under control. She was biding her time. Bigger things were coming for her. So she lay low and stayed out of trouble. And read biographies of Lady Gaga.

  I thought that big things were coming for me, too. Cars at Night was turning out great. I would have liked to talk to Antoinette about it. I felt she might give me good feedback. But that was the problem with Antoinette. She was never going to take a guy like me seriously. Not after I dated Grace Anderson and Krista and was still friends with Claude and Logan. These sins were unforgiveable, I guess. Once a popular jock, always a popular jock.

  But if she wanted to go snowboarding, I would take her snowboarding. Of course I would. I would have taken her anywhere.

  • • •

  Kai pretended she didn’t know anything about snowboarding because that would have marked her as boring and suburban. But when I went to her house the next day to see what equipment she had, her garage was full of skis, boots, snowboards, and every kind of accessory you’d need. So we had plenty of gear. Kai and I then drove to Burrito Express for dinner to discuss how best to introduce Antoinette to snowboard culture, which devolved into a conversation about Antoinette in general: what books she read, what she thought about high school, what she thought about us.

  “She thinks I’m an idiot,” I said. “That’s pretty obvious.”

  “No she doesn’t.”

  “Then she thinks all my friends are idiots.”

  “Well, they are, kind of.”

  “She never gives me any credit.”

  “Maybe that’s not her job. You have to have your own confidence. You can’t get it from her.”

  I shrugged. It was always a little awkward, talking about Antoinette with Kai.

  But now, though, for some reason, I brought it up. “Did she ever say anything to you about Berlin?”

  Kai became anxious. “Just that you guys fooled around a little, because you were so jet-lagged. . . .”

  That was the official story. Which was true enough.

  Kai sighed. “You can’t pine away for her for the rest of your life.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not like that anyway. I know my place with her.”

  “What is that, exactly?”

  I thought for a moment. “I’m the guy who can teach her how to snowboard.”

  • • •

  The three of us slept over at Kai’s on Saturday night—Kai and Antoinette in Kai’s large bed and me on the floor on an air mattress. At five thirty a.m. Kai’s mother woke us up and had a huge delicious breakfast waiting downstairs. Then we piled into the prepacked Subaru, with the snowboards on the roof, and drove to Mount Hood.

  Antoinette was somewhat athletic, but she had a terrible time with the snowboard. We started her on the bunny slope, but she couldn’t figure out the balance. She face-planted multiple times. When a bit of blood appeared on her lower lip, we decided to take a break.

  So then we had lunch and sat in the lodge, watching people. I had been snowboarding my entire life, but with Antoinette there, I saw the ski-lodge crowd in a more critical light. Like how much status was being expressed by the different clothes and equipment people had. And how vain and full of themselves everyone was, tromping around in their French ski boots and thousand-dollar parkas.

  “This is quite a scene,” said Antoinette, with her slightly swollen lower lip, which she was dabbing at with an ice cube wrapped in a napkin.

  • • •

  After lunch Antoinette insisted that Kai and I go snowboard ourselves. She didn’t want to hold us back any more than she already had.

  So Kai and I rode the big chairlift to the top and came down together. Kai was not as good a snowboarder as Rachel and Ingrid, but she was still pretty good, and we carved gentle turns back and forth together, zoning out on the dazzling white snow, in the brisk mountain air.

  At one point Kai got caught in some deep snow beside the trail and wiped out. She did a serious tumble in the snow. I skidded to a stop and hiked up to get her hat and goggles, which had fallen
off above her. I then scooted downward on my butt, until I slid into her back where she was sitting. I stayed there while she rearranged her hat and scarf. I helped brush the snow out of her hair. Then, since we were off the trail and tangled up together anyway, we just sat for a while, enjoying the view of the mountains in the distance and the trees and the snow.

  57

  The last week of March was when most people found out what colleges they’d been accepted to. Wednesday was the big day for most people. Many of them got the news on their phones. You’d hear random screams or outbursts from other classrooms. And then people in the hall would be laughing and super happy and threatening to not bother going back to their afternoon classes.

  After last period, people who hadn’t heard were frantically checking their phones. You’d see someone beaming with joy at one locker and then, a few lockers down, someone else in tears. In the midst of the excitement, an e-mail from Cal Arts silently materialized on my phone. Staring down at it while I stood at my locker, I felt like my life was about to take its first major turn. I slipped my phone into my pocket. I couldn’t look at it yet.

  I drove the RAV4 home. My mother wasn’t home. It was just me in the big house. I did my usual routine, opening the refrigerator and getting out the milk. I took a bowl out of the dishwasher and a box of Cheerios from the cabinet. I filled the bowl and poured in the milk.

  I took out my phone and set it on the table beside me. I looked into my bowl and began to eat. I kept my head down. Antoinette had once said if I’d been born in a different century I’d be a monk. I felt like that now. Spooning the Cheerios into my mouth, my head down, my mind empty, my eyes focused on the light brown circles floating in the white milk as I scooped up every last Cheerio.

  When I was done I put the bowl in the sink and sat down at the table again. I picked up my phone. I opened the e-mail, which sent me to a link. I opened the link and found a message. I pressed on it:

  We are pleased to inform you . . .