by Pete Hautman
“I know you hated that long bus ride in Schaumburg, so we found this place close to your new school.”
June knew that her convenience had nothing to do with why her parents had chosen this house. The fact that it was near school was purely coincidental, but her mother, typically, had taken credit for supposedly making sacrifices to enhance her poor, pathetic daughter’s life.
“You can walk to school in five minutes,” her mother had said.
More like ten, June thought. “What about in winter? When it’s, like, twenty below? I’ll freeze.”
“It doesn’t get that cold here.”
“We’re in Minnesota, aren’t we? Icebox of the nation?” Not that what she said could have changed anything.
She had timed herself on the way to school that morning. Eleven minutes, thirty-four seconds. If they were still living here in January — no sure thing — eleven minutes, thirty-four seconds was enough time to book a serious frostbite.
She decided to time herself again on the way home. Maybe she could cut her time down to ten minutes if she walked faster and cut a few corners.
Unfortunately, Naomi Liddell latched on to her as she was leaving the school and yakked her ears raw with something about the school paper. June didn’t know what Naomi was going on about, except that she seemed intent on getting June involved in some sort of after-school activity involving sticking address labels on envelopes. June finally extricated herself by saying she had a dentist appointment, which she didn’t.
“Which dentist do you see?” Naomi asked.
“Um, I don’t know.” That was the problem with lies. They got complicated. “My mom made the appointment.”
“I bet it’s Posnick. He’s nice.”
“I’ll let you know,” June said, edging away. She checked the time on her cell phone. “I gotta go.” She started walking fast.
“See you tomorrow!” Naomi called after her.
June put Naomi out of her mind and gave herself to the rhythm of her heels scuffing the sidewalk. About halfway home she saw a boy ahead of her going in the same direction but walking much more slowly. As she drew closer she noticed his hair — pale brown, kind of on the long side — and his shirt — plaid, unbuttoned, tails flapping in the light breeze. Faded black jeans. Dirty white basketball shoes. He was shuffling along, in no hurry, but every few steps he would sort of skip, or maybe he was kicking something.
He was kicking a rock, moving it down the sidewalk in front of him.
June slowed down when she got about twenty paces behind him. She didn’t want to startle him and throw him off his rhythm. He had probably been kicking that same rock for blocks.
On the other hand, she was making good time, and she hated that this guy was holding her up. She sped up her pace and walked past him, staying out of the way of the rock by walking on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. As they came next to each other, she glanced over at him and their eyes met. He kicked the rock too hard; it bounced up onto somebody’s lawn. June gave him a flat smile and kept walking, but the image of his face stayed with her, those startled brown eyes, that open mouth. He reminded her of other boys she’d met, but there was also something different. Something about those eyes, the way he looked at her.
Aqua Girl walked really fast. Wes tried to match her speed, but he couldn’t do it without sort of half running. He gave up after a few seconds; the gap between them widened.
He kept following her even after passing Fourteenth Street, the street that led, after another mile of nearly identical houses, to the nearly identical house where he lived.
The girl kept up her rapid pace for several blocks, then turned a corner.
Wes, a block behind her, sped up until he was almost to the corner, then returned to his nonchalant shuffle. He stopped at the corner. She was nowhere in sight. She must live in one of the houses near the corner. Not that it mattered. He didn’t even know why he’d followed her. Just something to do. Stupid. He’d added half a mile to his long walk home.
He thought about taking the shortcut across Jenkins Park, then decided against it. Izzy lived right on the park. It would be too weird to run into her.
For nearly eighteen months — an eternity — Izzy O’Connor and Wes Andrews had been monogamous, a constant part of each other’s life. They had talked two or three times every day. Wes had been a regular dinner guest at the O’Connors’. He called Izzy’s mom Mrs. O’C, and he called her dad by his nickname, Hap.
Izzy had spent plenty of time at Wes’s house too, most often when Wes was drafted into babysitting his sister, Paula, who had recently turned ten and declared herself too old to need a sitter.
He had only seen Izzy once at school that first day, sitting in the lunchroom with her artsy friends. They were laughing and making things out of straws. That was the sort of thing she liked to do. Always bending and twisting and coloring things to make them look like other things.
People were always saying what a pretty girl Izzy was, and it was true. Though over the past year her face had become so much a part of Wes’s life that seeing her was almost like seeing his own face in a mirror. Except that at lunch that day — the first time he’d seen her since they’d broken up two weeks ago — her hair had been shorter.
At Sixteenth Street, Wes caught a whiff of something baking. Something sweet. He turned left and followed his nose to the Bun & Brew.
The Bun & Brew — “brew” as in coffee, not beer — had taken over an old filling station, still with the antique pumps out front, forty-nine cents a gallon for regular. They didn’t work, of course. Inside, the nostalgia theme intensified: photos of old cars, Formica tabletops, and a working eight-track tape deck constantly playing oldies so moldy they were actually semi-cool. The tables were set up in the old garage bay; the office had been converted into an espresso bar and baked-goods case. A muffin would kill the stomach clench, and it wouldn’t take his every last dime. He shuffled up to the counter. Eight types of muffins, three varieties of croissant, a killer chocolate éclair, and some giant chocolate chip cookies. He always ordered the blueberry muffin.
“Can I help you?”
Wes looked up. On the other side of the counter stood Izzy, her face carefully arranged in that tight half smile she used with complete strangers.
His heart did a ka-thunk.
“Iz … you work here now?”
Izzy nodded, still holding the smile.
“Cool,” said Wes. A really stupid thing to say because it was not cool at all, her working there, where if he wanted a blueberry muffin, he would have to see her all the time.
“Blueberry muffin?” she asked.
“Cookie,” he said, not wanting to be too predictable.
Izzy grabbed a tissue and got him a cookie.
“How’s Paulalicious?” she asked. That was her nickname for his sister. Izzy had a nickname for everybody. She’d come up with some really weird ones for him. Like Pookie.
“She thinks she’s an adult already. Two digits.”
“Oh, right — her tenth birthday. Tell her happy birthday for me.”
“Okay.” Wes knew he wouldn’t. Paula was still mad at him for breaking up with Izzy, who she worshipped. He paid for his cookie and stood awkwardly as she counted out his change and handed it to him. She smiled, a real smile this time. Wes felt a smile begin to form on his own face, then realized she was looking over his shoulder. A woman stood behind him, waiting to place her order. Wes stepped aside and carried his cookie to a table, sat down, watched Izzy ring up a coffee and a muffin, stood up, took his cookie outside, and ate it as he walked home.
He didn’t even really like cookies.
CHAPTER
THREE
SHE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO CALL SCHAUMBURG, or any of the other places they’d lived before. Her parents were fanatical about that.
“Move on, Junie,” her mom had said. “The past is the past.”
“ ‘There Is No Reverse Gear in Time Machine,’ ” her
father said, quoting the title of a book he’d once read.
“But isn’t the whole point of a time machine so you can go back?” June said.
“Not this time machine. This time machine only goes forward, into the future. Next!” Like a counterman in a deli, he loved to yell, Next!
Her mother said, “Junie, you’ll probably never see any of those kids again. Best to make a clean break.”
“Why?” June asked.
“Junie, I know it’s hard moving from one school to another. But hanging on to the past is not the way to deal with it.”
“Why?” she asked again.
“Please don’t be difficult,” her mother said.
June scrolled through the numbers on her cell, remembering faces to go with the names. Brent. Gerry. Felicity. Heather. Katie. Kevin. Krista D. Krista K. So many K names. LeBron. Octavia. Prathi …
June knew her mother was right. The past was gone forever. Nobody in Schaumburg probably even thought about her anymore. Or if they did, it was like, Remember that girl? The one with blond hair?
You mean Teresa?
No. The one that moved a few weeks ago, you know. The one who was going out with Brent?
Oh yeah, um, I’m pretty sure her name started with a “J.”
Jennie? Jenna?
Something like that.
“June.”
June looked up. Her mother, carrying two bags of groceries, was standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“Sitting at the kitchen table.”
“Well, put down your phone and help me with these groceries.”
Later that night, June picked up her phone and once again looked at her contact list. It was blank. All the numbers had disappeared, erased, gone forever.
Wes’s mom and his little sister were in the kitchen having one of their arguments when Wes got home. Neither of them noticed him. Paula was being a brat, as usual, and Mom was falling all over herself trying to please her.
“Honey pie, I am not going to buy you a new pair of shoes just because Lynette Stiles told you your shoes were stupid. She’s only being mean.”
“Nobody wears Skechers anymore.”
“Honey, that’s not true. Lots of kids your age love Skechers.”
“Yeah, the dweebs and morons.”
“You liked them fine when we bought them. Does that make you a dweeb?”
“If you make me wear them, yeah.”
“Don’t you think that Lynette was just trying to make you feel bad?”
“The shoes are bad.”
“And suppose you wear new shoes to school tomorrow, will that make Lynette think you’re cool?”
“I don’t care what she thinks.”
“I’ll tell you what she’ll think — she’ll think she has power over you. She might say your jeans are dorky. What then?”
“My jeans aren’t dorky. These shoes are.”
“Honey, don’t you think …”
Wes grabbed a bottle of juice from the fridge and took it out to the garage, where he wouldn’t have to listen. He knew how it would end. Paula would be in tears and locked in her bedroom, and his mom would come looking for him and saddle him with some heinous task — mowing the yard, or sorting his dirty laundry — just to remind herself that she could still control her children. She wouldn’t cave to Paula’s demand for new shoes, but she would probably take her to the mall and buy her a new belt or something.
The garage was a refuge of sorts. It contained several half-finished repair projects: his dad’s prehistoric ten-speed with the bent wheel, an outboard engine with a broken prop and no boat, a rocking chair that needed a new armrest, and so forth. One corner was filled with Wes’s skateboard collection and other sports gear. There was a table saw, a drill press, and assorted other tools, and several lawn care items: weed whacker, leaf blower, push mower, trimmer, edger, spreader. There was no room for their two cars. That was one of his mom’s pet peeves. About once a year she would throw a fit, and Wes and his dad would rearrange and clean and get rid of a few things — just enough to fit Mom’s car inside. And then they would start accumulating again, buying things like the infamous and enormous commercial sod cutter, which his dad had picked up dirt cheap at an auction. The sod cutter had sat in the garage for two years, never used, until one day Wes’s mom wheeled it out to the curb — she must have been really mad, that thing was heavy — and put a FREE sign on it. An hour later, it was gone.
Wes’s dad couldn’t believe she’d given away his sod cutter.
“When were you ever going to cut sod?” his mom had said.
“It was worth a lot of money, Rita.”
“So why didn’t you sell it?”
“I was going to get around to it.”
“Well, I’ve saved you the trouble.”
Wes turned on the light over the cluttered eight-foot-long workbench and sat on one of the three ancient leather-covered bar stools from the Hotel LaGrange, which had been torn down before Wes was born.
“Why do you need three stools?” his mother had once asked. “There are never more than two of you out here.”
“The stools are cool,” Wes had said. His dad had backed him up. That was one argument they’d won. Something Wes had figured out — learned from Izzy and her artist parents, actually — was that purely aesthetic judgments were unassailable. If you said you liked something, or loved it — like when Iz declared that vintage blue jeans were the most beautiful garment ever created — people could disagree all they wanted but never be able to prove you wrong. Of course, to make it work, you had to not care what anybody else thought, and you had to believe.
Wes believed in the stools.
Wes looked around the garage, hoping he might be inspired to do something. The workbench alone made him want to curl up and scream. He couldn’t even see the top of it. What was all this? Scraps of used sandpaper. Bent nails. Worn-out drill bits and Allen wrenches and pieces of electrical cord and a busted desk lamp and a pile of rusty upholstery tacks and a squeeze bottle of Elmer’s glue, open on its side and permanently cemented to a box of dry-wall screws. The bench was both an archaeological wonder and testament to the utter and undeniable incapacity of father and son to clean up after themselves.
Overcome with a wave of revulsion and shame, Wes got up, kicked the stools aside, and tipped the workbench onto the floor.
Two hours later, Wes’s father got home from work and looked into the garage to find his son sitting on the floor sorting screws and nails and upholstery tacks into small piles.
“Wes, what the hell?” he said.
“Hi, Dad.”
Mr. Andrews noticed that the top of the workbench was completely empty, and that it had been painted green.
“You painted the workbench green?” he said.
“I like green,” said Wes. “Green is cool.”
“Oh. What color was it?”
“White, I think.”
“What got into you?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain,” said Wes.
CHAPTER
FOUR
BY THE END OF HER FIRST WEEK AT WELLSTONE, June had made three new friends — Jess, Britt, and Phoebe. Jessica Weitz was a tall, thin girl with flawless-but-quirky fashion instincts, Britt Spinoza had her own car, and Phoebe Keller’s brother worked at First Avenue, the famous Minneapolis nightclub. June was accepted into their circle by virtue of her cosmopolitan background — she told them she’d lived in Chicago, Kansas City, Phoenix, Dallas, and a few other places all bigger and more exciting than here. June did not mention that most of her homes had not technically been in the cities she cited, but in the stunningly boring suburbs preferred by her parents.
Naomi Liddell attempted to use June to inveigle herself into the group, but was met with the sort of icy politeness that even she was unable to overlook. June felt bad about shrugging off Naomi, but her relief outweighed her guilt.
Jess, Britt, and Phoebe had several male friends they o
ccasionally dated, though as near as June could tell, none of the girls had a boyfriend in the usual sense.
“Our job is to have fun,” Phoebe declared one afternoon as they were drinking iced coffees at the Bun & Brew. “I need a boyfriend like I need a third boob.”
Jess gave Phoebe a look and jerked her head toward the counter behind them, where a girl with short dark hair was taking an order from a sour-faced old man wearing a leather cap with earflaps.
“Just coffee,” the man said. “No capu-whatever, no flavors, no milk, no nothing. Just a cup of coffee.”
“Dark roast, breakfast blend, or decaf?” the girl asked.
“Surprise me,” the man snapped.
“Decaf it is,” said the girl.
Jess leaned over the table and lowered her voice. “You heard Izzy and Wes broke up?”
Who’s Izzy? June wondered. Who’s Wes?
“So?” said Phoebe.
“So it seems kind of, I don’t know, rude. To be talking about boyfriends with her standing right over there.”
“She can’t hear us. Besides, I wasn’t talking about her.”
“Wes and Izzy were practically married,” Britt said.
“That’s Izzy behind the counter?” June asked.
Britt nodded.
“Who’s Wes?”
“You’ve seen him, I’m sure.”
“He’s in our English class,” said Phoebe.
“You mean language arts?”
“Yeah, English. Floppy hair? Kind of cute?”
June knew right away who she meant.
Wes had almost gotten used to seeing Izzy at school. It helped that she had shorter hair now, and some clothes he hadn’t seen, almost as if she had become a different person. He was also getting used to not having one special person to talk to about everything all the time. The closest thing he had was Jerry Preuss. Not that they had much in common anymore. Jerry had decided to become Emperor of the Universe or something, and he was kicking off his political career by running for class president. Wes cared less about who was class president than he did about, well, anything. He didn’t even know who the current class president was, so it was awkward when, during a study period at the library, Jerry asked him to work on his campaign.
