by Sarah Bird
Daddy got a giant-screen TV as a return from Circuit City and Mom kept it turned on night and day. Every time there was anything on the news about someone being taken to the West Mesa and raped or a drive-by shooting in the south valley, Mom stepped up our home security system. She had bars put on all the windows, triple dead bolts on the doors, and an alarm system wired to a special private security service. I think she’d decided to homeschool me before she even saw Pueblo Heights, but the armed cop at the entrance and the sight of more brown than white faces sealed the deal for her.
The one good thing for me about homeschooling was that I discovered an incredible online math program that let me go as far and as fast as I wanted in calculus, trig, some statistics. The only people I met my junior year were other homesehoolers and the geeks I competed against in Math Olympiad. It was through the homeschooler group that Mom connected with HeartLand, the weirdo church she ended up joining. The major emphasis of HeartLand seemed to be to remind women that they were “subject” to their husbands and to try to return to what they imagined was a simpler time. None of the women from Mom’s new church cut their hair and they all wore clothes that they thought small-town people wore. But no one I ever knew back in Houdek would have been caught dead in a long denim skirt and high-buttoned blouse like a five-year-old would wear to a piano recital.
All the burglar bars and buttons in the world, though, couldn’t keep out the one thing Mom should have been afraid of. Daddy had the cough for months before he finally went to the doctor. It was cancer. Daddy acted like it was no big deal. Still, it was decided that homeschooling on top of taking care of Daddy was too much for Mom’s weak nerves, and for my senior year I was enrolled at Pueblo Heights.
Daddy joked about the chemo and radiation, said he was doing it just to “humor the tumor.” Even when he got so weak he had to use a wheelchair, he was still able to convince Mom and me that the thing growing inside of him was merely a passing annoyance. The day I met Didi was the day even Daddy had to stop pretending.
When my parents came back out to the oncologist’s waiting room where I sat watching Didi Steinberg act like she was reading Golf Digest, the expression on my mom’s face scared me. The way the nurse in her tropical fish smock held the door open for her to push the wheelchair through scared me even more. It was too kind, too solicitous. My eyes met my father’s and everything he’d tried to hide from me for the past four months was there. The fear and panic were so big that they made him a little boy who just wanted someone to rescue him. My mom looked at me in the same lost, scared way. But there was nothing I could do for her, for either one of them. When Mom realized that no one would be coming to rescue her, that nothing would change what the doctor had just told her back in his office, her face started squirming around. At first, it didn’t seem she was about to cry, more like she was going to say something but couldn’t remember the words. All I cared about in that moment was that she was going to do something embarrassing in front of Didi Steinberg. Like talk.
She did something worse, though. My mother fainted. One instant she was standing behind the wheelchair, pushing my father toward me, the next she went down so fast I thought she’d stepped into a hole.
Didi, who only truly came to life when the adrenaline was flowing, reacted faster than anyone, even the nurse. She was helping Mom to a chair before I could figure out what had happened. My father tried to hoist himself up to help her, but Didi was already in charge.
“Make sure he stays put,” she ordered me, pointing to my father as she helped my mother bend forward to put her head between her knees. She looked at the nurse and barked at her, “Get us some water. Stat.”
Everyone followed her orders. Her calm, authoritative manner combined with using the medical word, stat, made us all believe that, in spite of the lime-popsicle-colored hair, she just might be an intern, a medical student, someone who had answers and could help us. That, I would later learn, was Didi’s greatest gift. When she wanted to, she could read your deepest needs and turn herself into whoever could fill them.
“Cyndi. Rae. Honey.” My father huffed out one word on each laborious exhalation. “Get. The. Keys.”
I picked the car keys up from the floor where Mom had dropped them. “I’ll. Drive. Home.” He held out his palm.
“Are you tripping?” Didi asked my father, plucking the keys from my hand.
Mom didn’t object. Whatever unimaginable news the doctor had given my parents had stolen the little bit of fight she had left.
“You”—she pointed to my father—“need to get into bed. Stat. You”— she pointed to my mother, who was staring at the cup of water the nurse had put into her hand as if she were trying to figure out how to work it—“should not be behind the wheel of a car. You”—my turn—“need to be in the backseat of the car monitoring your father. I”—she thumped her chest with an open hand—“will drive.”
Didi blurted something in Spanish to her mother. She used the word papi a lot so I assumed she was telling her mother to take her father home. All Mrs. Steinberg did was shrug and nod vaguely. Then Didi took the handles of my father’s chair and propelled him forward. I helped my mother get up. Her body was damp and clammy against my own. Didi seemed so crisp and strong marching ahead of us, so dark and well defined. Mom and I with our identical wispy, strawberry blond hair, blue-veined skin, invisible eyelashes and eyebrows, had always run together like two underdone cookies melting into one blob on the baking sheet. I hated the touch of my mother’s doughy body.
Didi drove us home, helped Daddy into bed, then refused Mom’s halfhearted offer of a ride home. Instead, she said she needed the exercise and ran off.
The next morning, without any plan being made, Didi pulled her dad’s Mustang into our carport and honked until Mom gasped, “Well, I mean, that is the rudest thing I’ve ever heard. Go make her stop before the neighbors call the police.”
I crunched across the rocks that were our front yard, wishing I had a pair of the cool low-rise jeans Mom had forbidden instead of the dorky ones with a waist she insisted on. Didi yelled out her open window, “You going to school today?” Just like it was optional. Just like I might be considering not going that day.
“Uh, yeah,” I answered. “Give me a second.” I rushed into the house, certain that if I gave Didi more than ten seconds to consider what she was doing, she’d be gone. I grabbed my books and the box of animal crackers I took every day to eat on a bench in the patio so I wouldn’t have to sit alone in the cafeteria at lunch. I ran back to the car pretending I didn’t hear Mom yelling that she didn’t approve and that I was to get back into the house this instant.
The Mustang, fingernail-polish red with white leather upholstery, rumbled as we roared down Carlisle Avenue. I wondered what it would be like to have parents cool enough to buy a red Mustang with white leather interior. On the back window, written in swirly script, was SKANKMOBILE. Didi smoked Eve cigarettes, occasionally waving the smoke out the tiny slit she opened in her window. Piercings had appeared in her lip and eyebrow that I didn’t recall being there just the day before.
“You have a theme song?” she asked.
“Am I supposed to?”
“Here’s mine. Check it out.” She shoved in a CD and an oldie blared out: “Dirty Deeds.” I looked at the case to find out that the band was AC/DC, some guys dressed up like British schoolboys.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking, No rap? No hip-hop? Where’s Snoop? Why’s she like this old-school shit?”
That wasn’t remotely what I was thinking, but I loved having a conversation with Didi Steinberg that didn’t require my participation.
“Well, old school still rules! There’s a reason it’s called rock. Cuz it rocks!” Didi sang along with the CD, hitting the chorus hard, yelling about doing dirty deeds dirt cheap. She turned to me as if I were sitting on a stool next to her at a bar instead of careening down a road and explained, “That’s how I got my nickname, Deeds.
”
We headed east, toward the mountains, toward the rising sun, which was turning the Sandias the watermelon color they were named for. Morning light flooded into the car. Didi had the visor down so only the bottom half of her face was illuminated. Her mouth was golden as she sang.
With a screech, she opened the ashtray, snuffed the cigarette, and plucked out a half-smoked joint. I knew what it was only because back in Houdek Sheriff Zigal had visited our class in seventh grade with a briefcase filled with drug paraphernalia. He’d told us a joint could be called a blunt, a spliff, a number, a nail, a stick, a stake, a spike, a rod. I think Sheriff Zigal made up some of the names. Didi pinched the joint between her lips as she fumbled through her purse until she dug out a box of matches.
“Take the Skank,” she said, nodding toward the steering wheel as she removed both hands to strike a match. It took me a split second to process the fact that there were no hands on the wheel before I lunged over and grabbed it as we bumped onto the median. Didi laughed when we sideswiped a newly planted catalpa tree. She got the joint lit and sucked in a long hit before holding it out to me.
I waved it away and tried to keep the Skankmobile in its own lane.
Didi shrugged. “How does anyone do Pweb straight?” she asked. Pweb. I liked her name for Pueblo Heights. “Gotta keep consensual reality at bay.” She inhaled until there was nothing left to burn, then popped the still-smoldering roach into her mouth and took the steering wheel from my death grip. “You’re not a bad wheelman.”
I made myself lean back, but lunged forward the instant Didi closed both eyes and joined AC/DC singing, “Call me anytime. I lead a life of crime!” She laughed when I grabbed the wheel again. “Wow, someone who’s interested in keeping me alive. You could be just what the doctor ordered.” She giggled a giggle that made me remember another one of Sheriff Zigal’s names for a joint, giggle stick.
Didi’s new piercings, dozens of tiny silver rings, glinted in the sun. “When did you get the piercings?” I yelled over the music, keeping my hands on the wheel.
She ripped one of the rings out. It was a fake clip-on. “No tattoos, no piercings. That’s the rule. Have to be ready to change at a moment’s notice. If it’ll grow out or wash off, fine, but I’m not gonna be sitting in the old folks’ home covered in saggy ink and Ubangi piercing holes.” Even the diamond studs in her nose were fake. “Nothing permanent. I’m not into permanent.”
Not into permanent. That was the first line in the manual I started composing that day on how to be Didi Steinberg’s friend.
She took the wheel. “Hey, you study for the test in Mith Myth?”
Mith Myth was what everyone called world cultures since the teacher, Ms. Smith, even more than most teachers, taught what she liked best and that was Greek and Roman mythology. Hence her nickname, Mith Myth.
“Yeah?” I said, cautiously, not knowing how dorky she would think studying for a world cultures or any test was.
“Brilliant? I’ll sit next to you. I’m not into the whole test-regurgitation thing.”
Not into the whole test-regurgitation thing.
She pulled into the Pueblo Heights High School parking lot. It was guarded by the school mascot, a giant hornet painted on the wall of the gym. The Pueblo Heights Hornet was a snarling bully with a sailor cap pulled down palooka-style over one eye, his hornet dukes up waiting to sting all comers into the next century. Students milled around beneath our hostile hornet.
“Well,” said Didi, popping down the visor and tugging her eyelid tight so she could outline it in black pencil. “I see all the Whore-nut cliques are out in force. You’ve got your skate punks in their traditional place, east side of the gym, all properly scabbed and stoned, recounting face plants and road rashes for their skuts.”
As Didi moved on to the lower lids, I checked out the skate punks in their black knit caps and giant shorts that hung off their butts and below their knees. Skuts, I guessed, were skate sluts, the girls in spiky pigtails, striped tube socks, and shredded camou cutoffs who revolved around the punks, pretending to care about skateboarding.
“Next farther out, the gamers.”
This was an all-male group that didn’t really have any uniform fashion look other than pasty skin and slumped shoulders. All they cared about was what level they’d gotten to on Doom and what the new cheats were for Quake.
“And even sadder and more pathetic, our Goth friends, who all, somehow, have the exact same desire to express their really intense individuality through dyed black hair, creepy flowing black clothes, blue lipstick, devil horn implants, and goat’s-eye contact lenses.”
The Goth kids congregated the farthest of any group from the bellicose bee. They seemed nervous and, Didi was right, sad.
“But the scariest of all the groups? The Abercrombies.” She pointed her eyeliner toward the clique who occupied the area directly in front of the hornet as if by divine right. They looked like they belonged front center—cheerleaders, football players. All the popular kids, the ones who could afford to buy stuff from Abercrombie & Fitch.
“Ew, backward caps? Cargo pants and fleece?” Didi pretended to shudder in horror. “Give me a Goth anytime over those Whore-nuts.”
I snuggled more deeply into the white leather. The Mustang had come to feel like a cave to me with us on the inside, all snug and dry, and everyone else on the outside being drenched in the downpour of Didi’s caustic comments. I noticed that, for the first time, the knot that had tied in my stomach when we left Houdek, then tightened when Daddy got sick, had loosened so much that I could actually take a full breath. I took one, then another, marveling in the simple pleasure of breathing. I never wanted Didi to stop talking about everyone who wasn’t us. I never wanted to leave the Skankmobile.
“Hey,” she said. “I just thought of something. How are you in math?”
“Sort of, well, brilliant?”
The bells on the rings Didi wore tinkled as she slapped her hands together like she was praying. “Thank you, Jesus!” Then to me, “You are so what the doctor ordered. Depew would just stroke out if I actually turned in an assignment.” She reached back, fished an algebra book from the pile scattered on the floor, and opened it to the homework assignment she hadn’t done.
“Cool beans, factoring polynomials! I haven’t gotten to do that for years.” The words, unbelievable in their dorkiness, popped out before I could stop them.
“Hey, knock yourself out.”
While Didi worked on her hair, getting the lime popsicle tips to stick up in a cunning way, I zipped through her assignment. Dorky as it was, it was true, I did love factoring polynomials. We both finished a few minutes later. Didi snapped the visor back up, tipped her head back, squeezed one drop of Visine into each eye, and turned to me. “So, how do I look?” She didn’t look like anyone else under the hornet.
She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever known before. The word whispered out of me before I could worry about how dorky I would sound. “Beautiful.”
Didi smiled. It was the right answer.
Chapter Five
After that first morning, Didi showed up at my carport every school morning. It was my own personal miracle. At school, I took over all note-taking in the classes we had together like world cultures and English, advanced placement classes that Didi could have aced if she’d wanted to. But she didn’t want to. Instead, I fed her answers when she got called on and sat next to her during tests so she could copy off of me. We even developed a vast language of hand signals for me to use to flash her test answers. In spite of the fact that she was naturally better in world cultures and English than I was and it would have taken less time and work for her to actually study, she insisted on cheating. After school, we went to her house, where I did her homework in the classes we didn’t have together, like science and her slow-boat math.
I loved our division of labor, the fact that I did all the labor. It helped me and everyone else understand why Deeds Steinberg would be friends with C
yndi Rae Hrncir. While I worked, Didi jumped on the Net to research the only subjects she was truly interested in: bands, astrology, and weirdo diets. She would always fire up a joint. She said it helped her concentrate.
A couple of times in those first weeks, Didi got me to take a few hits. Maybe it kept “consensual reality at bay” for her, not for me. When I smoked all I thought about was my dad waiting to get on the lung transplant list. Mom had started telling me to be thankful that I’d had him for as long as I had and to stop always thinking of myself. I had my whole life ahead of me plus I was lucky and had inherited Daddy’s steady nerves. What did she have, she asked me?
I tried not to make things any harder on her than they already were. Mostly, I made myself not think about what was happening to Daddy and that had been impossible the few times I’d smoked. Then his face would bob up in my mind like a balloon that I couldn’t press down, swollen from all the steroids he took to fight off infections.
Numbers, though—numbers took me away. At night when I lay in bed trying to go to sleep, the only thing that could block the sound of the ventilator pushing air into my father’s ruined lungs was numbers. I’d hoard the extra-credit problems from my AP calculus class to work at night. I’d start trying to figure out what the area underneath a soccer ball would be if it followed a path defined by the curve y = 20 sin x over 2 yards and a vast calm would flood me.
The one good thing about Daddy getting sick was that he absorbed all Mom’s attention and she didn’t have any left over to scrutinize my new friend. If she had, Mom would have forbidden me from ever seeing Didi again.
Every morning, though, the miracle of Didi pulling the Skankmobile into our driveway repeated itself and I would jump in, devouring air, avid for the first real breath I’d been able to inhale since Didi had dropped me off the night before. Maybe it was sympathy, my breathing problems. Like when my uncle Anton gained fifty pounds when Aunt Geneva got pregnant. Because Daddy’s lungs were getting worse. Pretty soon he had an oxygen line clamped to his nose all the time and hardly ever got out of bed.
