“He knew just by looking at me that I was a polyg.”
“So?” She shrugs. “You’re not one anymore.”
It’s not just the clothes we wear. Our people have a certain look, a similarity—which only makes sense, seeing as we’re all pretty much related. “He says he doesn’t care, because he has his own shit to deal with.”
“It’s not just in Unity that families have issues. He’s probably impressed that you’ve escaped your past. Maybe he’d like to run away from his family too.”
I think about that. Maybe. I turn off the TV and go outside to pull weeds from my vegetable garden. The combination of fresh air, the warm soil and the feel of a plump, ripe tomato resting in the palm of my hand soothes my jangled nerves.
The back door bangs shut, and Jimmy leaps from the top stair down to the yard in one bound. “Meet any girls?” he asks, scooping up a basketball and taking a long shot. The ball hits the rim and bounces away.
I place the vegetables I’ve gathered on the picnic table and snag the ball out of the air after his next shot. “Not yet, but I met a Wolf.”
He gives me a surprised look. “Well, that sounds promising!”
“Anyone sitting here?”
Wolf is eating alone at the corner table again. “Doesn’t look like it,” he says and turns the page of his book.
I sit down and unwrap my lunch.
He shows me the cover of his book. A Feast for Crows. “Have you read it?”
I shake my head.
“Have you read the first books in the series?”
“I don’t read much.”
He looks surprised, but then he gets it. He remembers where I’m from. “You should—they based a season of Game of Thrones on this book. It’s the fourth in a series. All the books are awesome.”
I nod, but there’s not a chance. I’m never going to be able to keep up with the reading for my classes as it is.
A girl suddenly plunks herself down next to Wolf. “Hi,” she says and smiles at both of us. The braces on her teeth glint.
We just gaze back at her. Her long brown hair is pulled into a loose knot on the top of her head. She’s wearing ripped shorts, a turquoise blouse and sneakers. Hoop earrings dangle from her earlobes. She has a pretty face, but I’ve yet to get used to the fashion of these girls.
She turns. “Is your name really Wolf?”
Wolf nods.
There’s an eruption of giggles at the next table. A bunch of girls are watching us, hands over their mouths as they try to conceal their laughter.
“They dared me to come and sit with you guys,” the girl admits.
“Well, aren’t you the brave one, sitting with a Wolf,” Wolf says loudly so the girls at the next table can hear.
That sets them off again. I take a closer look. Probably ninth grade. Lots of makeup, short shorts and wispy blouses.
“You guys want to hang out?” the girl asks.
Wolf looks at me. I just shrug.
“We’re going to shoot some hoops,” Wolf says, giving me a nod that says just go along with it. “Do you think your friends would like to have a little pickup game?”
She looks over at them. They glance at each other, hoping someone else will make a decision.
“Okay, it’s decided then,” Wolf says. “Let’s go find us a ball.”
Wolf and I lead the pack of giggling girls down the hall to the gym, where we sign out a basketball. A couple more girls have joined our group by the time we reach the outside court. Wolf divides us into two teams, him on one, me on the other. The girls are divided according to hair color. The fairest three are on my team, and the darker-haired ones on his. He throws me the ball, and I dribble it toward a hoop. I look for a girl to pass it to, but they are all hanging back, so I shoot the ball and it drops into the basket. The fair girls cheer. Wolf grabs the ball and dribbles it the other way. He teases the girls, dribbling circles around them and not-so-accidentally bumping into them, which sets off peals of laughter. I can’t help but smile at his strategy. He shoots and also scores.
Slowly the girls get into the game. I can’t bring myself to purposely bump into any of them the way Wolf does, but one pushes up against me as I wait to receive a pass. Once I have the ball, I hold it over my head, looking for someone to throw it to. The girl leaps against me, over and over, trying to knock the ball out of my hands. I’m way taller than her, and she doesn’t come anywhere close to the ball, but her body repeatedly brushes against mine. It seems no one has taught these girls that body checking is not allowed in basketball. Wolf grins at me.
When the bell rings, Wolf snatches the ball from one of the girls and dribbles it back toward the gym. Crystal, the girl who first joined our table at lunch, walks with me into the school.
“Are you in eleventh grade with Wolf?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“You look older.”
I don’t answer, but my heart sinks. For a short time I felt like I was fitting in.
“Well, see you around,” she says and jogs off to class.
I wait for Wolf, and he gives me a high five. “So now you’ve met some girls,” he says. “School life is about to improve.”
Lunch hours with Wolf and the girls are a nice distraction from failed quizzes, well-meaning teachers who want to help but can’t and a growing pile of work that I do not understand. By the end of the third week of September, my worry about catching up has mushroomed into full-on despair. I try to be invisible. I sit in the back of each class, but I know that even though I dress like the rest of them, I still stand out, being a full two years older and a head taller. The teachers ramble on about scientific studies and theories, numerical analysis and the significance of historical events. I often feel like I’ve been dropped into a classroom in a foreign country where I don’t know the language or even how I got there. As I predicted, the home computer hasn’t been any help either.
I’m back in biology class on a Friday afternoon late in September. The teacher has asked us to find a partner and quiz each other on the parts of the respiratory system. Wolf pulls his desk up next to mine.
“I’ll quiz you first,” he says. He reads from the textbook. “What is the nasal cavity, and what does it do?”
“The nose. And it takes in air.”
“Good. The epiglottis?”
I shake my head. I read the chapter last night, but none of the words registered in my brain.
“It’s the flap that prevents food from falling into your trachea,” Wolf says.
I have no idea what a trachea is.
“How about the glottis? Same word as epiglottis without the epi part.”
I stare at the floor.
“Opening between the vocal cords,” he says. I feel his eyes on me for a moment and then he hands me the textbook. “You quiz me.”
I find the list of respiratory parts and sound them out as best as I can.
“The pah-har-x.”
“The pharynx,” he corrects. “Food and air pass through the pharynx before reaching their destinations. The pharynx also plays a role in speech.”
“Why do we even need to know this shit?”
“Just because,” he says. “Continue.”
“The lar-y-nix.”
“Larynx. It’s essential for speech.”
“Bron-chi.”
“Bron-kai. The bronchi branch from the trachea into each lung and create the network of passages that supply the lungs with air.”
“You know this stuff already.” I hand the book back to him.
He shrugs. “I’m good at memorizing.”
The only stuff I’ve ever had to memorize was Scripture, and I wasn’t any good at that either. Maybe if it had made some sense…
“Do you want me to help you with this?” he asks.
A flush of anger burns in my gut. How is it he can memorize these facts when I can’t? They just get jumbled together in my brain, along with all the material from my other classes. Respiratory-system terms
get mixed up with chemistry terms. Math concepts tangle with physics ones. No wonder Selig dropped out.
“There’s no point,” I tell him. “I can’t do it.”
“You’re going to have to. It’s the only way to pass.”
I reach over, take the textbook from him and snap it shut.
He just shrugs again. “Let me know if you change your mind.” The legs of his desk scrape the floor as he returns it to its proper place in the row.
All around the room everyone is working in pairs, heads bowed to study the diagram in the book. Back in Unity, these kids would be out working, the boys mostly in construction and the girls helping their mothers with household chores, and waiting to hear who the Prophet would assign them to in marriage.
What am I doing here? I grab my backpack and stomp across the classroom and out the door. No one tries to stop me. I walk straight to the school office and down the hall to Mrs. Kennedy’s room. She’s sitting at her desk and looks up, startled, when I step in.
“Oh, Jon! What is it?”
“I can’t do it.” I start pulling the textbooks out of my backpack and pile them on her desk.
“But Jon, it’s only been three weeks. You haven’t given school a chance.”
“Oh yes I have. I’ve learned that I’m stupid. Algebra makes no sense at all. I can’t read or write well enough to get through English. I’m done.” I place the final textbook on her desk with a bang before turning to leave.
“Jon. Stop!”
Following orders. That’s something I know how to do. It’s ingrained in me. I stop walking, but I don’t turn around.
Mrs. Kennedy gets up and closes her office door. “Have a seat,” she says, and instead of returning to the other side of her desk she pulls a second chair up to face the one I first sat in three months ago. We both sit down. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“Nothing’s happening except there’s too much to learn.”
“Are you making friends?”
“Sort of. One.” I don’t think the girls qualify as friends. They’re more like amusements, and their behavior makes me a little uncomfortable. With the exception of Taviana, I’m not used to such assertive girls.
The room goes quiet for a moment. I feel the need to fill the silence. “I can’t do it. I appreciate your trying to help, but it’s no good. I’m quitting.”
“Jon,” she says quietly. “This has nothing to do with being stupid or smart. You have simply not been given the building blocks that new information depends on. If you had been taught more than Scripture in the early grades, you’d have a solid base now, the foundation to learn more.”
I know about solid bases. From building houses. “Well, I don’t have the right foundation, so there’s no point talking about it.”
We sit quietly for another moment.
“Did you feel stupid when you studied with Craig this summer?” Mrs. Kennedy asks.
I shake my head. Craig had a way of making new information interesting, even exciting. He told me about things I never knew existed, like dinosaurs and prehistoric humans. He showed me pictures of amazing things—an astronaut walking on the moon—and he opened my mind to possibilities in medicine. What he didn’t do was catch me up on high school math and science.
“What you need, Jon, is an individualized learning program.” She sighs. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the funding to support that.”
“I don’t need any more schooling to build houses.”
“I want you to reach your potential. And you need an education to do that.”
Her kindness is making things even harder. I stare out the window at a tree in the distance and will the tears away. It doesn’t work. I swipe at my eyes, grab my almost-empty pack and head out the door.
PART
TWO
Eleven
Charlie tosses me a beer, and I snag it out of the air. I shouldn’t have another one. I’ve already had a few and have to work in the morning, but I’m the only one here who has to get up early, so it’s not like I’m going to get any sleep anyway. The couch is my bed, and it’s groaning under the weight of the people crowded on it. Now I know why this place is called a butt hut.
I crack the tab and take a long swig. It didn’t take me long to figure out that beer numbs everything. Shots of tequila work even better, but after spending a morning puking my guts out behind a job site, I’ve learned to refrain from the hard stuff on work nights.
Selig and Brent are sitting on the floor in front of the TV, playing video games. I’m on the couch watching, my arm around Belle. She’s snuggled in deep. Pot always makes her mellow. I hope she’s planning to stay all night on this couch with me.
The boys have strung Christmas lights around the apartment, and a little plastic tree hunches forlornly in one corner, but no one ever remembers to plug in the lights. I have no clue what Belle means when she calls it a Charlie Brown tree, and I’ve quit asking people to explain these references. It just reminds them that I’m still a Unity newbie.
I look around the room at the faces of the other Lost Boys and their stoned girlfriends. I’d felt like such a failure when I first crashed here. Just another loser polyg. It was going to be a short stay. I was going to prove everyone wrong—that I could make it on my own, without a high school diploma—but these guys have become family, the same way Matthew, Jimmy and Taviana were family at Abigail’s. Family is everything, especially when you no longer have anything else to believe in. Unlike Arnold—the “part-time Indian” from the novel who learned he belonged in both his worlds—we don’t belong in either Unity or Springdale. But we have each other. Besides, construction work slows down when the winter weather hits. Work is sporadic, and my savings are nearly gone. I can’t afford to live anywhere else.
“You look like hell,” Jimmy says. He still picks me up on the days when Alex has work for both of us.
“Thanks.”
He shakes his head. “You don’t smell very good either.”
I ignore him. “Could you pull into the drive-through? I haven’t had any breakfast.” I didn’t have any dinner last night either, but I don’t bother mentioning that.
I look down at Jimmy’s lunch bag sitting on the bench seat between us.
“Yeah,” he says, before I can ask. “I packed you a sandwich.”
“Thanks.”
“And Taviana says to say hi. She still wants to connect with you.”
“I know. Tell her I’ll be in touch.” I’ve been saying that for two months. “Anything new?” I ask.
“Yeah. I got accepted into Highrock Community College. I start in January.”
“Cool,” I say, trying to sound happy for him, but a stab of jealousy makes my gut clench. Jimmy is one of the few polygs who managed to get through school. “Still want to be a social worker?”
“Maybe. I’ll see where it takes me.”
I think back to the conversation we had six months ago. It feels more like ten years ago. I was a different person then. So hopeful. So friggin’ naïve.
Jimmy pulls into the fast-food chain’s drive-through. “The usual?” he asks.
I nod and wait while Jimmy orders. We drive to the takeout window, and the girl leans over so she can see me in the passenger seat. Her boobs spill out of her uniform. “Hi, Jon,” she says.
“Hey, Olivia.”
Jimmy gives me a look and then hands her a ten-dollar bill. She passes him the bag of food and change. I wave as we pull away and then open the bag. “Thanks,” I mumble.
“You’re welcome. Who was that?”
“Just a girl.”
Jimmy waits for more, but I don’t offer any. The truth is, she’s one of Charlie’s customers and hangs out at the apartment sometimes.
“I won’t be able to spring for your food any longer,” Jimmy says. “I’ll be in school the rest of the winter. I won’t be able to work again until after the spring term. I need to save everything I’ve got.”
“You won’t be working anymo
re?”
“Can’t,” he says. “I’ll be at school every day.”
My mind is fuzzy this morning, but not so fuzzy that I don’t hear a little alarm bell go off. Without Jimmy to drive me, it’ll be a lot more trouble, almost impossible, to get to some job sites.
“Hello, boys,” Alex says when we arrive at the home where we’ll be working on a bathroom renovation. It’s a fortress of a house, high on the hill overlooking Springdale.
“Hey,” I say, but I don’t meet his eyes.
“Did you get a good sleep last night, Jon?” he asks.
“Sure did,” I answer. He was on my case about my work on our last job, calling it shoddy. I’d apologized with the excuse that I was tired.
Which I was.
We get our instructions from Alex. I try to stay focused as I measure and cut, but it’s hard. Belle did stay over last night, and we had a mind-blowing couple of hours alone on the couch. The hangover is the price paid—and well worth it.
I remember the day Alex told me I still had a job with him. There’d been a big scene at Abigail’s when I told them I’d quit school. They each pleaded with me to give it another chance, but I knew it was hopeless. Abigail didn’t have to ask me to go. She simply went into the backyard while I packed up my few things. Jimmy, Matthew and Taviana stood at the door and watched me leave after Alex told me that he’d still see me at work. His eyes were glassy too. I’m glad they couldn’t see the tears streaming down my face as I walked away.
It wasn’t hard to find Selig. He was still working at the restaurant, and Brent and Charlie were willing to take me in too, even though their apartment is a steady stream of people crashing for a few nights or a few weeks. It’s a rare night that there’s no one else sleeping in the living room, so I had to make the most of having it to myself last night. Just me and Belle.
I poke around the enormous kitchen while Jimmy finishes his sandwiches at the table. Music blasts through his iPod. Alex has gone off to supervise on another job site, and the owners of this home are at work. It’s nice when it’s just the two of us on a project. We don’t have to compromise about what music to listen to or when to take our breaks.
Lost Boy Page 10
