“Bullshit!” I say, then quickly, “Sorry, I just mean—”
She interrupts, “Stop calling me. Don’t call me anymore!” Then she hangs up.
I feel totally numb, but at least it’s a feeling that I recognize.
At my dad’s funeral, Uncle Terry, Mom’s brother, spoke about my dad. He said lots of nice things, stuff about how funny my dad was and how good a guy he was and how much he loved all of us and the Seattle Mariners. Uncle Terry said lots of great things about Dad, in spite of how Dad had killed himself, and gave Dad lots of compliments. But as Uncle Terry talked and as people all around us were crying and blowing their noses and trying to avoid looking over at Mom and me, I started to feel more and more numb, like novocaine was pumping through my whole body.
I feel that again now, thinking about Becka.
SEVENTEEN
I’m trying to explain to Don about what happened. “She said not to call her.”
“Don’t, then,” Don says.
“Not at all?” I ask.
He stops looking at the oil dipstick he’s checking and glances over at me. “Which part of ‘don’t call’ didn’t you get?”
I feel my ears turn red with anger.
Don notices and quickly adds, “Shit, Jordan, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be mean. But people have to get over stuff in their own ways—and a real friend accepts that and gives a person space. After all, it sounds like you got mad at her for not giving you space, right? Now it’s your turn.”
I nod. What he says makes sense; I mean of course it makes sense. Still, I’d hoped that Don would say, “Call her anyway.”
He asks, “This girl means a lot to you, right? I mean, you do care about her, don’t you?”
I nod again. I haven’t told Don what Becka and I fought about; I haven’t told him what I did, or how horrible it was for me to think about my dad again. I haven’t told anybody that. But my feelings remind me of how it felt after Dad died, that weird, horrible numbness. I don’t want to go back there again. I don’t know what to do.
Don interrupts my thoughts. “Do what she asks, Jordan; don’t call her. She knows your phone number, and she’ll call you when she’s ready.”
I say, “Okay.”
But I don’t mention that I feel like I felt in those days after I lost my dad, during the worst time of my whole life. I don’t mention that I’d almost rather die myself than feel this numb again!
I don’t tell Wally what Becka and I fought about either—he wouldn’t understand it anyway.
But his brilliant suggestions are typically amazing, a little less than helpful.
He asks, “So she’s super-vulnerable right now?”
“I guess.”
“She must be all broken up.”
“Yeah, maybe a little bit.”
Without missing a beat, Wally says, “Be sure and take a condom along to go comfort her.”
“What?”
“You know, just in case.”
“Jesus, Wal, you’re an ass. I’m not sure when or even if I’ll ever hear from her again.”
“All the more reason to be prepared,” Wally insists. “Make-up sex, buddy; this might be your best and last chance.”
“Wally, does the phrase ‘sociopathic dickhead’ have any meaning to you?”
He laughs. “Hey, I’m not the guy who lied his head off to the love of his life while stealing his mom’s boyfriend’s car.”
One of Wally’s most annoying traits is his tendency to sometimes be right.
Truthfully, Mom is the most helpful.
I explain, “She was asking about Dad, about stuff I didn’t want to talk about.”
Mom nods that she understands and then says, “I know how hard that is for you, sweetie. It’s hard for me, too.”
“You didn’t see him like I—” I stop myself.
But Mom finishes my sentence for me. “You’re right, Jordan, I didn’t see your dad right after he died—I didn’t go through what you did. You were incredibly brave that day, trying to help him.”
I’m starting to feel crummy again, even talking this much about it. My hands are shaking a little bit. Mom notices and stops talking.
After a few seconds, she says, real softly, “I know that my seeing Don has brought a lot of stuff back up for us.”
I say, “I like Don.”
“I know you do, honey. You can like him, and it can still be hard. Let’s face it; we’ve spent the last three years in survival mode, nothing more than that. I see it all the time at the hospital—people curling up and making every breath count, just hanging on and fighting for their lives—in a lot of ways, that’s what we’ve had to do.”
“I guess,” I say, but I’m thinking about Becka and me, wondering why this had to happen now, when things were finally starting to get good.
Again, Mom kind of reads my mind. “When you push things down inside yourself, try to ignore pain, it never really disappears—it just hides out and waits, then it comes up again.”
I kind of get what Mom’s saying; I know because I felt the same way, when I argued with Becka, that I used to feel anytime I thought about Dad killing himself, the same fear and anger followed by going all numb and stupid.
Mom says, real gentle like, “Do you think that maybe this fight with Becka is a way for you to start dealing with some of this?”
“Yeah,” I say, but then I get up to leave the room. “Yeah, maybe.”
I can’t talk about this anymore; even though I get what Mom’s saying, I just can’t do this now. Not yet.
Mom says, “Whenever you want to talk, Jordan, you know that I’m here, right?”
I nod.
EIGHTEEN
Wally is at my house after school hanging out. I still haven’t heard from Becka. But Wally is good at collecting school gossip.
He says, “I guess she’s having a hard time—she must have really liked you or something.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask.
“Yeah, she goes home every day and just hangs out with her brothers and sisters … they’ve got like ten kids in their family.”
“Five.”
“I heard ten.”
“You heard wrong—I went out with her. She’s got two brothers, Billy and Brian, and two sisters.”
Wally says, “The youngest kid is all messed up.”
I say, “The youngest is Lori and she’s got Down syndrome. She’s not messed up.”
“What would you call it?” Wally asks.
He really isn’t an asshole; he just acts like one sometimes.
I try to find the right words. “Developmentally … handicapped or delayed … something. I don’t know, but messed up isn’t right.”
“Okay,” Wally says. “Anyway, I guess Becka’s taking your breakup pretty hard.”
I feel myself getting pissed, not at Wally really, but just pissed off generally. “You think she’s messed up,” I snap at him. “What about me? She just wanted to talk about stuff that I don’t talk about. She thinks like a regular person, but you don’t lose a parent and have things be the same—it changes everything. How do you talk about that? How do you explain something like that?”
“Yeah,” Wally agrees—like he’d know. His parents are still together, with Wally and his sister, Claire, who is twelve. How the hell could Wally understand what I’ve gone through? I almost say something but bite my tongue. It isn’t Wally’s fault, any more than Becka’s, that the world is such a crappy, unfair place.
Suddenly, out of the blue, I ask, “You wanna go for a ride in the ’Vette?”
He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Do I want to become an accomplice to grand theft auto? Gee, tempting … but … no, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” I say.
Wally asks, “How many times do you think you can pull off that shit before you get busted?”
I answer, real smart-ass, “You didn’t fill out an app.”
“What?”
“When my old man died, you never appl
ied for the vacant position.”
“I’m not trying to be your dad. I’m just—”
I interrupt. “You’re just saying the same worthless shit that he’d say to me.”
Amazingly, for the first time I can remember it ever happening, something I’ve said actually shuts Wally up. I get quiet too. Although neither of us says it out loud, we both know that it’s time to change the subject.
We eat some junk food and play video games for an hour or so, but the truth is I can hardly wait for him to leave so that I can go get the ’Vette. Becka may have dumped me. Wally may not have a clue. But when I’m behind the wheel of the Stingray, nothing seems to hurt anymore—everything feels okay.
NINETEEN
Almost two weeks have passed since Becka and I broke up. I haven’t tried to call her again, and she sure hasn’t called me.
Wally says, “You blew it, buddy.”
“How did I blow it?”
“You shoulda nailed her when you had the chance.”
“When did I ever have a chance?”
“Yeah,” Wally admits, “I suppose. But you were so close—we both were.”
Wally is watching his one chance to move from Invisibility Street in Loser Land to the swanky neighborhood of Big Shot Boulevard in Cheerleader Heaven disappear.
“Sorry, Wal.”
“Yeah,” he says, and pauses. “At least now you can stop stealing Don’s car.”
I don’t say anything.
What I’m not saying to Wally, what I’m not saying to anybody, is that somewhere between Becka and the Corvette I stopped feeling numb, stopped wanting to hide out and just be invisible. Yeah, my dad is dead and that’s messed up. But there’s more to life than being a goddamned frozen, freakin’ zombie. Somewhere, somehow, and some way, I’ve thawed out. And now it’s like I’m starving for everything I’ve missed these last three years.
Becka has been a part of this, but she’s gone now—which leaves me just one lady: the one with the NOS sticker on her ass.
I’d decided not to take the ’Vette again unless I absolutely had to, but losing Becka has made me feel so bad that I’ve been worried that I’ll get stupid again. I have barely talked to anybody for the last few days, right up till about five seconds ago, when I heard Adam Scott bragging about his classic GTO.
“I can kick anybody’s ass in this town,” Adam says to a few starstruck freshmen in the cafeteria at school.
I laugh, and he hears me.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“That’s what you drive, right … nothing?”
The freshmen laugh, too.
“I’ve got a ride.”
“Yeah, right,” Adam snarls.
Adam isn’t a tough guy, at least not a fighter or bully. He is a motorhead, and his red 1965 “goat” is beautiful and, within the world of our school, a legendary car.
But I can’t let the freshmen laugh at me, so I say, “I borrow a friend’s ’Vette once in a while.”
“Bullshit!” Adam says. “What kind of ’Vette? What year?”
“A ’76 Stingray.”
Adam laughs, “A ’76, huh? A gutless wonder? What’s that pull, a hundred and eighty horses?”
He’s right about factory horsepower for ’Vettes in ’76. From the showroom, with their original crappy catalytic converters, Stingrays were rated at 180. But in Don’s car, with her rebuilt engine, her tweaked exhaust system, not to mention the nitrous package, we can crank 380 hp.
Before I can explain that to Adam, he laughs again. “Even if you did have a seventy-six ’Vette, it doesn’t belong in this conversation.”
“It’d beat your goat,” I say, having no idea if this is even close to true but feeling too defensive of the Stingray to let Adam talk about her in that way.
“Right!” Adam says, and laughs. “Name the time and place.”
I should hesitate; at least, I should think it over, but instead I hear myself blurt out, “The stadium, tonight, six o’clock.” Thank God it’s a Wednesday!
Adam looks me straight in the eyes and says, as serious as a heart attack, “You got it.”
The freshmen are impressed, but then again, they’re only frosh.
For the rest of the afternoon at school, among the motorhead population especially but a lot of other kids, too, the race is the big news of the day. “The stadium” is Joe Albi, on the northwest side of town, only a few miles from my neighborhood. Kids have drag raced there for years. The huge parking lot surrounding the stadium has half a dozen long, straight stretches of blacktop, some of it crumbling and cruddy but most of it fairly smooth. Every kid in town knows that Albi is the place to race.
Wally catches up with me by our lockers at the end of the day. “You’re gonna race Adam Scott?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a will?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Are you crazy?” Wally smirks.
Suddenly I spot Becka leaving the building at the other end of the hallway. “Wally, shut up,” I say, and watch Becka go out the door.
Wally follows where I’m looking.
With Becka out of sight, Wally starts up again. “Listen, I know this thing with Becka is hard on you, but there’s no need to commit suicide. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Shit, man, they’ll throw your ass under the jail if you get caught.”
“How am I going to get caught? I’m careful.”
Wally laughs. “Yeah. Right. Mr. Careful!”
“Whatever,” I say.
Wally shakes his head. “Does the phrase ‘next of kin’ mean anything to you?”
I ignore his question and ask, “You gonna come watch?”
“Of course,” Wally says. “Like I said, they’ll need somebody to identify your body—it’s me or dental records.”
“Shut up!” I say again, but I start to feel a little nervous.
Still, nervous is better than numb.
I’ve known since Don explained about the nitrous booster that I’ll have to try it someday and that I’ll probably get killed doing it. Not really killed, maybe, but the thought of controlling the ’Vette with 200 extra horsepower scares me; it just doesn’t seem that there’s any safe way to do it.
I turn on the nitrous and lift the red cover over the activator switch and click it on, too. I can’t hear anything change in the sound of the car over the engine’s loud rumble, or feel anything different, but then I wouldn’t; the nitrous is filling the lines but won’t kick in until I slam the gas pedal all the way to the floor. This will happen in a few seconds—when the 1965 GTO next to me, and “my” ’Vette, get the signal to go. I can hear Adam’s big engine, 400 cubic inches and 400 horsepower, revving over and over again. He’s ready.
But so am I.
It’s six ten. We’re idling, side by side, a dozen feet apart, on the longest straight stretch of asphalt at Joe Albi Stadium. Our engines rev up over and over. The roadway runs close to an eighth of a mile long.
Adam, having noticed the small red-and-black Edelbrock NOS sticker in the back window of the ’Vette, says, “You didn’t say you had nitrous.”
It’s a fair point. “I know, sorry, I should have said something.”
Adam says, “No, it’s good. You wouldn’t have stood a chance without it. This makes it more interesting.”
“Yeah,” I say.
He also notices the larger sticker in the middle of the back window of the ’Vette, one I bought as a present for Don and insisted that he put up. Adam, reading it, says, “‘Does not play well with others,’ huh?” These are the words written over a pair of angry red eyes. I wonder if Adam can make out the smaller print below: “It seems others don’t like to lose.”
He smiles. “Doesn’t play nice, huh?”
I might be blushing, but I don’t say anything.
Adam says, “You ready?”
I nod; my throat feels too tight to talk.
It’s like a hot-rod movie. A g
irl from school stands between us, right in front. I don’t like her being there; what if one of us gets sideways and hits her? But this is the way it’s done.
She raises her arm over her head and raises one finger, another, and as she raises a third finger, she drops her arm.
Scared that I might hit her, I don’t floor it right away. Adam does; his goat is a four-speed manual, and he pops his clutch. My slower start doesn’t hurt me too much, as Adam’s rear wheels break loose and smoke pours off of them. We’re past the starter girl in only half a second, and then I floor the ’Vette, too. Adam’s tires grab in the same moment as my nitrous kicks in.
The rush from the nitrous is amazing. The ’Vette’s always felt fast, always been fast, but it seems a hundred times faster now. My head slams back against the headrest and is stuck there; I can’t pull it forward if I want to. The torque makes my eyes water. The vibration in the steering wheel is stronger than I’ve ever felt it before. The front wheels lift up off the ground as the car feels ready to explode. Instead she flat-out flies.
Adam’s GTO is right next to me. I may have inched ahead of him slightly, but I can’t tell for sure. The nose of the Stingray protrudes so far out that it’s impossible to tell where I am in comparison to the goat. Glancing over, I see that Adam and I are right next to each other. There’s hardly any back and forth as our cars charge forward with incredible power. In a matter of only seconds, we’re running out of room. I back off.
Adam lets up a moment later. We slow down together.
The crowd of kids watching is standing back at the starting line, and I can hear them cheering as Adam pulls up next to me and stops.
He rolls his window down, and I lower my passenger window so that I can hear what he’s saying.
“Good run, Jordan, I think you got me.”
I say, “Thanks, but I don’t know, I’d call it pretty even.”
Adam smiles and says, “I can live with that. Shit, that NOS really kicks, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Gonna have to get me some of that,” Adam says.
I say, “Well, don’t look for me out here if you’re running nitrous on top of four hundred horsepower.”
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