What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  Miney is the anti-me. She won numerous Senior Superlatives last year: Most Popular, Most Attractive, Most Likely to Succeed. I do not anticipate winning any. Though I guess Miney and I have one thing in common: Miney is also an example that correlation does not imply causation. She is popular but not a bitch. Unfortunately she has also led me to question the entire field of genetics, since we share fifty percent of our DNA.

  My parents have been married for twenty-two years and they are still in love. This is statistically remarkable.

  My mom says: “Opposites attract.”

  My dad says: “I just got seriously lucky.”

  Miney says: “Mom is a closet weirdo, and dad is a closet normal, and that’s why they work.”

  I haven’t put much thought into their marriage, but I like that my parents are still together. I wouldn’t want to have to pack a bag every other weekend and sleep in some strange apartment and have to brush my teeth in a different sink. My mom claims my dad and I are a lot alike, which gives me cause for optimism. If he could get someone like my mother to love him—someone who is universally acknowledged to be all kinds of awesome—and not just love him but love him enough to spend the rest of her life with him, then maybe there is hope for me too.

  Halfway through class, when Mr. Schmidt starts writing equations on the smart board, Kit stands up and walks out. No explanation. No asking for a bathroom pass. No excuses. She just leaves.

  After the door closes behind her, the whispering starts.

  Justin: That was badass.

  Annie: She, like, needs to talk to us. She’s totally shutting us out.

  Violet: Her dad DIED, Annie. As in dead, dead forever. Cut her some slack.

  Gabriel: I’m hungry.

  Annie: I have a PowerBar.

  Gabriel: You literally just saved my life.

  This is how it goes. Conversation swirls around me, and the words all feel disconnected, like playing pinball blindfolded. What does Kit’s dad dying have to do with Gabriel being hungry?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, moving on,” Mr. Schmidt says, and then claps three times—clap, clap, clap—for no discernible reason. Before I realize what I’m doing, my hand is in the air. “Yes, Mr. Drucker?”

  “Can I be excused?” I ask.

  “Excused? This is a classroom, not the dinner table. Let’s get back to work.”

  “I meant can I go to the nurse? I have a migraine,” I say, though this is a lie. Miney would be proud. She says I need to practice not telling the truth. That lying gets easier the more you do it. I consider making a moaning noise, as if I am in pain, but decide that would be overkill.

  “Fine. Go,” Mr. Schmidt says, and so I stand up and walk out the door, just like Kit did a few moments before. It’s not like I’m going to miss anything here. I read the textbook last summer. The few questions it raised for me were answered with a couple of Google searches and expounded upon by a free online Stanford class.

  Once I’m in the quiet hallway, my brain catches up with my body and I understand what I’m doing here. Although Mr. Schmidt’s class is boring and a complete waste of my time, I usually obey instructions. I sit through my classes. Mostly keep my mouth shut. Unless I want to bypass high school and get a GED, I don’t have much choice in the matter.

  What I realize is: I want to find Kit. I need to know where she’s going.

  I jog down the hall and decide to head out the front door, ignoring Señora Rubenstein, the Spanish teacher, calling out to me in her heavy New Jersey accent: “Adónde vas, Señor Drucker?”

  I scan the parking lot to my right, which is about six hundred feet northeast of the school’s entrance. No Kit. But her red Corolla, which is parked like always in the second row, six cars back, space number forty-three of the upperclassmen’s lot, is still here.

  I walk around the school to the football field, which has high bleachers and a decent view of Mapleview. Maybe she’s sitting up there to get some fresh air. I don’t like sporting events—too noisy and crowded—but I’ve always liked bleachers, things ordered vertically from high to low.

  “Did Mr. Schmidt send you?” Kit asks. She’s not in the bleachers, which is where I was looking, but in the concession hut. This is where kids from student government sell hot dogs and lemonade and candy at football games at inflated prices. The lights are off, and she’s sitting on the dirty floor with her knees pulled into her chest. If she hadn’t spoken, I don’t know if I would have noticed her.

  “No. I lied to him and said I had a migraine,” I say, and force myself to make eye contact. It’s easier than usual, since it’s dark in there. Kit’s cheeks are red from the cold. Her eyes are green. They’ve always been green, obviously, but today they are greener somehow. My new definition of green. Green used to equal Kermit the Frog. And sometimes spring. But no more. Now Kit’s eyes equal green. An inextricable link. Like how when I think about the number three, I always, for no reason that I’ve been able to understand, also see the letter R.

  “I wasn’t trying to start a ditching trend,” Kit says, and I smile, because if it’s not exactly a joke, it is sort of related to one.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t usually follow trends,” I say, and point to my pants, which are loose-fitting and khaki-colored and, according to Miney, a “crime against fashion.” She’s been begging to take me shopping for years, claims that I could look so much better if I put in just a tiny bit of effort. But I don’t like shopping. Actually it’s not the shopping I mind so much. I don’t like the new clothes afterward. The feeling of an unfamiliar material against my skin.

  Kit looks up at me, and then over my shoulder to the school.

  “So are you following me? This isn’t the nurse’s office,” she says. I can’t make out her tone. Can’t tell if she’s annoyed. Her voice sounds scratchy and her face doesn’t match any of the expression cards Miney once printed out for me.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” I hold up my hands, a signal to say no harm, like they do on cop shows.

  “Everyone was talking about me when I left, right? I didn’t mean to make a whole thing about it. I just couldn’t sit there, suddenly,” she says.

  “Clearly,” I say. “I mean, that you couldn’t sit there. Not the making a whole thing about it.” Now that I’m here, talking to Kit, twice in one day, when we haven’t really spoken pretty much ever, except our few Notable Encounters, I realize how off schedule I find myself. None of this was part of today’s plan.

  Me following her outside.

  Me electing myself the one to check on her.

  Me suddenly redefining green.

  I’m in the concession hut and David Drucker is standing outside. The whole thing is so weird. Surely he knows that when I sat at his lunch table this afternoon I was just looking for a place to be alone. I don’t want anything from him. Or for us to suddenly be besties or something. I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I’m not usually like this. I don’t abandon my friends in the cafeteria or walk out of class in the middle of the teacher’s lecture or have any trouble lying and saying “Your ass looks awesome in those high-waisted jeans.”

  My dad’s shirt is filthy.

  This place reeks of rotting hot dogs and old gym sneakers.

  Everything is wrong.

  It’s been one month.

  I am still all wrong.

  “I wasn’t following you,” David says, his eyes darting off the walls and then, finally, landing on mine. “I mean, I was. But just because someone needed to follow you. Does that make sense?”

  “It’s okay,” I say, because he looks nervous and he makes me want to make things easier for him. “Here, help me up. I don’t want to touch the floor.”

  David comes around to the side door. He puts out his hand, and I grab it and hike myself up to standing. “This place is gross,” I say.

  “The bleachers would have been the better choice.”

  “You know what? That’s a great idea.” I sprint toward t
he field and then up the stairs, taking two at a time, and the momentum feels good, air pumped directly to my cold, dead heart. When I get to the top, I take a seat.

  I forgot how much I love being up here. I rarely miss a game, not because I care that much about football, but because I love being part of the crowd. Like there is nowhere else any of us is supposed to be except right here cheering on our team, perfect teenager clichés reporting for duty. I see David craning his neck to look up, probably deciding whether he should join me.

  “Come on!” I call to him.

  He takes the stairs more slowly than I did. Stares at the ground so as not to fall. David is one of those random people at school you don’t think about at all, but now that I’ve invited him to sit next to me here, I scramble to remember everything I know about him. That will hopefully make things slightly less uncomfortable, because honestly I’d totally pick the stomach flu over awkward.

  But the problem is, that’s the first word I think of when I think of David: awkward. I don’t know much else about him. I remember I used to go to his birthday parties, and when he turned five he had one that was space-themed. We all got these cool NASA badges (I still have mine, actually), and his parents rented a bouncy castle that looked like the moon. We were jumping and then bumping into each other, and out of nowhere he fell to the floor and started crying with his hands over his ears. We all went home early.

  What else? I’ve seen him trip about a million times, and he has this bad habit of bumping into people. Maybe it’s because he walks around with those huge headphones on and can’t hear anything, or maybe it’s because his mind is busy solving, like, global warming or something. And he’s right. He’s a terrible dresser. He looks like a missionary. Or like he has an after-school job at an electronics store at the mall.

  Now that he’s sitting up here, I quickly study his face and I realize he’s not bad-looking. Actually a step up from Justin and Gabriel, who think they are hot shit despite their matching chin acne. If David got his hair cut and let people see his bottomless dark brown eyes, he’d be seriously cute. Probably the reason I invited him to sit next to me, if I’m honest with myself, is that my dad mentioned him out of the blue just a few months ago. At the dinner table one night, my dad announced that he thought I should get to know David Drucker.

  “David Drucker was in my chair today, and I gotta tell you, that boy is interesting. He talked to me about quantum mechanics,” my father said. And I’m sure I replied with something sarcastic, like “Sounds fascinating, Dad. I’ll get right on that.”

  Do I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face? Yes, yes I do.

  “The Arthur B. Pendlock Stadium can hold up to eight hundred and four people,” David says, sitting next to me now but looking out at the field. You can make out the post office from here. The cupcake bakery. Sam’s Bagels.

  “That’s what this place is called?” I ask. “The Arthur B. Pendlock Stadium?” David nods. “I never knew that. I think I would have guessed more than eight hundred and four people. It gets pretty packed at the games.”

  “I’ve never been,” he says.

  “To a game? Really? They’re fun,” I say, though I wonder if our definitions of the word fun are the same. He shrugs. I consider asking him about quantum mechanics, but I don’t even know what quantum mechanics is. Or are? Is quantum mechanics plural?

  “Not a sports fan, I take it?” I ask somewhat inanely. I’m not sure why I’ve always assumed that the responsibility of a conversation falls on me. Half the time, I’m better off just shutting up.

  “Nope. I don’t really understand the appeal. The suspense is inherently limited. Your team is either going to win or lose through some variation of throwing and catching balls. That said, I’d rather watch than play. Why would you let yourself be tackled to the ground and risk a potential head injury? It’s confusing to me.”

  “I can see how that would be confusing,” I say, and find myself smiling.

  “I’ve considered whether some of the guys find it homoerotic, but most of them have girlfriends, so probably not.”

  I laugh.

  “I’m only half joking,” he says. He looks at me and then his eyes dart away again. “We can stop talking if you want. I assume you left class to get away from all that noise, though my assumptions usually have only a thirty percent accuracy rate.”

  “I did, actually,” I say. I can see the grocery store parking lot from up here, where my dad taught me to drive not so long ago. We went there at odd hours on weekends and even some weeknights for the three months leading up to my birthday. He was patient with me, a good teacher, only getting annoyed in the beginning, when I got confused between the gas and the brake. I passed my test on the first try, and my parents and I celebrated with sparkling apple cider in fancy champagne glasses. My dad toasted to “all the roads Kit has yet to travel.” He took a picture of me holding up my license, and then he teared up a little, because he said he was already starting to imagine what it was going to be like when I left for college, how his life would have a Kit-shaped hole.

  My dad was supposed to miss me, not the other way around. That’s how things were supposed to go.

  I don’t want to think about that.

  After a while, quiet settles between David and me, and surprisingly it’s not awkward at all. It’s actually kind of nice to sit up here, away from school and the shitstorm that awaits at home, away from the terrifying concept of one whole month. It’s nice to sit with someone and not have to think about what to say next.

  —

  I don’t go back to class. Instead I go home and spend my time lying on the couch and watching Netflix. Though I’ve been here for hours, I did not study for tomorrow’s physics quiz. I did not read fifty pages of Heart of Darkness and think about its thematic relevance to my own life (though that should have been an easy one) or start that essay for world history on migration. I also didn’t write that article about the debate team for the school newspaper even though the deadline is tomorrow by three. We’ll probably have to run a picture in its place. Clearly this is not the way to make editor in chief, which has been my goal for the past three years, but I can’t seem to motivate.

  “Egg rolls, scallion pancakes, General Tso’s. All the bad stuff,” my mom says, dropping a bulging bag of Chinese food onto the counter. She kicks off her shoes. “Does grief make your feet swell? Because these things are freaking killing me.”

  “I don’t know.” I get up and set the table for two, not the usual three. I need to stop noticing details like this.

  “How was your day? As bad as you expected?” My mom kisses me on my head and then decides I need a hug too.

  “Not really. I mean, it wasn’t good.” I don’t tell her I skipped class. No need to freak her out. “But you were right. I needed to go. Yours?”

  “I kicked ass, took names, even landed a new account. Not bad for a Monday.”

  “That’s cool,” I say, and we toast with our glasses.

  “I need to up my game on the financial front.” Wrinkles I haven’t noticed before bracket her mouth. She shouldn’t have to up her game. She already works too hard as it is. Bangs on her laptop after dinner and dashes off emails late into the night. When I was younger and brattier, I used to complain that she loved her work more than she loved me. Now that I’m older, I realize that’s not true. My mother is just one of those people you miss, even when she’s sitting right in front of you.

  “I didn’t think about the money thing,” I say, and my stomach cramps with guilt. Soon there will be my college tuition, and what about when I leave? My mom will come home every day to this big empty house. A team of three knocked down to two, and then, finally, just one. Will she sell this place? I hope not.

  “Don’t worry. No one’s going to starve. But you know what’s really stressing me out? How do I know when to change the oil in the car? Or what the name of our home insurance company is? And all our online passwords. I don’t have any of them,” m
y mom says. “Your name? Birthday? I feel completely in over my head. Work I can handle. It’s the rest—it’s real life—that’s the problem.”

  I think about how my mom doesn’t really have lots of people around to help other than me. My grandparents retired and moved back to Delhi like a million years ago. She and her parents have this complicated relationship anyway. When my mom was a kid, her parents did everything they could to make sure she assimilated into American culture—paid for her to go to a fancy-pants, mostly white private school they could barely afford, even packed PB&J in her lunch box because the other kids used to tease her that her Indian food was too stinky. The way she tells it, they raised her as an American and then were surprised and resentful when she didn’t turn out to share their old-school values. I’m pretty sure “old-school values” in this case actually means “not cool with the fact she fell in love and married a white dude,” because otherwise, she’s totally on board with the rest of their beliefs—well, except for the fact that she’s a straight-up, unapologetic carnivore and gets her hair cut and colored every six weeks. Still, we go to gurdwara in Glen Rock one Sunday a month, and my dad used to come with us sometimes, though less for a religious awakening and more for the homemade Indian food, which admittedly, now that I’m old enough to have a choice in the matter, is why I go too. At my grandmother’s request, my mom keeps in touch with all the relatives, even though they are in Delhi and Vancouver and London and distantly related and kind of a pain in the ass. And though I’m not quite fluent, my mom has taught me enough Punjabi that I can get by. My mother may be American-born, but she’s never forgotten we’re Indian too.

  Everyone pretends things are okay with my impossible-to-please grandparents—we go to visit them in Delhi every other year, though my dad always stayed behind because “he had to work.” We pretended this was true and that it had nothing to do with the fact that my grandparents didn’t approve of him. Whenever my mom talks to Bibiji on the phone, she always puts on a voice I associate with her work, the advertising-executive voice. My mom’s conversations with her parents have mostly consisted of a recitation of our small accomplishments—my grades, my mom’s landing an account, my dad getting a local business award—as if these things are part of some campaign pitch that she made the right choices. And whenever I wear a lengha or a salwar kameez for some second cousin twice removed’s birthday party, which requires three hours in the car to the middle of Pennsylvania, my mother makes sure to take a picture and email it to Bibiji immediately. See, she seems to want to say, nothing’s been lost here. I’m passing it all along.