“We should get rid of some of this stuff. Clean this place up,” said Leon.
“You think so?” said Lenny.
“We could make a nice TV room down here,” said Leon.
“Yup,” said Lenny. He didn’t bother thinking about this idea; he had heard it before and he knew it wasn’t going to happen. “I think I can climb up and roll those carpets back a little and push the dresser sideways a couple inches, turn the bikes so they’re straight. Then we only have to move the boxes in front out of the way and we can drag the washer right out.”
“Let’s give it a try,” said his dad.
Leon was strong, and Lenny was starting to get strong, too. Together they hefted the washing machine up the narrow cellar steps, one at a time.
“Does anyone still even use this kind?” asked Lenny, during a pause. It was a wringer washer, with rollers.
“I guess someone does,” said Leon. “I told him what it was, and he said he’d give me twenty bucks for it. I figured it was worth it just to get it out of here.”
They banged out through the screen door and set the heavy monster down on the stoop before the final heave and shuffle over the gravel and up onto the bed of the pickup. With a final grating screech, they shoved it toward the cab, then secured it with a complex arrangement of rope.
“Success,” said Lenny.
Through her open window, Debbie could hear their voices and all the banging, shuffling, and scraping noise, but none of it registered. She was doing homework, and she was absorbed in thought.
She didn’t know his middle name—that could be the tiebreaker. She was doing FLAME with her name and Dan Persik’s name, where you write down your names, cross off the letters that are in both, then count the letters that are left and see where it takes you on the word FLAME. For example:
DEBBIE
DAN
leaves seven letters.
FLAME
12345
67
L stands for Lovers. However,
DEBRA
DANIEL
leaves only five letters, and ? stands for Enemies. DAN PERSIK and DEBBIE PELBRY was ? for Enemies, while DANIEL PERSIK and DEBRA PELBRY was another L. The forms had to match: both just first names, both full names and so on. The other letters stood for Friends, Affectionate, and Married. So there was a pretty good chance of something good.
It was funny that they had the same initials. In fact, Dan Persik’s locker was right next to hers because of alphabetical order: Pelbry, Persik. It seemed like that could mean something. Or not. She decided to try “Deb” and “Dan.” No one called her Deb. But it was a legal nickname for Debra. She tried it.
DEB
DAN
4: M!
Not that she believed in it. She removed the page from her spiral notebook, folded it in half, put it in the desk drawer under some pencils, and whipped through some quadratic equations (she didn’t exactly get what they were for, but she could solve them). Then she described her favorite meal in three paragraphs of German while scraps of the day floated randomly in and out of her head.
The scrap that kept popping up was the one where Dan Persik said hi to her.
“Debbie Pelbry,” he had said. “Hello, there.”
He said it when she was standing in front of her open locker in her bunny-free jeans. That were the right length. But he had caught her unaware. Sometimes that was good—it meant you didn’t have time to freeze up, and you could behave like a normal person and have a natural response. And then sometimes it meant you looked startled, like a bunny at a loud noise. Like a bunny at any noise. That was sort of natural, too, in a way, and could have a certain kind of charm, she thought. She hoped.
“Oh,” she said involuntarily. Startled bunny response. Then, “Hi!” Her mind dissolving into a rosy, patchy fog that drifted to the skin on her face, leaving a vacancy in her head. Something else. She needed to say something else. What? What?
“How’s it going?”
Dan Persik said it. Just when Debbie thought of saying it, he said it, and now she needed to come up with another idea.
He said it in a friendly way. Almost flirting. He talked that way to everyone. Even so, it was pretty irresistible. What should she say back, though? Something funny. Something friendly and funny and light and also irresistible. But soon. Time was passing. Seconds, eons were slipping by.
Dan Persik had paused, looking at Debbie, waiting for her to answer. She had to say something.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s going fine.” Oh, barf.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.” He smiled at her. It was a really nice smile, and something about it made her laugh, just a little bit.
“What’s so funny?” he asked. With curiosity.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing.” She really didn’t know, but a couple of times during the day they passed in the hall, and he looked at her and said, “What’s so funny?” Each time, she smiled involuntarily, blushed, and said, “Nothing. Nothing is funny.”
It wasn’t much, she knew that. But it felt like something to her. She couldn’t help thinking about it, about Dan Persik and his smile. As she read her science assignment, the brief exchange took on the proportions of a TV miniseries, appearing in a variety of settings and situations.
“What’s so funny?” he would say to her, with his irresistible, curious, interested smile as they walked down the hall together at school. As they sat on their beach towels on the grass at the pool at Bouquet Park. As they wandered through the golden green fields of the brief Siberian summer. (As in the old version of Dr. Zhivago, recently on TV.)
“I don’t know,” she would say, smiling enigmatically. “Nothing.” Pushing a sun-bleached strand of hair behind her ear, like Julie Christie.
He wasn’t really a donkey.
Dan Persik was under a spell, conferred by a magic jersey and a powerful potion of lucky genes and emerging hormones. The spell gave him special powers. He was having a lot of fun with it. Who wouldn’t?
He was untroubled, which made him even more appealing.
It was a time-sensitive spell, with a catch. He didn’t know that yet. Here was the deal: He had to somehow learn certain lessons, involving humility, compassion, respect, and independent thinking. Math and verbal skills would also be useful. Actually, these are the same lessons everyone has to learn, but part of the spell was a blinder effect that made it a lot more difficult.
It could take five minutes or five years or forever. It wasn’t clear how it was supposed to happen. Probably through encountering certain significant persons, like maybe a sick person, an old person, a dead person, and a monk in a yellow robe. A white rabbit, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, and a walking deck of cards. Or it could be a lonely misfit, a shy girl and … a wrinkled crone bearing magic pieces of fruit? It could be almost any combination of people or events. The key was, something had to penetrate his golden aura and touch his soul.
If he learned these lessons, he would get to keep some of the special powers, though they would matter less because he would have some new ones.
If he didn’t learn them, he would remain a large, furry, willfully stupid animal.
If he learned just some of them, he would be somewhere in between, but any would be better than none.
The likelihood of any one result was completely unpredictable.
In the meantime, he had to maintain a “C” average to stay on the team. It wasn’t that difficult. He wrote his name and the date at the top of the paper, all in capitals, with a sharp, slashing slant.
The house was empty when Hector took out his guitar, and he left his bedroom door wide open. He opened the notebook on his desk to the back and flipped forward a few pages until he found his newest song. The new idea he was trying with this song was that, since he wasn’t good enough at finger picking to do it and sing at the same time, he was going to strum while he sang, and in between verses he would do the finger picking. Besides the fact that it was the
only way he could do it so far, it seemed like that’s when people would notice it more, anyway.
He thought the refrain of the song was really a good one. Basically, he just wanted to sing the refrain over and over, but he knew you had to break it up with some verses, so he was working on that.
Here’s how the refrain went:
It sounded so good he hoped someone hadn’t already written it—that could happen. How would you know?
What was brilliant, Hector felt, was that the words said “fine, totally fine” and so on, but it had this minor-key sound so you were left thinking, well, is it fine, or maybe it isn’t?
He didn’t have the verses, or a tune for the verses, yet, but he had a feeling about them. A bittersweet feeling. The verses should be about things that weren’t really fine at all, but—or maybe there should be a verse or two about things that really were fine.
He couldn’t decide if it should be about social injustice or about the human condition or about love. Maybe all of them. Maybe one verse each. You could have the same reaction to each one. You could say the same words with different feelings:
and it’s fine, totally fine, totally fine, all of the time.
It could be dark, bitter, ironic.
Or it could be light, joyful, carefree.
Pick a feeling, you could feel it when you sang these words. It could be a song about …
Something Hector had heard a day or so ago came back to him, unexpectedly. He had been in the grocery store, N.J.'s, the neighborhood one with wood floors where you could sign a charge sheet and they would send your parents a bill at the end of the month. A mother and her little girl were at the checkout in front of him. The little girl wanted to whisper something. Her mother leaned over and listened, then said to the cashier, “She’s excited because she has a new toy cash register at home. She says, maybe when she grows up, she can run a real one.”
The cashier laughed. She said, “I used to play with a toy cash register when I was little, too. And see? My dream came true.”
She was entirely pleasant and cheerful saying this and yet, there was some other kind of knowledge in it, too. A knowledge that it sure as hell wasn’t her dream come true, but, oh well, here she was.
There was some kind of “Totally Fine” clue there, but it was such a good line itself that Hector decided to save it for its own song. He wrote, “And see? My dream came true” in his notebook. That one could have a million verses.
He still didn’t know what the verses would be for “Totally Fine,” so he fiddled around with chords and notes, looking for a tune. Periodically he went into the refrain.
He was also thinking about his voice. Finding his own voice. Liz had talked about it the night of the coffeehouse, but Hector wasn’t sure what it meant. Did you have to just take it as it came out of your throat? If you tried to improve it, or try out some other kind of voice, was that fake, or could it all be part of your own voice?
He tried singing “Totally Fine” in a slow, deep, gravelly voice. Then a falsetto. Papa Bear, Mama Bear. He felt silly. He sang it in a sarcastic, angry shout, which he knew wasn’t his voice, but it was kind of fun so he did it several times, standing up and really slamming the chords. He jumped up and down a little and spun around.
Rowanne was standing in the doorway watching him.
“It’s just you,” she said. “It sounded like more.”
It bothered Patty that electrons were so constantly in motion. It made the whole world seem like a place on the verge of disintegration. What if the molecules in this chair suddenly got all excited and spun apart? What if they realigned themselves and decided to be something other than wood? It was one of the many areas of science that she preferred not to think about: the very small (atoms) because they were so busy, and the very large (universe, infinity, time) because they were so unending.
Also relativity and the universe turning back in on itself, whatever that was supposed to mean. Picture a man on a train, picture trees going by. Yeah, sure. It was nothing like those things.
She was going to have to take her chances on actual people in trains with actual trees going by because the other stuff, the guy who gets younger because time is moving sideways next to his train, which science teachers seemed to feel was so exciting, made her feel like there was no ground beneath her feet. It gave her the creeps.
Patty wondered if her aversion to these ideas would relegate her to a job pouring coffee at a diner in The Future. She hoped the diner would be on earth. She hoped the coffee would be real. And the cups. And how soon was all of this going to really kick in? She glanced over her shoulder at her room to make sure that it hadn’t reconfigured itself while her back was turned. She went downstairs and called Debbie on the phone, letting their conversation block out any thoughts about the expanding and compacting molecules that were simulating Debbie’s voice in her ear.
The grass was still wet from the rain that had fallen earlier in the day, but the twilight sky was clearing and, in the west, an evening star hung a few inches above a deep pink and orange fringe, tail end of the sunset. Russell’s sneakers were getting soaked. He lifted the lid, dropped the garbage in, and pressed the lid back on firmly to keep the raccoons from getting into it. He saw that a Styrofoam cup had fallen outside the can and, when he bent to pick it up, something else caught his eye.
It was some sort of a necklace, a slender chain with flat gold letters linked together in the middle of it. He thought it was probably something belonging to his little sister, Annette, but when he held it up in the fading light, the letters seemed to spell Debbie. He took it into the house, into the bright light of the kitchen. It still spelled Debbie. There was a tiny red gemstone dotting the I.
Russell wondered what the necklace was doing in his backyard, how it had gotten there, and which Debbie it belonged to. There were a lot of Debbies. Three that he knew of; probably there were even more. He pictured himself going around to all the Debbies, asking them if this was their necklace. “I found this in my backyard, is it yours?” He didn’t want to do it. He decided he would turn it in to Lost and Found at school, and he put it in the pocket of his jacket, hanging in the hall closet. Where it stayed for a while, because the next day was sunny and warm.
But back in the evening before the sunny day, Phil was shooting baskets. He had finished his homework at school. Lenny heard the ball bouncing on cement and boinging on the backboard, and went over. He sat on the low wall in Phil’s backyard while Phil kept shooting. Sometimes one or the other of them would say something, not saying much, but with the feeling of talking that is a good prelude for going home and going to bed.
A while later, when he finally did slip into his bed, Lenny felt a weight on his feet. Oops, he thought. He reached down and dropped his unopened school books onto the floor. As he fell asleep, he heard the muffled thunk of heavy objects settling into new positions down in the basement.
CHAPTER 17
At the Tastee-Freez on a Tuesday Evening
Three or four stars were visible in the opalescent dome of the sky, which was light and diaphanous to the west, a deepening delphinium blue to the east. The air was as warm as bathwater. Across the street, strings of lightbulbs illuminated rows of shiny used cars and a yellow sign with red letters that read
Debbie couldn’t look at the sign without saying it aloud in her head and trying to make it come out right. She and Patty were eating hot fudge sundaes from plastic boats with plastic spoons. They sat balanced on the back of a bench with their feet on the seat, watching people come and go at the Tastee-Freez. Light, spotty currents of east and westbound traffic shoop-shooped past, one way and the other.
Frank’s Featured Cream Puff of the Week was a light blue Mustang convertible, a coupe. It reminded Patty of Nancy Drew, who she hadn’t thought about for years.
“Did you ever notice,” she said, “that everything good or interesting happens to Nancy Drew, and her friends just get the leftovers? If there’s a statue or a painti
ng or a lookalike person, it always looks like Nancy. It never looks like Bess or George.”
“And they never mention Bess without saying that she’s ‘pleasingly plump,’ or George without saying that she’s boyish and athletic and has short hair,” said Debbie. “Just so you don’t forget that
Nancy is the beautiful one with the perfect figure and the ‘titian’ hair.”
“What I want to know is, where does she find time to learn how to do so many things? You never see her practicing. If there’s something she doesn’t already know how to do, she’s good at it right away. It’s always harder for Bess and George.”
“I’d like to read a book about Bess and George solving a crime while Nancy is in the hospital with a broken leg.”
“Or off on a ski weekend with Ned.”
“She’s good at skiing.”
“She’s really, really good. She could probably be in the Olympics. Maybe she breaks her leg, though. An evil criminal rams her into a tree on the ski slope. And Bess and George solve the mystery without her.”
“Ned could help.”
“Maybe Hannah Gruen could still be in the story. She makes really good food.”
“She could help, too. They could all help. And they would find out that Nancy isn’t the only one who can do things.”
“Meanwhile, in her hospital bed, in traction, Nancy is studying marine biology. And Norwegian.”
“And brain surgery.”
“Have you ever noticed how many evil criminals use River Heights for their headquarters?”
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