Californium (9 page)

At home, all I want to do is talk about DikNixon, but I can't. My parents don't need to know, Colleen's too young to understand, and Brendan couldn't care less if it doesn't have anything to do with football. So here I am, geeked up in my room and just writing the name in different ways on notebook paper until I've got the word
Dik
angular with the
D
and the
K
shaped like two arrows, the
I
in between them:
>I<.
Then I stack it on top of
Nixon
with all those letters the same height and it looks right. I draw it careful and slow on the notebook I use for letters to Uncle Ryan, right next to the
NY
of a Yankees logo I drew, only bigger. Now it's official. I draw it on my English folder, then Spanish, and then I see Edie's number, swirly and blue across the top of my Algebra folder.

My heart's pounding—full-count, bases-loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth pounding—and in a second I'm downstairs in the kitchen, dialing. The phone hums and crackles and hums and crackles and then, in mid-hum, clicks. This tired-sounding “Ha-lo” comes
through the line. With my best church voice I say, “Hello, ma'am, this is Reece Houghton from Edie's Algebra class. Is she home?” There's a mishmash of talking and the only word I can make out is “Edie!”

The phone crackles and thumps a little, there's this shuffle of footsteps, and did Edie just say something in Japanese? Then I hear, “Reece?”

“Yeah.”

“What's going on?”

It's weird how clear she sounds, like she's right next to me, and even though I've never been to Edie's house I can see her standing next to the phone in her kitchen, leaning against the counter.

“Who was that?” I say.

“My grandmother.” Edie has this way of talking while she smiles, especially if she's making fun of you, and I hear her face doing that. “Are you just calling to see if I gave you the right number?”

“No. We got a band name.”

“Cool,” she says, and she says it cool: not excited like she won a prize but long and smooth, like each
o
really matters.

“Yeah. Only, we didn't go with yours because Treat wanted something more punk rock.” Just as I'm saying this my mom walks into the kitchen and starts pulling things out of the cabinets. My face and chest flash hot like I've been caught looking at panty ads in the Sunday
Times.

“That's okay,” she says. “What name did you pick?”

I look at my mom. Her hair is still done up, her nose freckles
still hidden beneath makeup, but she puts on an apron over her work clothes. She's going to be here awhile. “Dick Nixon,” I say just above a whisper.

Edie laughs. “Richard Milhous Nixon? For a punk band?”

“It's how you write it,” I say.

And just as Edie says, “How do you write it?” my mom says, “Who are you talking to?”

“In English,” I say.

“Reece?” my mom says.

I cover the phone. “Someone from school.”

She nods and starts washing off potatoes.

“Oh,” Edie says like I just told her the earth was round. “So you're not going to write it in Japanese characters?”

I know her arms are folded now and she's smiling like she's tough. “Characters?” I say. “They're not letters?”

“Not really. It's complicated.”

“Oh. Well, this isn't complicated. It'll still look cool, though.”

Edie laughs, a nice one, not like she's making fun, and then neither of us says anything. I'm staring at the floor tiles, listening to Edie breathe. Then it hits me: There isn't any other sound. My mom's at the cutting board, potato peeler in one hand, a potato in the other, only she's not peeling. She grins at me and mouths,
A girl?

I shake my head no and she looks down to start peeling. “Have I met this person?” she says out loud.

“Is that your mom?” Edie says.

“Yeah.”

“I have?” my mom says.

I glare at her and cover the phone. “Not you.”

Edie says, “Tell her I said hi.”

“My friend says hi.”

My mom keeps whittling away at the potatoes. “What's your friend's name?”

“My mom says hello,” I say.

“What's she do?” Edie says.

“Reece?”

“Manages some office,” I say.

“What kind of office?”

My mom clacks the potato peeler down on the cutting board. “Reece?”

“I don't know,” I say to Edie.

My mom's eyebrows rise. “I asked you a question.”

“It's nobody,” I say. “Just a person from my math class.”

My mom gives me the
Now, was that so hard?
look before picking up the peeler and returning to the potatoes.

“Man,” I say into the phone and don't hear anything back. “Hello?”

“I'll let you go,” Edie says.

“That's okay. Dinner's not ready yet.”

“Well, then I'll let me go. I need to get back to my homework.”

“Oh, okay. I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Sure,” she says. “In math class.”

The phone clicks and I've barely got the receiver back on the wall before my mom's rattling things off without even looking at me: How I'd better not
ever
talk to her like that again, especially in front of a friend, and do I think that was cool or something? Do my friends treat their parents like that? I stare at her and think,
Nothing
I do seems cool, and yeah, Keith and Treat are worse.
Only, if I say any of that, I'll be doing dishes and peeling potatoes every night until I graduate. So I just take it, then say how sorry I am and how it won't happen again. That gets her because she's a mom, except she doesn't say it's okay like usual; she says she forgives me, which is different, because it keeps the guilt on me.

Back in my room after dinner, I'm stuck after two algebra problems and spend most of the time drawing the DikNixon logo again and again. Every time I look up at
I
nno¢ and Edie's number, I want to call her back for help, but now I can't imagine how to ask without sounding stupid.

.

I'm early to Algebra on Wednesday, hoping to get Edie's notes, but she doesn't get there until just as the bell rings. Mr. Tomita hops up right away with a big announcement about this accident he saw coming in to school today. It gets everybody leaning forward, excited and wanting to know everything. Edie even shushes me twice, so I shut up and listen like everybody else.

Mr. Tomita says the accident happened at the intersection of Imperial Highway and Yorba Linda Boulevard. And not only did he see the accident; he also heard some of the stories the witnesses told. “I don't want to say too much,” he says, rocking back and forth, “in case one of you knows the people involved. I'll just call the two people involved Mr. X and Mr. Y.” Everyone's nodding like that makes sense; any way he can tell us more is fine.

Edie lets out this annoyed sigh when Mr. Tomita starts in about how the cops made people stand on one of the four corners depending on what they thought of the stories Mr. X and Mr. Y
had told. He draws it on the board so we can understand better how some people believed both, some believed X and not Y or Y and not X, and how some didn't believe either. “We already know how some people are always positive,” he says, “and some are always negative. They are the easy ones to understand. It's the people who are a little bit of both that we seem to have trouble with.” He bounces on his toes, and Edie's sigh makes sense to me now. This isn't a story; we're moving on to a new unit and Mr. Tomita is tricking us into learning.

After class, I can barely keep up with Edie as she walks to the staircase. She hasn't said a thing, so I finally say, “You never said if you liked our band name.”

Without stopping or looking at me, she says, “It's interesting.”

“That means no.”

Edie stops walking. “If my opinion offends you, don't ask for it.”

“Offend?”

She starts walking again. “Look it up.”

“I know what it means.”

“Good,” she says, “because I'd hate to think you need
some person from your English class
to help you with that homework too.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, but Edie doesn't answer, doesn't even stop. She hits the stairs early, slipping between people and knocking others sideways as she trots her way up and away from me.

.

Right after school, me and Keith pick up his guitar and amp and go straight to Treat's. Treat has the garage open and the Bug out on the driveway. Mr. Dumovitch has taped some old egg cartons
on the other wall and garage door. He's thrown a cloth tarp over the floor and it makes the garage kind of soft and less echoey. There's some folding chairs set out and an extension cord too, and when we set Keith's amp down and lean the guitar against it, it looks right with the brown boxes towering behind.

“Bitchin',” Treat says. “Let's plan to meet in the studio every day by three thirty.”

“Studio?” Keith says. “The Two-Car Studio?”

Treat steps up to Keith, the Mohawk reaching out over the top of Keith's head like a wave about to crash on him. “Anywhere you create art is a studio.”

Treat likes the logo with
Dik
on top of
Nixon.
He covers the bottom words with his fingers so just
>I<
shows. “People will recognize this after they get used to seeing it over
Nixon.
Pretty soon, all we'll need is the top part. Like how people know it's the Dead Kennedys just by seeing the tomahawk or the Clash when all they see is the guy bent over, smashing his guitar.”

“I didn't know that,” Keith says.

“That's because I was talking about cool people,” Treat says. “Not you.”

Me and Treat laugh. Keith walks over to the back wall of boxes. “What if we drew the logo real huge on these boxes?” He looks at Treat. “When we have the garage door open, people will see it behind us while we're playing.”

Treat steps over to the wall and outlines the logo with his hand. “Yeah. We could pull a few boxes out to stand on too. That way we'll be taller than the crowd in the driveway.”

They both look back my way and out the garage door like there's a hundred people standing on the driveway.

“Hello?” I say. “We have one guitar, no drummer, and no microphone.”

“Wait,” Treat says and runs into the house. A second later he's back. He's got a bullhorn and sets it down on a chair, like,
Ta-da!

“Are we going to protest drummers?” Keith says.

I tap Keith in the chest with the back of my hand. “No, it's like
Starsky & Hutch.
We're going to try to get them to come out of the studio with their hands up.”

Keith picks up the bullhorn and says, “Just drop your drumsticks and come on out. We don't want anyone to get hurt.”

Treat shakes his head. He flips on the amp, picks up the guitar, and walks it over to me. “When I say ‘four,' start strumming really fast and keep strumming until I hold up my fist.”

He grabs the bullhorn from Keith and says, “One-two, one-two-three-four!”

I fling my hand down, smacking it against the guitar, and as it comes up, each string punches a finger. The amp fires out this whining, deep
twang-twang,
like a hundred nuns playing acoustic guitars.

Treat leans back and holds the bullhorn to his mouth, pointing it at the rafters. “You don't care / that I don't care / and I don't care / that you don't care.” It sounds like Treat's screaming from the other end of a tube you have up to your ear. It's mixing with the music and vibrating in my chest. “No one cares that we don't care / so all we do / is stare, stare, stare / all we do / is stare!” Treat's arm flies up, his fist tight, and I stop just like he said. The last
twang
s crackle out of the amp. My hand is throbbing, red and hot, but I hold it up in a fist like Treat's.

Keith falls into a chair. “Holy shit. That sounded real.”

Treat sits down in another chair, wrapping his arms around himself with the bullhorn sticking out the side. “See?”

I do see. I see people on the driveway, crowding around, pogoing all over the place, crashing into each other. Treat's jumping around and singing. Keith's on a box, strumming away, his eyes relaxed and cool. I'm up on a box too, my hands on the guitar in all the right places. And Astrid's in the front of the crowd, her hair tied back with a big bow that's more cute than pretty, her arms over her head, fingers snapping to the song. It's not sexy like I want it to be, but she looks good. Then Edie appears. She's wearing that white shirt and the puka shells, standing perfectly still, even with everyone bouncing all around her. She's glancing at Treat and Keith and everyone else but keeps looking back at me, her arms wrapped around a folder and pulled up to her chest and that
I know something you don't know
grin across her face.

“What do we do next?” I say.

T
hursday in Algebra I'm taking real notes because Edie isn't talking to me. I'm working on the DikNixon logo in the margins too, making ones that match the one on my folder. When class is over, Edie grabs the folder and taps the logo. “So
this
is how you write it?”

I nod.

She hands back my folder, and her smirk appears. “Are you sure that's English?”

We walk together and I tell her how it's supposed to work, people seeing the logo so much they'll start to know exactly what it means even without the
Nixon
part.

“Where?” she says.

“I don't know. Around?”

“Okay.” She starts for the stairs. “See you . . .” she says, and waits until she's a couple steps up before yelling back, “around.”

.

Friday morning, it looks like a ticker-tape parade hit campus overnight. There's squares of notebook paper everywhere and I'm about to grab one when Keith says, “You're not going to pick up someone else's trash, are you?” It makes me wonder if it's some kind of joke they play every year to mess with freshmen, so I don't pick anything up. We just go to class.

In Algebra, Edie is almost completely back to being Edie now. She says hi to me as I sit down and even smiles. Her hair is all up, shiny and kind of pushed forward. As cool as it looks on her, for some reason my eyes go to her neck because, I don't know, I can see so much of it now. It's not like girls are posing in
Playboy
to show off their naked necks, but you don't always see a neck all smooth and soft and exposed like that. It's weird that it can look that good. I mean, it's just Edie's neck.

While Mr. Tomita is confiscating confetti from people who are showing it to each other, she slips me a note:

(Check One)

I am going to the football game tonight

I think I'm too cool to go to the football game tonight

I think, therefore I am (and I am going to the football game)

I'm not a >I<, but I play one in my band (and I am not going to the game)

Me and Keith have to be at the Two-Car Studio right after school
for band stuff, but I could still probably make the game. Astrid will be there on the sidelines. Plus, Edie will probably be there with her friends, so I could sit with girls and not look like a total loser. And it's not like my dad is going to surprise me with tickets to a baseball game tonight or something. He'll get home late, say he has an overtime Saturday shift, and go to bed early. So I make a new choice and check:
I thought, therefore I am (going. If I can get a ride).

After class, Edie tells me Cherise's parents are giving them a ride and to have a good weekend if she doesn't see me at the game. Most of the confetti is gone now; just a couple pieces, wrinkled and dirty, are swirling around people's feet as they rush to class. Astrid's at her locker, her back to me, wearing varsity cheer pants, which are maroon and tight and a trap: The stripes hug her legs and curve so perfectly around her backside you can forget how long you've been obviously staring at her. I'm ready when she turns around, just about to flash my eyes forward like they've been where they're supposed to be the whole time. But her head is down, a piece of that confetti in her hand, and then she's looking up and tapping another cheerleader on the shoulder.

There's no way the confetti is a trick if Astrid's looking at it, so when I get to English I ask Treat if he's seen it, but he hasn't. Mrs. Reisdorf starts class saying we need to put any slips of paper we've found away, and to stop talking about whatever it is. “We don't know what it is,” somebody says, and Mrs. Reisdorf says then that's all the more reason to stop talking about it and to open our books to 463 for the author introduction to
Our Town.

.

Keith has confetti in his hand on the way to lunch. “Look,” he says, bug-eyed as he hands over the paper.

It's just a line of typed words, but they're not from a typewriter. Each letter is made up of all these dots, which is weird, but what's even weirder is what it says:
>I< Nixon is back.

“Did you do this?” I say.

Keith says his dad doesn't have a dot-matrix printer at home. We figure Treat must since his dad makes computers, but when we get to the Bog, Treat says, “Did one of you guys do it?”

All three of us are grinning and looking at each other like somebody is going to admit it. Then Edie comes marching up, a piece of confetti in her hand. “Why didn't you tell me about this?” she says.

Some guy near us holds up the confetti he was showing his friends and says, “Do you guys know what this is?”

Edie turns and looks at the guy like he's an idiot. “Duh. You've never heard of the band DikNixon?”

Treat grins and as soon as the Mohawk starts nodding, the guy says, “Yeah, DikNixon is awesome.” His friends nod too, like they've been listening to DikNixon for years. “I just didn't know if this meant they're coming back here.”

“They are,” Treat says. “So get ready.”

When the guy and his friends go back to talking to each other and Edie leaves, I ask, “Seriously, who did this?”

“Does it matter?” Treat says. “It's done. It's working.”

Keith's still watching Edie as she walks away, and it takes
him a second to realize we're watching him watch her. “What?” he says.

“We need to jam tonight,” Treat says. “Don't lose focus.”

It sounds so cool, so exactly what I want to tell Astrid the next time we're taking out the trash together. I almost forget we don't have drums, or a bass guitar, or anything else. “We need instruments.”

Keith scratches his chin. “Yes. A fine point.”

Treat looks out of the Bog toward the band room. “We could ‘borrow' some things.”

A cartoon of Keith rolling some big drum across campus in the middle of the night flashes in my head. Then it's me in the confessional, asking if it's a sin to steal instruments for the punk band you started so people will think you're cool and this cheerleader will start liking you in ways that you hope will have you back in the confessional every week for doing things with her that, if you're honest, you won't be sorry about. “No,” I say to Treat. “That would make us a gang, not a band.”

Treat nods and grins and says, “And DikNixon is not a crook.”

I'm laughing right away and Keith is quiet. I almost want to tell him it's a Watergate joke just so he'll say,
I thought Watergate was a dam.
But Keith's still got his hand on his chin, still thinking, and then he says, “Here's what we can do: I'll tell my dad the band needs to practice at our house. Then we'll bring Treat over, and as soon as my dad sees the Mohawk, he'll buy us anything we need if we promise to go somewhere else.”

Keith looks at Treat, then me. No grins. No punch line.

“Would your dad really do that?” I say.

“Oh yeah,” Keith says. “He's afraid of anyone whose hair is longer than a flattop.”

Treat says he has no problem being scary if it'll help the band. After that, the plan just fuses together. Keith will ask his dad to drive us to the football game tonight. We'll meet at his house. Treat will be Treat. We'll go to the game, get a ride home, Treat being Treat, and on Saturday we'll meet at Treat's house to make up a shopping list for Keith to take back to Mr. Curtis.

When I get to my locker after lunch, van Doren is there talking to one of the guys from Filibuster. “All I know is, I've never heard of these guys.”

“Me neither,” the other guy says, “but do you think they're coming here? Like Black Flag did at Katella?”

Van Doren doesn't even look at me as I slide down and start opening my locker. He hands the other guy a book and says, “After that riot? They'd be scared to let Barry Manilow do the morning announcements at Katella.”

“Well,” the other guy says, “DikNixon is going to be somewhere around here.”

“Hooray,” van Doren says, flat and low, like someone just told him he'd been drafted. He's so annoyed, he forgets to drop anything on me.

.

I get to Keith's early. He's just out of the shower, ripped jeans on and a towel around his neck. “I can't figure out a shirt,” he says.

I don't have anything maroon to wear to the game, so I'm wearing my red paisley, spotty and bleached and totally punk
rock. Keith doesn't have any maroon either, but he's got a closet full of red T-shirts from vacations: Maui, Taos, Vail, Disneyland, and Disney World. “Wear Mickey,” I say.

Keith holds up the Disneyland shirt. “Treat will kill me just out of principle.”

I grab it. “We'll rip the sleeves off and cut some slashes in it.”

Keith rummages through his desk for scissors. “But it'll still be Mickey.”

“It'll be Punk Mickey.”

By the time the doorbell rings, we've sliced Mickey up good and put a Mohawk on him with a black marker. We fly past Mr. Curtis on the staircase and let Treat into the front hallway. He's wearing his best holey jeans and a spiked dog collar. His black shirt shows through his sleeveless Levi's jacket and his combat boots are shined up, blacker than ever. “What's with Mickey?” he says.

Keith looks at me and I say, “It's the Anti-Mickey.”

“Bitchin'.”

Mr. Curtis steps between me and Keith and stops. “Well . . . ,” he says and doesn't move for a second. “You must be Treat.” Mr. Curtis sticks out his hand.

Treat grabs it so fast and hard their hands pop. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Yes,” Mr. Curtis says. “You boys pile in the car. I'll go grab my keys.”

Me and Keith grin as we lead Treat through the house to the garage. Even with the “sir,” we know Mr. Curtis must be running to the kitchen to ask Keith's mom,
Have you seen this kid? Are we okay with this?

Mr. Curtis has one of those new Buicks with the square headlights, the seats squeaky and crunchy and smelling like dress shoes. And everything moves with the touch of a button. Really
Star Wars.