Casebook (7 page)

“Oh, yeah. The brother.” Relief hugged me, enough to make me care a little about Eli’s brother. “What kind of job did he have again?”

Their dad had been a professor who made a lot of money in the stock market. Hugo had inherited that talent. He’d considered business school; Eli thought that had been his last good chance. But he’d only worked in menial positions in financial services. “His new doctor says that he’s on way too high a dose of this drug. I guess it’s very addictive.” She put the top down on her computer. “You want tea?”

I did want tea. She made tea then that tasted like a bowl of spices. We brought our handleless mugs to the porch and sat looking out over the canyon. That was where my dad lived, in a multilevel house hidden by trees. We couldn’t see many stars. Most of them turned out to be airplanes.

The next time I asked about Eli, she said his brother was in the hospital for Dalmane withdrawal. Eli had moved into his apartment in New Jersey to help.

I don’t think I remembered to ask again.

I was a pretty selfish kid. But I didn’t love Eli yet.

^*
At least Surferdude should have red hair. He pretty much does
.

21 • A Trip to the Other Economy

That fall, my class moved to the Upper Campus, and it was a city. Over the summer, kids had grown. All of a sudden, Hector and I were short. People sold great food from carts. But my mom refused to pay for hot lunches. My allowance covered one a week; the other days I had to bring food from home. She packed leftover pasta and farro salad and carrots and shit. And she’d gotten to my dad before I tried. Some Tuesday mornings he didn’t have food in the house and gave me a twenty, saying, “For just this once, Miles. It’s not going to be a habit!” Then we had to rush to Whole Foods, because the Boops, who were still in elementary, couldn’t add on lunches by the day.

The noodle soup cart and the burrito guy had the longest lines.

A Wednesday, after school, I saw Esmeralda eating the same kind of noodle soup at our kitchen table. I said, “I buy those for lunch.”

“How much?”

“Two fifty.”

She spurted giggles. “Near my place, I pay one dollar for ten pieces.”

I gave her my allowance and skipped my hot lunch that week. She’d buy soup and bring it when she came to clean the house again the next Wednesday.

I started selling soup from my locker. At first I waited until I saw people in line for the cart, then I told the ones at the back that I could give it to them for a buck twenty-five. Kids worried about finding hot water. It didn’t seem right to ask the cart vendors for their water if you didn’t buy their soup. But I figured we could get it in the chem lab.

In two weeks, I sold out and gave Esmeralda thirty dollars to buy more. Upper Campus bustled with opportunity. I asked Esmeralda about other deals. I started to watch what people bought. I threw out the organic Whole Foods crap my mom packed and bought
a burrito and a soda every day. Money piled in. I bought Hector lunches, too. Esmeralda delivered eight bags of new soup and she still had cash left over. She was happy because I gave her a twenty, as a thank-you. She didn’t know how big my profits were.

“You are gaining weights,” she said.

I looked at her and thought,
You
should talk.

But I’d put on fifteen pounds by Thanksgiving. My legs felt packed into my jeans, and my stomach bulged out over the top.

I wanted to investigate other products. I asked if I could go home with Esmeralda one day; she seemed happy with the idea. But I couldn’t figure out how to explain to my mom.

Then my progress report arrived. Cottonwoods only gave letter grades starting in ninth grade, and they were going to be a problem: I got a C in math. My mother sat with her reading glasses on, scanning the paper report. She didn’t say anything. That was bad. She would definitely notice a C in math. She disappeared to her room to talk on the phone. It had to be either my dad or Eli. Or Sare.

“Miles?” she said, coming out. “There’ll be no television or video until your next report card.”

“What? You’re taking away TV for two
months
because of a grade?”

“We both know it’s not your best.”

“What if it is? No, really, Mom. What if it
is
my best?”

I called my dad to fight, but he interrupted. “I agree with your mother one hundred percent. One hundred percent, Miles.” Then he had to get off the phone. Dickwad.

With no electronics, I had time, so I hitched a ride home with Esmeralda the next Wednesday. She took me to Lucky supermarket, where her son, in his baseball uniform, showed me all his favorite stuff. Chips I’d never seen before—fried pigskins! No shit!
They were good, but I didn’t know if I could move them. I bought Mexi-Crisps, prepopped caramel corn, and two different chips, all cheap, and a yellow soda I wanted to introduce. I bought one bag of the pig chips for Hector. Right before I left, I saw Cokes in bottles; they turned out to be Mexican Coke and cost more than regular, even here, but I bought five six-packs, for a luxury item. Esmeralda drove me to the bus stop. When I finally got back, I left the bags outside under the windows of my room to sneak in after dark.

The Mims wasn’t pleased when I walked in at nine twenty, but I’d told her I wanted to see Esmeralda’s home. She couldn’t say anything to that, even though we both knew she’d rather have had me copying algebra problems a hundred times and showing my idiotic work.

22 • A Basement Below a Doctor’s Office

When Boop One made the dance team, our schedule turned wack. Thursdays didn’t work anymore. Esmeralda could pick us up from school, after cleaning Charlie’s house, and drive Boop Two to speech therapy on her way east; I had to go along. Then the speech therapist took us to the dance studio, where we’d wait for Boop One’s carpool. But I couldn’t read in a place that smelled like feet. Finally, we figured out that Esmeralda could drop me off near UCLA; I could work in my mom’s office and then ride back with her. “But I see a doctor Thursday after work,” the Mims said.

“O-kay,” I said. “Just this Thursday?”

“Every Thursday.”

“What kind of doctor?”

She paused. “A therapist.”

“You see a
ther
apist? For what?”

She shrugged. “Just everything, I guess.”

Once, after I’d been torturing my sister and repeating
gobble gobble,
the Mims said if we couldn’t get along better we’d have to see a psychologist. I said back, “Dad doesn’t want us going to therapists,” just guessing, but I turned out to be right.

So I sat with my mom in the waiting room doing homework while she watched. A tall woman, my grandmother’s age, opened the door halfway.

“This is Dr. Sally Bach,” my mother said. “This is Miles.”

“Hello, Miles.” The woman’s smile seemed halfway to laughter.

My numbers on the page marched up in a slant and I needed to pee. A guy in the lobby pointed me to the basement. I found the bathroom and then, next to it, another door to a low-ceilinged unfinished place. I climbed around under hanging pipes to a spot I thought was below the doctor’s office. And I could hear the old doctor laughing! They sounded like two women having tea. When you’re trying all the time to glean information, sometimes it just falls onto you. That’s when it felt sweet.

“Eli’s pressuring me to hurry,” the Mims said.

Hurry and what? I wondered.

“Some mathematicians have spouses who follow them,” she went on. “Marge called Stanley a Trailing Spouse.”

“Cary not only didn’t follow you, he suggested you quit,” the doctor said.
He did!
That was news to me.

“He didn’t really want me to quit. He just didn’t like me to complain.”

“Or to ask him to help with his children.”

“He never wanted twins. You’ve got to give him credit. He knew his limits.”

My dad didn’t want the Boops! A smile crept onto my face as I felt the wind knocked out of me. I was surprised how much they were talking about my dad.

“The truth is, I think I’m happier now,” the Mims said.

That made it seem like she was the one who left. I was never sure. I didn’t know when my dad had started up with Holland.
But it was hard to believe my mom left. My dad admired her; she seemed to him rare and valuable, but he didn’t
need
her. She needed him, not for the complicated things but for the easy ones. She forgot to lock the door and she ruined enough kettles for him to buy one that shrieked so she wouldn’t burn down the house. But then he moved out. I guess he didn’t worry about the house burning with just us in it. I thought my dad had loved my mom more than she’d loved him. Eli loved her more, too. I felt a twinge; she hadn’t even visited the guy in the hospital. I felt guilty remembering that; I hadn’t wanted her to go.

“You’re happier without him and
with
Eli,” the doctor said.

“Eli’s coming with me to the Kovalevsky thing. No, I’m happy with him. Everything’s just … even bobby-pinning Emma’s bun. Doing ordinary things, I feel more …”

“Is he going along with you?” Bells rang in the doctor’s voice. She was merry. There were girls in my class like that. Hector called them the goofy good-time girls.

“Do you think he’ll always be getting mad at me?”

“We’ll have to find a way to make him feel secure.”

“I’d never leave him,” my mother said.

The doctor laughed again. She seemed like a party girl, just a very, very old one.

It wasn’t until we were driving west to the smelly upstairs studio that I realized they hadn’t mentioned me once.

23 • Business

I opened bags of the new chips for people to sample. Mexi-Crisps were catching on. Three girls bought the prepopped caramel corn. Salsitas were a hard sell, even though they were way cheaper than the brands we knew. And nobody touched the yellow soda. I was surprised to learn that Cottonwoods kids were so prejudiced.

But even with resistance to the new merchandise, business grew. Kids asked me in the halls if I sold soup. We had a regular line now in the chemistry room. Hector and I both stashed thermoses in our lockers to keep things from getting overly conspicuous. We had bat-shit crazy lunch periods. I stayed by my open locker while Hector went to buy us burritos from the cart. We were sick of soup. I was waiting to introduce the Mexican Coke. I still had to figure out pricing.

“What are we going to do with all the Inca Kola?” Hector asked.

“Starting next week, I’ll cut it to half price. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know. We may have to actually start drinking it.”

Hector loved the spicy pig chips. But then, he’d eaten bugs when he was little.
^*

^*
I always did have the more refined palate. That became clear later, with the older version of Coke and bath salts
.

24 • Einstein Was a Great Romantic

We were standing in front of Cottonwoods waiting for carpool when Eli showed up on foot. No one
walked
to carpool. He said hi to my friends—he knew the Rabid Rabbits’ names, even Simon’s, and he’d only met him once, and they nodded, not the least surprised to be remembered—and asked me if I wanted to take a walk. I said sure, and we headed to a supermarket parking lot, where he put his hand on top of a rusted Volvo. The car wasn’t as neat as I expected from what my dad had since dubbed the Closet Caper. A dirty toy slanted on the backseat. “My friend Mark lets me borrow his mother-in-law’s car,” he said. “She doesn’t use it. I pay for the long-term parking.” He drove south to a tract of land with a miles-long duck pond and a dusty road. There were old half-neglected parks like this all over LA. We started to roam.

“Your mom told me about the math teacher,” he said. “She sounds frustrating.”

The Mims never thought I had the right to be frustrated. No matter how horrible a teacher, my parents wanted me to make myself the little favorite. “It kinda is. I mean, before this year, I actually
liked
math.”

“Well, what, wh-what did you like about it?”

Again, his question surprised me. Everything my parents said about math directly pertained to my abysmal grade and my manual lifting of it. “It was always kind of easy.”

When Eli listened, his hands dug into his pockets, and his head turned down. He had a funny-shaped head and a long neck, darkly tan with a bump. “When I was your age, I was just getting to understand that I couldn’t do math. I loved it, I could
see
it, but I wasn’t going to be good enough to
do
it. My math test scores were so low compared to my verbal, they thought I’d cheated. I made myself learn. I’d go over every page six times. The next year my scores jumped two hundred points. Then the people from the College Board wanted to study me because I was such an anomaly.” He must have been able to tell I didn’t know the word because he said, “
Anomaly
means ‘oddball.’ ”

I couldn’t imagine my dad ever calling himself an oddball. And he wasn’t one. “Do you mind being short?” I asked all of a sudden, thinking of my father. Height never strayed far from my father’s consciousness. Eli was short, too.

“You know, I never really knew I was short, I didn’t know until—” Then he stammered. I was aware of some problem. Like dust on a CD.

“Until what?” I said, to help.

“Well, when I was getting married, my in-laws complained. That’s how I first heard I was short.”

“Nazis,” I said—the kind of joke that made my mom tense up.

But Eli laughed. “They actually
are
German.”

“Did they like you?”

He paused. “Not really. The night before the wedding, I sat with Jean on their dock—they have kind of a compound, on a lake—and I apologized for taking her away from all that. She didn’t deny it. I always thought that was good. Honest.” He spoke about his ex-wife kindly. That troubled me in some way I didn’t understand. I wasn’t being fair. When my parents talked about each other in those same tones, it seemed natural and right. We walked for a long time. I thought of how he listened on the phone at night for hours to my mom and how, when she called my dad, he rushed her off. My dad didn’t do that to me as much.