Death Spiral (3 page)

“So, I'm guessing Doc…your dad…your parents…whoever, freaked when they found out about you ditching school,” I say, changing the subject.

“Went mental. Moved us out here in about one second. Doc already has my sister Stacy locked up at Harvard. According to plan, I'm next.” Jesse stretches his arms above his head and yawns. “So, I guess I'm rotting here for a year and a half until I graduate. That's my story. What's yours?”

“Mine?” I wrap my fingers around the lighter and think about Marlee Gomez, my best friend at West Philly High until one day she came over and there was Mom, passed out on the couch, needle on the floor, the tie-off still stretched around her arm. Marlee and I could never really go back to being friends after that. I was no longer myself. I became the girl with the junkie mom.

It would feel good to actually have a conversation about these things. To actually open my mouth and tell someone my story, like how sometimes I feel so lonely I think I might die. Instead, I look down and say, “No story.” I expect Jesse to push, to insist I tell him something, like why I live with my aunt instead of my dad. He doesn't.

“That's cool,” he says. “Some other time.”

“Yeah, sure, some other time,” I mumble. “I have to go, anyway. It's getting late.”

“Totally, man.” He's out of his seat and passing the motor oils and air fresheners before I've even said good-bye. He stops at the trashy magazines by the door and turns back to me. “You on foot, or did you drive?”

“Foot,” I say, joining him. “I don't have my license yet. What about you?”

He holds up his skateboard. “Got a car, but I rode.” There's something edgy in his voice I hadn't heard before. “I'm kinda under house arrest. My parents don't exactly know I went out. Didn't want to make a lot of noise escaping. Which direction you heading?”

“Toward Orchard.”

“Cool. Me too. I'll walk with you.”

He doesn't wait for my approval. He just pulls out his iPod, offers me an earbud, and pushes through the door.

“Punk rock,” he says when we're in the parking lot. “That's where it's at. Some people say punk is dead. No way, man. My bud, Clyde, he's a magician on the guitar. He plays in this band, Flesh. It's raw stuff. Pure energy. Check it out.”

He hits play, and we listen to fast guitar and aggressive drumbeat as we walk, but being connected to one iPod by a set of earbuds while trying to synchronize our steps is like trying to perform the three-legged relay from elementary school track-and-field day. After stumbling forward to a few bars of Flesh, we take out the earbuds and instead of listening to music, we talk about it, or rather Jesse talks about it, and I listen. He's in the middle of an elaborate explanation on the political and economic roots of England's punk scene when he stops in front of a two-story stone Colonial with an expansive front porch and detached garage and breaks from his dissertation.

“This is my pad,” he says, “but I could walk you home. I'm not tired, and I don't have anything better to do.”

Instantly the wall goes up. I reach for the lighter. Showing someone where you live is what friends do, good friends. I haven't even shown Anj where I live. Not to mention I've never once set foot in her place. Every time she's suggested we do the normal chilling-at-home thing, I've made an excuse. Never let her in too close.

“Nah, I'm good,” I say, stepping off the sidewalk onto the empty street.

I slip into the darkness before New Boy can say another word.

Four

Friday morning at school when I get to my locker, Anj, fashion princess extraordinaire, is waiting for me, wearing a t-shirt featuring a cartoon carrot lifting a barbell beneath a logo that says
Veggie Power
.

“What's up with the shirt?” I say, lifting my eyebrows.

Instead of explaining why she's traded in vintage cashmere for a one-size-fits-all tee with a picture of a talking vegetable, she winks and says, “I heard about your hot date.”

“What date?” I open my locker and take out my books for first period. English with Laz, short for Lazzio, as in Mr. Lazzio. I remember now I was supposed to finish
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
but last night when I got Melinda's note I forgot all about it, so I guess I'm busted.

“So?” Anj says with a coy smile. “Tell me about it.”

“God, you're like a dog on a bone. Drop it. There's nothing to tell.”

“Oh, I see, it's a secret.”

“Anj, come on, get off it.” I kick my locker closed. “I didn't have a date.”

Anj cocks her head and her eyes widen. “Then why did Jennie Potter say she saw you nestled into a cozy little booth at the Wawa last night with Jesse what's his name?”

“Schneider, his last name's Schneider, and we weren't nestled.”

“Aha! But you were there.” She claps her hands and sounds absolutely delighted with herself. “You admit it! Jennie was right. She wasn't positive it was you.”

I roll my eyes at Anj and remember the first Judo class during my two-week stay with Aunt T last summer. When Anj strolled into the studio, I took one look at her perky ringlets, pearl necklace, and peace-sign tie-dye and figured I'd kick this upper-class hippy-wannabe's ass.

Kung Fu chick took me down in about two seconds.

Anj didn't care about my five silver hoops, black nail polish, and grimace. Maybe she felt guilty about nearly breaking my back, but at the end of class, she said she needed new jeans and invited me to go shopping. I had nothing better to do, so I said yes, figuring I'd tag along as she checked out the racks of Macy's or J Crew at the Suburban Square Shopping Center. Maybe I'd even scrounge enough change from the bottom of my gym bag for a Frappuccino. Anj skipped the whole mall scene, though, and drove us straight to The Attic Thrift Shop in Broomall, then to Take Two in Ardmore where we discovered a joint love for gaudy costume jewelry (her pearls—overstock.com, $9.99), Wonder Woman memorabilia, anything purple, Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk, and
Gone with the Wind
.

By the end of the day Anj had became a proton to my electron. Her positive can-do attitude attracted my negative force, and soon we were orbiting each other's worlds, transmitting our relationship via Internet radio waves, and becoming friends without even realizing it was happening.

I stuff Hemingway into my bag and drape an arm around Anj's shoulder. “Look, Anj. You might be my one and only friend in this entire school, maybe in the entire world, but sometimes you're a real pain in the ass.”

“I do my best.” She pecks my cheek. “So?”

“So nothing. I went to the Wawa to grab something to eat and I bumped into Jesse. He was all hopped up on caffeine and I shared some peanuts with him. There. That's it. Satisfied?”

“Peanuts, how romantic. Sounds like a real Prince Charming.”

We both laugh because at that moment Prince Charming himself comes barreling down the hall in his skinny jeans, black Converse high tops, and t-shirt silkscreened with the word
Flesh
in big letters across his chest.

“Hey, what's up?” Jesse grinds to a halt in front of us, taking out his earbuds and dropping them around his neck. The music's still playing, and I hear the unmistakable sneer of Johnny Rotten belting out “God Save the Queen.”

“Did you get busted last night?” I ask over the thrashing drums and bass guitar.

Jesse turns off the Sex Pistols. “Nah, Doc was locked in his office, and Mom…” His voice trails off. “Let's just say nobody heard me come in.”

“Well, I'll leave you two lovebirds alone,” Anj says, slipping out from under my arm. “Three's a crowd.”

Before I can punch her out cold, Anj skips off down the hall and joins up with Tara Henderson and her gang of socially conscious friends who are currently organizing a campaign called Happy Cows to raise awareness about factory farming. I'm sure Anj knows nothing about cows and hasn't once thought about where the plastic-wrapped grocery store meat comes from, but she's got the kind of personality that fits in anywhere. I'm betting within days she'll be lead vegan heading up the campaign for animal rights.

I shake my head as I watch her leave. “Sorry about that. Anj is really into setting me up. She thinks I need a boyfriend.”

Jesse leans against my locker, arms folded across his chest like he's the king of cool and the question means nothing to him. “So, you don't have a boyfriend then?”

“No, and I'm not looking for one.” I hoist my bag onto my shoulder and change the subject. “What English class are you taking?”

“Lazzio, first period.” He grabs a well-worn paperback from his back pocket and flashes the title.
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“Great book. I've read it three times. Hemingway's the man. You like his stuff?”

I shrug. “It's okay. I like Fitzgerald more.”

Someone bumps into me. For the first time since meeting up with Jesse, I look around and realize it's morning rush hour. The halls are bloated with students completing last-minute locker checks and urgent social obligations before the bell rings.

“Well, see you later, then,” I say, setting off toward homeroom.

Jesse doesn't give up so easily. “Ernest Hemingway,” he says, trotting along beside me. “Born in Oak Park, Illinois. Won the Nobel Prize in 1954.” He weaves around a herd of cheerleaders without breaking from his speech. “Seven novels, six collections of short stories, and two nonfiction books published before he died. And three novels, four collections of short stories, and three nonfiction books after he committed suicide in 1961.”

I stop outside my homeroom and plant a hand on my hip. “And I suppose you know his middle name too?”

“Miller,” he answers, grinning.

“What do you do, spend all your free time looking up this stuff so you can impress girls or something?”

“No, I'm just determined. Or compulsive. Once I start something, I can't stop until I know everything about it. Like did you know—?”

“No, I don't, and right now I don't want to. Tell me about
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
We have about three minutes before homeroom, and I didn't finish it.”

Jesse tells me enough about how the book ends so I can answer today's essay question without getting an F. When it's time for English, I do my work and answer the question, but when Laz starts his lecture, my mind wanders.

I look at Jesse, or rather I look at the back of his head, because he's sitting in the front row debating Laz. I look at the other guys in class, too. Most of the guys at Haverford spend all their time trying to impress each other, bragging about how much they drank, how many points they scored at the game, how many girls they slept with, and who's easiest to get into bed. It's a total drag, like the date I went on at the end of the summer with Bruce Washington. Anj set it up. If I had to listen to Bruce talk about himself another second, I would've screamed. And then he tried to put his hand up my shirt. I kneed him in the balls, and the date was over.

It's not like I want a boyfriend anyway. Mom provided enough shitty examples to slow the whole hormone-sex-drive thing way the hell down. Mom was as addicted to losers as she was to heroin. Frank. Joe. Bob. Didn't matter. Different name, same guy.

Those guys were always hanging around our house, hiding in the shadows like spiders. When I needed to pee or get some water in the middle of the night, I'd wander out of my room in a t-shirt and boxers. More than once I'd found one of those boyfriends stoned on the couch with a cop show rerun playing on TV and a look in his eyes that made the mere act of being a girl feel dirty. So I learned when to stay in my room. When to lock the door. And to wear sweats to bed even in summer. Just in case.

I look at Jesse again, more like listen, since he's holding court now. “My dad's great uncle's friend had a sister who lived in Key West and knew Hemingway,” he tells the class.

“Dude!” Jason Wallace, a bleary-eyed slacker who, according to Anj, was voted class clown two years running, shouts. “That, like, practically makes you Hemingway's best friend!”

Even Laz laughs.

Jesse starts to say something else, but the bell rings, cutting off the finale of his one-man show. Books slam shut. Chairs scrape the floor. Cell phones come out. Jesse follows me out the door and squeezes through the halls next to me.

“That was some act you put on in there,” I say, barely avoiding a girl who's simultaneously talking to her friend, texting, and trying to dig something out of her pocket.

“Yeah, well, you have to liven things up, right? Otherwise it gets dull. ‘Hemingway lived in Key West in the 1930s…'” he drones, holding his arms out in front of him zombie style. We reach the stairs and he stops. “I'm heading up for Pre-Calc. What about you?”

“History,” I mutter, avoiding Jesse's eyes because having History next means my math is lowly Algebra instead of Pre-Calc.

Pre-Calc is the math I should be taking. I mean I could be taking it. I'm smart enough and always have been, especially at math, because whenever life got too chaotic I went for the books—the math books—where the problems had answers that I could solve. But because of Mom and the fact she could never hold a job for more than a few months at a time, we moved around a lot. New places meant new schools. Between four high schools, lost transcripts, starting and stopping midyear, I've repeated Algebra like three times.

Jesse doesn't question my math status. He reaches out for a parting hug at exactly the second I lift my hand to wave. The end result is I poke him in the eye. I stammer to say something, but Jesse makes a joke of it. He pretends to poke my eye, and that's our good-bye: A see-you-later and an eye-poke.

I travel the rest of the hall solo, a voyeur, taking in all the sordid happenings of high school life outside the classroom: Chip Walker—
Mr. Duuuuude-I'm-So-Wasted
—gropes a girl who turns around and slaps him in the face. A knuckle-dragging Neanderthal in a football jersey sticks out his foot and trips a small Indian-looking kid, causing the kid to tumble to the ground and his books and papers to go flying.

“Did you see that?” Neanderthal laughs, punching his friend, Cro-Magnon, in the shoulder.

Cro-Magnon yuks it up with his buddy. “Check this out.” He bends down and scoops up a bunch of the kid's papers from the floor.

“Thanks,” the kid says, standing and reaching for the papers.

Cro-Magnon waves the papers above his head, so the kid has to stand on his tiptoes and twist and twirl like a trained circus dog to reach them. “Not so fast little guy,” he says. “I have a joke for you first. If you know the answer, I'll give you back your stuff. What do you get when you cross an Indian with a—”

“Leave him alone,” I blurt, stepping out of the crowd and squaring off with Cro-Magnon.

Cro-Magnon looks at me, his frog eyes bulging, and keeps the paper in the air. Neanderthal looks ready to turn my face to pulp. Even though I'm tall, I'm a dwarf compared to these two. These guys are big. Meat and potatoes big.

I should save my ass and shut up, but I've never been good at keeping my mouth shut. “I guess it must be hard to find someone your own size to pick on. Not many guys around here have taken as many steroids as you.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Neanderthal says, curling his hand into a fist and taking a step toward me.

“Try it and I'll—”

“You'll what?” He laughs. “Grab your broomstick and wand and turn me into a toad?”

I look around at the crowd that's gathered and feel my confidence wane. I won't back down, though. This I know from experience:
Look tough and act tough.
It's the name of the game. If you don't show your fear enough times, you actually start to believe you don't have any.

“No,” I say, lifting one foot and showing him my Operation Desert Storm shit kickers. “I'll shove my boot up your butt and rip you a new asshole.”

For a second nobody says anything, but then Cro-Magnon pulls his friend away from me and says, “Leave her alone. She's just some dyke. She's not worth it.”

Cro-Magnon drops the papers, and he and Neanderthal laugh and bump fists and male bond over the brilliance of their final diss. That's it. The little show is over. I help the kid pick up his stuff, and I move on to history class where I find Anj hunched over her desk, working on our project, “Rediscovering Columbus,” to show the negative impact of first contact on indigenous people, worth sixty percent of our grade for the term.

“We need to do more for this if we're going to get an A,” she says without looking up when I reach her desk.

I stand towering above her. “More?”

“Maybe we could have a bake sale of First People's traditional foods. You know, show what it was like before Burger King?”

“But the project's due in less than two weeks. Isn't our PowerPoint presentation enough? I mean we've already edited, what, seventy-five slides?”

“Or we could put on a benefit concert for indigenous people's rights,” she goes on, ignoring me completely. “Or make a digital movie reenacting Columbus' arrival. Wait! I've got it!” She perks up and beams at me. “We can each learn an Arawakan language! We'll decide when we meet next Tuesday. Don't forget. The library before school. The earlier the better.”