Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (11 page)

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Utch is looking over his shoulder at me.

“Did you see it?”

“I didn’t.” If I had seen a flying purple thing, I would be very, very frightened. As it stands, the fact that the guy driving saw it should frighten me more.

The car is going very slow and we’re sticking to back roads. Jorie navigates and Utch keeps talking about seeing things.

“Are you tripping?” Jorie whispers.

“I can hear you,” I say.

“I’m way past tripping,” Utch says.

I can hear the things my father would say about this.
This is what you do with your time? This is the way you choose to live your lives? This is the smartest decision you can make—get a ride home from the highest guy at the party?

“Go slowly,” Jorie says. “Don’t kill me and my brother.”

I want to have faith that nothing will happen. Whitman would say that I should have faith in the universe. I can’t think of any lines relevant to this situation.

Then Utch drives into a parked car.

After a moment, I get out of the back seat. Jorie gets out of the front seat. There’s steam or smoke or an angry car spirit misting from the front of Utch’s car.

“You should get out of here, James,” Jorie says.

“Should we leave him?”

“No. You should go. Cops will be here. You don’t need to be here.”

I look at Jorie and she’s wilted. Her night will never end. I wonder if all her nights have been like this since she got kicked out.

We go over to help Utch out, but he waves us off. The driver’s side door makes a magnificent crunching sound as it opens. I look at the dark and crackled windshield. The streetlight or the moon reflects in it. I want to take a picture, which seems stupid, but there it is.

“Did I kill it?” Utch says.

“What?”

“The rhinodactylus!” He has a giggle fit and then sees blood on his hands and gets quiet.

Jorie pulls me away and urges me to leave. She points me to Batch Road, which I can follow all the way back home. I start walking and listen for the sounds of cops, but the night is quiet except for Jorie reading her friend the riot act.

WHEN I GET HOME
there’s a note on the front door that reads: “This is entirely too late.”

It’s my mother’s handwriting.

I open the door quietly and head upstairs. Pictures of my mother and father line the upstairs hallway. Other relatives are peppered here as well, but the constant inclusion of my youthful parents has always suggested to me a strange vanity. Hold on to youth, ignore life with kids. My parents do not seem emotional in the pictures; they mostly embody verbs—they blow out birthday candles, they raise hands in the air along with a crowd of others, they shield their eyes from sun, they throw Frisbees, they barbecue. Even in shots of them hugging or smiling, I sense no real emotion. Maybe I can’t see them as people; maybe they will always be malfunctioning robotic parenting units.

I’m about to open my bedroom door when the Brute’s voice shotguns the back of my head.

“Who told you
this
was okay?”

I turn around and whisper, “What?”

“It’s two-thirty in the morning.”

“Sorry.”

“You pissed off your mother.”

I want to say that he’s going to wake her up, pissing her off more, but decide not to push it.

“Sorry.”

“I don’t want sorry. I want to know where you’ve been.”

“Out with Derek.”

Oh, shit. Derek is supposed to be sleeping here!

“Really. How come he didn’t drop you off?”

“He did. Up the street. I didn’t want his car to wake you up.”

“Don’t lie.”

Clearly I’ve already forgotten Rule Number One of Teenage Happiness:
Less detail makes for an easier lie.

My father stands in the hallway, crosses his arms. He’s very alert for two-thirty. And he’s using a voice he only ever used with Jorie.

“I was out with Jorie,” I admit.

“Great. Were you drinking?”

I sigh, dramatically and angrily.

“And who said you could hang out with her?”

“No one.”

“Exactly.”

“I didn’t know I’m forbidden from seeing my sister.”

My father, the Brute, walks toward me and I fear the health of my other arm. If he touches me I will freak. I can feel the freakout in my throat.

He just walks past me to the bathroom and rips a fart that would have made me cackle when I was little.

IN PHYSICS ON MONDAY
, Beth pretends like she doesn’t know me. I try to figure out what I did wrong. Maybe it’s because I work at a pizza shop. Maybe the idea of it—along with the smell—makes her too good for me. I don’t blame her for thinking this, but I just want confirmation. Confirmation would let me move on without staring at her and out the window at the same time.

After school I go to Mr. Pines’s classroom, where the
Amalgam
has its meetings. To be honest, I walk past the door four times, peering in casually to see if there’s anyone there. But I can’t tell. I hear voices, but none of them sounds like Beth’s.

I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I’m standing a little ways down the hall and a few people are still walking around, but I don’t care if they wonder about the guy with the all-black arm cast holding his breath and shutting his eyes.

I consider running outside to find a tree to feel the comfort in a hug, but finding a tree that lets me wrap my arms around it
just so
will take time and attract attention.

I let my breath out. Two cheerleaders walk by me slowly, staring at me without worry. It must be nice to find the world strange but to keep walking.

The lit mag editorial team looks at me as I enter and drop my book bag by the door. I wave with my broken arm—basically I flash my arm at them, sideways, signaling that I am friendly and unarmed. Ha-ha.

“What are you doing here?” Beth pops her head up from a laptop and smiles. Perhaps she’s not harboring some kind of grudge.

“Thought I’d see where the famous literary magazine got put together.”

I dig out a CD from my bag and walk over to offer it to these self-appointed gods of the high school literary scene.

“Also, I have some photos and poems. Like we talked about.”

One of the guys by the laptop asks what’s on the disc.

“An idea. Nothing definite,” I say cryptically. I notice Beth’s concerned face. Maybe she hasn’t broached the subject of a multimedia, Whitman-influenced poetry extravaganza.

“James takes great photos, Roy,” Beth says, snatching the disc from the co-editor. “I wanted to see them. I have an idea for a special end-of-the-year issue.”

“What’s the idea?” Roy’s curiosity and annoyance seem equal.

Beth starts explaining her idea of a visual issue, poems and pictures, and the three other students seem into it until the coeditor pisses all over it.

“And how are we going to print color photos in a black-and-white publication? Did you consider that?”

I want to defend Beth from this sophomore whose poetry I’ve never read but would definitely hate.

But Beth does fine.

“We put it on the school website,
Roy.
Save all the printing money to throw an end-of-year launch party.”

I’m surprised. She’s really into this idea.

“Can we do that?” Roy asks.

“Of course we can! Don’t you think Pines and the department would be thrilled to save a little money going forward? We could do the whole magazine online next year.”

“We could even make an app for people’s phones like
The New Yorker
or something,” another kid suggests. Roy rolls his eyes, but Beth stays quiet. She doesn’t want to oversell it. (I don’t blame her. I can’t imagine kids downloading a school literary magazine to their phones. They won’t even pick it up in classrooms for free.)

Beth loads the disc. The photos appear on the screen of what I assume is not a school laptop since it looks expensive and has stickers all over the back.

I stand there as strangers and Beth evaluate my work. Though I don’t consider it work—it’s just twenty photos I scanned in the library.

“I like the colors,” one person says.

“I notice colors and textures a lot,” I say quietly. “Trees have good textures.”

Roy doesn’t say anything. I get the sense that if he were controlling the laptop he’d be clicking through the images much more rapidly than Beth. But she’s giving me a great showing. By the end it seems like everyone has a favorite. One girl asks to see an image again and begins to analyze the balance, talking about the rule of thirds or something that sounds really technical. She asks me if I’ve ever taken a photography class and when I say I haven’t she says I have a natural eye.

“That’s funny, because I actually have robot eyes,” I joke, and the girl looks confused, but at least Beth laughs.

I tell them that there are some poems that can go along with the images, but not many.

“Well, we have a little time to sort everything out.” Beth gives her team some work to do and Roy just concurs with her orders and suddenly it’s just me and Beth sitting at a different desk on a different laptop, reading through bad poems. Together, alone.

“I’ve been weird,” she says.

“What line is that?” I think she’s reading from the poem on the screen.

“No. I mean
me.
I’ve
been weird. I’ve wanted to talk to you but e-mail seemed like the wrong way.”

“Are you breaking up with me?”

I smile.

She does not.

“You know when I came by the pizza shop with my friends?”

Ugh. I do smell of pizzeria.

“I had made the mistake of telling one of my friends about you. They said from the way I liked you that I talked about you. I mean, the way I
talked
about you that I
liked
you.” She blushes. “They were teasing me about you and then they teased me in front of my boyfriend and then my boyfriend freaked out.”

“I’m so sorry.” But really I’m sort of not sorry, because I think Beth likes me in a way that messes up her words, which means it’s not just about poetry and friendship.

“You didn’t do anything,” she says.

“That’s . . . true.”

“Anyway, Martin freaked out. And I freaked out at my friends. So I’ve been weird about you now.”

I’m not sure what to say, so I start reading the bad poem on the screen. It’s from someone lamenting the loss of love, written by a ninth-grader. I wonder if the feelings are real.

“This is a bad poem,” I say.

“Don’t say that so loud. It’s Jen’s.” Beth gestures over to the other computer. I think Jen heard us, but who knows. She doesn’t look like she’s had her heart broken recently.

“Sorry.”

“Great, now my literary magazine staff will turn on me.” Still, she’s smiling.

“Have I ruined your life?” I ask.

“No. Everything can be fixed.”

AT THE PIZZERIA THAT NIGHT
, I’m distracted. Images of Beth and the sensual summer we might spend together blast through my racing brain. I feel synapses sparkling.

I sing the body electric!

I can’t remember what Whitman writes after that, but I know that he’s singing of the synapses. He read books about the electrical pulses that the body uses to communicate. He wasn’t just invoking metaphor. He was invoking
science itself.
What a genius!

Flip tells me to wipe the tables down, and as I smear the gray rag around I try to tell him about Whitman and how our bodies are electric. Flip actually seems interested until the phone rings and he goes off to make a pizza. I rummage through my bag under the counter and pull out my tattered Whitman anthology.

This is the female form,

A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,

It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,

I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself . . .

I think that’s erotic. Right?

People come in to pick up their orders and I take their money. I want to tell them the pizza is terrible, but some of them are regulars. Plus, I don’t care! Let them have what they want! Maybe they like the pizza! Maybe the chewy cheese pleases them! Maybe it’s all they want at the end of a long day! Who am I to say what pizza people should eat? I should take their money with a grin and wish them a good evening! I shouldn’t judge their pineapple and pepperoni combos! I shouldn’t
tsk-tsk
their extra sausage! I shouldn’t judge the obese who come in wearing old running shorts and stained Phillies shirts and flip-flops! I shouldn’t judge the frazzled mothers who can’t corral their kids! I shouldn’t judge the men in suits who eat a slice with their ties flipped over their shoulders! I should embrace them all!

That’s the line that follows
I sing the body electric,
ringing loud from my memory:
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them.

I’m not sure if this is what I feel, but it’s a Monday night and I’m full of energy. Let me celebrate something other than myself for once. Let me celebrate the fact that a girl might like me and her boyfriend might be jealous of me and her friends might make fun of her for even wanting to be near me but she told me all this anyway!

Derek comes in and I can’t wait to tell him about my day.

“Flip!” Derek yells.

“What?” Flip yells back.

“You screwed up that last order! It was
no
onions. You put on
extra.
”

Flip comes out with a slip of paper and holds it up. Derek and I both look at it. “Cheesesteak peppers onions.”

“Yeah. Well, you put on extra onions and there was supposed to be no onions.”

“Why would I write
onions
if someone didn’t want onions. There aren’t onions
by default.
You don’t have to ask for
no
onions. You have to ask
for
onions. So they must have asked for onions.”

“They asked for no onions.”

“According to who?”