Full Tilt (4 page)

It’s a Volvo. Beat up, rusty, and barely breathing, but a Volvo, nonetheless. Still the safest car on the road. Air bags, head-restraint system, front- and rear-end crumple zones, and a crush-resistant passenger compartment. No crash-test dummies lost their lives testing this one.

With my license only one month old, I drove us home from the amusement park with both hands on the wheel, positioned at ten and two, like we learned in driver’s ed.

“What a rip!” Quinn complained. “What theme park closes at ten at night?” He fiddled with his nose ring, pulling loose a booger that had rotated out on the shiny silver ring like an asteroid. He wiped it on the dashboard, and I smacked him.

In the back Russ and Maggie examined the strange invitation to the phantom amusement park. “I think I’ve
heard of this place,” Maggie said. “If I’m right, it’s supposed to be pretty good.”

“I’ve heard of it too,” Russ said.

I thought of the way Cassandra just disappeared. It was pretty creepy. “There’s nothing down Hawking Road,” I informed them. “Just the old quarry.”

“Dude, it’s a theme park rave. Never in the same place twice. Attendance by invitation only.”

“And we’ve got an invitation,” said Quinn.

“Correction:
I’ve
got an invitation.”

Quinn made a face. “What good is it to you? You’ll never go!”

“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” But we all knew I wouldn’t. I turned a corner, arm over arm, then returned my hands to ten and two.

“You know what your problem is—” said Russ, but Maggie didn’t let him finish the thought. She grabbed the invitation from him.

“If Blake doesn’t want to go, then he doesn’t have to go.” She slipped the card back into the inbred bear’s pocket. “It’s probably overrated, anyway.”

I held back a smile. Whenever I was at the short end of a disagreement, Maggie always shifted the balance to my side.

I dropped off Russ, then Maggie. As I worked my way through the neighborhood toward our house, Quinn set his mouth on cruise control, constantly complaining about how I came to a complete three-second stop at every stop sign.

“C’mon! At this time of night, stop signs are optional.”

“Is there any rule that’s not optional for you?”

Then, as I braked for the next stop sign, a little green car barreled across the intersection, completely ignoring the four-way stop.

“See? If I didn’t stop, we would have smashed into that Pinto. Do you know what happens when you hit a Pinto?”

“What?”

“They blow up!”

“Cool!” said Quinn.

As it turned out, explosive Pintos were the least of our problems. I could tell what type of evening it was going to be when we drove up to our house and saw Mom out front with Carl, boyfriend of the month.

So you get the complete picture, I ought to explain about my mother and her boyfriends. You see, Mom is sort of like a blue whale. I don’t mean she’s big—she’s actually on the small side. What I mean is that Mom filters losers through her baleen as if they were krill. I don’t know why; she’s a good person with a big heart—enough of a heart to raise Quinn and me alone on what little she makes. But when it comes to herself, I don’t know, it’s like she never aims as high as she deserves. She could have graduated college, but she dropped out because Dad wanted her to. Then when Dad left, she never went back, because she had to support us.

Most of the guys she’s dated were like Dad. They drank too much, demanded too much, and when it came
time to give something back, they bailed. But her latest boyfriend seemed to be an exception to the rule. Aside from a bad hair transplant that looked like rows of wheat and a wardrobe that was just a bit too young for him, Carl seemed to be an okay guy. But I reserve judgment on anyone Mom filters through her baleen.

Now, as I drove up, Carl had a new mark against him, because he was making out with Mom on the porch—and I mean
really
making out, the way I should have been doing at around this time in my life. I was thankful we’d dropped Maggie and Russ off already so they didn’t have to witness the scene.

“Now,
that’s
what I call a vomit ride,” I told Quinn as we pulled up the driveway. He snickered. No matter what disagreements we had, we were of one mind when it came to Mom and her boyfriends.

As soon as we got out of the car, they stopped sucking face. Mom looked embarrassed at having been caught.

“Hi, guys,” Carl said. He noticed the bear I held. “Looks like you came up a winner.”

“Carl was just saying good-bye,” Mom said.

“Really,” I said. “He must speak in tongues.”

That got me a high five from Quinn. When we were done laughing, Mom raised her eyebrows and said, “Are you done having your joke at our expense?”

Oh, please don’t try to sound parental now.
“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Good, because Carl and I have an announcement to make.” She took his hand, and I felt my gut beginning to collapse into a knot, because I knew what she was going to say. I knew because of the ring I saw on her
hand. It was a diamond; and I had a feeling it was no cheap zircon, either, but the real thing. I clenched the arm of the misshapen bear tighter.

“We’re engaged,” she said, and bounced up and down like a cheerleader. Her enthusiasm was met by our silence. “Well, aren’t you going to congratulate us?”

Frankly I didn’t know what I felt: good, bad, or indifferent. The news hadn’t completely sunk in yet. But Quinn took it all in at once. First his ears went red, and the redness spread like a rash across his pinched face.

“Well?” Mom prompted.

“The last guy’s ring was bigger,” Quinn said, and tried to storm off into the house. Carl grabbed Quinn by the arm, and Quinn braced himself to be hit. It was a natural reflex after years of Mom’s boyfriends, who spoke in fists rather than in tongues. But Carl, to his credit, wasn’t like that. He only grabbed Quinn to get his attention, and he let go as soon as he had.

“Hey,” he said, “I’ve got something for you, Quinn.” He held out a small jewelry box, flipping it open to reveal a tiny diamond ear stud. It was just like the one Carl himself wore.

“I don’t want it.”

“Take it, Quinn,” Mom said. It was an order.

Carl cautiously took a step closer to Quinn. “Here, let me.” He removed the sputnik dangling from Quinn’s ear, replacing it with the diamond stud. “Sometimes one is enough, when it’s the right one.”

Quinn grimaced like he was having a root canal.
Finally Carl stepped back. The new stud was still one among three earrings in his ear, but it was definitely less in-your-face than the sputnik.

“Can I go now?” Quinn didn’t wait for an answer. He bolted into the house, slamming the screen door behind him.

Carl sighed. “Well, that could have been worse.” Then he looked at me. I was still feeling numb about the whole thing, but I knew what I had to say to get me out of this awkward situation.

“I’m very happy for you both.” I turned to go in.

“Carl has something for you, too,” Mom said.

“It’s okay,” I told them. “I’m not Quinn. I don’t need a bribe.” The words slipped out before I could hold them back.

“It’s not like that, Blake,” Carl said. “I know we’re going to be family. . . . But I want to be friends, too.”

I cringed at the word
family.
For years our little family had been about as misshapen as the bear I was holding. It didn’t need more stuffing, it needed a complete makeover. The guys Mom dragged into the task never made it through the preliminaries. Was Carl so different? Did I want him to be?

Carl reached into his sports jacket and produced an overstuffed envelope. He held it out to me, a gesture of friendship. “Just some things you might need at college,” he said, “and some phone numbers of friends I have in the city. New York can be rough without someone to help you out.”

I took it, thanked him, and went inside, riding a wave
of sudden nausea—a sort of seasickness from the many unexpected lurches of the evening. They say it’s not the sideways motion of a ship that makes you sick, but the pitch and yaw: the constant rising and falling of the bow, both predictable and yet different with every wave. On days like this, it felt like I’d never get used to it.

Once in the house, I spared one more look at the ungainly little bear and his unpleasant yellow shirt. It was my trophy for a twisted evening that wasn’t getting any better. The corner of the invitation stuck out of the bear’s pocket, but I didn’t care about that anymore. I wasn’t going. Cassandra would probably be there, but who was I kidding? She was out of my league.

On the way to my room I passed Quinn’s closed door. Angry music blared on the other side. I just didn’t feel like dealing with him, or his room. I mean, imagine the debris field of a tornado, and you’ll begin to understand what it looked like. There were dust bunnies that lurked in corners, evolving into higher forms of life. Half-eaten sandwiches growing thick green fur filled the bookshelves.

No surprise that my room looked nothing like my brother’s. I opened my door to a clean floor, a neat desk, and a host of evenly spaced travel posters lining the walls. Russia, England, and Greece hung over my desk. Above my headboard was Italy, with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and on my closet door was France, with the Eiffel Tower and the Arc De Triomphe looking like a hundred-foot keyhole into all the places I’d never been. An oversized poster of Hawaii was strategically placed as
a backdrop for some World War II model planes I’d hung from the ceiling in a mock dogfight.

The posters had been free because they knew me at the travel agency down at the mall. When I was younger, I hung out there, and they would pretend to book me on trips to faraway places. Then they’d give me the posters, along with whatever other promotional stuff was lying around in their office. That was how I got the two carved heads from Easter Island that now served as bookends and an authentic imitation totem pole from Alaska that stood in the corner.

My desk was empty except for a desk organizer holding paper clips, pens, and sharpened pencils. Quinn called it “anal” the way I kept everything, as if being neat were some weird complex. As if there were something wrong with having all my pencils sharpened and my books in alphabetical order and my clothes hung up by color. So what? I used to do that with my crayons, too.

I sat at my desk and opened the envelope Carl had given me. Like he said, it contained a list of names and phone numbers of people I didn’t know in New York, but there were other things in it as well. Like a subway map I couldn’t figure out no matter which way I held it. Like a brochure from Columbia University’s sports department that featured the school mascot, a menacing blue lion, stalking forward as if trying to intimidate me out of trying out for their swim team.

And then there were the airplane tickets.

American Airlines. 6:45
A.M
. departure. September 4. One was round-trip, for my mom. She got to stay for two
days. The other ticket was mine and was one-way. The flight landed at an airport called LaGuardia. I’d never flown—never had the need to—but now here was a ticket, with a date only one month away.

Ever have the real world hit you like a steel pole to the head? Until now all I had from the university was an acceptance letter and a dozen forms to fill out. But here, spread out before me, was solid reality on a collision course with me.
Wham!
Sixteen years old and living at a college in New York City? What was I, crazy? Was I totally out of my mind? My head was spinning, and whenever that happened, it always called back that memory of my first ride.

Screaming. Spinning out of control. Gripping tightly on to the seat. So dizzy . . .

Too tired to resist, I let the memory come. I was seven. There are so many details I still remember, like the smell of cherry-flavored bubble gum in the air and the cold feel of the seat and the screams of my friends, each voice a different pitch, like a terrified choir, all out of tune. And yet so much is also gone. Not so much forgotten as exiled from my brain. Maybe that’s because the ride didn’t take place at a carnival or an amusement park. It took place on an icy December morning. On a school bus.

Mom never talked about it, and so neither did I. I always figured the memory of that ride was best left buried. Problem is, rides like that have a way of coming back, and then you’re stuck riding them again. And again. And again.

I brought my hands to my temples, pressing until the spinning feeling went away. Then I took the subway map, the list of names, and the brochure, and dropped them in the trash. I made sure the brochure was facedown, so I wouldn’t have to see the eyes of that blue lion. As for the plane tickets, I shoved them as far and as deep in my desk as I could, knowing I really couldn’t throw them away but wishing that I could at least make them disappear.

I went to the kitchen as Mom came inside.

“Did you look in the packet Carl gave you?”

“I’m tired, Mom. Can we talk about it in the morning?”

I scavenged through the fridge, finding doggie bags left over from her and Carl’s big engagement date. Wan Fu’s Szechuan Emporium: the most expensive Chinese restaurant in town. At least the guy had good taste in food.

Mom leaned against the wall. “Why does Quinn have to be like this? It’s like I’m not allowed to have any happiness around here.”

I didn’t feel like getting into it. “Not everything’s about you, Mom.”

“Yeah, well, not everything’s about him, either.”

I snatched up the doggie bags, and instead of escaping to my clean room, I went in Quinn’s pigsty. At least there, the chaos was all out in the open, instead of hiding in unseen places.

I pushed open his door. A dart zipped through the air headed straight for my face. I deflected it with the doggie
bags, and it punctured the flaming
Hindenburg
on Quinn’s classic Led Zeppelin poster instead, which had once been Mom’s until retro became cool and Quinn nabbed it.

“That would have been a bull’s-eye,” Quinn complained. I looked at the dartboard on the back of the door.