Plastic (6 page)

“I doubt it,” I say. Daisy pats my hand and gets up from the table. She is wearing board shorts, a bikini top and flip-flops, as if she's about to hit the beach. Sounds like a good idea. It beats pounding the pavement for a lost cause. Maybe I'll join her.

“Yeah, and what about those interviews?” Mike isn't ready to let it go. “
The Globe
.
The National Post.
Maclean's
.” He rinses his cereal bowl and puts it in the dishwasher. “You can't blow those guys off.”

“Why not?”

“'Cause it's the big time, Baby Bro.”

“Don't call me that. And I don't care about the big time. I care about Leah.”

“Just give it a few more days,” he says. “Do the interviews. See what happens. Think about all the other kids you could help.”

He's right. I know he is. But I just want to see Leah, make sure she's okay.

I sigh. “One more week. Then I'm out. I'm gonna shut down the blog. Put away the signs. Go back to being—”

“Lame?” Mike starts doing pull-ups in the doorway. His muscles are huge and tanned. Daisy elbows him in the crotch as she leaves the kitchen, and he drops to the floor, clutching himself. “What'd you do that for?” he moans.

I can't help laughing. Mike staggers to his feet and follows Daisy back to their room. I can hear them fighting, but I can't really hear what they're saying. I'm about to go and listen outside their door when Dad comes into the kitchen.

“Trouble in paradise,” he says, pouring himself a huge mug of coffee.

“I guess,” I say.

“Young love,” Dad says. He raises his eyebrows at me. He's not much of a talker until the caffeine kicks in.

I grab my pack just as Daisy comes flying down the stairs with Mike right behind her.

“I didn't mean it, baby,” he says. “Let's talk about it. We can work it out.”

Daisy stops suddenly and turns to face him. “I shouldn't have come here.

This is all wrong. I need to think. Don't follow me.” She turns to me. “Let's go, Jack.”

I open the front door for her. Mike takes a step toward her, and she shoves him—hard—in the chest. “I mean it, Mike. Leave me alone.”

He nods. His face is flushed and his eyes are wet. My big brother is crying. Dad comes up behind him and puts his arm around Mike's shoulders. “Back off, son,” he says. And Mike does.

Daisy walks me to school. She doesn't talk at all, but she kisses me goodbye in front of the school. In front of everybody. Just a kiss on the cheek, but still. Maybe I'm not so lame after all.

Leah still isn't at school. The day passes slowly. I mess up an algebra test and zone out in English class. In pe someone nails me in the head with a basketball. Probably not on purpose, but it still hurts. At the end of the day, when I get to Dr. Myers's office building, the news vans are already there. No sign of Daisy. And Mike is being arrested in front of the cameras. I hang back and watch. No way I'm getting involved in this. The baristas at the café are all outside, watching the show. I wander over and ask what's going on.

“Guy paint-bombed the building.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. He threw a balloon full of red paint at the front window. Take a look.” The barista points, and I can see the red paint dripping down the plate-glass windows. It looks like blood.

The barista adds, “Then he screamed something about the blood of the innocent, and then the cops came.”

“Jesus,” I say. “What an asshole.”

“An asshole with a mission. He was here a lot, protesting. Really hot chick used to come with him. Not here today though.”

I nod and edge away. I'm used to being invisible around Mike. But I've never been happy about it until today. The cop car drives away with Mike in it. I go home to break the news to Mom and Dad.

They don't take it well.

“Protesting is one thing,” Dad says grimly. “Vandalism is something else.”

Mom shakes her head. “Where on earth would he get such an idea? We
never
damaged property. Never. Maybe Daisy—”

The phone rings just as I say, “Not Daisy, Mom. Daisy thinks Mike's an a-hole.”

“Is that true, Jared?” she asks my dad.

“Judging by the fight they had after you left this morning—yes.”

The phone keeps ringing. Mom finally picks up. She listens to whoever's on the other end. Then she says, “I don't think so, Mike. Not this time.”

“Bail?” Dad says.

Mom nods. All I can think is, What did she mean by “Not this time”?

Chapter Twelve

“How many times has he been arrested?” I ask.

“Counting this time? Seven,” my dad says. “Or maybe eight.”

“Why?” I ask.

“It's always for a good cause. Or it starts out that way, anyway.” Mom sounds tired. “Save the coral reefs. Save the rain forest. Save the whales. But Mike always takes it a step further. Protesting isn't enough for him. He gets carried away. Does stupid things. Trespassing, vandalism, a couple of fights. The last time he had court-ordered angermanagement classes. We thought things were better. He was in a relationship—”

Taking a dump on someone's desk. Trashing an office. Suddenly it all makes sense. In a totally horrible way. Mike's always been kinda out there, but violence? I couldn't get my head around it.

“He's out of control, Rachel.” Dad pours himself a cup of coffee and puts the kettle on for Mom's tea. “We can't keep bailing him out. He has to figure it out himself.”

“But…jail?” Mom's eyes fill with tears.

“They won't keep him long,” Dad says. “I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it'll be good for him. A dose of reality. I don't know.” He sits down at the kitchen table and puts his head in his hands. I wonder if they worried that I would get carried away with my protest too. I doubt it. They know Mike and I are chalk and cheese. For the first time, I think being the chalk isn't such a bad thing. You can communicate with chalk. Cheese just makes you fat and clogs your arteries.

“I've got homework,” I say, “and I'm gonna shut down my blog. I think my protesting days are over.”

“Oh, Jack,” Mom says. “Are you sure? Don't quit because of Mike.”

“I told Mike this morning that I wanted to quit. He convinced me to stick with it for a while. But now? No way. Not gonna happen.”

“I understand,” she said. “And we're proud of you. Very proud of you.” She mists over again, and I leave the room before I start to cry.

I post one final entry on my blog, thanking people for sending me their stories. I turn off the function that allows comments. I explain that I'm shutting down the blog for “personal reasons.” I don't provide any details. It's nobody's business. I scroll through the last few comments. There's the usual grab bag of horror stories, abuse and porn. It makes me tired just reading them. The last message, though, wakes me up.
I'm heading back to Maui. I hope
Mike gets some help. He needs it. You're
a great kid, Jack. Good luck. Aloha,
Daisy. PS call Leah.

A kid. She called me a kid. I sigh and shut off my computer. I wonder what Mike is doing. Sitting in a cell, shooting the breeze with another inmate? Sleeping on a hard bench under a thin gray blanket? Eating watery stew with stale white bread? Fighting off a guy named Bubba in the shower?

I shudder and go downstairs to the kitchen. Mom and Dad are still sitting at the kitchen table, an unopened bottle of wine between them.

“One more time,” I say.

“One more time what?” Dad looks puzzled.

“Bail him out one more time,” I say. “He did this for me. He was trying to help. We can't let him rot in jail.”

Dad snorts. “It's not like he's in Attica, Jack. He's in a city holding cell.”

“It's still a cell, Dad.” I look at Mom. “What do you think, Mom?”

“We agreed—your father and I— that we wouldn't enable him anymore.”

Now it's my turn to snort. “Enable him? Jeez, Mom, since when are you Dr. Phil? And since when do you give up on people?”

Mom takes a deep breath—in through the nose, out through the mouth. Yoga breathing. For relaxation.

“He's right, Jared,” she says to Dad. “Sitting in jail isn't doing him any good. I'm bailing him out and then I'm taking him straight to Roberta. If he stays in therapy, he can stay here. If not…”

The thought of Mike sitting across from Dr. Smithson makes me laugh. Talk about tough love. A hot chick who could kick his ass in more ways than one. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

“This isn't funny, Jack,” Mom says, although a tiny smile has crept onto her face.

“It kinda is,” I say. “Right, Dad?”

He nods and heads for the door.

“You guys coming?” he asks.

I don't get to be a fly on the wall when Mom takes Mike to meet Roberta. As a matter of fact, I barely see him at all. I'm too busy taking calls from the media. The headline in the morning paper reads:
Prominent Surgeon Puts Down
the Knife for a Good Cause.
Underneath a picture of him from about 1978, Dr. Myers is quoted as saying,
“From
now on, my practice will concentrate on
patients nineteen and older, unless there
are true medical reasons for surgery.
I call on my fellow surgeons to adopt
similar policies.”
He doesn't mention me or the picket line or the red paint. He sounds noble. Dedicated. Giving up all that income. Looking out for the kids. Making the world a better place. And in a strange way, he is. I know he's just trying to get out in front of the story. But the end result is the same: he won't be doing boob jobs on fourteen-year-olds anymore. This is a very good thing. And that's what I tell the media. Over and over again.

Chapter Thirteen

After Dr. Myers swears off underage surgery, I get both the blame and the credit. Blame from some of the girls at school. Blame from their boyfriends. Credit from a lot of adults. A few teachers come up and actually shake my hand, like I've won the Nobel Prize or something. In the dim halls of Warren Academy, I am a celebrity. I have been on tv. More than once. Girls ask me to sit with them at lunch. They slip me notes on scented pink paper. They wait for me at my locker, giggling and offering me gum or a ride home. Guys ask me to join their study groups. Study groups at Warren are like fraternities at college. Snobby, with hazing rituals. The hazing is usually a really tough trigonometry test or an essay question about medieval Iceland. I try to be polite, but I turn everybody down. The sooner I can go back to being plain old Jack, the better. My mom says the average teenager has the attention span of a gnat. Tomorrow they'll move on to something or someone else. If not tomorrow, then the next day for sure.

All I really care about is Leah, who comes back to school with two black eyes and a swollen nose. She isn't talking to me, but she's here. She seems okay, and she didn't have her boobs done. She must have listened to me. Me. Skinny, pale, notebook-keeping Jack. Now all I have to do is think up a way to get her to be my friend again. For a minute I consider picketing her house. Bad idea. I might end up in a cop car. Mom and Dad would freak. It would reflect very badly on their parenting skills. I wonder if skywriting might work, but it's probably super-expensive. And how do you make sure the right person sees it? Maybe I should buy her roses. Too cliché. A card? Weak. I could buy a star and name it after her. Everything I think of seems either too romantic or too dumb.

A few days after she comes back to school, I'm walking down the hall to my locker before lunch. Something hits me between the shoulder blades—hard. I yelp and turn around. On the floor is an apple. Beyond the apple is Leah. Her fists are clenched, and she isn't smiling. She looks like she does on the pitcher's mound. Focused. Kind of mean. There's no way this was an accident. I bet it's gonna leave a bruise.

“Hey, that's a waste of good food,” I say. “There are starving children in, like, Africa.”

“You're kidding me, right?” she says. “We haven't talked for a month, and you're worried about kids in Africa?”

I pick up the apple and drop it in the garbage. “Well, yeah, I mean…”

“Don't you want to know how I am?” she says. “Why I have two black eyes? Why I haven't been at school?”

Instead of saying, What do you think I am, a moron?, I say, “You wanna grab some lunch? Sit outside? Talk?” I figure the worst that can happen is that she'll throw a sandwich at me.

“Okay,” she says. “But I'm still mad at you. You're not getting off that easy.”

“Fair enough,” I say. And just like that, we head to the cafeteria, pick up some food and go to “our” bench.

I'm halfway through my burger when she puts down her yogurt and says, “Is it true Mike got arrested?”

“Yeah. Mom sprung him. He's in therapy. With a woman who used to be a man.”

Leah's eyes widen. “For real?”

“Yup. I met her. She looks like Cameron Diaz, but with really big feet.”

Leah giggles. “Ouch.”

“Does it hurt a lot?” I ask.

“Not as much as it did right after.

Now it's just when I laugh. Or bump it.”

“I wish I'd been there for you,” I say.

She shrugs. “You sorta were. I kept reading about you and seeing you on the news. Even though I was mad at you, I decided you were right. Then this happened.” She points at her nose.

I'm confused. “Plastic surgery doesn't just happen. And I thought you decided I was right. So why did you do it?”

“Why did I take a line drive to the nose? Not because I wanted an emergency nose job, that's for sure.”

For a second I can't speak. Then I manage to stutter, “You mean you didn't have a nose job?”