The Gap Year (21 page)

FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

Y
ou got an extra one of those?” Martin reaches between my legs and grabs a beer, his gaze falling on the empty cans scattered about.

There would not be this many empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best scattered about in the Cape Cod dream life I want Martin to believe I am leading.

I sit up and explain, “Some friends … several friends, a whole gang actually, were over earlier to celebrate the, you know, going away to college. Some of Aubrey’s friends. She just left with them actually.” Too late I remember when Aubrey discovered the word “actually,” and how often it signaled she was about to stretch the truth.

I add, “To spend the night. Play board games. She has this whole group that gets a kick out of retro stuff. Playing Twister. Things like that.”

Martin nods at this image of me serving Twister-playing minors unlimited beers.

“Their parents were with them. Just a few of the parents—the many parents—that I’m close to. Whole big, rollicking gang.”

He holds the can up—“To rollicking”—uses the tail of his shirt to wipe off the top of the can, pops the top, drains half the beer in one gulp. A dramatically un-Next thing to do.

I wish I had bought classier beer. Certainly bottles. Then I chastise myself.
I am not the one who should be feeling apologetic
. I go back on the offensive. “I thought Nextafarians didn’t drink.”

“ ‘With our thoughts we make the world.’ ”

“What is that supposed to mean? How does that pertain to anything? Seriously, one more word of Next bullshit and this conversation will involve lawyers.”

“I thought you liked Prince Gautama. That was from
Siddhartha.
”

In a blinding moment of clarity, I see how insane it is that Martin, who is wearing a pajama suit with a shirt that looks like a sampler platter of condiments, is sitting on my front porch enjoying a cold one. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He gives the one answer that could have made any difference: “I fucked up.”

At that moment I understand how Elaine, a nurse I go to lunch with whenever our shifts synchronize, felt when her ex-husband, father of her two boys, had come out as a woman mistakenly assigned to a man’s body. A woman with a deep affection for bustiers and mall-rat hair.

If Martin had dropped his jeans and revealed a garter belt and fundamentally rearranged plumbing, I could not be more surprised than I am at hearing him say that he made a mistake. Being right, being ultimately and forever correct, was the cornerstone he’d built his Next identity on.

“Not that I really had any other option, but the second, the instant, I sent in that codicil allowing Aubrey to claim the money on her own, I knew I’d made a huge mistake.”

“No kidding. You invalidated the trust. You know that, don’t you? You flushed not just the first year, but Aubrey’s entire college fund down the drain.”

“It was flushed anyway. It would have been flushed the second I left, and, Cam, I was leaving. That much was certain. I tried to stay in so Aubrey could get all four years of the tuition money. I mean, Jesus, I wanted to get at least that much out of the past sixteen years. But I could barely hang on long enough for her to claim that first year. I don’t know how much she’s told you about our communication—”

I shrug as if of course my daughter and I have such a close, loving relationship that we tell each other everything. Because I raised her right. Without Next.

“Well then, you know about us messaging on Facebook. It was the safest way to get in touch with her. We chatted for months. It was … I can’t describe how powerful it was. I lived for those little chat bubbles. Those little fragments, glimpses, of my daughter. Then, right after Thanksgiving, they stopped.”

And Tyler started
.

“By that time,” Martin continues, “I felt like a spy, a POW, in Next. I had to force myself through every day, every moment. All I wanted was to make it until they paid out for her first year. But then time came for tuitions to be paid, and no withdrawals were made, so I started sending her messages every day telling her, ‘Get the money. Get the money.’ But she completely ignored me. I got no response whatsoever. Why are you smiling?”

“Oh, nothing. Then?”

“Then I was done. I couldn’t hang on a second longer. I sent her my cell number knowing that once she used it, you and Aubrey had a day, maybe two before Next ID’d the call, realized I’d had contact with my daughter, canceled the trust, and put their bloodhounds on my trail. So I sent the message, took the Bentley, and started running. I figured either she’d call and I’d get her to claim the money or I’d track her down and take her to the bank myself. I was on the road when she called, stopped at a Kinko’s, got the bank to fax the codicil to me there, signed it, and sent it in. After that, there was no going back to Hub HQ.”

Hub HQ is where Martin has lived for most of the past sixteen years, ever since he was promoted to their Celebrity Corps, the elite inner circle assigned to deal with Next’s highest-profile adherents. Located outside Los Angeles, Hub HQ had once been the palatial manse of a robber baron. Its last owner, some music mogul who attributed all of his success to Next, had bequeathed it to “the church.” Its 56 bedrooms and 61 bathrooms and 19 sitting rooms perched on 127 acres high above the Pacific seemed the kind of place that might have a dungeon or torture chamber.

“All I could take was the Bentley and this suit.” He plucks at the dirty shirt, glances down, catches a whiff of himself. “Whew. Sorry, don’t sit downwind of me. Anyway, since I don’t have a dime to my name, I had to move through this kind of underground railway for Next heretics. Made it kind of hard to do a lengthy consult with you. I’m sorry.”

I’m stunned: He really is out. And, from the almost normal, mostly non-Nextian way he’s talking and acting, he’s been separating for a while.

“But it’s fine, right?” he says, waving at the empties. “You’re having a farewell-leaving-for-college party? She got the money and used it to pay her first-year tuition?”

“Of course she used the money to pay her tuition. But if she wasn’t such a sensible girl, who knows what she might have done? A less sensible girl might be in Mexico with her boyfriend right now. He might have made her spend that money on drugs. Or made her buy him a new truck. Or … or …”

Or diapers
.

His cell phone buzzes. He checks the number and his Next armor snaps back into place. “I’ve got to take this.”

He walks down the porch steps out onto the dry grass, barking Next-type phrases. “You are aware of the dossiers that I compiled. They’ve all been downloaded to a safe account out-of-network.” Like baboons, Nextarians are always trying to back one another down. “If anyone from SkyPat shows up, those dossiers will be compromised. Trust me on this. I
will
initiate. Do you read me? I
will
initiate.”

I think he’s telling them that he’s got dirt he’ll spread on all the celebrities who’ve confessed their secrets to him if they come after him. I briefly wonder if he would have ever been tough like that with Aubrey. Would she have ever dared to lie straight to his face about her “friend” Shaniqua?

Listening to Martin boom out this secret clubhouse lingo as he tramples across the crispy remnants of my lawn brings back the insoluble puzzle of how such a smart man could have fallen for such bunk. Or the real puzzle of how such a smart woman could have lost her man to it.

NOVEMBER 15, 2009

M
y bra is vibrating where I’d tucked my cell into it. I know it’s Tyler. This is the signal we’d arranged for him to let me know that he is waiting at the end of the block so we can go hang out at his place. When I first asked him to pick me up there instead of coming to my house, he’d said, “What? Are you ashamed of me?”

Only Tyler Moldenhauer could say this as a complete and absolute joke: No girl at Parkhaven High has ever been ashamed of bringing Tyler Moldenhauer home.

“No, my mom’s … She’s different.”

“Strict?”

“Yeah. Strict.” My mom is the complete opposite of strict, but I don’t want to go into that.

“That’s why you’re the way you are.”

“What way am I?”

“Sweet.”

“ ‘Sweet.’ ‘Nice.’ Tyler, you make me sound like a cross between vanilla pudding and a kitten.”

“You are. To me you are.”

“I’m not. I’m really not.”

“OK, you’re a giant jizbag ho. That better?” He never stops smiling.

“I wish you texted. If my mom’s there, I don’t want her hearing my phone ring.”

“Text? With these?” He held up his hands. They were as scarred and rough and almost as hard as old bricks. The little finger on his left hand stuck out at a forty-five-degree angle from where it was broken and not set right. The top of his middle right finger was missing entirely. It was hard to imagine how someone could lose the top of a finger playing football. Like his teeth, his hands are different from anyone else’s at Parkhaven. “Texting is too much like homework and you know I don’t do homework. Just put it on vibrate and stick your phone right there.”

When he touched my breast, he was the public Tyler Moldenhauer, the player who could have any girl he wanted. Who could have me. But he’d pulled his hand away, clamped it on the steering wheel. I guess he didn’t want to get my hopes up. Lead me on or something.

“That’s cool,” I said, silencing my phone and sliding it into my bra. “Vibrate is cool. Just call, hang up, and I’ll come.”

And now he is calling. I head for the door. My mom intercepts me. “Aubrey? Are you going out? You have school tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Shaniqua and I need to work on our project.”

While I am trying to remember if I told her it was a project for physics or Spanish, she stations herself in front of the door, folds her arms across her chest, and says, “Aubrey, there is not a single person, male or female, at your school named Shaniqua.”

“What? You looked through the entire directory?”

“Only because Madison’s mom mentioned that you’ve been seeing Tyler Moldenhauer.”

“Madison’s mom? When did you talk to her? I thought you hated her and all the Parkhaven moms.”

“I don’t hate Joyce. I don’t hate anyone. We’re just not … Aubrey, are you dating Tyler Moldenhauer, and why haven’t you told me?”

“Dating? No one
dates
anyone anymore.”

“OK, hanging out, chilling, hooking up.”

“Ew.” I cannot control a full-face grimace at how excruciatingly wrong, factually and every other way, hearing her say “hooking up” is.

“OK, sorry if I’m not up on all the latest slang. How about this: You lied to me. All those ‘study dates’ with ‘Shaniqua’? Complete and utter lies. Lying is unacceptable. Our entire relationship is based on trust, and if I can’t trust you …”

She inserts the Trust Tape. The volume is louder than usual this time, other than that it is the same old message. As it plays, all I can focus on is that the thought of Tyler meeting my mom makes me ill. At the moment, she is wearing a pair of ancient navy blue mesh running shorts and a T-shirt with the Virgin of Guadalupe on it, which is supposed to make some kind of statement. She is barefoot and carrying a glass of wine and has the reading glasses she started wearing last winter perched on her nose. She was proud of having “scored” them at the dollar store. They have a leopard-print pattern that she thinks makes them cool.

“Aubrey! Are you even listening to me? Say something.”

“This is so ridiculously unfair! Why do you have to know every single thing I do every second of the day! I am not two years old. I’m not going to choke on a hot dog or stick a fork in an outlet. You do realize that I’m going to be gone in a few months, don’t you? You won’t be able to micromanage every second of every day when I’m on my own. What then, huh? I’m almost eighteen. Legal age. Then I’ll be able to vote and sign a contract and, if I was a guy, I could be drafted. You know, run my own life.”

“And who is supposed to finance this life you’ll be running all on your own?”

“I have money saved.”

“You did until you started squandering it on identical pairs of obscenely overpriced shorts.”

“See!? That is exactly what I’m talking about! God! I cannot wait until I don’t have someone keeping track of every cent I spend and passing judgment on every single goddamn thing I do!”

“Aubrey, I am not passing judgment on you.”

“Bullshit. That is all you ever do! That is all you’ve ever done!”

“Aubrey, calm down.”

“Me calm down?
You
calm down.”

“OK, I’m calm. Look, all I want to do is meet this guy you’re spending so much time with. That is not some kind of bizarre request.”

The overhead light shines off her freakishly large forehead until it starts pulsing like something out of
Babylon 5
. There is no way I can explain why she must never meet Tyler. Why Tyler and I are not and never will be a
Meet the Parents
kind of thing. It just can never happen.

Desperate, I recall how, for as long as I can remember, she’s been telling me that she does not want to be the kind of mother her mother was. The memory even comes with its own sound track, a song she used to sing about how your children are not really your children, and how I am an arrow and she is only there to shoot me into the future. That song used to scare me when I was little. I didn’t want to be an arrow and I really didn’t want to be shot into the future. Back then being separated from her was the scariest thing I could imagine. Much scarier than dying. Yet that song comes in very handy right now, when I do want to shoot out of the house.

“Mom, you’re being exactly how you said your mother always was. You’re trying to smother me.”

“I am not trying to smother you. This is totally different,” she yells in a defensive way that means she is no longer certain that she is right.

“You always said you want me to find my own path and now you’re literally blocking my path.” Without trying or even knowing why, I start crying.

“God, Aubrey, all I said was that I want to meet this young man.”

I suddenly believe that my mother
has
smothered and oppressed and micromanaged me my entire life. That I
have
never known one second of freedom. She tries to stop me when I run out the door, but I push past her. I am still crying when I get into the truck. Tyler hugs me. But just a friendly besties hug. Nothing more. Never anything more.