The Great American Whatever (17 page)

“I believe somebody is making off with your bike, Toto,” he says. He has perfect teeth. I was definitely right: His parents had big plans for him.

I turn around. Two kids half my size have found a way to board my little Mongoose, together, like a circus act, and are jamming away with it down the street.

I drop all the paper advertisements and take off after the little punks. Just as I make it out of the frame—tripping past the Quiznos that has the best raspberry iced tea and feeling my stomach gurgle—one of the flyers, advertising a candlelight vigil for a local girl killed in a car accident six months back, gets swept up in a manufactured breeze that has been added by a set decorator simply so that this sequence ends with a visual flourish. The flyer blows directly into the screen of the camera, cutting to the next scene.

QUINN ROBERTS'S TOP-TEN MOVIE QUOTES

1. “A boy's best friend is his mother.” (
Psycho
, 1960)

2. “As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.” (
Gone with the Wind
, 1939)

3. “Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night.” (
All About Eve
, 1950)

4. “I coulda been a contender.” (
On the Waterfront
, 1954)

5. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” (
The Godfather: Part II
, 1974)

6. “I'll be right here.” (
E.T.
, 1982)

7. “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.” (
The Wizard of Oz
, 1939)

8. “We'll always have Paris.” (
Casablanca
, 1942)

9. “What we've got here is failure to communicate.” (
Cool Hand Luke
, 1967)

You'll notice there's no tenth. I'm still waiting to happen upon it. I suppose that's just the kind of guy I am: whimsical.

I
t's an amazing thing when two prepubescent kids on a Mongoose bicycle built for one can outspeed a full-grown nearly adult teenager, but there you have it. I'm stuck in Mount Lebanon without a ride home, without a movie to see, with too many hours to worry myself into the overwritten version of what tonight's going-away party for Amir is going to be like. I'm not ready for him to leave. He just arrived.

“My, people come and go so quickly here.” (
The Wizard of Oz
, 1939)

I'd get out my new phone to text Geoff to come pick me up, but the contacts aren't synced yet and the only number I have memorized is my mom's landline, which hasn't been connected for months. So when I stomp past the old Presbyterian church, I figure I may as well make the most of my misery and stop into the family-run drugstore to pick up some new cologne. Mom's gift to me.

Look at me. Attempting optimism again. Twice in one week, new world record.

I'm in the beauty section thinking maybe this will be the summer I bring CK One back, when: “Mr. Roberts,” I hear, and I'd know that voice anywhere.

“Whaddup, Mrs. Kelly.”

So. Weird. She's wearing pristine white sneakers and a T-shirt, and I can barely wrap my head around seeing this totally buttoned-up Republican anywhere but in her cinder-block counselor's office at school, grilling me.

“Well, here we are,” she says. In a screenplay, we sometimes write in “(beat)” when we want an actor to take a purposeful pause. Imagine a lot of (beats) here, because,
finally
, she goes: “You look fantastic, Mr. Roberts.”

“Oh, thanks,” I say. “You, uh, look the exact same. You haven't changed!”

“I've been working my tail off at the gym.” Mrs. Kelly tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I've lost maybe twenty pounds since the last time I saw you.”

“Oh,
jeez
,” I say. “I was kidding, Mrs. Kelly. You look amazing.”

“Please, Mr. Roberts.” If an entire face could do an eye roll, hers does. “I've been married twice. I know when a man is lying.”

Mrs. Kelly is holding some kind of nutrition powder in a bulk container, and the weight of it seems to be making her arms shake. What kind of gym could she possibly be going to if it hasn't prepared her for the weight of a jar of powder?

“Can I help you with that?” I say, and I put the CK One down and she hands the powder to me, and, with no discernible segue, goes: “There's still time, you know. I haven't legally been allowed to reach out directly, but as your counselor, I am as committed to getting you into a good college as I am the next studen—”

“Thanks, Mrs. Kelly. Let's see what happens,” I say. I've never liked school. Nobody in my family has ever finished college. Why upset the applecart? “I've been looking into getting my GED, and I was thinking about getting a job, so stuff is
def
initely on the horizon.”

Mrs. Kelly bypasses my words. “Have you gotten any of the packets I had your teachers send home? You really
can
start senior year right on track.”

I keep picturing what it would feel like to drive past The Pug every day, to pull past Annabeth's dog face and see the school flagpole, which will, no doubt, be permanently at half-mast, as a tribute. Kill me now. As if homeroom wasn't tragic enough already.

My phone rings. No idea who it is, but it's local.

“I should get this,” I say, handing back the protein powder, which was, by the way, heavy as fuck. My bad! “It's an important call.”

Where is her mean face? Where is Mrs. Kelly's judginess? She is being so kind and patient. She is frustrating me. “Of course,” she says.

I step away and swipe to talk.

“Hey,” I hear.

“G., hey, you have my new number! Cool.”

“Yeah, I
got
you the friggin phone,” Geoff goes. “I had to pretend I was you at the Verizon stor—”

“Are you coming with me to Amir's party tonight?”

He sighs. “Uh, no. Just to remind you, he and I aren't really friends. He was just using me to get you cakes and love notes.”

“Okay, so what's up?”

“Let's meet up,” Geoff says. “In person. I have to . . . show you something.”

“Something bad?”

“No.” He does this weird pause. Like, a suspicious (beat). “No, I don't think so.”

“Okay,” I say. “Can you pick me up on Washington Road in Mount Lebo, actually? I got here and then some kids stole my bike.”

“Quinn, your life story is starting to turn into a documentary that people would walk out of because it's both too sad and too slow.”

Fuck you,
I start to say, but I realize Mrs. Kelly is only an aisle over, and suddenly I want her to like me.

“
Well
, then,” I say, instead. “Can you show me this mysterious whatever
tonight
? Like, after Amir's party.”

“Fine,” Geoff says, and just when I'm about to say,
And can you
mayyyybe pick me up from Station Square, late?
he goes, “Figure out a way to get to my house,” and hangs up.

I check the time on my new phone and realize I should put some work into making myself as hot as possible for later. I feel an incoming-missile zit situation coming on.

“Mrs. Kelly,” I say, walking too fast down the aisle and nearly running right into her. She's been spying on me, I think, hiding behind a tower of sympathy cards, but I don't care. In fact, I like it. I feel cared for. “Can you give me a ride home?”

• • •

Mom is in the sunroom. She's hugging a pair of Mickey Mouse ears, teeny-tiny Mickey Mouse ears that Annabeth got on our one family road trip to Florida. I can tell Mom's been sorting through everything—the house is even more turned over than ever, with piles of newspapers and old
Life
magazines pulled up from the basement—and she's asleep and lightly snoring, which is normal. But she's doing something else, at the same time, something headline-making big:
LOCAL WOMAN FOUND SMILING FOR LONGER THAN THREE SECONDS IN A ROW. CLICK FOR VIDEO.

I look to the counter. The postcard advertising men's haircuts is gone. She started going through the mail, finally, like some kind of grown-up. Sometimes it's hard to not think of Mom as a kid, herself. Technically speaking, she's an orphan now. And she isn't married. I'm kind of the only thing left that makes her seem like an adult, by default.

One of the lights flickers off in the kitchen. I hope she pays the bill soon.

W
e have this local train thing called “the T” in Pittsburgh. It's our rickety “mass transit system” and our version of an above-ground subway. Everywhere else in my life, I like complete control. But whenever I'm on mass transportation—the T, like tonight, or an airplane,
once
, to Charleston, for a choir trip—I'm actually okay with giving over. With letting the pilot steer. I don't know why.

For the record, the best train scenes of all time are:
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(1989),
The Bridge on the River Kwai
(1957), and, duh,
Strangers on a Train
(1951). I'm not looking these up, by the way. I just know the dates. Can you imagine if I could apply this kind of memory to something genuinely useful?

The Sunday-night T schedule is usually unpredictable, but tonight we're going particularly slow, and I really can't be late to Amir's party. Apparently it's on a riverboat, and we're traversing one (or all?) of Pittsburgh's three rivers, and it's a whole thing. I only know I have to be there by “seven p.m., sharp,” according to his voice mail, which I've listened to so many times that I have started taking the little breaths that he takes, along with him, when I relisten.

“
Ladies and gentlemen,
” I hear from a speaker mounted directly behind my head—making me hop out of my seat and nearly smash into some lady's granny cart, “
because of an incident near Station Square, the T will stop before the tunnels, with free shuttle buses directly to Station Square. This will cause an approximately ten-minute delay in schedule.
”

Well, this is ridiculous, and I'm about to say as much to the other passengers when this guy in full Pirates regalia goes, “This fucking blows,” and starts kicking at the doors of the train car. He's really quite violent about it—you can see actual dents forming in the metal—and now he's talking to the granny whose cart I bumped into and trying to loop her into his anger. And as I'm watching him, I realize I don't want to be that kind of guy. The one who ropes people into his fury.

The one who makes fun of his wife's cooking for how it always disappoints him.

The one who never watches a single one of his kids' five-minute-long movies.

I don't want to be that guy.

“This is our last and final stop. Please board the shuttle across the street.”

And so I choose not to be.

• • •

“Does anyone know where Amir is?” I say, pacing around the launching dock off Station Square, right at the edge of the river. Pittsburgh is so pretty. People think it's not going to be and then it is.

“I don't think he's here yet,” someone says. I'm looking and looking for Carly, hoping to see a familiar face, when a girl in a skirt goes, “Pepé Le Pew!” and I realize she and I were on the team of non-natives in the Celebrity game of doom.

“Oh, hey,” I go.

“Cool glasses,” she says, and I touch them like I'm Cinderella, like my fairy godmother put them on for me. Which I guess she did.

A horn from behind me
honk-honks
, followed by the halfhearted cheers of a group of people trying to look cool. There's so little that people get openly worked up about. A few folks stub out their clove cigarettes, and I see one guy swig from a Dr Pepper in a brown paper bag, and then a faceless voice calls out:
“All aboard!”

It's him, Amir, jumping out of the back of somebody's car and holding Carly's hand. It makes my stomach shimmy, seeing them touching each other, and I like that—that I feel protective about a guy, for once. Usually I'm the only guy I feel protective about, ha.

I try to get Amir's attention, but he and Carly run ahead, onto this old-fashioned riverboat called
The Good Ship Lollipop
. A line forms after them, to get on too. These three girls in front of me are guffawing at something on one of their phones, and when I turn away from them, that's when I notice giant floodlights—the kind in stadiums, but also the kind used on film sets. The kind you'd set up if you were shooting a movie on a Sunday night that disrupts the flow of the T, which causes a kid to decide to not react like his dad would, and to hop on a shuttle bus to a going-away party for a boy he was just, well, getting going
with
.

My phone buzzes. “
Go to the upper deck, mister
,” the text says. “
I'll find you
”