The Great American Whatever (25 page)

“Oh, crap,” Geoff goes. “Here comes Dwight.”

I lean forward and look out the window, and even though we don't go to school with anyone named Dwight, I fall for it, and then the smell hits me.

“Jesus Christ, Geoff,” I say, and I lift my T-shirt and cover my nose. “Seriously, you should see a doctor.”

He rolls down the window and starts laughing so hard, the Corolla swerves. My stomach does too.

“Seriously,” I say, “you should be ashamed.”

I let an appropriate amount of time go by before dropping my collar, but, Jesus, Dwight is still here, like an uncle at Thanksgiving whose stories last
wayyyyy
too long and never have a punch line.

“Seriously,” I say again. But then I start laughing because the other choice is vomiting, and my stomach is having too good a time with the ice cream cake to say goodbye to it already.

We pull into my rocky driveway. I'm thinking maybe we should whip up some lemonade for old times' sake, but I let the thought go. We unload all the groceries super quietly, because Mom is asleep in the sunroom, and then I walk G. back out to the car and I take a paper towel to wipe up some of the peach juice on the seat, and I swear to you Dwight is still lingering in there like a nightmare fog and it makes us laugh again.

We make some vague plans for Geoff to come back in a couple of hours with some “tools” to finally put in the new AC, and we're still laughing about That Lingering Dwight!—but before I let Geoff go, I stop laughing, and I pull my old phone out of my bookbag, and I hold it up for him to see.

Geoff looks at it weird, like it's an ancient Mesopotamian tool.

“I thought—I don't know,” I say. “I thought we could turn it back on together.” Deep breath. “Geoff, I have to tell you something.” Deep exhale. “Annabeth died right after sending
me
one last tex—”

“Win, I know. Everybody knows.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Literally
everybody
knows. It was on the news.”

Ignore. Can't compute. I power the phone on and my stomach does every single ride at Kennywood at once. The old cell takes forever to come awake, and in a flash I think that perhaps I'll be saved from reading the message from beyond—Geoff even goes, “Dude, maybe it won't even, like,
register
old texts, since you have a new phone now,” when—
ding
.

There's exactly three hundred unread messages. But only one that matters.

I can't look at it. I can't look at it.

I hold it up for Geoff to see. He touches the screen, and then his eyes go watery, but he is somehow made out of smiles.

“
YOU'RE DEAD TO ME
,” I texted my sister—after not finishing the college recommendation letter for her teacher to sign; after almost two decades of not appreciating the
A
to my
Q
—and right before she ran the red light without her seat belt on, she wrote—

“Read it, dude,” Geoff says.

I flip the phone around.

“
grow up, win
,” it says.

A
fter Geoff drives off, I walk two steps at a time upstairs and I keep up the pace till I reach my desk, where I wake up my laptop and decide it's time to finally do it. To finish the damn screenplay.

And here's the thing: I don't plan out the last fifteen pages or refer to Ricky Devlin's outline or worry about satisfying mythical story beats. I just . . . type. Forty minutes later—that's all a first stab at it took, forty minutes; or maybe six months and forty minutes, depending on your math—I hit print, and pace an infinity loop in my floor until the hot stack of paper piles up, which I grab to take downstairs.

When I wake up Mom, I am crying and so she is too, immediately.

“What is it?”

“Mom, I'm gay,” I say, which I didn't expect to say, but there you have it.

She holds my gaze. “I know. I've known.”

“Are you—are you, like, disappointed?”

Her face fuzzes over like mine does when I write dialogue, or so my sister used to tell me. “Only in myself,” Mom says. “That you'd think you could ever disappoint me.” Her eyes well back up for round two. “I just want you to be
happy
, baby.” She looks like my sister, who cried at everything. “But maybe you aren't a baby anymo—”

“Did you know about Geoff and Annabeth?”

“Of course, yes.” Her voice changes gears. It grinds in the shift. “It was killing me for you not to know. I don't like secrets.”

I take a pillowcase off her pillow. We don't have throw pillows; we have full on
pillow
-pillows in the sunroom, to make up for how uncomfortable wicker furniture is.

I walk the pillowcase to the mantel, and I throw it on top of the urn. I can't look at it anymore. It isn't good enough for Annabeth. It's fake.

“Well, that just makes it look like a ghost,” Mom says, and she isn't wrong. It looks as if the urn is dressed up in a cheap ghost costume, that amazing Halloween sequence in
E.T.

“Yeah,” I go. “But don't you always kind of feel like she's with us? Like, doesn't she feel like a ghost already?”

“I believe in heaven,” Mom says.

“Doesn't it feel like she's always over your shoulder, though?”

“Every minute,” Mama says. “Every second.”

Now she practically laughs almost, her sobbing is so hard, like a hyena or a volcano. She laughs and I do too, because this is almost joyful, this realization that we get to share something again. Misery loves company and that's not a bad thing, folks. Misery fucking
needs
company.

“I saw fruit in the fridge,” Mom says curiously, as a middle schooler might if his parent had laid out a book about how bodies change. My parents never did that for me. Maybe that's why I was the last guy in my class to get armpit hair. My body just never knew the rules.

“Yeah,” I say, “I thought we'd have some fruit for once. The red ones are called apples and the purple ones are called grapes.”

“Alert the authorities,” she says, fast, and I tilt my head at her and she winks at me and I solve a riddle: I got my humor from her. I am hers.

“You never gave me my birthday gift, Mama,” I say. I wipe my nose across my arm.

“Oh. Oh! It's being delivered this afternoon.”

“Wait. What's bein—”

“Your present. I've been saving up. I ordered you a replacement air conditioner. A really good one, too. A sturdy one.” She takes a deep breath. “My new goal is to cut up my credit cards and start paying for everything outright.”

“Mom,” I say, “that is amazing.” And it is, but I'm also thinking: I've got to call Geoff and tell him to just return the one we bought, and so I go, “Let me make a quick call,” when Mom goes: “Fine, Winny. But first you have to tell me what's in your hand.”

I look down. I'd forgotten about the whole reason I came downstairs.

“I did it,” I say. And then I clear my throat and I look over at the urn ghost and I don't flinch this time. “I finished this screenplay thing I've been working on. Or, I mean, that I
haven't
been working on.”

This is where my sister would ask me to read it for her.
Read it to me!
she'd say,
No caveats!

I hold up the new pages and scan the first lines of dialogue. Garbage.

But still: “I was thinking I could, I don't know—”

“Read it to me?” Mom says, like a question that isn't one.

“Yeah. The last couple pages, anyway. I
just
wrote it, so it's probably gonna be rough, so—”

“Don't move,” Mom says. “I'm going to need one of the
red
fruits. I'm going to need strength for this.”

And so she gets an apple, and she sits back down on the wicker lounger, and she settles in as if I am a movie—no, as if I am her son, who she just wants to be happy—and I clear my throat again and close my eyes, and count backward from ten.

“Exterior: Ordinary suburban house, day,” I begin—and I read fast, because I don't want to hear Mom not laugh at jokes that she doesn't realize are supposed to be jokes. That would crush me. When I get to the final, clunky pieces of dialogue in the screenplay, where my little protagonist, Double Digits, comes home from battle and discovers that everything is different—that his heroes are just ordinary mortals, and that his life has turned out both more heartbreaking and more astonishing than anything a movie could ever attempt to pull off—I am so overcome with grief that Annabeth isn't here, to tell me how to make it better, that I can't keep going. I actually drop the final page of the screenplay, and my head, too, but then I hear Mom crunching and crunching on that apple. Nothing stops the Roberts family from eating.

And when I look up to smile at that, at my beautiful mom crunching away, I also see, out of the corner of my eye, the pillowcase fall from the urn. It lands quietly on the floor. I leave it there and I pick up the last page, and I finish what I started.

INT. QUINN'S BEDROOM – NIGHT

It's late. Quinn gets into bed and covers himself head to toe in a thick blanket.

He switches off his bedside lamp. He takes out his earplugs. And then we hear what he hears -- the pleasant drone of his brand-new air conditioner, humming from the window.

The air conditioner is still wrapped in a big red ribbon, like a car in a TV commercial.

Quinn props himself up, takes off his fake glasses, and drops them into the wastebasket beside his bed.

Then he lies back down and closes his eyes.

And he smiles.

FADE TO BLACK.

The Great American Whatever
began its life five years ago as a sprawling manuscript intended for a grown-up audience. That unpublished book was called “Quinn, Victorious,” and featured many of the same characters as the book in your hands—except they were all a decade older, as the book was set ten years after the accident that changed Quinn's life and ended his sister's.

Lots of people aided me in getting
The Great American Whatever
published, whether by reading hilariously long drafts of “Quinn, Victorious,” or later—in the case of Cheri Steinkellner, my close confidante and closest prodder—by encouraging me to revisit the book altogether, from page one.

Thank you, then, to the many folks—including the librarians and educators and booksellers and fellow authors who have supported my work since
Better Nate Than Ever
first debuted—who helped get Quinn out of my bedside drawer and onto bookshelves, especially: Andy Federle; Annie Batz; Betsy Morgan; Brenda Bowen; Brooks Ashmanskas; Christian Trimmer; Christin Landis; Eliot Schrefer; Jason Snow; Karen Katz; Kevin Cahoon; Krista Vossen; Marci Boniferro; Matt Roeser; my parents, Lynne and Mike; Rick Elice; Rob Thomas; Tom Schumacher; Wendi Gu; my
many
vivid bullies within the Upper St. Clair school district; and the all-star staff at Simon & Schuster—particularly my editor, David Gale, and his assistant, Liz Kossnar.

Special thanks to Ellie Batz. This isn't her story, per se, but I could never have told it without her.

Lastly, thank you,
you
, for making it this far. And if you feel like you have a story you have to tell, tell it.