The Spectacular Now (10 page)

Chapter 24

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. It’s weird—I can feel exhausted but still, I just lie there wide awake, staring up into the dark with all sorts of ideas bombarding me like dead pelicans. Tonight, for example, I get to thinking about Geech’s stale military school proposition, wondering if maybe it’s not such a terrible idea after all.

Maybe I should’ve joined up when I was about fourteen or fifteen, worked hard for a year—marching ten miles a day, hustling through obstacle courses, scuttling under barbed wire with a wooden rifle cradled in my arms. Then come back home muscled up and spit-shined and tight as a snare drum on the inside. How else are you supposed to know when you’re not a kid anymore in this society?

I remember reading about these primitive initiation rituals in school. They had one where they take the kid way out into the wilderness and drop him off and he has to get back by himself without any weapons or tools. He’s just out there with his bare hands, digging up roots to eat, making fires with rocks and sticks or whatever. I mean, he could starve or a mountain lion could eat him or something, but that’s all part of the test. When he gets back, he’s a man. And not only that, he finds his Spirit Guide. Talk about embracing the weird.

But nowadays they don’t do anything but leave you at home by yourself with a kitchen full of potato chips and soft drinks. Then, in your bedroom, you’ve got your TV, video games, and the Internet. What do they expect you to get from that? A big fat case of
I don’t give a shit
?

These days, a kid has to go looking for his own initiation or make his own personal war to fight since the wars the atomic vampires throw are so hard to believe in. It’s like Ricky says—every time they trump one up, it gets worse.

If I was in charge, it’d be different. You wouldn’t have to go to military school or get dropped off in the wilderness or fight in a war. Instead, you’d head off for what I’d call the Teen Corps. It’d be like the Peace Corps, only for teenagers. You’d have to go around and, like, pile up sandbags for people when hurricanes blow in and replant trees in deforested areas and help get medical attention to hillbillies and so forth. You’d do it for a whole year, and then, when you got back, you’d get the right to vote and buy alcohol and everything else. You’d be grown.

I have most of the details of the plan worked out when sleep finally takes me.

Unfortunately, the next morning the excitement wears off. It’s too late for me anyway. If I were a dreamer like Bob Lewis, I’d wax on about becoming a politician and establishing the Teen Corps for the next generation or whatever, but like I say, I’m more of a right-now kind of guy. And right now I have my own miniature aid plan to work on—going to Aimee’s to get tutored.

See, by letting her help me, I’ll be helping her. She gets confidence and I get the satisfaction of bringing confidence to someone who needs it worse than a pop singer needs rehab. Hey, it may not change the world, but for the two of us, it’s a win-win situation.

The problem is, since officially I’m grounded, I have to pass the idea by Mom over breakfast. Usually, in the mornings, she tries to avoid talking to me—except maybe to say, “Get it yourself”—but when I hit her with the Aimee proposition, she hits back with a barrage of questions that are supposed to sound like she’s trying to get a read on Aimee’s character.

I know better. What she really wants to know is whether Aimee has any uppity-up social connections. If that was the case, I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have any problem with me going over there. But, of course, since Aimee’s mother is nothing more than the queen of the paper route and the Indian casino, Mom suspects I must have some sneaky ulterior motive.

“So,” she says, “how do I know you’re not just trying to get out of being grounded all afternoon?”

I go, “Hey, if you don’t believe me, why don’t you call her up and ask her?”

And she’s like, “Because, for all I know, this is just some little thing you want to date, and she’ll say anything you tell her to.”

“Believe me,” I say. “I do not want to date this girl.”

Why does everyone have to automatically assume it’s a sex thing?

Mom’s still not convinced, so I tell her to call Mr. Aster and ask him whether I need a tutor. That does the trick. She’ll never call him. I know all too well that she doesn’t like to get involved with my actual schooling if she can help it. Something must have happened in her childhood to make her afraid of teachers.

So we work out a deal. I still can’t drive to school, but I can drive to Aimee’s in the afternoons. And Geech will check my gas level every evening to make sure I don’t go driving around all over everywhere. Like I can’t just put more gas in the tank if I want to. Jesus.

Chapter 25

Driving over to Aimee’s that afternoon, my intentions are good, but I have to admit this girl’s going to be a challenge. Judging from how her parents and her best friend treat her, she may be the biggest pushover I’ve seen since Kenny Hoyle.

Poor little Kenny. He reminded me of a character out of a fairy tale. He lived down the street with his stepfather and three stepbrothers. His mom committed suicide. The stepbrothers were enormous thugs. While they were out vandalizing road signs or inhaling spray paint or whatever, scrawny little eight-year-old Kenny was outside cleaning the windows or pulling weeds or pushing their giant lawnmower up and down the steep front yard in the hundred-degree heat. But you knew there wasn’t any fairy godmother waiting out there to zap Kenny into some shining prince. All I could do was go over and help him mow the lawn now and then before he got sucked underneath the mower and spit out the side like a batch of hamburger meat.

Anyway, I’m expecting Aimee’s house to be a real shack, but it’s actually a lot like the house I lived in before the era of Geech—basically a small brick cube with a gray roof that needs new shingles and a scruffy little bare yard with no trees or shrubs or flowers or anything else. At least my old house had an overgrown hedge and a cool redbud tree to climb in, but this house doesn’t have even a shot glass’s worth of character to it.

After taking a hit of whisky with a mouthwash chaser, I head up to the cramped porch and give the doorframe a jazzy little knock. Inside, a whiny voice calls out, “Aimee! Your boyfriend’s here!” Which is followed by Aimee going, “Please, Shane, don’t embarrass me, okay?”

A second later, the lock clicks and the door opens.

“Sutter,” she says with a cautious smile. “You’re here.”

“Right on time.”

Something’s different about her. It takes me a moment, but then I realize she’s wearing lipstick. Usually, she doesn’t wear any makeup at all, and let me tell you—this isn’t better.

As for the inside of the house, it’s an absolute sty—clothes piled on the backs of the faded sofa and recliner, fast-food sacks gaping open on the coffee table, obsolete VHS tapes littering the floor. And in the middle of all this, her little brother’s sprawled out, his legs flinching and twitching as he proceeds to blow up bug-eyed, saw-toothed video game aliens on their ancient PlayStation.

“Um, this is my little brother, Shane,” Aimee says. “He’s eleven.”

“Hi there, Shane.”

He doesn’t bother to look at me. “Mom says you’re supposed to go to the store and get a big bottle of Dr Pepper,” he says, his hands still twisting and popping at the game.

“I’ll get it later,” she tells him, but he’s like, “You better get it now. Randy might want some pretty soon.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “There’s a little bit left in the fridge.”

“I’m just saying what Mom said.”

“You know, Shane.” I step up next to the sofa. “You could go get it yourself. There’s a convenience store right down at the end of the block.”

Shane responds by splurting out a raspberry.

Aimee laughs nervously and gives me a sheepish
boys-will-be-boys
look.

Usually, I’d hit the kid with a scalding putdown—which I’m all too capable of doing—but that’s not going to help Aimee any, so I’m just like, “That’s no way to act toward a guest, little man.”

And he’s like, “You’re my stinky sister’s guest, not mine.”

Aimee’s face flushes crimson all the way to the tips of her ears. It looks good on her, better than the lipstick. “Why don’t we go back to my room to study,” she says, waving her hand in the direction of the hall.

“Ladies first,” I say. She seems like she could use the gentlemanly treatment for a change.

“You all better be quiet,” calls Shane. “Randy’s trying to sleep.”

Randy turns out to be their mother’s disability-collecting boyfriend. “Don’t worry,” Aimee says. “One time Shane set off a bottle rocket in the bathroom and Randy never woke up.”

After wading through the debris in the living room and hall, I’m awestruck when Aimee opens the door to her room. It’s like that moment in
The Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy opens the door and sees the land of Oz for the first time, only instead of going from black-and-white to color, this goes from an absolute dump to an awesome, almost geometric neatness.

Welcome to Aimee’s world.

The giant map on the wall stretches out so smooth you’d think maybe Aimee ironed it, and the same goes for the big picture of the Milky Way and the pencil drawings that hang on the other walls. The desk looks thrift-store cheap and the computer is practically twentieth-century like their VCR, but everything—the pens and notebooks and ceramic cats—is arranged to perfection. Her chest of drawers is similarly cheap and neat, but the thing that really strikes me is her books.

A plastic snap-together set of bookshelves stands against one wall, row after tidy row of paperback books lining each shelf. And even though she ran out of shelf space and had to stack probably a hundred more paperbacks against the wall, those rows are just as spruce as the others.

“You must really like to read,” I say, admiring the stacks.

“They’re mostly science fiction.” She gazes at the books with supreme fondness. “Some are mysteries and I have quite a few old classics like
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre.
”

I pick up a book titled something like
The Androids of NGC 3031.
On the cover, a woman android with one hell of a bod dashes away from low-flying spaceships as they shoot pink laser bursts at her. “This looks interesting,” I say, but what I’m really thinking is, Wow, Aimee, science fiction? Really, could you try any harder to brand yourself with the mark of the nerd herd? What’s next, anime?

“I like to think about space,” she says apologetically.

“Space is cool.”

“I want to work for NASA someday.” She sounds kind of tentative, like she’s afraid I’ll think that’s a stupid ambition or something.

“That’d be spectacular,” I say. “I really think you ought to.”

“Yeah,” she says, a new enthusiasm sparking in her eyes. “And after I’ve worked there for about five years and get some money saved up, I’m going to buy a horse ranch to live on.”

“I don’t see what could be better than that. I guess that’s why you have all these drawings of horses on the walls.” I walk over and have a closer look at the drawings. Actually, her horses look more like dogs, but there’s no need to mention that. I’m pretty sure, for her, drawing them is a lot more important than what they end up looking like.

“I guess this is you riding the horses, huh?”

“Um, no. That’s Commander Amanda Gallico from the
Bright Planets
books.”

She’s standing right next to me now, and I know she sees a lot more in the pictures than I do.

“What’s her story?”

“She commands the Neexo Ark 451. They’re escaping from the Dark Galaxy and trying to find their way to the Bright Planets system.”

In the drawings, Commander Amanda Gallico looks a little too big for the horses, at least her body does. It’s all athletic and superheroey, but her head’s kind of small and I’m still of the opinion that she looks like Aimee in the face, without glasses.

“You must really like her,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says with that drawn-out, half-committed way she has of saying anything positive. “I guess she’s kind of like my hero and everything.”

This is all too heartbreaking. I mean, I quit on heroes by the time I got to fifth grade. This girl needs some help and she needs it now.

So I’m like, “You know what? You’ll be my own personal hero if you can straighten me out on this algebra business. Where should we do it?”

I realize my wording might have sounded a touch on the sexual side as we both look at her neat little bed with its plaid comforter. It’s the only furniture in the room big enough for two people. She says, “Um,” but that’s as much as she can get out.

So I go, “Me, I always do my homework on the floor where I can spread everything out.”

That sounds good to her, so we get down to it. As soon as we start, she clicks into a more confident mode. But it’s a sort of soft confidence. A kind confidence. She could easily start coming off all superior or even ridicule me for my mathematical idiocy, but she doesn’t even come close to that. She doesn’t need to. Here in the realm of books she’s self-assured. She has some of the control she doesn’t have anywhere else. And you know what? If I was a better listener, I’ll bet she could get me to understand some things that Mr. Asterhole never came close to.

Chapter 26

After we get my homework done—or I guess I should say after
she
gets my homework done—she starts explaining some more basics that I need to get me through the rest of the semester. It’s a nice thought, but my attention span isn’t really up to it, so I decide to steer her onto another topic.

“You know,” I say, leaning back against the side of her bed and looking at her bookshelves. “With as much reading as you do, you should try writing your own book.”

She studies me for a second as if she’s not sure whether I’m making fun of her.

“I’m serious,” I tell her. “I’ll bet you could write a science-fiction novel that’d sell a million copies.”

She sets her pen down and says real soft, “I don’t know about a million copies, but I am writing one. I’ve got about two hundred pages done, and it’ll probably end up being about six hundred pages long.”

I’m like, “Jesus. Six hundred pages?”

“Yeah,” she says. I’m beginning to see that her “yeahs” are almost always two syllables, one for “yes” and the other for “but I don’t know if anything will ever come of it.”

“That’s cool. What’s it about?” I ask, though I suspect I may be opening a can full of boring.

She’s like, “Do you really want to hear about it?”

And I’m, “Yeah.” One syllable.

She starts off telling me that this is just going to be the summary version, but it ends up getting pretty involved. And surprisingly it’s not boring at all. The basic idea is that there’s this teenage girl who gets beamed aboard a spaceship while she’s out throwing her paper route, and the crew—which consists of a race of genius horses—recruit her to help fly the ship back to its home planet. The twist is that it turns out the home planet is really Earth of the future, where genius horses and humans coexist on an equal level, and the girl—who is somehow really of Earthling descent—has been living among aliens on the planet Gracknack all along.

As she’s telling the story, it hits me—this is how she escapes. She runs away to her perfectly tidy room and disappears into faraway galaxies. I’ll bet it’s the same with her schoolwork because, from what I can tell, she gets no encouragement in that direction from her family.

Her brother and mother and Randy, the unemployed boyfriend, are Gracknackians. They’ll never understand her. And her best friend, Krystal Krittenbrink, is a big, type-A nerd who treats her like an employee in a Gracknackian geek factory. But this room is Aimee’s space capsule and she’s a long-distance galactic traveler, winning every battle along the way.

Or almost every battle. Right as she’s getting to the end of her story, a scratchy voice calls out from the next room, “Aimee! Hey, Aimee! Bring me a Dr Pepper, why don’t you?”

It’s Randy. He woke up and now he wants room service. Aimee’s shoulders slump. “I’ll be right back.”

After a couple of minutes, Randy’s voice booms out again. “What’s this supposed to be? You know I like my tall blue glass. This is like a thimble or something.”

If Aimee says anything back, I can’t hear her, but Randy’s loud and clear. “Well, go down and get some more. What have you been doing all afternoon?”

So Aimee slinks back and tells me she’s sorry but she has to go to the 7-Eleven. It doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind that I might drive her. When I volunteer, she’s like, “You don’t have to do that. It’s my fault. I should have gone right after school.”

And I’m, “What are you talking about? It’ll take like a minute and a half. Of course I’m going to drive you.”

That perks her up a little, but any trace of the confidence she showed earlier has shriveled up about to the size of plankton. It’s even worse after we pick up the Dr Pepper. Looking through the windshield at her front porch, she has this expression on her face like her spaceship just crashed and she’s found herself back on Gracknack.

So the next thing I know my mouth’s open and these words are spilling out: “You know what? There’s a party this Saturday. I think you should go with me.”

It was like a reflex action. I had to do it. What else was I going to do, let her traipse back into that house with nothing?

True to form, her response is a surprised “Me?”

And I’m, “Yeah. You and me.”

And she’s, “A party?” Like I’ve been speaking Mongolian or Gracknackian maybe.

“Yeah, a party. Saturday night. You and me. I’ll come by and get you around 8:30. What do you say?”

“Um, okay?”

“Is that an answer or a question?”

“No,” she says. “I mean, yes, I’ll go.” And this time it’s a one syllable
yes.

“All right, then. Fabulous. We’ll have fun.”

And as she walks back to her house with her head held high and the liter of Dr Pepper dangling casually from one hand, I feel pretty damn good about myself. It was a drastic measure, but it needed to be done. And it’s not like I asked her out for a date or anything. I just figured a party would be good for her. I know it’ll be good for me.