I spent Saturday afternoon doing my homework. First chemistry, then anatomy, then calculus (I love chemistry, I like anatomy, I can tolerate calculus). When I was finishing the last of my derivatives, I heard our screen door slam shut.
"Stevie!" my dad called from the living room. "When were you planning on mowing the darn lawn?" Janey Mac, I thought, he's trying to quit smoking again. He only gets pissy like that when he tries to quit smoking. Don't get me wrong, he's miserable most of the time, but usually that misery is self-contained. If he starts complaining about the way I sweep the kitchen or the timetable for my chores, it's almost a hundred percent because he's craving his nicotine fix.
"Sorry!" I shouted. "We had our first football game last night and I had a lot of homework today!"
"You don't need to scream."
I looked up. My dad leaned against the doorframe of my bedroom, and tousled his straw-colored hair with his hands.
"Sorry," I lowered my voice. "I'll mow the lawn, let me finish these derivatives-"
"It's already sunset," my dad's tone softened. "You'll do it tomorrow, alright?" Evidently he hadn't come to my room to yell at me, because then he added this:
"Uh, I wanted to let ya know. I'm going out for dinner tonight."
"With Joe?" I picked up my pencil and returned to my calculus. "Could you save me the pickles from Chili's?" I love the pickles from Chili's. I could eat an entire jar of them. My dad sometimes brings his home for me, but only if he remembers. I make it a point to remind him.
"We're not going to Chili's," My dad mumbled.
I dropped my pencil. My dad's best friend Joe only ever eats at Chili's. He point-blank refuses to go anywhere else. He'd probably have Chili's cater his wedding, if his girlfriend would ever agree to marry him.
"How did you convince Joe to-"
"I'm not actually going with Joe."
"Oh, so you're going with Mr. DiPaolo?" Mr. DiPaolo is my dad's other best friend. They'll go to baseball games a lot, but they don't eat out together all that often because Dr. DiPaolo likes to have "family dinners."
"Not Vinnie, either," My dad said, and his shoulders fell in the way a dam might collapse when overrun with water. "I, uh, got a date."
A date? I'm pretty sure my dad hadn't as much as looked at a woman since my mom left him for Dave, five years ago. What's worse is that Dave was my dad's douchebag boss. My mom didn't come out with the affair until after Dave got head-hunted to be the manager of the Connecticut branch of the software company my dad still works quality control for. Of course, she wanted to live with Dave. Connecticut is a long distance from Pennsylvania, so for my adolescent sake, my parents let me choose where I wanted to live. Mom tried to win me over with pictures of my potential new neighborhood. A straight-from-the-farm creamery and soda fountain in biking distance of brick-faced, two story houses with four car garages and stainless-steel-everything kitchens, nicer than even the DiPaolo's- and Dr. DiPaolo is a doctor. Roads paved freshly by the county every year- no potholes, no cracks, no sidewalks split by unearthed tree roots or ruptured pipe lines. A small, 'everybody-knows-everybody' school district, equipped with smart boards and boosted by stellar standardized test scores. Impossibly-attractive, genetically-superior students who smiled with straight, whitening-strips commercial teeth in every promotional photo. And all of that less than thirty minutes away from the white sand beach.
I think Mom was shocked when I chose to stay with Dad, in our ranch house (the only crap-shack on our block), with the small vinyl-linoleum-everything kitchen. That I chose Linden Valley, where every street has a pothole. Where, over the past century and a half, working class rejects from all parts of Europe and Latin America had gathered around a steel mill (now bankrupted and rusted over). Where everyone still wears their great-grandparents' malnutrition on their faces, in the form of weak chins and overbites and crooked teeth and asymmetrical noses. (Valerie says she can pick out the New Yorkers who moved into the Valley after the economic recovery, when suddenly our town- and it's low living expenses- became cool. Because they're hipsters? I ask. No, she says, because they're not uggos like the rest of us).
The reason why I chose to stay was simple. I was twelve, and I lived across the street from the best friend I will ever have. When I think about it logically, I should have gone to Connecticut with my mom. I would probably be able to get into Dartmouth's pharmacology program that way (because God knows Linden Valley Central isn't an Ivy feeder school). But then again, how many Valerie DiPaolo's are you likely to meet in Connecticut? Lightning strikes maybe once, maybe twice.
I'm sorry. I can't take credit for that line. That's ripped from possibly my dad's favorite Fleetwood Mac song. Don't ask me how a townie like him got interested in Fleetwood Mac. I don't have the answer. The band is a decade or two before his time. Maybe because he's got his moon in Pisces? He's secretly sensitive? When I think about it, that's probably why my mom left him (she's a Leo with her mars in Sagittarius. I don't know why they ever thought it would work). He falls into these moods where he doesn't want to do anything. That's the primary reason why this date utterly shocked me.
"A date?" I managed to spit out. "With whom?"
"With whom?" My dad chuckled, "Where did you learn to talk like that?'
"Whom's an object of a preposition," I regurgitated the most useful thing Herr Norwood taught me in German class last semester, "so it's in a different grammatical case than who. Who is in the nominative-"
My dad pulled his thin lips into his mouth, widened his eyes, and nodded at me like he was listening. I could tell he wasn't. He was making the stupid Irish face, which, if you have any proficiency at reading body language, might as well be a neon sign saying 'I'm not listening.' I know this, because I make it all the time.
"Fine then," I interrupted myself, "with who?"
"A friend of Joe's," my dad answered. "It's a blind date. It'll be a disaster, but Joe won't buy me dinner again unless I go."
And then there was a third voice in the room.
"Mr. O'Shaughnessy, look at you! Getting back on the market!"
Valerie appeared behind my dad in my doorway. She had startled him. His shoulders jumped up when she first called his name.
"Sorry for letting myself in," Valerie squeezed between him and the opposite door frame and flopped onto my bed. "Stevie wasn't answering my snaps so I thought I'd see if she was still alive. We got some big plans for tonight."
This was the first I had heard of these big plans for tonight. I checked my phone. Sure enough, ten notifications had collected on my lock screen. Each snap and text a message from Valerie D.
"Mhmm," my dad again made the Irish face, "nice van by the way, Valerie. Anybody at school shampoo your hair in the toilet yet?"
Valerie giggled, Daisy-Buchanan style, as per usual. My dad melted, like everybody else on earth who's heard her laugh. The lips came out and he was smiling.
"I'm sorry," he apologized, "that was mean."
"No," Valerie protested, "I deserve it. That's what I get for flipping my Jeep. Especially with such precious cargo onboard." She gestured at me like she were a model and I were a prize on The Price is Right.
"Aww stuff it," I picked back up my pencil and tried to remember what I was doing with my last derivative. The way they write the textbooks, it always seems that the last problem of the homework set is always the hardest.
"Alright, have fun," my dad turned around.
"Good luck!" Valerie yelled as he walked down the hallway. "Wear lots of ChapStick!"
"ChapStick?" I repeated absently, as I struggled to make sense out of the fs and the xs and the hs on my binder paper.
Valerie made a series of kissing noises. And then I got it.
"Oh gross," I turned around in my desk chair and glared at her. "I only wanted to finish the calc homework. You didn't need to remind me that my dad might get a love life."
"Calc?" Valerie propped herself up on her wrists. "Lemme see!" She rolled off my bed and took the homework off my desk. I watched her gaze bounce over the problem set.
"The answer to the last one is f= 4x2 +19x-3," she handed me back my binder.
"You did the calc already?" I asked. Valerie never did her homework on Fridays or Saturdays. There was a good chance she wouldn't even do her homework on Sundays either, depending on whether the teacher was the type to collect and grade it.
"Just that problem, just now," Valerie cocked her head.
"How?" I suspected Valerie might have been bullshitting me so I'd put the homework away and do whatever stupid thing she wanted.
"You had most of it done already," she pointed at my work. "You just reduce the exponent and eliminate the last term."
She must have seen I was skeptical, because she took the pencil from my hand, leaned over my desk, and wrote out the rest of the solution. I watched her. It was legit.
"There," she dropped the pencil to the floor as if it were a microphone. "You wanna get chickens now?"
"Fine," I slid the sleeve back on my calculator.
***
"Yeah, so then Jan taught Carla and me how to curse in Tagalog," Valerie nibbled on a waffle fry, "fascinating language."
We were at the Chick-fil-a. Apparently Valerie and Carla had spent the morning at one of those 'young writer coffee houses' the English department funds. I like to write. I think I'm pretty good at it, too, but coffee houses? They're filled with the sort of person who pretends to read James Joyce or T.S. Eliot for fun. Like Isaac. He was a senior last year, and is now at NYU, if what I heard was accurate. Valerie had a big crush on him last December. Actually, I'm not sure if it was a crush. It was more like a fixation. She had to learn as much as she could about him. Lurked on his Instagram, read ALL of his tweets. She even found his Yelp reviews, for some ungodly reason. She found his grandmother's Facebook (and tried out her recipe for key lime cheesecake bites). Then she somehow became friends IRL with him. They had a whole streak going on Snapchat (that was probably the highlight of her Christmas). Every day she had a new interesting Isaac Factoid to report back to me. And then, by Martin Luther King day, she was over it. No real explanation. Of course, Isaac then decided Valerie was girlfriend material. He made his romantic intentions known, and she rejected him. Normal people with crushes do not do that. None of that. I've crept on Jesse Niemczyk's Instagram for a longer time than is warranted for the amount of meatspace interaction we've had, which aside from a ninth grade English project we were assigned, is next to nothing (to this day, every time someone mentions The Glass Menagerie I get tingles). I've been as brave as to have liked some of his band's videos. And yeah, I'm as curious about him as I can possibly be. But if, for some unforeseen reason, he were to ask me to be his girlfriend, there is NO way I would say no, even if I had started to find some of his habits annoying. I'd still give the relationship a chance, because, uh, I don't know, I'm in love with him.
"And then, you'd love this part," Valerie waved her Hi-C at me, "we hung out with Jesse."
I could feel my blood pool in my cheeks.
"You hung out with Jesse?" I asked, "My Jesse?"
"The very same," Valerie took a sip of her Hi-C.
"Why didn't you invite me?!" I slapped the table more aggressively than what was appropriate for a Chick-Fil-A at dinnertime. The nine-or-so-year-old in the booth across from us widened his eyes and flared his nostrils at me.
"I didn't know Jesse was gonna be there," Valerie shrugged, "besides, it was a coffee house. I know how you feel about the coffee houses."
"How do I feel about the coffee houses?" I crossed my arms and sunk into my seat. I didn't care if I looked as petulant as I felt.
"Well, you hate that they always smell like weed," Valerie counted off on her fingers, "and that everyone there pretends to like James Joyce, and that-"
"Alright fine," I didn't want to hear it. "What was Jesse doing there?"
"His band was playing," Valerie explained. "It's more of an acoustic scene, so they had him on bongos instead of his drum set."
Jesse playing bongos. I didn't get to see Jesse playing bongo with his perfect, bongo-playing hands. I wondered if I would ever get a chance to see Jesse playing bongos. Probably not. Even if I were Jesse's type (which I highly doubted, seeing as I'm a couple inches taller than him and guys typically don't like that), no relationship between us would ever get off the ground. I don't know how I'd even talk to him. At that moment, I became overwhelmed with the thought that I would never talk to him. That I was a bottom feeder. A cave dweller. A protozoan. A worm.
"Don't." Valerie threw up a stern pointer finger at me. "I can see it in your eyes, don't."
"I'm a worm-" but before I could face plant into my chicken sandwich, Valerie had grabbed my topknot and my shoulder and pushed me backwards into my chair.
"That's it," she actually sounded pissed. "Guys are attracted to one thing, and one thing only: confidence."
"Buullll-shit," I said, "They're attracted to butts. Why do you think the Kardashians have any money whatsoever?"
"Yeah, but-" Valerie began. I really didn't need one of her endlessly optimistic pep talks right then. It's not the 1980s. People don't dance by flailing around at parties. There's no real synth pop on the radio anymore. Everybody thinks Pizza Hut is garbage. So I interrupted her.
"Have you seen my pancake ass?" I couldn't stop the words from coming out of my mouth. "I have no ass, Val!"
"Listen to me-"
"The number one prerequisite to date in the twenty-first century happens to be AN ASS," I spat. "Swallow the red pill and unplug yourself from the matrix, Neo, because I'm going to DIE ALONE!"
And then I noticed the mother of the nine year old in the booth across from me. She was standing up. Her gaze jumped from me to Valerie, and then to her son, whose hand she grasped.
"Sorry," Valerie forced a chuckle, "she's got a lot on her mind right now."
"Come on, Brick," the mother dragged her now white-faced son out the front door.
We said nothing for a few moments. And then:
"What kind of sick puppy names their kid Brick?" Valerie nibbled on another waffle fry, "that's what I want to know."
I wasn't sure if I was embarrassed or seething, but I had trouble catching my breath. Valerie had this probing expression in her eyes. The same one I see sometimes when we're in calculus and Mr. Black does a difficult proof on the chalkboard, or when we're driving around somewhere and we stumble on a street she's never been on before. It made me uncomfortable to have her look at me like that, so I stared down at my sandwich.
"They never put enough pickles in these," I muttered.
Valerie was quiet.
"Look, all I'm saying is your underselling yourself," she finally said.
"Yeah, how come you've got such good advice?" I said, in as calm a voice as I could muster. "You're just as perpetually single as I am."
"That's an intentional choice." Valerie insisted
The sad thing is, she was right. For Valerie, it was an intentional choice.
"Alright, so it's a choice for you-"
"It's a choice for you, too," Valerie set both hands on the table and leaned in, like she was telling a secret. "It might not be intentional, but you're still making that choice."
"What?"
Valerie opened her mouth. Oh boy, I thought, here we go. Another motivational speech from Valerie D. FOUR MORE YEARS. HOPE AND CHANGE. She must have read the look on my face, because she closed her mouth without saying anything. Her gaze fell onto the cashier counter behind me.
"What?" I looked over my shoulder. Valerie kicked me in the shin. "Hey why did you-" I reached down to rub my leg. It hurt.
"Don't look," she whispered, "you see the kid that works here?"
"You just told me not to look." I gritted my teeth.
"Our cashier," she continued, "he's around our age. Do you dare me to go ask for his Snapchat?"
"What? Why should you do that?"
"It's been a week since we did our last feats of courage," Valerie explained.
Oh. I had hoped Valerie forgot about that. Things just never come together.
"Yeah," I said, "I don't think you should ask for a random guy's Snapchat. Then he'll feel bad when you never snap him."
"Ugh," Valerie threw back her head, "we're gonna do something tonight. Don't try to get out of it."
"I won't," I lied (that's precisely what I planned to do), "but I get to pick the feat of courage. Otherwise it doesn't count, remember?"
"Fine," Valerie snapped her fingers. "Come up with one."
"Right now?" Darnit, Val.
"Schnell, Schnell, madchen!" Valerie's black ponytail bounced as she spoke.
***
A/N: Thanks for reading, voting, and commenting! A REALLY REALLY big update comes on Tuesday, one of my favorite scenes in the book <3