_*_ 67 _*_
The first snowstorm of the year (eight inches) that hit late on Thursday night should have canceled school, but all we got was an hour delay because the superintendent didn’t care if we died fiery deaths in chain-reaction pileups. Finn’s tires sucked but since his mom was home sick, he drove us to school in her ten-year-old Nissan. If she sold it, she’d be lucky to get enough to pay for half a day of rehab. The smell of her hair spray made me wonder if I was ever going to meet her. I shoved that question to the back of my mind and buried it under the mountains of junk stored there.
Topher and Gracie pulled in next to us. We fell into the migratory flight path of students converging from all corners of the parking into a reluctant line that led inside the building.
“Why are they wearing shorts?” I asked, pointing to a group of guys walking ahead of us. “It’s barely twenty degrees out.”
“Baseball,” Topher said cryptically.
“The team wears shorts all winter,” Gracie explained.
“It’s like a badge of honor, proves they’re tough.” “Look at the leg hair!” I said. “Are they all related to
bears?”
A snowball skirmish opened up by the flagpole. We
ducked and ran for the door.
“If they were really tough,” I continued, “they’d shave
their legs every day and then wear shorts.”
“Exactly!” Gracie said.
“If they did, maybe girls like that,” I pointed to the girl
in front of us, who was wearing fake Uggs, a pink miniskirt, and a tight black sweater, “could grow out their leg
hair to stay warm, and another gender inequity would be
balanced, right?”
“Hmmm,” Finn answered, mesmerized by the twitching miniskirt.
Fake-Uggs Naked-Legs Girl slowed down and looked
back at Finn over her shoulder like she had testosterone
radar.
“Did you hear me?” I asked him.
“His other head is doing the thinking right now,” Topher said.
“That’s gross,” Gracie said.
Fake-Uggs Naked-Legs Girl winked at Finn. Before I
could growl or rip her face off, she disappeared inside the
building.
“She’ll get frostbite, you know,” I told him as we walked through the doors. “Frostbite so bad they’ll have to amputate her legs and big hunks of her butt. Then she’ll die of despair, all because she forgot to wear pants on a day when
it was fifteen degrees outside.”
“Guess that means you’re stuck with me,” he said, stopping in the middle of the crowd. “Cleveland asked me to
stop by his room before first period.”
Before I could answer, Ms. Benedetti appeared out of
nowhere and wrapped her cold fingers around my arm. “I need you in my office, right now,” she said. Finn gave me a quick salute and melted away in the
crowd.
“What if I say no?” I asked Benedetti.
“I’ll follow you,” she said with an unnerving smile. “I
have all day.”
We both pushed against the wall as a group of impossibly pretty girls strode past, bare-legged and acting like it
was eighty degrees outside.
Benedetti tapped my shoulder. “My office.”
“I’m claustrophobic,” I said. “It’s too small in there.” The bell rang.
“Follow me,” she said.
The auditorium was cool and damp as a cave. Dark, too, with just a few of the wall lights turned on. I followed Benedetti down the aisle and across a row to the dead center of the room.
“Is Finn in trouble because the newspaper isn’t done yet?”
“We need to talk about you,” she said as she sat. “Will this work? I imagine it’s hard to feel claustrophobic here.”
“You’re real funny.” I left an empty seat between us. “Am I suspended after all? Is that what this is about?”
She shook her head. “No, but that little altercation gave me another chance to talk to your dad. Did he tell you? I bugged him again about joining us for the Veterans Day assembly.”
I tried to think of something witty, but it was too early in the morning and I was freezing. “Not a word.”
“I also told him that you didn’t take the SAT.”
I shrugged. “What did he say?”
“That he’d discuss it with you.”
“His schedule is kind of booked right now.”
“Why haven’t you asked any of your teachers for recommendation letters?”
“Don’t want to watch them laugh at me.”
“Some of your classmates applied early decision. They’ve already been accepted.”
“You told me the deadline wasn’t until Christmas.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t apply now. The sooner you apply and get accepted, the better your chances at getting financial aid. Now look.” She leaned over the empty seat, crowding my air space. “It’s been a huge transition for you, coming here, but it’s time to suck it up.”
“Do you yell at all the new kids like this?”
“You haven’t turned in homework for almost two weeks. Before that, your effort was sporadic at best.”
“I do the interesting assignments. It’s not my fault that most of them are boring.”
“Colleges will scrutinize your grades this year, especially because you’re not a traditional student. You have to step up to the plate, get in the game.”
“Baseball metaphors don’t work with me.”
“Damn it, Hayley!” She pounded the armrest. “Quit screwing around. This is your future.”
“The present can’t be the future, Ms. Benedetti. It can only be the present.”
“What are you so afraid of?” she asked.
“Do you get a bonus for every college application we file? Is there a quota you have to meet?”
Benedetti paused, licked her lips, then continued like I hadn’t said a word. “I’d like to see a list of the colleges that you’re interested in by Monday.”
“What if I don’t want to go to college? What if I don’t know what I want to do? I don’t even know how to think about it.”
The doors opened and students streamed in, led by an English teacher.
“Hope this is okay,” he called to us. “I want to show them how much better Shakespeare is onstage.”
“Good idea,” Benedetti said.
“So we’re done?” I asked, standing.
“One more thing.” She glanced at the class making their slow way to the stage. “The school board had an emergency session last night. They cut a number of extracurriculars.”
“So?”
“They canceled Model United Nations, Latin Club, the Brass Ensemble, and the newspaper. Their revenue projections for this year were way off. That’s why Bill Cleveland wanted to talk to Finn, to break the news to him.”
I shouldered by backpack. “If they really want to save money, they should just shut the whole school down.”
_*_ 68 _*_
And suddenly, it was the tenth of November.
The day before Veterans Day was traditionally the day when the crazy trapped inside my dad chewed its way out of the cage. This time a year earlier, we’d been in a small town outside Billings, Montana. Driving under bridges had started to become a problem so we stayed there a while. Dad got a job working the grill at a diner near the motel where we lived. I hung out in the library and sometimes fished in the small river that ran behind it.
That Sunday, his day off, I caught three tiny trout. I burst through the motel room door to show him. He was deep into a whiskey bottle, watching the 49ers play Seattle. He mocked me about the size of the fish, slurring his words. I turned to leave, but he told me I couldn’t.
I didn’t want to upset him. I stayed.
I didn’t see the gun until the fourth quarter. (It was a
pistol, a new one.)
In the last second of the game, the refs blew the call that would have given Seattle the winning touchdown. Dad exploded, throwing his glass across the room, leaping to his feet, and yelling at the screen. As the official review dragged on, he acted like they were doing it on purpose just to piss him off. He cursed, his face red and sweaty. He stomped his boots on the floor. I wanted to tell him it was only a game and we didn’t like either team, anyway, but I didn’t open my mouth because I didn’t want him screaming at me. The station went to commercial. He paced—back and forth, back and forth—muttering things that didn’t make any sense, almost like he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.
The commercials ended. The camera focused in tight on the ref. Dad sat at the end of the bed.
“The ruling on the field stands,” announced the ref.
He never got a chance to declare the game over because Dad grabbed the pistol and shot the television in the guts. Then he picked it up and heaved it against the wall and sent a table lamp flying after it. I sat, paralyzed, while he raged, until finally he slid down the wall, crying, his right hand a bleeding mess.
I wrapped a towel around his hand and packed our stuff in the truck. By the time I was done he’d pulled himself together enough to drive, which was good because we needed to get out of there fast. After a while, he made me drive, telling me when to push on the clutch and shifting the gears with his left hand.
We found a town with an urgent care center that took his insurance. The doctor who stitched Dad up was a Seattle fan whose brother was shot in the Korengal Valley. He understood everything. He prescribed a new pill (the seventh new pill? the eighth?) that he promised would mummify Dad’s memories and keep the crazy in its cage, even when Veterans Day approached or the moon was full.
Dad never filled the prescription.
That morning, I was tired and angry and late. The only cereal left in the cupboard had been purchased by Trish and was “healthy,” which was another word for “tasteless.” My clothes all looked like they’d been bought at Goodwill and my hair lay flat on my head like a dead jellyfish drying in the sun. Dad knocked on my door, said something about how he wasn’t going to work. My head was in the closet, trying to find something to wear that didn’t make me look like a refugee.
I wasn’t thinking about the date.
A few minutes later, Dad knocked again and asked if he could come in and I grunted and he opened the door.
He said, “Breakfast,” set a plate with toast on it on my desk, and left.
The crusts had been cut off the toast. He’d spread a little butter and a lot of honey.
“Thanks,” I said. “What are you going to do today?” But he was already gone.
Trish paused at my door like it was an ordinary morning, like she might remind me about a dentist appointment or tell me I had clean clothes in the dryer. The sight of her filling up my doorway, as if she belonged there, as if everything was fine, we were all just fine in the morning—it chased me out the door without a jacket, without my books, without a bite of toast.
Finn’s car had no windshield wiper fluid and we were surrounded by trucks without mud flaps spraying road gunk on the windshield, plus his wipers were worthless. We had a stupid argument and I made him pull into the gas station and buy a gallon. When I realized he didn’t know where to pour it, I yelled at him and did it myself. And then he yelled at me and said I should chill, but I knew he was upset about the stupid newspaper so I didn’t let it bother me too much.
We were so late we missed first-period lunch. I went to the library, grabbed a book from the new fiction table, and read in during class for the rest of the day. If anyone said anything to me, I didn’t hear it.
After the last bell rang, the final injustice was that I had to ride the bus home again because Finn had to lifeguard. It seemed to me that anyone who needed a lifeguard to make sure they didn’t drown shouldn’t be allowed on a swim team, but when I said that to Finn, he gave me the “whatever” look and stalked away.
* * *
The driveway was empty and the house was still when I got home. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept more than a couple of hours at a time, and the sun had warmed the living room and the next thing I knew I’d been asleep for hours and the house was dark and I was hungry. I stumbled to the kitchen, opened a can of chicken noodle soup, and put it on the stove. Someone had taken the fossilized toast out of my room and put it on the kitchen table, right below the calendar that hung on the wall, still showing the month of September. I threw out the toast, untacked the calendar, and flipped it to November.
That’s when it finally dawned on me that the shitty day I’d endured was the day before Veterans Day. I looked around and realized that I did not know where my father was. I turned off the stove.
I won’t get upset , I thought. That would be silly. Maybe he went to the grocery store for milk. There was no reason to worry. Maybe the truck needed a new oil filter. Maybe he decided to drive into the Hudson River. Or he offered to take Trish to work and drove them both into the Hudson River. Maybe he went for a walk and flashbacked and he was lost somewhere walking point on a patrol through a valley of insurgents.
I shook the thought out of my head.
No, no, no. He went for milk.
Still, I checked. The guns were locked in the safe. Ammo locked in its own storage box.
I sat on the couch with Spock. One deep breath. Another. Shadows were trying to turn into monsters. One more breath. We’re fine. He’s fine. The furnace kicked on, blowing the smell of stale cigarette smoke out of the curtains and across the room. I’d give it an hour; one minute past and I’d call the police, though I wasn’t sure what I’d say to them.
Fifty-five minutes later, the front door opened. Trish walked in first, her face pale and eyes red. Dad followed a few seconds later. He glanced at me, then turned his face away, but not fast enough. He walked down the hall to his bedroom without a word.
“What happened to your eye?” I called after him. He slammed his door.
“What did you do to him?” I asked.
“He did it to himself.” She sat in the recliner and hugged
her knees to her chest. “It was supposed to be a date.”
I fought the urge to throw her out the door. “Did you punch him in the face?”
“No, the bartender did.”
“You took him to a bar, tonight of all nights?”
“Can I tell you what happened before you start with the accusations?”
I nodded once.
“We were supposed to meet at Chiarelli’s at five,” she said. “I was only half an hour late. He’d gotten there three hours early. By the time I walked in, he’d bonded with a couple of losers over the Giants defense and bourbon. He didn’t want to eat in the restaurant anymore. I ordered pizza, but he said he wasn’t hungry.”
My stomach started to hurt.
Trish sighed. “The bar got crowded. Andy’s new friends left and he went quiet, not wanting to talk, but determined to stay there. It was the first time I’d been in a bar since I joined AA. I must have drunk a gallon of ginger ale.” She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. “Anyway. I left to use the restroom. Everything was fine when I walked out.”
“And when you got back?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“The bartender had him in a headlock on the floor. Andy thought some guy was staring at him, insulting him. They got into it and the bartender tried to break it up. Andy turned on the bartender, who was half his age and twice his size. By the time the police got there—”
“They called the cops?” I interrupted.
“This wasn’t a biker bar at two in the morning, Hayley. This was a nice restaurant, filled with families who wanted dinner, not a show. Yes, they called the cops.”
“Did they arrest him?”
She shook her head. “I smoothed it over, gave them the background. God, how many times have I done that before?”
I was thinking the same thing.
“I paid for his tab and our meals. They won’t press charges as long as he stays away.”
We sat without talking for a long time, the clock ticking against the wall.
“Has he ever hurt you?” Trish finally asked. “I know he’d never do it on purpose, but . . .”
“Of course not,” I lied as the scene in front of the bonfire and the confrontation on Halloween night played out in my mind. “He wasn’t this bad before you got here. I think you should leave, go back to Texas.”
She stood up. “You could be right.”
After a long shower, I got into bed and texted: not going to school tomorw
Finn didn’t answer.