Songs for a Teenage Nomad (5 page)

Yellow

In the pewter light of early morning, my mother croons along to Coldplay on the radio, her knees propped up against the steering wheel of the parked moving van. She eats powdered donuts from a white box, and the sugar sifts down on her chest like snow. I wonder how she can sing so loud when she’s spent all night crying over another man…

Sam wears a yellow shirt that deepens his olive skin. Today I see that shirt everywhere. I watched the yellow shirt getting hot chocolate from the cafeteria window this morning. I saw the yellow shirt at break, lounging on the bench across from the boys’ bathroom with Jake Simon and Ray Herrara.

Now the yellow shirt sits in the library bent over a book. I finish making a photocopy of the
New Yorker
article I’m using for my English paper and return the magazine to the front desk.

“Hey, Calle.” Sam spots me.

I slide into the chair across from him.

“Hey.” My face is warm from the heat he seems to give off. All I can think of is that kiss yesterday at the beach. I want to seem relaxed, casual. I hope my face isn’t the neon sign it feels like, flashing,
“You kissed me…you kissed me…you kissed me.
”

“Working away your lunch?” He nods at the article in front of me on the table.

“You too. Isn’t there actually a rule about football players in the library?”

“Ouch.” He smiles and cups a hand under his chin. “I have a math test next period. Treveli’s class.”

“Known for the tests from the seventh level of hell.”

He taps his pencil on the open page and makes a face. “Quadratic formula. Very essential information to my life.”

I would never reveal in a million years that I actually find the quadratic formula somewhat interesting. “No kidding.”

“So, are you coming over this afternoon?”

“Am I still invited?”

“Of course.”

He looks over his shoulder at the sound of people entering the library. Chela Walters, one of Amber’s friends, walks through the door with her usual pack of friends. They look straight off the cover of
CosmoGirl
.

Sam’s smile disappears. “Treveli said that we could come early for help if we wanted it.” He starts gathering up his books. “I’ll see you later, okay? Four o’clock?”

“Oh, okay.” I sit up straighter. “Yeah. Four.” I watch him hurry out of the library, nodding to Chela and then pushing through the heavy glass doors.

Outside, I see the yellow shirt heading nowhere near Mr. Treveli’s classroom.

***

I turn my key in the lock, annoyed that I even have to make this stop at home. At lunch today, Eli had the brilliant idea that he could balance a hot dog (complete with bun, mustard, and relish) on the end of his nose. Back arched so that his nose pointed skyward, he balanced that stupid hot dog for three minutes and forty-six seconds before he sneezed and sent the hot dog all over me—and my white shirt.

So I’m home to change before heading over to Sam’s.

I push open the door but stop when I hear my mom’s voice. What’s she doing home from work so early? At first I think she’s talking to herself, but I soon realize that she’s on the phone. I start to call to her, but something in her tone stops me. Still in the open doorway, I tip my head, listening.

“Well, then where is he now?” Her voice is tight, irritated. “Uh-huh…but I thought he had another year?”

I take a few steps forward into the entryway. Silence. She must be listening to the person on the other end of the phone.

The door blows shut behind me. I jump. Mom hurries into the entry, the portable phone attached to her ear. She’s wearing a Jack Johnson T-shirt and a pair of Rob’s pajama bottoms.

“I’ll call you back,” she says quickly and clicks off the phone.

“Hi, Mom!” I say too brightly.

“I thought you were meeting a friend?” She tries to smile but looks more nervous than anything else.

“I thought you were at work.”

“I got off early,” she says. Then she notices my shirt. “What happened to you?”

“Eli spilled a hot dog on me. I have to change.” We eye each other for a minute. “Who was that?” I nod at the phone.

She looks at it as if she’s never seen it before. “Oh, no one. Kelly from work. We were just gossiping. About a guy we work with.”

“Jason?” I ask. My mom works with a guy named Jason who just left his wife for some waitress from Denny’s. I’ve been hearing about it all week.

She looks guilty. “Yeah. Jason. Kelly’s at work and just wanted to call and chat a bit.”

I smile at her. “Jeez, and you think Alexa and I are gossip monkeys.”

I walk by her to my room. After slipping into a new black shirt that my mom bought me last weekend, I find her still in the entry. She is biting her lip, staring at the floor.

“Mom?” I pick up my backpack.

She starts. “Oh! Yeah?”

“Are you okay?”

She smiles. “Sure. Sure. Just spacing out.” She gives a little wave and disappears into the kitchen.

Downtown, I walk by OM!, the store my mom works in. I stop and stare in the window. Jason leans on the counter, flipping the pages of a magazine, bored. He is bobbing his head to music I can’t hear. My mom’s conversation tugs at me. I thought Kelly was working today.

***

I knock on Sam’s door at 4:03, having waited down at the bottom of the driveway for more than ten minutes so that I don’t seem too eager. The house is a tall, white Victorian with a wide black driveway. In the front yard, a tree with yellow leaves bends like a dancer. I take a few breaths.

No one answers, so I ring the doorbell, unleashing a tumbling string of moaning notes. A haunted-house doorbell. Still no answer. I check the address again, 638 Shore View. Iron numbers bolted into the frame of the white porch. I check my watch again. 4:04. From the front step, I can see the ocean, a strip of sheet metal between the autumn-colored trees, silver and then yellow and red. Money buys views like this. Money and luck. I ring the doorbell again and memorize the view.

Sam appears at the door looking flustered and tired, like he’s been sleeping. In jeans and sock feet, he pulls the door behind him and steps out onto the front porch with me.

“Hi,” he says. His hair looks like he has been running his hands through it for hours.

“Are you okay?” His eyes seem red. Crying?

“Umm. Not really.” He steps lightly from foot to foot; the cold of the stoop must eat socks in seconds.

“What’s wrong?”

“No big deal. Some family stuff is all. But would you be pissed if I had to cancel today?”

“No,” I say. Disappointed, yes. Not pissed. “It happens. Anything I can do?”

“No. No. I just have to go. I’m sorry, Calle. We’ll talk tomorrow at school, okay?” Without waiting for an answer, he ducks back inside.

***

We don’t talk at school the rest of the week.

In English, he is a gunshot out the door. I don’t try to catch up with him. Now, I’m pissed.

On Friday, I watch Sam race away, and Drew raises his eyebrows. “Something you want to tell me, Cal?”

I scoop up my folder and jam it into my backpack. “No. Why?”

“No sudden interest in football you’d like to discuss?”

I glare at him. “What, Drew?”

He holds up his hands in defense. “No implications. Just wondering.” He walks out with me, fiddling with the hem of his “I love mullets” T-shirt.

Eli joins us in the hallway, linking his arm through mine. He wears shiny red pleather pants. He says, “You ready for tonight?”

Tonight is opening night of the fall festival one-acts. “Of course.”

“So,” Eli begins, “a bear walks into a bar and says, ‘I’d like a gin and…” He takes a long pause and then says, “‘Tonic.’ The bartender says, ‘What’s with the pause?’ The bear holds up his paws and says, ‘Well…I’m a bear.’” Eli cracks up.

Drew looks at him sideways. “What?”

“Get it?” Eli frowns. “Paws. Pause. Oh, never mind…umpf.” A girl runs into Eli head on.

Cass Gordon doesn’t apologize. She looks straight at me, her eyes penetrating the fence of hair that falls in front of her face.

“Whoa. Sorry for driving in your lane,” Eli jokes.

I try to smile at her, but before I can, she plows away down the hall, mowing over several other people like a street-cleaning machine.

Eli watches her, fascinated. “That is one weird chick.”

***

At first, I think my eyes are lying, melding together the people I have on my mind and standing them together like toy soldiers. I turn the volume down on the Black Eyed Peas blaring into my ears, but my eyes aren’t lying. They stand pressed into the narrow alleyway created by the foreign language portables.

Sam and Cass. In a conspiratorial huddle, tipping heads toward each other, whispering, her hand clutching a chunk of his jacket, rooting him there like the mooring of a boat.

I’m glad they don’t see me. Their huddle is a secretive loop of her clutch and his tilting, nodding head. I step away from the building and head toward my Spanish class across the way from their alley. I cannot even begin to imagine how they know each other: Sam, one of the visible, glowing gems of the campus who knows this place is his turf, and Cass, like a scab on flawless skin, so horribly and embarrassingly not a part of this place.

They shouldn’t even cross paths, but their talking—her hand on him like they
know
each other—sends me spinning, jostled like a pack of gum slipping to the bottom of a grocery sack. What could they possibly be talking about?

***

I sit in my plastic Spanish class seat, my CD player a marsupial in the pouch of my sweatshirt, wishing I were at the beach and not here at school where everything seems to slide farther from normalcy each day.

***

The theater hums with a full closing-night house who wait in papery light for the start of the play. I am backstage with a headset that lets me talk to the small lighting booth at the back of the Little Theatre. Alexa is calling the show from the booth. I have been promoted to assistant stage manager backstage because the girl who was supposed to do it switched to home schooling.

I peek out through the black curtains even though Ms. Hecca told me not to. “If you can see the audience,” she said, “the audience can see you.”

I look anyway, watching the shuffling of green programs that have my name under “crew” and smelling the chocolate-chip cookies Sara’s mom baked for the show to sell at intermission.

“Calle?” Alexa’s voice comes over the headset.

“Yeah?” I click back.

“Five minutes.”

I go tell the actors, who smile widely. Sara blows me a kiss from under a messy blond wig. Drew gives me a thumbs-up and pulls a pair of black pants over boxers with hearts on them. He spends most of the play in those boxers and has started wearing them around backstage for luck before putting on the pants he wears in the first scene. His legs are the color of bleached driftwood. Brave man.

When the house lights dim, I wait for Alexa’s cue to pull the curtain while Drew finds his place center stage. I like being backstage. All of the audience’s attention is focused on the actors while we stay quiet in the dark. From a small folding chair, I listen for my three cues, watching actors change costumes for their next entrance. They switch in and out of their characters in the blink of their exits, focused. I could
never
get out there, exposed to those waiting eyes.

At the end, the applause is everywhere at once. Because it’s closing night, Sara, her arms full of roses, pulls me out onstage to bow. The lights sting my eyes; the faces of the audience float and shift.

Somehow through the glare and floating faces, I know that Sam sees me see him standing in the back. He’s ignored me for two weeks, avoided my eyes in class. Still, I can’t help but smile a little. He gives me a short, quick wave, a salute in midair. The house lights come up. I blink into the softer glow, looking again for Sam, but he’s pushing through the heavy doors into the late fall night.

Human Nature

…I turn twelve on New Year’s Eve, and for some reason I can’t totally explain, my mother decides to throw me a Madonna party, maybe because she had a Madonna party on her twelfth birthday. People in all versions of Madonna’s rock-star evolution crowd into the living room and bump and grind and…vogue. I sit under the dining-room table and eat an entire package of Nutter Butters…

“You need to get to class, please.” The yard lady whose name nobody knows stands on the concrete pavement several yards away. “Now. Read your love letters in class.”

This last comment is unnecessary and a little rude. Still, I gather up my backpack, refold my note, and silently obey orders. I am not one to talk back or make quippy remarks when there could be detention at the other end of it. I can feel her watch me walk the quiet path toward the math building, her walkie-talkie whispering at her hip.

The note reads:

Hey, my friend: If you’re going to waste your time here, at least waste it with me. Listen to Green Day’s “Sassafras Roots.”

I found it wedged into the plastic sleeve of my binder at the end of lunch. Unsigned and written in quick, black letters. I know that song. I love that song.

I want the note to be from Sam. Maybe more than I actually think it is from him, I want it to be. That would be cool—a cryptic apology of sorts. But inside me, stalking my optimism, is reality. The images of him with Amber, she leaning in close enough that her hair drapes his shoulder; Cass clutching his sleeve; his heroic run of the football; his brisk exit from the theater.

Chances are, he didn’t write this note. Did he? Does he know I keep songs in my journal? Write down lyrics to cement the memories in ink across the page?

In math, I rub the folded edge of the note between my fingers until the blue lines of the binder paper are gone, and the paper is as soft as Kleenex. I try to concentrate on the lesson going on at the board, solving for x, finding the value for y. The value of y. Why. Why did he kiss me? Why did he kiss me and then ignore me for weeks?

I look at my binder. My notes are a mess, and finally I just give up, hoping that the textbook explains the concept well enough for me to figure it out on my own. I want to read the note again, looking for the words beneath the words. A clue. The subtext, Alexa would call it. In theater, the actors have to figure out what’s going on under the lines in order to play the character truthfully. Ms. Hecca does a lot of subtext games with them at rehearsal. To get at the honesty of the line, she says. What is the subtext here in my little secret binder note?

I tuck the note away in my sweatshirt pocket, letting it sleep alongside my Walkman. I don’t want to risk it getting taken away.

***

I decide that I’ve been imagining things.

Watching Sam laughing with his friends in the quad at lunch, drinking a soda, thumping Justin Wallen on the shoulder, I realize that maybe he hasn’t been avoiding me at all. I mean, I haven’t exactly approached him.

This is ridiculous. I should just talk to him. Determined, I cross the lawn to the stone picnic table he sits on with his friends. Small clumps of lunching students brave the chilly wind. The hum of their conversations tickles my ears, or maybe that’s the wind, but I feel detached from all of them. A boat suddenly unanchored from a steady dock. Adrift, I slow my stride as I near him, aware that the boys at the table have stopped talking and are watching my approach. Zach Wilcox follows the gaze I have fixed on Sam, his eyebrows curious.

“Hi, Sam,” I say when I’m close enough to have to say something.

He averts his eyes. “Um, hey.” He takes a quick drink of his soda and shrugs at Zach.

I know the blood has gone to my face. It has to go somewhere, as I’m certain it’s no longer in my feet or my hands or my legs. No matter, with bloodless limbs, I turn away, but not before I hear them ask him, “Who’s that?”

And hear him respond, “I don’t know. A girl from English.”

I head straight for the bathroom, hearing and seeing nothing, and push my way into a stall. I close the door behind me, latching the silver arm that flips up and over to lock the stall, and stare at the back of the door. Scrawls of black-marker proclamations, both personal and general:
Jim Trainer is a hottie…Erica Greenich is a bitch…this school sucks ass!

I lie and tell myself I won’t cry. Maybe he kissed me on a dare? Kiss the new girl. Funny football locker room joke.

My eyes are drawn to the side of the stall where someone has covered half the wall with fist-sized black-ink words. A poem. And not your usual bathroom insult or proclamation. My eyes wash over it.

Then I read it again.

Read me, read me here alone, walled off

In a room to hide in this place of unending

Night. This shadow place. You race to find

What’s right here in front of your two-

Faced space. Read it. And open your eyes.

All of the lies, the screaming, dreaming lack

Of focus pleading with the only one who sees

The truth. Not you. Not me too. This night’s

Too dark, split apart, to have dreams.

The words hit me. I’m sitting in the night of this poem. In my life, I’ve been a traveler too many times, a visitor in other people’s hometowns. Each time I’ve set a suitcase down, my other hand has been ready to pick it up again. I’m packed before I even unpack. Until here. I see Sam again, shrugging me away, sipping his soda. He swatted me like a fly.

This is the worst moment of my life. I had the beach, his smile in the late afternoon sun, his kiss tasting of air and salt, and now I’m sitting in this crappy bathroom stall staring at graffiti on a door. I look at the last line again: “
This night’s too dark, split apart, to have dreams.”