After Eli (14 page)

Ron Mazzola was a year ahead of us in school and was known as the Oil Man, both because of his last name and because of this gel stuff he puts on his hair. I thought that Yvonne and Ron were probably a good pair, seeing as they both had a kind of thing for strange hair. Also I didn’t want to make a move on blue Yvonne. What I wanted was to be with Isabelle, just the two of us again, like that day at Scrubgrass Creek.

“Hey, I’ve really been talking you up,” Peter said. “And so has Amanda. Look, Dan, we’re supposed to do stuff
together,
right? We’re best friends, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So just
ask
her,” Peter said.

“I just don’t feel like it right now,” I said.

“Christ, Anderson,” Peter said.

And he hung up.

For a minute or so, I thought about what it would be like to take Isabelle to Ryan’s party, and how great it would feel to walk in with this really beautiful girl, and everybody envying me, and Peter Reilly with his eyes bugging out, punching me in the arm and saying
“Way to go, man.”
But I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of my friends. I just knew they wouldn’t fit with Isabelle.

The party was on Saturday. Walter says that Einstein’s theory of relativity is difficult to understand, but for a change, it’s one of the few things that make perfect sense to me. Relativity means that when you can’t wait for something to happen, time moves slower than a snail, and when you’d rather something never happened, ever, time shoots forward faster than a greased jackrabbit.

Which last is what time did leading up to Ryan’s party. Just like that, it was Friday night, and then, before I was done worrying about it being Friday night, it was Saturday morning, and then, before I’d even begun to deal with it being Saturday morning, it was two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, and my dad was dropping me off in the Bakers’ driveway and saying hi to Ryan’s mother and that yes, thanks, my mom was fine, just a little tired was all, and then telling me to have a good time, and driving off, leaving me standing there with my swim trunks and a towel and a sense of impending doom.

Actually, the party started out okay. It was a great day, hot like it gets in August but not so sticky hot that you feel like you can’t breathe, and Ryan’s folks have this bug-zapper thing, so there weren’t a zillion mosquitoes and blackflies. All the bugs fly into the zapper and get charbroiled. Every few seconds, on top of the party music, there’d be this
zzz
noise that was some bug getting fried. There was a big cooler full of drinks, and Ryan’s weird uncles were all off in the yard at the barbecue grill, cooking up hot dogs and hamburgers and drinking beer.

Most of the kids were horsing around in the pool, including Ryan’s little sisters and a couple of their shrimp friends who were paddling around in the shallow end with a big rubber turtle. They all yelled, “Danny! Danny! Hi, Danny!” and started jumping up and down when they saw me, because I am good with little kids, and I thought how great it would be someday if Isabelle and I had a whole lot of little kids and lived in the old Sowers place. Though without the twins. I thought maybe we could encourage the twins to join the Peace Corps and go dig wells in someplace like Malawi.

Amanda and Yvonne were lying next to the pool on these plastic lounge chairs. Yvonne was wearing little shorts and big blue sunglasses that matched her blue hair, and Amanda was in a bikini that really had its work cut out, since up top it was about the size of a pair of gingersnaps. They waved when they saw me, and I waved back, but I didn’t go over right then.

Instead I went and said hello to Ryan’s weird uncles. Uncle Bug said, “Dan, how’s my man?” and Uncle Rat asked if I wanted a hot dog but said to forget about the hamburgers, because Uncle Chop’s unprintable son-of-an-unprintable dog had grabbed them off the plate and eaten them. Uncle Chop said to lay off his dog. He said that his dog was one good dog, and if you’re going to wave a plate of hamburgers in front of a dog, well, the dog’s going to eat it, because that’s dog nature, and what’s human nature, when there’s a dog around, is to put the plate of hamburgers up where the dog can’t reach it, unless the human doesn’t have a brain in his pinhead because he’s too busy ogling some teenage girl’s backside.

That seemed to be a good time to excuse myself, so I did.

Then I changed into my swim trunks and did cannonballs into the pool, along with Ryan and Mickey Roberts and Peter and a couple of other guys, and the girls came by and sat, and kicked their feet in the water, and Yvonne talked the whole time to somebody on her pink cell phone. I hoped it was Ron the Oil Man.

So then we swam awhile and then we toweled off, and I had some lemonade and Mickey Roberts chugged two cans of soda and made himself burp, which hasn’t been funny since he learned how to do it in second grade, and actually wasn’t very funny even then. But we all laughed anyway, except Peter.

I was beginning to notice that Peter was ticked off.

First I thought maybe he’d had a fight with Amanda, but then I knew that was wrong because they were still all hugging, which everybody kept watching them do, hoping that Amanda’s stressed-out bikini top would fall off. And then I thought maybe he was just in a lousy mood, due to his parents getting on his case or his brother Tony telling him off, which always made him what my dad calls cross as a bear with a boil on its ass. But then it became pretty clear that what was really bugging him was me. He was punching people in the arm the way he does, but not me, and when he talked to me at all, which wasn’t much, he made it sound sort of nasty.

Then blue Yvonne said, “So what have you been doing all summer, Danny? You’re never around anymore.”

And before I could say anything, Peter said, “He’s working for that crackhead with the potatoes.”

“Jim’s not a crackhead,” I said.

“And I’ll tell you who else he’s been hanging with all summer,” Peter said.

And the way he said it, you could tell he was building for a fight.

“Wally the Living Dead, that’s who. And the
professor
that’s renting the Sowers house. Those are his best friends now. What do you do, Anderson, sit around all day together, reading
Play-Doh
?”

“Oh, stop it, Peter,” Amanda said.

“I think the weird’s rubbing off on him,” Peter said. “I think over the summer he’s gone weird. You guys smell anything? You guys think he’s starting to smell a little weird?”

Woo-oo-oo,
somebody said, and Amanda kind of giggled.

And that’s when I did a rotten chicken-ass thing.

“Come off it, Reilly,” I said. “The only things that smell around here are your flat feet. And I’m not hanging out with weird Wally the Living Dead. I wouldn’t get near that guy with a ten-foot pole. I’m not that hard up for friends.”

That’s what I said.

I was like Brutus, Julius Caesar’s best friend, who betrayed him and then helped stab him to death.

I was scum.

T
he party was on a Saturday, and on Monday Emma came out to the blue-potato field where I was hoeing and asked what in Sam Hill was wrong with me, because I looked like somebody just ran over my puppy.

“I’m fine,” I said. Considering that I was scum.

Brutus, after stabbing Caesar, felt so rotten and guilty that he committed suicide. I wasn’t that bad off, but I could see how Brutus felt.

“Yeah, sure,” said Emma. “Look at the face on you. If that’s fine, then I’m a whistling teakettle. Come sit down and tell me what’s wrong.”

I don’t know what it is with Emma, the way she gets people to talk to her, but whatever it is, she’d be a hotshot if she ever got hired by the FBI or the CIA. They’d just have to put her in a room with some suspect, and in maybe thirty minutes she’d get his signed confession, along with a heartfelt apology and his whole life story from childhood pets on up. I think she’s psychic. Walter says she just has a high quotient of interpersonal intelligence, but a more intense and directed kind than mine.

Also, of course, as long as you’re talking to Emma, you can’t be drinking her black-carrot smoothies, because it is impossible to talk and swallow at the same time, which is a point in favor of prolonged talking.

So we sat down under a tree, and I told Emma about the party and blue Yvonne and Peter Reilly and Walter and what a chicken-ass coward I was and the scum stuff I’d said.

Eli always had all these ideas for what I should do after I’d been scum. Like the time I broke the head off Angie Cook’s Barbie doll at her birthday party and threw it at her, and Angie’s mom called my mom and had her come take me home before the cake, Eli got all this information off the Internet for me about how to join the French Foreign Legion. And when I accidentally smashed my grandma O’Brian’s Mother’s Day rosebush by riding my bicycle over it, he got me a travel itinerary to Zanzibar.

But I’d done other scum stuff too. I started a fire once, back behind the barn, with some firecrackers and a leftover can of gasoline. It was a pretty big fire. It didn’t go anywhere much, but it could have. I stuffed the scarf Aunt Wendy knitted for me one Christmas into the garbage can and then lied about it and said I’d lost it. I skipped school and forged my mom’s name on the excuse note. I gave my cousin Georgie, who’s a year younger than me, a bloody nose, just because he wanted to play Ping-Pong and wouldn’t shut up and leave me alone.

Emma said my list of rotten stuff was pathetic. She said that on hers, the top five were so unspeakable, she wouldn’t even tell me. Among the others were stealing twenty dollars out of her auntie Dell’s pocketbook, breaking a window in the basement of the Saint John the Evangelist Catholic church, and swiping a car that belonged to one of her mom’s boyfriends and smashing it into a telephone pole.

“Yeah, but you were never a traitor to a friend,” I said.

Emma said she’d done a lot of mean talking behind people’s backs, which was close.

“Back when I was still in school,” Emma said, “there was this girl in my class, Jenny Monroe, and I just wouldn’t leave her alone. She had these great clothes, designer jeans and nice boots and a leather jacket, and this great haircut, and everybody just
loved
her. I couldn’t stand her, and I was mean as a snake. I said everybody knew she was nothing but a fat cow. I said her boyfriend was cheating on her with her best friend.”

“What did she do?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Emma. “She didn’t give a hoot. I just gave her and all her cute friends a good laugh.”

Because Jenny Monroe was popular,
I thought. Of course it didn’t make any difference to her. But it would make a difference to Walter. Walter trusted me. Walter would feel like I’d stabbed him in the back.

Then I thought what it would be like not to be friends with Walter anymore. I thought about all the stuff Walter knows and how he made me think about things in different ways and how he always acted like what I was thinking wasn’t just dumb. And how he uses his brains in a kind way, like he did with the Ouija board when he saw how freaked I was.

“You know what a real friend is?” I asked Emma.

Emma said she had an idea but she’d like to hear mine.

“A real friend is someone who likes you for who you want to be and not for who they want you to be,” I said.

Emma said I had a good point, even though that sentence had a lot of
who
s.

“So what do I do now?” I said. Thinking that if Eli were around, he’d probably be on the Internet, looking up time travel for me. Or maybe seppuku.

Emma patted my knee.

“Look, Danny, your friend won’t be hearing about anything from those other boys,” Emma said. “You said they don’t even talk to him. So if I was you, I’d let sleeping dogs lie. You just swallow it down this time and make sure you never do it again.”

“I won’t,” I said. And I felt better.

I still felt like scum, but I felt like more optimistic scum.

And I couldn’t say so, because of sounding mushy, but I can tell you that Emma’s worth about a million Jenny Monroes.

Walter and Isabelle and I still got together most evenings on Isabelle’s porch, and we’d talk and sometimes we’d play badminton, since the professor had put up a net in the yard, with me and Isabelle against Walter and the twins or Walter and Isabelle against me and the twins, with whoever got the twins starting out with extra points, because the twins were pretty erratic when it came to rackets and shuttlecocks. I loved that, those late-summer afternoons, with our shadows all huge across the grass, and us jumping and running, and that
tock
noise when a shuttlecock hits a racket just right, and the sun gone butter-colored, and all of us laughing and yelling.

Or if it was rainy, we’d make popcorn in the microwave and sit around watching old movies on Isabelle’s parents’ very small TV.

Isabelle didn’t mention Simon Dewitt Paxton again, and Journey told me that she’d taken his picture out of the frame beside her bed and torn it into little pieces and flushed them down the Sowerses’ mahogany toilet, which took a lot of flushes because the Sowerses’ bathrooms only have those old-fashioned commodes with a tank up on the wall and a pull chain.