I stared at Toshi in shock. I’d never heard him be so mean before.
“Muzzle up, Knees,” Jay said. “If you were any help in a fight, maybe we wouldn’t be out here now. And you.” He pointed at me. “You got your skills from your idiot dad.” Jay started stumbling around, tripping over his own feet the way my father had when he’d shown up in New Veronia. “He’s running yellow.” Jay waved a pretend Nascar flag, then punched the air, letting the momentum of his fist carry him around in a woozy half-circle.
Toshi laughed. “Flagged!” he said.
My face froze somewhere between a grin and a grimace; I wanted to let myself feel bad about the teasing, but if I showed it, they’d only dig in deeper.
Then the bell rang, a jaunty four-note melody that always seemed out of place in the shitty school hallways.
My next class was theater, my favorite. Last year, we did Midsummer Night’s Dream and the whole jackass mistake was hilarious, the first time I really got into something written hundreds of years ago. I wanted to play Bottom or even be one of the background sprites, but Mr. Blake refused to let me act because I had “dead eyes,” and somebody had to push the button on the CD player backstage. I had hoped that maybe Mr. Blake would die over summer and we’d get a new theater teacher, but there he stood in the middle of the stage. He started reading from the play before he even took attendance.
“‘I have lost both my parents,’” he said in a deep voice. And then, raising his voice an octave: “‘To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?’” He spoke deeply again. “‘I am afraid I really don’t know. The fact is, Lady Bracknell, I said I had lost my parents. It would be nearer the truth to say that my parents seem to have lost me… I don’t actually know who I am by birth. I was… well, I was found.’” Mr. Blake dipped in a quick bow and a couple of suck-ups belatedly applauded. “And that, students, is the crux of The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, which we will study and perform this semester.”
That first class, we did a cold reading of the play, and I got to be the voice of Lane, the Manservant. I had some really hilarious lines, like, “‘There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir. I went down twice,’” even though I also had to say, “‘Yes, sir,’” about a thousand times.
I wished that people talked that way in real life, so that I could pretend I was in a play all the time, where everything was witty and entertaining and inconsequential.
That afternoon, I went home and stretched out on the trampoline in the backyard. Years ago, I’d begged my father to get me one, and then he finally had, and it had turned out that I was afraid of the damn thing. After my wrist got broken from the seesaw, I didn’t like bouncing so high, not knowing quite how I might land, but the trampoline was a comfortable and convenient spot to stare up at the sky.
It was only four o’clock, so the sun still warmed me, and the younger neighborhood kids were playing some game that involved a lot of yelling, and a few airplane jets spewed their thin, white clouds into the atmosphere. I thought about how I’d known Toshi and Jay for most of my life but really, I didn’t know them at all. They were like a tree when the sun starts going down, how the branches and leaves and trunk all turn black even though the sky is blue-orange and lighted behind it, and by the time the tree is no more than a shadow of itself, you’re pretty sure that it’s a beech, but maybe it’s an oak. This was how my oldest friends felt to me.
Earlier that day, I had watched with astonishment as Toshi walked straight up to Cindy O in the hallway and told her that she had a nice rack. He reached out as if he were about to touch it, and when she smacked his hand, he looked at his fingertips like they’d been burnt.
I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, it was dark except for the bright yellow square of the kitchen window. My dad was in the kitchen washing something at the sink. I hadn’t seen him since he’d stumbled into New Veronia. When I went inside, he said that he was cooking dinner.
“Really?” I said. It seemed like we were going to pretend the incident at New Veronia had not happened, which was fine with me.
“Don’t sound so surprised. I cook for you sometimes. Don’t I?”
“Sure,” I said, because I could tell that he was feeling touchy.
He was making pasta, pouring the box of hard little noodles into a boiling pot. He always said that pasta tasted like wet bread, so he must have been making it because there was nothing else in the house. He set a bottle of ketchup on the counter and, before I could ask, said that we were out of pasta sauce, but ketchup was the base of pasta sauce, anyhow. In a pot, he mixed frozen hamburger with the ketchup, some basil flakes, and dried crumbles of parmesan from the green plastic canister. He added pepper and thyme, and then he drained the noodles and mixed them with the sauce.
The meal was unexpectedly palatable, sweet and salty, or maybe I was especially hungry.
“See?” my dad said when I got up for seconds.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good.”
“Did I ever tell you that I used to work in a restaurant?”
“No.” I really didn’t know much at all about my dad when he was growing up, before there was me. And the weird thing was, I didn’t feel curious, either—everything I’d ever found out about him was a snore.
“Well, it was really more of a bar. But we sold food. And I was just the prep chef, cutting up potatoes, mostly, but sometimes I threw some plates together. When the chef got to drinking.”
“Huh.”
“I learned what flavors go together, then. We just don’t have anything fresh in the house. If we had a good stocked kitchen, I could really impress you.” He stared off into space for a while before asking, “How was the first day of school?”
“Fine.” I shrugged, and he didn’t nag me for details. He sat there, though, and I felt kind of pinned to my seat. The pasta was gone, and my feet, antsy, tapped at the floor, but I had nowhere to be.
Then he said, “You taking theater again? That was your favorite class last year— wasn’t it?”
“I guess.” I could feel him staring at me, but I couldn’t look up from the red-smeared plate in front of me.
“All right,” he said. “I know the first day at school can be rough. Classes okay?”
I filled the air with whatever came into my head. “There are so many hard ones. I don’t know if I can… keep up with my grades. And I don’t have any classes with my friends. It’s not fair: Jay and Toshi have three classes together.” I shut up then: I hadn’t meant to say Jay’s name in front of him.
“That’s too bad,” my father said.
“I don’t know. Can I be excused?” All this attention he was giving me was starting to make me highly uncomfortable. I kept picturing him on the ground, the bear traps all around. If I didn’t get away from my dad soon, I felt like I would snap, the way the traps should have. My dad didn’t even have to do anything to provoke me; for some reason, just him sitting there made my anger flare up. I stood. “Thanks for dinner.”
“All right,” my dad said, his face the same fleshy mask as always.
Little kids relied on their parents for everything, but they didn’t know them at all. They had no idea where their parents went to school or what political party they voted or what was their favorite drink. Then, when the kids got older—when they were my age, for example—they wanted to forget all the things about their parents that they found out. For some reason, it was terrible to know that your dad owned a pair of lucky underwear, that he thought late-night TV was the best, that he once chopped up vegetables for a living, that he drank too much and could get beat up by a fifteen-year-old.