Winded, I couldn’t answer; I slowed my pace and scooted rightward so that Toshi and I could bike side-by-side in one lane.
When I caught my breath, I said, “I’m just sick of you two lying. I don’t want to have to lie, just to fit in.”
“You think Jay made up all that stuff about Stephanie Helmet?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Yeah, some of it.” Between each sentence, I panted.
“Well, I don’t. I’ve heard rumors about her. Her name is scratched in the last stall of the bathroom in the cafeteria.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Jay might have done that himself, to make what he said seem more real.”
A car came up behind us and honked. We pulled closer to the shoulder, which was the width of a piece of paper and dropped off into a ditch, like the shoulders of most all the roads that ran between neighborhoods in Delaware, one lane each way, nothing but the double-yellow lines to separate the cars.
My heart wouldn’t slow down, and I was tired out from all the angry biking, so I pulled over into the parking lot of a little roadside liquor store. Jay and I had once tried to get a man to buy us beer from this store, but instead the guy had pocketed our money and ducked out the back. Toshi had never seemed much interested in drinking, which made me glad, because it was one thing Jay and I could do together, without him.
Toshi and I pulled our bikes around the side and sat on the curb. I sort of wanted to be left alone, but I also felt glad for Toshi’s company. Because it was summer, the sun wouldn’t set for hours. It pressed down on my shoulders and made everything feel wet, like a teabag just pulled from a steaming cup.
“My mother is dead,” I said. She used to drink chamomile tea, and she always steeped each teabag twice. There would be one waiting for her on a saucer beside the sink.
“Oh, no,” Toshi said, “when did you find out? Who told you?”
A line of ants marched between my sneakers and then disappeared down a crack in the pavement. I lifted a foot and brought it down on the line. When I moved my foot back, the live ones kept marching, veering around their dead coworkers. “No one told me,” I said. “I just know it.” One ant palpitated the squished body of another with his antennae, but then he moved on without taking further action. “Sometimes I feel like I fell off a stool, a really high stool, onto a concrete floor, and I hit my head really hard and now everything is just a little bit off.”
Toshi stared at me before he said, “Did you hit your head? It happens all the time, and you could get a concussion and die without even realizing it.”
It was so hard for us to understand each other; maybe impossible. I shrugged.
“So your mom isn’t really dead.”
“The shitty thing is that she could be and I wouldn’t even know.”
Toshi reached out and put his hand on my knee, but only for a second; he must have realized that it looked gay. He said, “That’s true about my mom, too. At least, it would probably take a week before someone thought to tell me.”
“Yeah.”
A pickup that looked exactly like my dad’s pulled in and parked crookedly, and then my dad got out of it.
“He should still be at the plant.” I tried to make myself small so that he wouldn’t notice me. My dad beelined for the entrance. “He must have got off a little early.”
“Oh no”—Toshi held out his naked wrist—“my cast.”
I helped him put it on. Bits of old plaster rubbed off onto my thumbs, and the athletic tape was losing its stick. “Don’t worry; my dad didn’t see us. Do you wear it in the shower? You’ll need to replace this tape soon.”
“Now I do. One time I left it on the bathroom counter beside the soap dispenser and my dad came in to pee, but luckily, he didn’t notice it. Probably it’s him making me sick all the time: he never washes his hands.”
“That’s good,” I said.
Chapter 4
In the morning, I headed over to the site as soon as I woke up, a granola bar stuffed into my pocket. I was early: not even Jay was there yet. We’d marked out the positions for the doors the day before, and I started furiously cutting along the penciled lines, the saw rattling the bones inside my arm. I felt cold, though the morning chill had already lifted.
The night before, I’d had an old dream, one I’d used to have as a kid: I was locked in a box with one little hole I could peek out of, and through it I could see people on a bed, but no matter how loudly I called out to them, they didn’t seem to notice me. I would suffocate in that box; I would starve. In the dream, one by one, my ribs started to show beneath my skin.
“Hey.”
Jay was standing over me; I hadn’t even heard him approach. Maybe something was wrong with my ears. I stuck a finger inside one and dug out a turd of wax, then wiped vigorously at my face before looking up. Even the memory of the dream had shaken me.
“You’re awake early,” he said, and the fact that he didn’t ask me what was wrong reminded me what a good friend he was: he knew when to give me space.
Jay watched me for a minute more and then said that he’d seen a house where they were remodeling, not far from my neighborhood, and they had taken all the old doors off and left them in a pile beside a dumpster—free, if we could get to them first.
“We’ll go over there today,” he said. “Now.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Toshi?”
“Naw. I don’t see why. Nut up.”
And when I thought about Toshi arriving in New Veronia, finding it empty, then realizing that Jay and I must be off somewhere together, I felt a mean twinge of happiness.
As we started walking back through the woods, Jay seemed to read my mind: he said, “Sometimes I feel like Toshi just doesn’t get us.”
I said carefully, “I mean, he’s not as fun as you.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s mixed. Like that mixes you up.” He grabbed a pebble and chucked it at a squirrel. The pebble clattered against a tree as the squirrel’s tail flicked us off before disappearing among the leaves.
Jay’s garage was filled with junk: chains snaked across the floor, several gun racks held one or two pieces each, boxes overflowed with plastic stuff. There were empty cartons, broken old lawnmowers, a pile of sticks, a flat of Coke with half the cans gone…. No room for a car. Jay walked over to one corner and began pushing aside a collection of old magazines until he uncovered his bicycle.
“Tires seem okay,” he said, testing them. He picked up a rope from the cracked concrete floor and overturned a kiddie pool, underneath of which sat a little red wagon. “We’ll use this to tie the doors onto and pull them back. Okay?”
“Nice,” I said.
“I been thinking”—Jay started tying the wagon onto his bike—“it might be about time that we replace Toshi. We’re getting older, and he’s not like us. It’s just, I don’t want the guys asking weird questions. Soccer starts up again soon.”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t exactly sure what Jay was ranting about, but it seemed like he was saying I was his favorite, and Toshi was far behind me. Tosh had always been the dorkiest of us, with his slightly-off clothes and his dedication to the school band.
Jay said, “When you think about it, Toshi shouldn’t even be here. Like his mom? She probably married Toshi’s dad just so that she could be a US citizen.”
“Then how come she went back to Singapore?” I said.
“It might be that Knees isn’t our kind of guy, I mean, we’ll be sophomores soon. We got to make sure they know what sort of men we are.”
“He should have gone with her,” I said. “To Singapore.” Sometimes I wondered what my life would’ve been like if, after the divorce, I’d gone to live with my mom instead of my dad.