“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s really going to be something,” he said. “The problem we’re running into here is, well, it’s the design of the machines. You’ve got to have six flavors in each machine, right, to give people the choice.” He counted them off on his fingers: “Cola, diet, lemon-lime, orange, root beer, and prune. That’s like Dr Pepper, but ours is going to be called Mr. Popper. So you’ve got to put in a computer chip, where you push a button and tell it what flavor you want and the chip controls which flavor syrup gets pumped in. How about that? A computer in a soda machine!” I indicated that I had heard of such things. “So the guy who’s building the machine, he said he could get it done in about six weeks. But now there’s some kind of shortage of these chips, and he’s telling me there’s no way to get any more until the end of the summer, and so we’re stuck with this great idea, and cases and cases of syrup and carbon, just sitting in this guy’s warehouse, and there’s no way to get the machines into the stores until the fall. This could be a very nice payday for everyone if these guys weren’t so incompetent!”
“Yeah,” I said. Spread out in front of me on the table were my mom’s last few tax returns. She’d given them to me so that I could copy the figures onto the financial-disclosure form. Looking at the documents felt a bit too intimate, like seeing her undressed. I copied the numbers carefully with a fountain pen, and then moved on to the next section of the form.
“Dad, how much money did you make in fiscal ’91–’92?” I said.
He craned his neck to see the forms. “What do they need to know that for?” he asked.
“They need to know, Dad,” I said. “It’s for, like, financial aid and whatever.”
“See, the thing is,” he said, “your income changes from year to year.” He went over to the stove and began filling a pot with water. “That’s how it is with entrepreneurialism — one year you might not make anything, and then the next year you’re going to make a whole lot, to make up for it.”
I said, “I have to send the forms in a couple weeks if I want to apply early decision.”
“Why don’t you call them?” he said, striking a match to turn on the burner. “Call the admissions office and say you don’t think it’s fair that your parents should have to disclose their whole financial lives. Start a consumer protest! If enough people complain, they’ll have to change the policy.”
“But no one is complaining, Dad,” I said. “The only person who’s complaining is you.”
“Well, and I’m the one who’s going to be footing the bills, aren’t I?” he said, turning to face me. “Look, Eric, it’s like this: Right now I don’t have any money apart from my salary from the college. Of course, there’s going to be a bunch of money soon, when we get the machines into the stores. But when you apply to these schools, they’re going to think, OK, teaches college, makes a good salary — let’s touch him for everything he’s got. Look, it’s not that I’m not willing to pay for your education — nothing’s more important than education, I’ve always said that — but if they make me pay for it right now, there won’t be enough left for the business.” He lifted the lid off the pot, but the water wasn’t boiling yet. “So just leave my name off entirely. Where they have a space for father, write N/A. That stands for not applicable. Just write that.” He reached into the cabinet for the spaghetti.
Cindy was at home with a cold, and Paul was in class, and Danny was in an expansive mood. “Do you have a free period?” he said when I ran into him in the hall. I told him I did, although this was not true. “Because I want to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t deal with being cooped up in this place, you know?”
“Where can we go?” I asked. It was a freezing Thursday afternoon.
“Anywhere, dude,” he said, sweeping his arm to take in the great world around us. “Let’s hit the road!”
“Yeah, man!” he said as we left the school building. “We’re out of there! Later, losers!” He was carefully looking straight ahead, and his breath was visible in the air. “We spend all our lives in these boxes, right? They want us to fuckin’ stay in that box until we’re eighteen so we can graduate and go straight into another box and spend the rest of our lives there!” He said this with no malice, only excitement at the break we’d made.
There was no one in Carl’s Jr. except four senior girls who ignored us and an old guy with a cup of coffee and packets of sugar all over the table. We ordered combo meals and piled our puffy coats and wool hats next to us on the plastic seats.
“It’s like, they’re just training us for some stupid office job anyway,” he said. He was the only one of us with even a slight claim to coolness, deriving from his wide, satisfied face and a voice that always gave the impression of minimal effort. “I mean, what do they teach us? They should be teaching us to be, like, poets or something. If the schools taught everyone to be a poet or a musician or something instead of, like, an accountant, the world would be a whole different place.” I nodded dumbly. “But maybe not everyone’s got it in them to be a poet,” he said, retreating a little.
“Yeah,” I said, “but they should at least have the opportunity.”
“That’s right!” Danny said, raising his Coke as if to toast me. “It should be like, OK, it turns out you can’t be a poet, you can’t be a painter, you can’t be a, a whatever — you’re going to have to drop out and be an accountant. And the poets should get paid ten times as much as the accountants, instead of the other way around.”
I was getting it now. “And if your kid said he wanted to be an accountant, you’d say, Where did your mother and I go wrong?”
“Exactly!” Danny said, slamming his drink down on the table. “That’s exactly right.”
I met Hannah Pronovost two days before her father died, which was a huge stroke of luck. She and Cindy had been at school together until ninth grade, when Hannah had started at Danville Academy and Cindy had come to MLK. Now Hannah’s father was fighting a hopeless battle with a vindictive tumor, and Cindy was going over to their house every night to keep Hannah company. She had started carrying herself with the special dignified glamour that teenagers acquire when they make contact with something important and grown-up. We didn’t see her much outside of school anymore.
“This is so stupid,” Danny said. We were sitting in his bedroom waiting for Saturday Night Live. “It’s like, we could be in the country, communing with nature or whatever, or we could be in the city where there’s things going on — but no, either of those are too dangerous, so we live in fucking Aurora.” It was only he and Paul who lived in Aurora, but I wasn’t going to point that out.
“But your kids can play outside because it’s safe,” Paul said contemptuously.
“Yeah, OK, but in exchange for safety you’re stopping them from having any kind of real experience!” Danny said. “It’s like, if you’re really going to live, you can’t just be safe every minute of your life.”
“No, right, I know,” Paul said, embarrassed that Danny had missed his sarcasm.
“I’d be happy if I could see my girlfriend occasionally,” Danny said. “It sounds really bad over there.”
“Bad like how?” I asked.
“Well, he’s dying,” Danny said. “I mean, imagine if, like, any time you saw your dad, that might be the last time you were ever going to talk to him.”