100 Sideways Miles (13 page)

Cade Hernandez never felt guilty or strange about the death of Mr. Nossik. Although it was easy enough to consider Mr. Nossik's aneurysm a fateful coincidence, it was also a certainty that Cade Hernandez would have eventually pushed that old man so far that our history teacher would have ended up bringing a gun to school and shooting one of the state's best left-handed pitchers. Nobody would have wanted to see that.

Cade Hernandez was the kind of kid you'd dedicate hundred-foot-high monuments to, just so he wouldn't kill you with his lethal powers of annoyance.

Good thing he was my best friend.

One time later that summer, I sincerely asked Cade to do me a favor and please not give my father an aneurysm.

By July sixteenth, which was my birthday, I had fallen wildly in love with Julia Bishop.

After traveling nearly eleven billion miles in my lifetime, my atoms and I had arrived at a place where we could confidently make such determinations about love.

Love makes atoms sticky.

Sticky atoms want to hold on to one another.

To be truly accurate, I fell in love with Julia Bishop the night of Blake Grunwald's shitty party, but I was afraid to admit such a thing to myself. I was scared I would ruin it, that things would unravel in the most horrible ways, and that I would have to go on simply pretending—as always—to be
fine
.

I knew this about Julia Bishop: She was a miracle—artistic, imaginative, and gifted—and she also liked to mess with me.

• • •

The last day of June, some time after school had been out for summer break, Julia Bishop drove her Mustang up into San Francisquito Canyon. We both wanted to hike around the tumbled ruins of William Mulholland's St. Francis Dam. Like most people who lived in the canyon, I had driven past plenty of times but never actually visited the site of the disaster.

And I had never gone anywhere alone with anyone who was a teenager and was also
not
Cade Hernandez.

My atoms were all riled up, and especially sticky that day.

At a bend in the snaking canyon road, just past the spot where San Francisquito Creek makes a ten-foot waterfall during rainy seasons, the city of Los Angeles built an impressive Art Deco–style power-generating plant.

It was creatively named Power Plant No. 1.

As a practice, I prefer to avoid abbreviations and to write out numbers, as opposed to using numerals. It's one of my quirks, like calculating distances rather than time. But the plant was actually named as I have written—with the abbreviation and the numeral as well—like
Sputnik 2
.

Power Plant No. 1 was completely wiped out by a twelve-billion-gallon wall of water in 1928. Starting at the location of the dam, and continuing all the way along the Santa Clara River bed toward the Pacific Ocean, perhaps as many as one hundred electric-company employees lost their lives.

The power plant was easily replaced, although nobody knows for certain how many irreplaceable people had been swallowed up in William Mulholland's churning liquid knackery.

In 1928 a group of thirty or so Native American Indians had been living on one of the large ranches below the St. Francis Dam.
One month before the disaster, a medicine man hunting deer in the canyon claimed to have received a vision of the catastrophe that would befall the dam. The medicine man warned the other Indians to leave the area. The Indians left the area the day before the collapse of the dam.

Imagine that.

Ten years ago, during one of the wettest winters on record, a large portion of the canyon road was washed away by the flooding of the San Francisquito Creek. The ruined highway shut down for more than a year—over half a billion miles. When a new roadway was finally opened, a stretch of the old ruined blacktop next to the rebuilt Power Plant No. 1 became a sort of parking area for the very few people who, knowing anything at all about William Mulholland's historic failure, traveled up here to see firsthand what was left of the St. Francis Dam.

Look: Even right here in Southern California, most people had never heard of the St. Francis Dam. The majority of Southern Californians simply assumed William Mulholland must have been someone magnificent because he had such a nice road, which meandered through the wealthiest communities in Los Angeles, named for him.

People probably would have remembered the St. Francis Dam better if its collapsing failure had caused the cancelation of an Academy Awards presentation, as opposed to just killing about five hundred innocent victims.

Julia Bishop parked her Mustang off the highway, along the chain-link fence that surrounded Power Plant No. 1.

“Are you okay?” she said. “You've been really quiet all day.”

“Um.”

“You're not—you know—feeling
weird
, are you?”

“I'm okay.”

Usually, whenever someone asked me if I felt like I was going to have a seizure, which I could tell was Julia's underlying question, it would make me angry. But not with Julia. She could ask me anything at all and I would tell her the truth.

And the truth was that I was nervous about being alone with Julia Bishop.

Up to that point, Julia and I had spent time together at each other's houses, but we'd never technically been on a
date
. In fact, the first catastrophic time we had been truly alone together, I was either lying facedown in a puddle of urine, blanked out on the floor of my living room, or standing on my upstairs landing, naked and wrapped in a bath towel with the pattern of a sea-foam green nautilus shell coiled directly in front of my penis.

No wonder I was nervous.

And even though we'd kissed that first night outside Blake Grunwald's shitty party, I had been plagued by the thought that Julia Bishop had kissed me—and run her delicious and soothing hand up inside my shirt—only because she'd felt
sorry
for the poor epileptic kid who had never been kissed in all those miles of his life.

So I took a deep breath and said, “Is this a
date
, Julia? Because I . . . we've never actually been anywhere alone together on purpose, and, well, I . . .”

Julia laughed and shook her head.

“You think too much,” she said.

“Uh.”

Julia put her hand on my knee. My bare knee. I was wearing shorts.

My wardrobe choice was based more on the heat of the day than on the likelihood of sexual arousal. Bad planning.

I felt very sticky at that moment.

I wondered what it would be like to feel Julia Bishop's hand slip up inside my shorts.

And then I blurted out, “I'm a Jew.”

That's when Julia Bishop started to laugh for real.

“What?” she said.

“A Jew. I am a Jew.”

Julia laughed so hard, tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. I felt terrible—like I'd made her cry. And I wanted to kiss her so bad and tell her I was sorry.

I was such a calamitous whirlwind of stupidity!

So I explained to Julia about my
real
mother, and how, technically, it made me a Jew.

“I don't know why I felt I had to say that,” I explained. “Sometimes I think I feel the need to clarify my origins. I'm not, like, a
real
Jew, but I am a Jew.”

Julia wiped her eyes.

“That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

“Oh. Uh. Sorry.”

“Anyway, you still can't prove to me you actually
didn't
come through a Lazarus Door.”

I phrased the following as a question: “I haven't eaten anyone?”

Julia laughed again.

In my father's science fiction book, the one that caused such a tremendous stir, all the aliens who'd come here through Lazarus Doors took the names of angels from the Bible and from the Koran.

It made it easier to lure Christians and Muslims onto the aliens' dinner plates, but it also upset a lot of contemporary readers here on the planet of humans and dogs.

You could imagine.

One of the characters also happened to be a boy named Finn. But it wasn't me, my father always swore. He only
named
the incomer boy after me. Writers do that all the time, my father said. Thankfully, in spite of my Lazarus Door marks and heterochromatic eyes, as far as I know there was never an angel named Finn in any religion.

Julia said, “Well, I'm half-black.”

I knew that. Unlike the Jew thing, half-black was something I could see. I never
asked
Julia Bishop about it. What would I say, anyway?

Hey, are you half-black?

And what did it matter? I supposed that was what Julia Bishop laughed about—the thought of her walking up to me and asking,
Hey, Finn, by any chance are you a Jew?

Besides all that, Julia's aunt and uncle—the people she lived with across the canyon—were black.

There was no question of that.

So I said, “Um. I kind of knew that.”

“Just wanted to clarify my origins,” Julia said. “My mother is a black woman. My father owns a restaurant. I have never eaten anyone either. Can I tell you something?”

She still had her hand on my knee. It felt wonderfully terrifying.

I said, “If it's about my legs, I don't shave them. That's just how they are.”

Julia laughed.

“It's not about you shaving your legs.”

“Is it about food?”

I was so nervous, it felt like my heart was playing xylophone against my rib cage.

“No. It's about why I came here. The real reason.”

Outside of that first awkward attempt on the night of the perigee moon to discover Julia Bishop's past, we had never really talked about the reason behind her relocation to California.

“Only if you want to,” I said.

Julia stared directly into the eye of her steering wheel.

“Charlie—that's the guy I used to go out with back home—he raped me. That's why my parents wanted me to get away from the old school. All the kids, you know?”

Every atom of air fled from my lungs.

What can you say when someone you're in love with tells you something like that?

I mean, it's easy enough to laugh when you put your hand on a guy's bare knee and he stupidly blurts out, “I'm a Jew! I don't shave my legs!” because he's so confused, he doesn't know what else to say, but what can you say to something like
that
?

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

I turned away from her and stared out the side window. It wasn't fair. Nothing ever is.

“Are you okay?” I whispered.