Better Nate Than Ever (16 page)

I have another Reese’s Piece. “It’s not going to happen.” My voice echoes off the tile. “Me getting home tomorrow morning? I’m supposed to be on standby here; the casting people told me I might be getting a call to come back in or something.”

“Holy
Gone with the Wind
, Nate. Honest. This is so boss.”

“Libby, even
I
know
Gone with the Wind
was a monumental hit, even if it’s unwatchable now.”

“Not the movie, wise guy. There was a London musical of the same name, but it played when we were little. I wouldn’t expect you to know about any musical flop created before you met me. But, yeah. Huge-ol’ floperoo.”

I pee and finish up and practically scream when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, thinking I’m actually a
midget
sneaking up behind myself to murder me in the Times Square Chevys. Turns out a bright yellow and burgundy jacket can be quite an intimidating combo.

“So where are you
staying
tonight, then?” Libby says. “Let’s figure this out.”

I exit the bathroom. “My Aunt Heidi’s address is listed in Mom’s book in the kitchen. I can crash at her place, maybe. Definitely.”

“Too dangerous,” Libby says. “Much too. There are a thousand grown-ups in your kitchen”—I can practically hear her squinting to see across the lawn—“and one of the Kruehler boys is having an arm-wrestling competition with your brother, and—oh! Anthony’s winning.”

“Libby, stay with me.”

“Sorry. Any other ideas?”

I see an exit sign at the end of the bathroom hallway and make a hard left, passing a waitress holding a tray of calamari.

Of
course
.

“I have an idea, Libby.” How did I not think of this before? “Can you get in front of a computer?”

“Hmm, depends on if your dad finally broke down and got your family one, now that you’ve run away. Like, now your house can be officially fun.”

“He didn’t, I can assure you. I need you to run back to your place. Say you have to check on your mom. Run home and text me the address of something called Aw Shucks. It’s an oyster place downtown.”

“Oh, that’s cute, the play on shucks,” Libby says with some effort, clearly swinging her leg over the biggest trunk, climbing back down our tree.

“Watch that third branch,” I say, but she says, “Ow,” and then, “Too late,” and I hear her land in the yard.

“I have to hand it to you, Mom,” she’s saying to
me
, I guess—lying in front of the adults, sliding open our broken screen door and walking back into my house, everyone probably staring at her—“you’re really brave. You really are the bravest person I know.”

And she hangs up and probably starts to wail again for everyone, and I break through the Chevys
back-staircase street exit just as Libby is probably skipping home.

Leaping over bushes as I leap potholes.

Passing stray dogs as I do clusters of garbage.

Each of us on our own journey tonight, in honor of me.

A neighborhood that never cared about me before, suddenly spinning into itself, looking everywhere but here.

A whole world revolving around Nate Foster, for once.

It’s practically embarrassing.

Practically.

M
omentarily full from chips and salsa—almost too full; I could regret this later—I’m back outside, making my way downtown, back toward the Ripley-Grier audition studios. It’s a flying guess that south is generally heading toward Aunt Heidi’s restaurant.

At any moment, Rex Rollins the casting director could call, so I’m clutching my dying Nokia in one hand and, no doubt about it, that lucky rabbit foot in the other. I probably look a little like Mom when she goes mall walking and takes along those silly purple three-pound weights, her double-fisted hands a-swinging.

She would throw those weights at my head, right now, if she saw where I was.

There goes Madison Square Garden again, and with it—with any arena, anywhere—an ocean of Anthony floods over me. Anthony the star? Him I
know. Anthony with a calf tear? Anthony the alcoholic? There is so much about my brother that’s undiscovered, I guess, and not just what he sees in that high school girlfriend of his, with the tight sweaters and overreliance on Bubble Yum as a leading personality trait.

I pass a giant post office, across from Madison Square Garden, its mammoth stairway straight out of that triumphant scene in
Rocky
(Dad made me watch it once, hoping it’d butch me up; instead I cried throughout and referred to myself as “the Adrian of our family” for the rest of that week).

Next, a sign, taped haphazardly to an upcoming light pole, promises
SOULS SAVED AND A FREE WAFFLE
at some church in Harlem. Whoops. Happened this morning. There went my chance at a free waffle. And a saved soul.

And I’m taken back to the last time Anthony and I were anything even close to close.

He and I went away to a Christian camp, at Dad’s insistence: Youth Truth ’n Spirit, up in the Poconos Mountains. It was a thrill, Mom allowing us out of the house for more than a sleepover, allowing us farther than twenty minutes outside Jankburg. We loaded up on buses and it was the best day of my life, riding alongside
the
Anthony Foster, who was, even at thirteen—gosh, my age now—a budding community
mascot, raising money for the kids’ library fund, having sports scholarships named after him.

Anthony and I shared earbud jacks, and he picked the whole soundtrack, narrating our ride up to the mountains with cool, older-kid music: Wilco and Santogold and Vampire Weekend, bands that I’d never even heard of, let alone played myself. I didn’t submit a single entry to our improvised playlist, because I wasn’t old enough to have an iPod and I only listened to Disney soundtracks at the time, besides.

This was pre-Libby, pre-showtune, pre-anything that I now look to as my true religion. Before she moved to Jankburg and changed my life.

Anthony and I got to the Poconos and bunked together, and he accepted Jesus Christ as his savior that weekend. And I
thought
I did, too, but I think I was just so wrapped up in the spectacle of it all—all the older boys playing acoustic guitar with their shirts off, for one; and the camp counselors dressing up as the Devil to scare us at midnight—that emotion overcame me, and I concluded that that feeling must have been Jesus. That maybe knowing Jesus was like crying and making new friends and being scared and not having parents around, all at once.

I stood onstage and declared my new Christianity, in front of hundreds of other kids. (Other than
Vegetables: Just Do It
, when I understudied the
legumes, it was the first and last time I’d ever been on a stage, actually). The setting was this hollow outdoor bandshell, with Christian fireflies lighting the non-Christian tears on my face a shocking blue (somebody posted photos on Facebook, after). And I took a microphone and yelled out, “My name is N-n-nate F-f-foster, and this weekend I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior.”

I thought it would make me belong, somehow. To a club. Any club. Any club that would have Nate Foster as a member.

And that night, having just welcomed Jesus Christ into my regular cast of characters, I got beat up outside the camp cafeteria by Larry Motlie and his Motlie Crew (all of my bullies have great gang names), who politely informed me that “God hates fags.” Even though I had nothing against God, and wasn’t even—and am not even, now—sure what I was. A fag or a straight guy, or what.

And when I got back to our bunk, Anthony was sitting in a circle with a bunch of other boys. They were reciting Bible verses aloud, and I was so embarrassed at my own bleeding lip, at my own swollen-shut eye, that I immediately doubled back out into the community yard, before any of them saw me, and put a brown paper bag, from the garbage can outside the cement bunk, over my head. And pretended to
come in and spook them. Pretended to be a ghost.

I just didn’t want anyone to see my face.

And Anthony leapt up and pushed me into the wall and told me I wasn’t being a very good soldier of Christ. And I hadn’t even taken the bag off. He just knew it was me. My underbite was probably jutting out.

I rinsed off in the group showers—thank (my complicated friend) God nobody was in there—and winced through the physical pain of all that tepid camp water splashing into my bleeding gums; delighted, still, that none of my brother’s bunk friends had to see my secret that night. That even with God on my side, everyone still hated me. I still wasn’t fast enough, not with an answer in Social Studies, not on the field with a football. I was still the kid who threw up back home on Tuesday nights, knowing Wednesdays were Shirts and Skins day in P.E., and what if I had to be Skins? And take my shirt off in front of the other boys? That even with God as a friend, I was still broken.

And on the bus ride back to Jankburg, Anthony must’ve sensed that I’d dropped the God routine as fast as I’d adopted it. And he didn’t let me sit next to him. I had to sit with the adult chaperone who smelled like Funyons.

And now, under this New York sky where nobody knows my name, I’m passing my fourth (fourth!)
cupcake shop (if you’ve never been to New York, there are, I can report as an eyewitness, entire shops devoted
only to cupcakes
, and you can find these shops spaced about twenty feet apart splaying out into every direction). I never want to go home. I never want to ride another bus again, or see Anthony, or accept Jesus Christ as my personal anything.

My phone rings.

“Jesus Christ!” I yell, jumping, knocking into a
Village Voice
canister.

“It’s me.”

“Hi, Lib.”

“Where are you now? And I’ve only got a minute, because I need to patrol your house and make sure the cops never actually came.”

“Goodness, this is serious. Okay, I’m—let’s see—I’m in front of a really weird building that looks like a 3D triangle, or something.”

“Be more specific, Nate,” Libby says, clicking away at her computer. She’s so lucky. Her family has
two
computers, and Libby has her own, even.

“Well, to my left is a sliver of a park, like somebody’s yard in Jankburg, but I’m sure this is considered, I dunno, maybe The Central Park?”

“If you’re at Central Park we’re officially
Flora, the Red Menace
-d,” Libby says.

I don’t know that flop, and make a note to look
it up if I survive the night; at least three people have already looked like muggers to me, though one of them was holding hands with another guy, which was kind of interesting.

“Okay, the street sign—let’s see—it looks like I’m at the point of Twenty-third and Fifth Avenue streets.”

“Oh!” Libby says, typing madly. “Wait! I think you’re at . . . the . . . Flatiron Building, it says.”

“
Flatiron
? Like the hair thing? That makes you go from frizz to fab in the summers?”

“I’ve trained you well,” Libby says. “Something like that. Google says the architect of the Flatiron Building ‘hanged himself after it was completed, because he forgot to put in a men’s restroom and was humiliated.’”

I guess I’m not peeing there.

“Oh my God!” Libby says, and I can practically feel her smiling. “I’m at Google Maps, and under Nearby Places of Interest there’s an entire— Are you sitting for this, Nate?”

“No, I’m literally opposite-of-sitting. I’m looking for a bathroom and avoiding muggers.” A cab honks and then another one does, but not at me: just at the air. Everything is so flipping jubilant here.

“There’s a
Museum of Sex,
like,
two blocks away from you
,” Libby says, and we howl for about forty minutes over that one. When I come up for air, passing (I’m not
kidding) another cupcake place, I say, “A Museum of Sex. Good golly, I wonder what the entry fee is. Like, a kiss?”

Thinking this a pretty good joke, I’m disappointed and humbled when Libby says, “You’re so PG, Nate. I can’t wait until you act PG-13. And I’m going to throw a party when you’re R.”

But I ignore her.

“Okay, Libby: Where am I heading? It’s getting really dark and the buildings are getting smaller, so it’s probably full of poor people down here, poor people who leave their apartments at midnight and rob children of their new yellow and burgundy coats.”

It’s nowhere near midnight, actually, but still: the drama of it all.

“Oh, Nate, I wish you had a bike; you’d get to your aunt in, like, less time than the
Chu Chem
overture.”

Four people, just like that, whip by me on bikes, exposing swollen calves emerging from rolled-up pants. People are
allowed to bicycle at night
in New York City, folks.

“Oh my God!” I look up. “I’m on Broadway! There’s a street called Broadway, and I’m on it!” I’m shouting. “Oh, I wish you were here to take my picture! Aaaaah! I always thought Broadway was just a cluster of the greatest theaters on the planet. It’s an actual streeeeeet!”

A Korean woman with a broom lingers outside a convenience store, and I smile at her but she sort of swats me away. Man, there’s a lot of liquor stores down here. If I wanted to get into some trouble, I could whip out Anthony’s fake ID and see what the fuss is with his sock drawer.

“Keep walking down Broadway, boss,” Libby says, and then I hear her yell, “Just a sec, Ma, I’ll bring you a glass of water in two shakes of a tail.” And back to me, “You’re going to get to Union Square, and that’s going to be awesome—”

“—because an entire scene in
Ragtime
took place there!”

“Yeah,” Libby says. “The one where the belty lady in the bad wig” (we’d watched the show in illegal clips on YouTube) “rouses the crowd.”

“Oooh! I love the tenor harmony part on that!”

“Well, yell it out, Natey,” Libby says, and I can hear the jealousy in her voice overwhelmed only by her excitement for me. She really is the best friend ever, even if—or especially because—she’s willing to blackmail my older brother to save my butt. “Stroll through Union Square, which, according to Google, features organic candy corn vendors,
hint-hint
”—Libby should just skip college, I swear to you—“and then walk down, uh . . . Fourth Avenue. Yeah.”