Better Nate Than Ever (19 page)

It’s heaven, though.

Freckles turns the TV on, pretuned to a channel that broadcasts only New York news, which is amazing.

“I wonder if I could get this back home,” I say. “Oh God, home. I should call Libby.”

“You want me to leave you alone?” Freckles asks.

“Well, I don’t want to annoy you.” Dad hates when I talk on my cell phone during Steelers games, even if I’m in my own bedroom.

“Nah, but why don’t you go into Heidi’s room, for privacy?”

A moment later I’m sitting on Aunt Heidi’s floor, not wanting to disturb the bed. A kitty circles me.

“Libby?”

“Oh, boy, how are
you
?” she says.

“I’m okay. I’m at my Aunt Heidi’s. It’s been a rough night.”

“You’re telling me. They called off the neighborhood search when your aunt got through to your mom.”

I wish I could just pause time or fast-forward or something. I don’t even want to hear, but still: “What—what did my mom say?”

“She was going to call my mom and rat me out for lying about Extreme Hide-and-Seek, but I did the crying thing again and everyone oohed and aahed and just told me to get lost,” Libby says. “So I’m home now, waiting for you to call.”

“Is your mom okay?”

“She’s asleep.”

“Is Anthony okay?” I can’t believe I’m asking about
him
.

“Yeah, sure. I mean, he won’t be playing for six weeks or something, which is sort of devastating to him. But it’s not as if he killed himself or anything.”

“Right.”

“So did you hear anything else about
E.T
.?”

“Yeah.” I swallow and look at the cat. “I didn’t get farther. They—I guess they just weren’t looking for little boys my age.”

“Oh, that’s weird,” Libby says, “because Jordan
Rylance posted something on Facebook that he has a callback for Elliott tomorrow, and the whole world Liked it. As if he already got the part or whatever.”

She just shouldn’t have said that, and we both know it, immediately, and I basically want to melt into the floor and let Aunt Heidi’s kitty eat me as dinner.

“Wow, good for Jordan Rylance,” I say, just as sarcastically as you can imagine a guy like me’d say it.

“You’re back home tomorrow, though?” Libby says. She doesn’t usually let me see her this hopeful and vulnerable, so it’s kind of nice.

“Yeah, we’re waking up at, like, five a.m. and going back to the bus station, and I’ll be home in time for the last class of the day, I’m sure. I’m sure Mom’ll make me go right to school, and then I’ll get home with twelve hours of homework and they’ll ground me and not even let me Trick-or-Treat.” Aunt Heidi’s cat, I see as my eyes adjust, is jet black. And crossing me. “Or Dad’ll just kill me, actually. And then send my body to school the next day.”

“Well,” Libby says, “at least I’ll be there. And luckily, you already sort of act like a corpse in class.”

“Yeah,” I say. And then I brighten for her. “Yeah, it’ll be great to see you. This whole thing has been . . . really overwhelming.”

“You’ll have to tell me every single moment, or act it out, when we’re face to face in my basement.”

But I know I won’t be able to. That to talk about New York would mean to remember everything I’m leaving, everything I didn’t get to get used to. Just to get a taste of. Even the Chevys chips were better than the ones back home, and I’d know, because I had two baskets.

I hang up. Heidi’s still in the bathroom, the water running on full blast, and Freckles is sitting on the futon with his laptop out. “Everything cool?” he says.

“Yeah, that was just my best friend.”

“The underwear sniffer?” I expect him to say, but he just goes, “It’s good to have a best friend,” like I’m seven years old or something and up next he’s going to teach me the difference between circles and squares.

I sit on the futon Indian style and can feel the weight of the day on my head, my eyes drifty.

Heidi comes out of the bathroom, having done a total costume change, standing there in sweats and an old Pitt T-shirt, looking like college photos Mom used to have of her. Before she put them all away.

“Okay, Natey, the bathroom’s all yours,” she says.

I hop in the bath and, come to think of, maybe I should take them more often. It’s like a big wet hug, in a good way. And something about seeing my body reflected back at me, like I’m looking at somebody else’s? It’s just not as bad as I might have thought.

I close my eyes and wince, thinking about the
return to Jankburg, and I sink to the bottom, below the layer of bubbles Aunt Heidi put in. And for a second, underwater, I nod off, asleep or maybe even hoping to drown.

If I have to die—and according to everyone I go to school with, I have to die often, and soon—it might as well be in New York.

I
f you’ve never been tucked into a futon, you don’t know what you’re missing.

“Night, Nate.”

You’re missing nothing, I meant.

“Night, Aunt Heidi.”

She flips the lamp off, next to the couch/futon/bed thing, and asks me if I’ve got enough blankets, and then, just when a normal person would go back to her own bed, she stays.

“Should I keep the kitchen light on?” she asks, shaking an old travel clock, distracting herself with an object like adults always do. “You going to be okay overnight?” She probably knows I’ve never really slept anywhere other than my room and Libby’s floor.

“Oh, sure,” I say, “thirteen-year-olds can sleep anywhere.”

“Ah, well, that’s good.”

She’s looking at me like I’m dying or she’ll never see me again. Both of which might be likely. It’s one thing to be old, to be forty or fifty with a broken heart, but it’s practically terminal when you’re thirteen. When you’re thirteen with a broken heart, I bet your valves aren’t even strong enough to mend themselves.

“I’m really sorry for causing you all this trouble,” I say, sitting up so I don’t fall asleep. “I hope Mitch didn’t fire you or anything.”

She makes a face. “How did you know my boss’s name was Mitch?”

“I overheard Freckles talking to you about it.”

“You’re very observant,” she says. “But, no, I’m not fired. It’s all good.”

“I found pictures of you when you were in the bathroom,” I say.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“There was a binder of old show photos, underneath the futon.” She rolls her eyes. “No, they’re great,” I say. “They really are. Freckles and I were making the futon up, and then I found them and started looking. You were really beautiful.”

She grunts. You’re not supposed to say stuff like that to girls.

“No, I mean, you still are. You just had so much makeup on in those photos. It was really something.”

“Yes, well—any help I could get,” she says, and a siren roars outside. I must have flipped my head around, really fast, because she says, “Don’t worry, happens all the time.”

“My friend’s step-uncle lives in Queens, too,” I say for some reason. “So it’s cool that you live out here. Seems like an amazing coincidence.” My head is getting heavy.

“Not such a coincidence,” she says, and now she picks up the binder of old show pictures. She’s tracing her initials, I can tell, into the leather cover. Distracting herself. “Everyone who almost-made-it-but-didn’t lives in Queens,” and she laughs to cover how pitiful she knows that sounded.

I gather the blankets around my waist and conceal a yawn, hugging a scratchy throw pillow, and then start into her. “Why do you say ‘almost made it’? You were luminous in Cleveland, according to Freckles.”

She laughs again.

“He told me at your restaurant. It’s an amazing restaurant, by the way.”

“Yeah,” she says, “the specials are really good on the weekends. And—” She catches herself, about to tell me there’s a drink named after her. About to repeat her routine.

“So why did you stop acting, for real?”

“Oh, Nate,” she says, and stands, putting the binder of photos underneath the coffee table, and then placing two hardcover books on top of it, and a remote control, and when that isn’t “hidden” enough, an ashtray on top of it too. “It’s just—this kind of lifestyle isn’t for everybody, you know? It’s tough and there’s a lot of rejection, and . . .” She looks at me hard. “You know that little hurt you felt today—or big hurt—when
E.T
. released you? It’s tough getting used to it.” My stomach drops; I’d almost forgotten about it. “I’m not sure you ever do.”

“Do you love working at Aw Shucks?”

“Do I
love
working at Aw Shucks? No, Nate, no I don’t. But I—you know, the tips are good and I believe in the product, and your friend Freckles keeps me company. It’s not a bad gig. While I figure things out.” Her voice catches.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Oy. Nate. The interrogation.”

I’m silent, which probably seems like a tactic, but actually I just don’t know what to say.

“I dated this guy, Troy, for a long time. I’ve
been
dating this guy, Troy, for a long time.”

“Well, that’s cool,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, looking at something on the table next to me. Maybe the cat leapt up, or a cockroach
is about to attack me. That happens a lot here, Libby says. “Yeah, it’s cool. It would just be nice to know where it’s going.”

“You mean you’re not getting married?”

“Not yet, at least,” she says, tilting her head at me. “Yeah, he’s not sure about marriage. This is after seven years together, off and on.”

Seven!, I think. “You’re like Adelaide in
Guys and Dolls
, but your voice isn’t annoying,” I almost say.

“And there was a blonde-and-mysteriously-younger girl that a friend of mine saw Troy out with a few months ago, and he still hasn’t come up with a particularly satisfactory answer for that. So. Yeah.”

I scrunch my nose and blink a couple times.

“Well,” she says, “I’ve always got those old show photos,” kind of kicking the coffee table, and she takes her hair out of a rubber band and repositions it. Girls are so lucky because they have so many props. “I’m just going to be quiet now,” Heidi says, and stands, but even then she doesn’t really move.

“I wish I lived here,” I say. “I wish I could see you every day. I think we’d have a lot of fun and probably teach each other valuable lessons and somebody would write a movie about it. And we’d play ourselves.” She smiles and then snorts a little and that, finally, makes me smile, my underbite cramping. I guess I haven’t smiled in ages. “Yeah. I wish I lived
right next door to you, or even on this futon.”

She grabs my big toe at the end of the bed, shaking it under the blanket. “I do too, Natey. You’re really sweet. It’s nice—it’s nice to see that you’re growing up so sweet.”

And suddenly she’s definitely crying.

“What’s wrong, Aunt Heidi?” I say.

She shakes her head and gulps. “It’s just like I’m seeing myself in you, is all. It’s just that I’m trying to remember what it felt like when even Times Square seemed cool, and not like just another mall.”

I actually love malls, but I think I know what she means. But boy, are malls fun.

“So what? Do you just work at Aw Shucks forever?”

“Gosh,” she says, squeezing my toe, “you sound like my shrink.”

So it’s true. People
do
stay up all night here—it’s after midnight and I can hear Freckles doing push-ups in his room, listening to vintage Madonna—
and
everyone has a shrink here. It’s no big thing, though. It’s just New York. It’s just what it’s like to be a New Yorker, it’s not that deep.

“I don’t know. I either work at Aw Shucks forever or Troy asks me to marry him and I have babies,” she says, laughing at herself. “Like, in the next twelve minutes”—she points to a wristwatch that isn’t even there—“I have a baby. Or I don’t. Ever.”

Freckles turns Madonna up a little louder, probably overhearing us. Probably sick of hearing Aunt Heidi talking about babies, which I bet you she does a lot.

“Okay, I’m going to bed. I’m going to bed, Nate,” and she turns off the kitchen light, reachable from the futon, and kisses me on the forehead.

“You’ll wake me up in the morning, before the bus?”

“Sure thing, Nate.”

“And Aunt Heidi?”

“Yes?”

“I think you should quit smoking.”

“Ha.” She rolls her eyes again, and retucks the blanket under my feet. “Anything else, Nate?”

“I think you should make up with Mom.”

She stops tucking and just sort of shifts her jaw at me, frozen. “Good night, Nate.”

I
know you’re not supposed to write about your dreams.

Libby told me that it is a scientific fact that
nobody
, other than Joseph in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
(hilarious songs in that one, by the way, and lots of girls in skimpy clothes for the dads in the audience), is interested in your dreams.

Though I bet Aunt Heidi’s shrink listens to Aunt Heidi’s dreams all the time, and I’m ninety percent sure they always involve babies, or Troy.

Anyway, overnight on the futon I had a pretty cool dream, but you can skip this paragraph and just go to the
^*
section below, if you don’t care.

An amazing thing happened in this dream. I was in the bathroom back at Aw Shucks (all my dreams are literal; I would die to slay a dragon or be able to fly, just one night) and I got out and Aunt Heidi and
Freckles were standing there, just like they were in real life. He was holding my cell phone and she had my bookbag, except instead of frowns, they wore grins.

“The casting office called,” Aunt Heidi said, in the dream. And I did the same thing as in life, except for spilling the Sprite on Freckles. In the dream, Freckles lifted me up and put me on his strong shoulders, and in the dream the Aw Shucks ceiling was another three feet high, so I didn’t hit my head. And Aunt Heidi stood atop my stool (you know it was a dream because girls after the age of eighteen always hate doing stuff like that, climbing stuff, and especially moms hate putting their heads under water at the Y pool after they’ve been to the beauty shop), and Aunt Heidi yelled out: “Listen up, everyone! My nephew Nate Foster is Elliott in
E.T. The Musical
!”