Everybody Sees the Ants (18 page)

“Sounds like Dad,” I say, chopping the meat into long slices.

Granddad doesn’t say anything.

“Don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault,” I add. I begin to fry the meat with garlic and chopped onion and some olive oil, and open the fridge to see what else I have. When I open it, all I see are flour tortillas. Hundreds of packages of flour tortillas. “I hope enchiladas are good with you.”

“How can I not feel bad? I cheated you out of a good life with a good father,” he says.

“Bullshit,” I say. “You didn’t cheat me out of anything. You’re a hero. And Dad’s old enough to know he can control his own destiny. If he wanted to be there for me, he would be.”

“Looks like you’re meeting him halfway.”

I look at him—a salivating, wrinkled old man with eyes as big as the moon because the rest of his body has shrunk. “What?”

“This cooking you’re doing. You’ve found the one way to reach him.”

I turn my frying turtle strips over, noting the sour color of the meat—and the toughness. No matter what I add to these enchiladas, they will probably taste pretty bad.

“But Dad’s a turtle, Granddad. Technically, we’re about to eat him.”

“Oh,” he says. “I see.”

The ants say:
Nom nom nom nom nom
.

When the meat is done frying and I’ve covered it in enough
chili powder to block out the brine, I throw it into flour tortillas and smother it in Monterey Jack cheese, and I serve it with a sauce I make out of the pan juices. It is probably one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever eaten. Granddad smiles and says, “Mind over matter, son. Smile and swallow. That’s what I do.”

•   •   •

I wake up with a horrible briny taste in my mouth. Not just the turtle enchiladas, either. I wake up tasting the reality enchilada, which I am not ready to taste, but I can’t stop it from happening.

We’d
moved on from graphs and statistics in social studies class and had spent the last week studying the caste system of India. I still had a monthly meeting with the guidance department, and I still frowned the whole way through. I told no one about the questionnaires I kept finding in my locker, but I had a stack of about fifty now, which to me proved that I was not the only one in Freddy High who had explored the subject of suicide—making the guidance meetings more ironic.

Confusing a lighthearted teenage joke survey about suicide with something so serious really bothered me. Depression, the real thing, is a serious disorder. Suicide is a real thing that happens all the time. Somewhere out there in Freddy High, some students
were
really depressed. Somewhere out
there in Freddy High, someone really
was
thinking about ending it all because of the bullshit they had to endure every day. I had proof that this was true—only I couldn’t tell which completed questionnaires were serious and which weren’t.

On a positive note, Nader was leaving me alone because he and his asshole posse were busy bugging other people, I guess. (Well, that and I’d pretty much learned how to completely avoid seeing him during the school day.) I heard they’d made sexually harassing Charlotte Dent into a sport. Rumor had it that a bunch of boys had rushed her during a postseason wrestling tournament and had a gang grope. There were other rumors, too—of worse things—but I didn’t know what to believe. Charlotte and I didn’t share any classes because she was a junior, but I saw her around the school and she looked fine to me. She smiled a lot.

But occasionally her curlicue handwriting would show up on a questionnaire in my locker, and I was starting to believe she was serious.

If you were going to commit suicide, what method would you choose?
She answered:
I’d slit my wrists, but only after duct-taping a garbage bag over Nader McMillan’s big, ugly head
.

We had rules now about this kind of thing. If anyone threatened to kill another student, we were supposed to report it, because these sorts of thoughts lead to school shootings. But Charlotte Dent put me in an impossible spot. First, I wasn’t supposed to ever mention my first social studies project again. Ever. It would only make things worse for me. Second, I had a hunch that Charlotte was only sharing this with me because
she knew Nader had bullied me, too. So I was her one safe place to go, even if it was just through a slot in my locker. And third, I wanted to protect her. I didn’t want her bombarded with the same school-district bullshit I was going through.

Something told me that whatever he was doing to her was probably just as hard to talk about as what I saw him do with the banana in the locker room.

I’m
an obsessed moron. I look through as many of Jodi’s magazines as I can to find pictures of Ginny, and I stare at them. In one of them she’s holding hands with this model guy, and he’s all perfect-haired and stuff, and I feel jealous—even though I know he’s just some model and she’s not really holding his hand in real life.

I look up the Clemenses’ number in the phone book, but it’s not there. I am so close to asking Jodi if she knows it—or if I can use her ancient computer to Google their address, or the shampoo company so I can see more pictures, or this vagina play that she’s doing—that I am starting to be scared that I’m stalker material. Seriously.

I have to stop myself and turn on the TV for distraction. I watch six back-to-back episodes of
SpongeBob SquarePants
until Dave shows up and produces a DVD from his briefcase, claiming that every pair of bonding males should watch
Caddyshack
together just once.

“If this doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will!” he says when he puts the DVD into the player. I feel instantly paranoid again that his interest in me is all a show. The ants say:
Just shut up and enjoy
Caddyshack.

On Sunday, Mom and I wake up at the same time. It’s early—six thirty. Mom says she doesn’t want to go to church today, and I’m really wishy-washy because I know going to church will mean I can see Ginny again, so I say, “I think we should go. I mean, they just took us to the Grand Canyon, and we owe it to them, right?”

Mom grunts.

“Anyway, it’s not like Jodi is dragging us there to convert us. She doesn’t even say grace or anything religious.”

Mom grunts again.

“If you want, I can tell them that you’re not feeling good. You can skip it.”

She turns onto her side and looks at me. “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Why the sudden interest in church?”

“I was just trying to help you out. Forget it. I don’t have to go if you don’t want me to.”

She lies on her back again and thinks for a while.

“You’re right,” she says. “We owe them.”

“And it’s only church,” I say.

Dave lets me borrow his pants again, and we head off in Jodi’s SUV. The youth choir isn’t singing today, and Ginny is in the second pew with her parents. I stare at the back of her head for the entire service.

When it’s over, Jodi grabs Dave’s hand and makes a beeline for them. As the congregation makes its way toward the front door, where the pastor is, she blocks the aisle and makes small talk.

“We took our houseguests to the Grand Canyon this week.”

Ginny’s mom says, “That’s nice. Did you enjoy it?” The question is aimed at Mom, but Mom is zoning out, looking at the stained glass, so I answer for her.

“It was pretty amazing,” I say.

“Dave and I had a nice romantic vacation,” Jodi says, squeezing Dave’s hand.

“That’s great,” Ginny’s mom says. She has huge diamond rings and takes a second to look at them while Jodi talks about the view and the walking she did with Mom.

I smile at Ginny and say hi. She shifts to her left and looks at me as if we’ve never met. As if she never made me say “vagina.” The ants ask:
What’s
her
problem?

“If you’ll excuse us,” Ginny’s dad says as he steps past Jodi and Dave and shimmies up the aisle. “We have quite a busy day planned.” I watch Ginny follow him, and as she walks by, she avoids eye contact completely.

For lunch we go to Jodi’s favorite after-church diner, which
is packed, and when we get home Dave asks me if I want to lift. I don’t feel like it, so I say no.

“You’re not going to start slacking on me, are you?”

“Just need a day off,” I say. “I ate too much.” I toss myself on the couch with
Catch-22
and open it up. All I can do as I turn the pages is think about Ginny and why she gave me such a weird look.

Jodi arrives on the opposite couch halfway through the afternoon, seeming bored. I glance up at her. She’s staring at me probingly again. “Wanna make dinner again tonight?” she asks.

“I’m still stuffed from lunch,” I say.

She sits and stares at me for another thirty seconds. “Wanna talk?”

I do not want to talk. But talking to Dave hasn’t been so bad, and Jodi’s been relatively sane for the last few days, so I shrug and say, “Whatever. Sure.”

“I think you’re a good kid,” she says. “But you don’t smile and you read too much.”

Oh. She didn’t mean talk. She meant:
Wanna hear me tell you what’s wrong with you?

And what the hell? Who tells a kid that he reads too much?

“I think your mom and dad wouldn’t fight so much if you stayed out of trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble,” I say.

“That’s not what your mother tells me. She says you got in big trouble last year for some project you did. Said you wanted to kill yourself.”

“That’s not what happened,” I say. Why would Mom think Aunt Jodi would ever understand?

“Well, what
did
happen?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it. But you have it wrong.”

“So what happened to your face?”

“Some kid beat me up. That’s all.” I open my book and look at the words to give her a hint.

“So your parents sent you here.”

“No,” I say. “You have
that
wrong, too.” I take a deep breath and exhale. “Look, they fight all the time. So she left because of him, not because of me.”

“Maybe that’s how you see it, Lucky, but that’s not really what’s going on.”