Like We Care (25 page)

“And the guy behind the counter? At the 7-Eleven? He wears a turban, too! And now nobody will buy from him, and whenever he comes out, they throw pennies at him, and they go ‘We’re not buying this shit!’ and everything.

“I thought you’d like to know.”

A fluke, that’s all.

“And they’re still there?” Annie asked.

“Well, it’s Monday, so we’re in school. But, yeah, I was just there, and there are a few. I was gonna buy some Altoids, but then I thought, like, ‘Ya-
huh
.’”

“Hmmm,” Annie said. “Well, thank you, Ashley. That’s really interesting. Hey, give me your address. I’ll send you a T-shirt.”

“Um,” the kid mumbled shyly. She couldn’t have been more than a freshman from the way she sounded. “You know that boy Joel? In your show?”

Annie heard some girlish giggles in the background.

“Have any pictures of him?”

T
hey split up.

Joel, at Todd’s direction, went to the Dairy Queen to see Dean Stoller. Dean, who was pushing 21, was Joel from three years ago. Better than Joel, actually. A hellacious knuckleball pitcher with a tricky split-finger fastball in his holster, Dean had brought Dickinson its first state championship in eight years, earning a baseball scholarship to UCLA as a reward. He was a hottie, too. Even Joel thought so, which sometimes confused him.

Then, on a July night after graduation, Dean went to a party dizzied up on ecstasy, and put his arm through a plate glass window, severing a major tendon in his pitching arm. He had been in physical therapy three days a week ever since, but he was getting old and his arm wasn’t getting any better. UCLA had left the door open if Dean should ever regain his high school form, but everyone pretty much knew it was over for him.

He was assistant manager at the Dairy Queen now. Manager loomed out there someday, if the breaks fell his way. You had to wonder why the kid didn’t bust out another window and aim for an artery this time.

He was looking kind of soft, maybe even chubby, Joel thought as he worked on his Dilly Bar while waiting for Dean to take a break. That seemed to happen to everyone after graduation. Dean’s friends, who lived like princes during his reign but who now seemed doomed to stay in town forever, with little chance of finding distinction ever again—all of them looked a little blurry around the edges. Sometimes, when Joel and his gang were cruising—Dickinson seniors, lords of the circuit—Joel would see Dean and a carload of his guys, driving around like they still owned the place. Like they had never left high school.

When Joel’s dad kept turning down those scholarships offered by lesser colleges, Joel thought of Dean.

“I’ll play for a small school. I’ll play anywhere,” Joel wanted to say. “Just please don’t let me end up like Dean Stoller.”

“’Sup?” Dean deadpanned as he sank into the booth opposite Joel. He was older and once a celebrity. Joel was suitably intimidated.

“Hey, Dean. How’s the arm?”

How’s the arm? How’s the fucking arm? For three years, total strangers kept checking in on the status of Dean’s arm, like he would be taking them with him to Southern California if things worked out. He lit a cigarette and instinctively rubbed his hand up and down the jagged scar that ran along his forearm.

“I had it halfway up your mother last night,” he scowled. “How’s yours?”

Joel met his glare. He couldn’t believe he used to think Dean Stoller was cool.

“Good Dilly Bar.”

“C’mon, kid,” Dean growled. “Whaddaya want? I’m busy.”

“I keep seeing you down at the Happy Snack.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Believe it or not, I’m not buying into this pussy-ass protest of yours.” He leaned back and took a deep drag off his cigarette. “I buy my smokes, I buy my Bud, and it’s damned sweet not having to stand in line with a bunch of faggot high school kids. It’s really so fucking impressive what you’ve got going down there.” His spite was eating him alive.

“Did you see me on R
²
Rev?”

Dean jutted forward in his seat. “
I
was on ESPN. After the perfect game?
SportsCenter
, baby.”

“I remember that. That was cool,” Joel recalled sincerely. “I was watching it with my dad. He said, ‘You pay attention. That’s gonna be
you
someday.’”

Dean eased up a little. Just a little recognition, just some acknowledgement that he was once superior—that’s all he wanted anymore.

“Yeah,” Dean sighed, drawn back to that night for the zillionth time. “Fucking Andy Stackhouse, if he could just come up with the ball in the ninth.”

“Still, a one-hitter. Against East,” Joel offered.

Dean conceded their excellence. “They went to state that year. They were awesome.”

“And you owned them that night.”

“Yeah,” Dean said sadly. “Whatever. . .”

“So,” Joel pressed on to fill the void. “Do you vote?”

Dean blinked. Joel may as well have asked if his shit glowed in the dark.

“
What?
”

“Since you turned eighteen, have you ever voted?”

“The fuck’s the matter with you?” Dean laughed.

“’Cause you know who’s thinking about running for City Council? Mr. Kolak.”

The name caused Dean to ease up a bit. “Oh, yeah? How’s he doin’?”

“Good.”

Dean took another deep drag off his cigarette.

“The only fucking teacher who would never cut me any slack on my grades. Coach would get in his face, and he’d still make me deliver C’s or he’d threaten to pull me off the team,” Dean recalled with a bitter shrug. “Fuck, if I’da had a couple more teachers like that. . .” He trailed off, gesturing to the Dairy Queen sadly. “You know, he was the only teacher who came to see me when I messed up my arm? I wasn’t even a student anymore.”

“Yeah, he did the same thing when
I
was in the hospital.”

Dean smiled fondly, then winced.

“God, I did some shitty things to him in tenth grade. Word was going around that he was gay.”

“Yeah, you still hear that,” Joel said. “But, I don’t know. I think he’s just lonely.”

This was getting too warm-hearted. Dean drew the armor back up.

“So? So what? He’s running for City Council. Tell him I said good luck. He’ll need it.”

“I don’t know,” Joel shrugged. “He’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, he’s a good guy. He’s a
black
guy. You see your parents voting for him? I know my old man wouldn’t.”

“But
you
could. And your guys, your crew could. And if they have younger brothers and sisters who are eighteen, or older brothers and sisters who had Mr. Kolak, who maybe aren’t using their vote. Get enough of you together, you could mess things up. Might be sweet.”

Dean smiled reluctantly at the thought that had gone into this. He studied Joel curiously. “This is just more of that Happy Snack shit,” he said, smiling reluctantly.

“Sort of. But he’d be good at it—you know that. And if getting him elected showed the old people in this town that guys like you had to be paid attention to. . .”

Joel moved to set the hook as Dean began to see what was being offered him.

“
I
can’t do it,” Joel conceded earnestly. “We need somebody older, somebody that people listen to, who is popular enough to make things happen. Maybe do a good job if he found himself being interviewed on television.”

It started to gel for Dean. The spotlight, having pivoted away, was always free to swing back.

“Shit, my parents don’t even vote,” Dean said.

“Mine neither. How hard could it be?”

Dean grinned. It would be nice to believe his suddenly light mood came from deciding to throw his support behind a good man.

“My old man would shit!”

Joel shrugged in summation. “There you go.”

Meanwhile, Todd sought out Ira Zimbaugh.

Ira was Dickinson’s leading computer dick, a spindly, pimple-faced geek whose sheer, unrelenting wretchedness would strike pity in the hardest of hearts—if it weren’t so clear that one day Ira would rule the world.

Ira was poking around the internet in ’92—when he was
eight
—at a time when no one but colleges and hardcore computer dweebs were out there. He was always 25 steps ahead of everyone else in town when it came to technology, and, in fact, he was among a select group of kids across the country who were quietly slipped prototype copies of new software from Silicon Valley in order to road test it. The kid was maddeningly discreet—he never let on what he was up to—but by the time the hottest new game turned up on the shelves of the nearest Best Buy, Ira had already beaten it, found all its cheats and Easter eggs, and even designed new patches that could send the game off in directions that no one else in the world had access to.

All the software companies he worked with were just waiting for the kid to get out of high school so they could hire him for twenty times what a Joel Kasten might make from a minor league contract. . . if he even got one. Ira figured he’d wait until he went out West before he got laid the first time. Figured the pickings would be better. Besides, he was busy.

Ira was also a genius at building websites. He put Dickinson’s together, and it was a marvel—you could spend hours just playing with the cafeteria menu. Several businesses around town had hired him to establish their web presence, but he was just as likely to put one together for a student who sought him out because he needed to create an outlet for his devotion to
The Matrix.
(A year or so ago, a super-scary Goth fuck wanted Ira to put together a tribute to Harris and Klebold, the Columbine murderers; load it up with hateful high praise to their wickedness, along with bomb recipes and some homicidal whacking off of his own. Ira bred one hellacious computer virus from the hundreds that he had captured over the years, and reduced the kid’s hard drive to dust. Then he called the cops.)

Ira was the guy to go to after Annie called. Todd hadn’t expected to hear from her again. The show had aired, and Todd’s message, processed through Joel, had reached an audience far beyond anything he could’ve imagined. But even though the protest soldiered on at the Happy Snack, the boost from the R
²
Rev exposure counteracting the practical effects of a typical Illinois winter, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go with the idea. Todd was looking forward to having a little more fun with the spring elections, but then it was probably time to let things go—get ready for graduation and life beyond the chemo-blast that was high school.

But then Annie called a week or so after the show aired with word that the Happy Snack action had grown satellites. In some corners of the country, she said, kids had found something to latch onto in Joel’s campaign, and picked up the cause. Some of it was misguided and much of it was regrettable (
towelhead
was probably not a popular teen invective prior to Berline), but here and there, kids were clogging up parking lots and asking hard questions about the ways in which adult lies were lubricating the flow of cash from their pockets.
We’re Not Buying This Shit!
, which Annie knew
killed
as a title for her show, was being embraced as their rallying cry.

Todd was wary. It was awesome, even frightening, that this movement, begun as the whim of a kid who spent far too much time in solitude imagining a realignment of the universe, could continue to mutate and gain potency. That it was now in the hands of dozens (hundreds?) of Joel Kastens elsewhere was sweet. But they could have it. He was done.

But Annie wasn’t letting it go. Todd had first noticed that when she called from New York the night of the premiere. When she found them all at Jeff Regan’s house, Todd was thrilled that she had asked for him first over Joel, and was dizzied by the fact that, by the time the show aired, Annie was treating him not just as a partner but as a kind of visionary for having set this whole thing into motion.

That night over the phone, laughed and preened at length, but
_{there came a point during the conversation when Todd wanted to return to}
his friends to celebrate. He would’ve gladly handed Annie over to Joel, but Joel was busy holding court over his fans, which that night included every prime-cut honey from Dickinson—and some of their older sisters.