The Genius of Little Things (17 page)

Around 1 in the morning Milagro Sanchez wanted to show me more photos of her non-family. This time I had a plan. I was armed with my own photos. I was already on a roll, personal revelation-wise, having started with Rachel.

I pulled out three photos from my breast pocket. One was of my BiMo, dressed as a cowgirl waitress. I told Milagro that she enjoyed the job because she was able to sing. I couldn’t remember whether the job was in Texas or New Mexico, but I told Milagro it was Texas. “She didn’t hate being a waitress most of the time,” I said. “She said it was like being on stage. She liked people.” I gave her another photo of my BiMo holding a fishing pole. It must have been Colorado, because there were snow-capped mountains in the background and she was wearing a parka. Maybe one of her boyfriends took it. I told her my BiMo—I called her mother for Milagro’s sake—liked to fish, and was good at it. This was not true, as far as I knew.

The third photo was of me at my tenth grade science fair. I was standing with two older men, in the process of explaining my exploration of spore dispersal in basidiomycetes. My BiMo was dead by then. She only attended one fair, my first, in seventh grade. She didn’t even stay the whole time. Later, she explained that she felt intimidated by all the “smarties.” She was very smart, just not book smart. I didn’t invite my BiMo to any other fairs, to avoid sending her into a depression.

I was beginning to experience something like a negative emotion, so I told Milagro I had to go. Her arm shot out and snatched the photos. We played a tug of war for a few seconds. I won, but in the process I spilled her box onto her bed. Some things—a ticket to a concert by someone named Paul Anka, a Jesus coaster, lipstick—fell onto the floor.

I began picking up the items, and when I reached for a lump wrapped in aluminum foil, Milagro fluttered her hand. I assumed that meant she wanted what was inside. I unwrapped the lump. Inside were pills, dozens of them. I recognized a few from the med carts I re-stocked. Milagro stopped fluttering and looked straight ahead, like a kid waiting for punishment.

I rewrapped the pills and placed them in her box. I told her I had to get back to my station immediately, which was a lie. I didn’t want to break the doctor-nurses’ aide bond—there was such a thing according to my nursing class—but I couldn’t ignore a cache of pilfered pills.

I told Mrs. Platt what I found in Milagro’s box. She showed no emotion when she thanked me.

At approximately 2 a.m., I convinced myself Milagro Sanchez hadn’t been planning to kill herself with an overdose. She was a collector, like me. The pills I saw may have been amassed over the years, from drawers in her house. They could have sentimental value.

You could convince yourself of a lot of
scheizen
at two in the morning.

For three days, Janet had been waiting for me at the end of my shift. She parked at the back entrance of Colonial Gardens. The commute was always quiet—she kept the radio off and a death grip on the wheel. She was the opposite of my BiMo, who basically did everything one could do safely, and sometimes not safely, while driving. She would punch in radio stations, re-do her makeup, pull back her hair, talk on the phone, seemingly all at the same time. When she was depressed, she didn’t drive. She didn’t see the point. It was remarkable that she was only involved in three accidents that I knew of. She never had an accident when I was with her. I believed it was my mental powers that kept us safe. I know that’s not likely or scientifically verifiable. It’s what I chose to believe.

Janet’s car was so quiet, it took all the strength I had not to fall asleep. Sleeping would have led her to assume, correctly, that the job was a strain on my body.

“I’m not going through with emancipation.” I just blurted it out. I had been thinking about this for several days, but I hadn’t actually made the decision until I heard myself say it.

Janet said nothing for about a minute. She must have heard me. I said it pretty loudly.

“It makes sense financially to stay in the system, and preferably in your house,” I said. “So if everything is working out to your satisfaction, I would prefer to stay.”

“I’m glad we make sense to you.
Financially
.” Her tone was snippy.

She was ticked about emancipation, before, and now she was ticked that I wasn’t emancipating. There was no winning with her.

SIXTEEN

November 12. Highlights of my romantic life:

·
        
Mika (a girl’s name) gave me a necklace for Valentine’s Day. I gave her nothing. Ten years old. Doesn’t count.

·
        
Sky (also a girl’s name) was my science lab partner in eighth grade. Relationship lasted half the school year, in my imagination only.

·
        
Jasmine, girl I met at the science fair in ninth grade. She was outside the auditorium, crying. She told me her no-bake asphalt cookies didn’t win anything and her parents would be disappointed. Without thinking, I hugged her. Also without thinking, I told her, “at least your parents aren’t dead.” Relationship lasted four minutes.

·
        
Sara. We had one date and might have had another, but the Foster-go-Round moved me across town the following week.

·
        
Zoe, in imagination only. May be ending.

·
        
Rachel, today  ?

**

The German party was official school business. I was granted permission from the office to paste fliers on the poles in the courtyard cafeteria. As with my tutoring fliers, they were defaced within minutes.
German Sux
was written on one. On another was a swastika and
Hile Hitler
. Not surprisingly,
heil
was misspelled. I invited a few random students from my classes. Most were uninterested. I would not be bringing fifty guests as Jann-Otto and Annette-Barbel demanded. It didn’t matter. Since the coup, it was mostly their club.

Before I left to set up for the party, I informed Carl of where I was going and how long I would be. He asked if I needed a ride. I said I didn’t.

“Janet doesn’t want you riding your bike at night,” he said.

Silence.

“That’s all right. I’ll cover for you. She’s… you know. After what we went through with Scott…”

I kept forgetting to ask who Scott was. But now was not the time.

 Carl followed me all the way to the front door. “I’m very glad, we both are. About you staying. I think this is working out. We have our issues. But who doesn’t?”

I remembered Jann-Otto’s other request. I asked Carl if he had any kind of German music, preferably danceable. He was thrilled to help me out—at least for a minute, until he realized he had nothing fitting that description in his collection.

I took some of his non-German CDs and said they would be fine. When I was half a block away, Carl called me back and said he found something. He was waving a CD case. I rode back and snatched it.

“It’s Janet’s. There’s a song about nuclear war, and you can dance to it.”

The party pad belonged to Jann-Otto’s parents. They bought it as an investment, but couldn’t rent it. It was all tan carpet, beige walls and generic plastic blinds. I noticed a hot tub in back, on the patio.

Jann-Otto had demanded that we come dressed as Germans. I chose to believe that if I were German, I would still wear khakis and a knit polo shirt. Jann-Otto was miffed at my sartorial nonchalance, even though his only nod to the occasion was a dorky green Bavarian hat with a feather. When I arrived, he was in the process of hanging crepe paper streamers and being a dervish of neuroses. He was not impressed with Carl’s CDs. “Paul Simon? Leonard Cohen? They don’t sound German.”

“They’re not,” I mumbled.

“Did you at least bring the strudel? Tell me you brought strudel!”

Oops.

In my defense, I couldn’t have brought a tray of strudel on my bike, even if I had remembered it. That would be dangerous. Janet would have been very pissed about that.

Jann-Otto crossed the line from churlish whining to a full-blown temper fit. He shredded the crepe paper streamers until it rained confetti. He screamed he always had to do everything himself. Nothing he did was good enough. His father went to Stanford, and he could
not
end up at UNLV. And if we couldn’t have decent music, we needed beer.

I informed him that I couldn’t get beer.

He made some kind of high-pitched scream, and threw his feather hat at the wall.

I wanted him to shut up. I agreed to look for beer.

“
German
beer,” he shouted, as I left.

In a planning meeting I had stupidly informed him I had a fake I.D. I don’t know why I told him this. The I.D. didn’t look like me, and it said I was 18, not 21, so it would be useless. I fully expected to come back empty-handed. This would make Jann-Otto even crazier.

I went to a sketchy-looking liquor store and picked out two six-packs of beer, because that was all I could carry safely on the handlebars. Yes, I realize the only safe way to travel is with
no
bags of beer dangling from one’s handlebars. I handed over my fake license, fully expecting the counter guy to shake his head and shove it back to me. That’s not what happened. He barely glanced at it. I think it may have been attitude that made him choose not to look closely. I must have displayed no sign of nervousness, thinking that there was no chance I would get away with it.

Back at the party house, Jann-Otto threw a two-minute tantrum because it was not enough beer. He pacified himself by grabbing a “Hiney” and consuming it as if it were the last drip of water in the desert.

Annette-Barbel showed up at the door, dressed as a garish Bavarian prostitute. She wore a push-up bustier and a mane-like platinum blonde wig. When she saw that we were not dressed as Germans—at least not as bizarrely German as she was—she became irate. “If I’m the only one in costume, I’m going to look
stuuu
-pid.”

“But you look good,” Jann-Otto said.

“And you look like
der pimmel
,” she said.

I covered up a laugh by making it sound like a sneeze.

The first official guests were two girls from German class and two girls I didn’t know. The quartet tentatively took steps into the living room, moving like an eight-legged giggle monster. Next, three guys who seemed too old for high school sauntered in with bottles of booze. A few minutes later two more guys—one wearing UNLV sweat pants—strutted in without knocking.

When there were about two-dozen people, Jann-Otto put on Janet’s German techno album. Almost everyone started shouting and jumping. Some guy pushed the sofa aside to make a dance floor. The “99 Luftballons” song went over well. Some partiers even sang along in German. If I knew how to dance, I might have joined them.

Around nine o’clock there were at least forty people. I assumed the party was at its apex. I turned down the music and asked for a moment of everyone’s time. I was ignored until Jann-Otto, now drunk, sprang up from the sofa and shouted, “
Achtung
!” The crowd gave me their reluctant attention while I explained about how joining German club would look great on college applications. I mentioned the importance of the German language. I even read a passage from Goethe, which bored everyone, so I cut it short. I wrapped up by promising more hot tub parties if at least 25 students pledged to sign up for German class next semester.

One person applauded. Rachel. She was standing in the back of the living room behind a cluster of students. I was glad to see her.

Someone put on one of Carl’s CDs, something that was more appropriate for burying the dead than for dancing. Still, one guy tried, alone, moving as if he were trapped in gelatin. It would have been a good mime for the Creative Soul class.

Now Rachel was standing in front of me. “Are we dancing? Slow dance?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. But the music…”

She fake-cringed. “I know.” She brushed her hand against my arm said she would be right back. She went around snapping pictures, causing most people to groan or shield their faces. A few guys posed by giving her the middle finger.

Jann-Otto was next to me, suddenly. He steadied himself by putting his hand on my shoulder. He apologized for being such a prissy twit. At least that’s how I interpreted it. What he really said, slurring, was, “you’re nice guy and everyone loved your music, at least the first album, but this album sucks donkey dick, and I shouldn’t tear up streamers and throw them at good people. I should throw them at aaaaaassssshoooolllllles.” He shot a glance at two of the UNLV guys.