The Great American Whatever (13 page)

“But how am I supposed to know what's special about my own freaking character?”
Annabeth said to me over and over this past fall—like a toddler, or a parrot—and I got the hint and promised I'd write one of the character recommendations for her, that Mrs. Wadsworth could just sign, if she wanted. That it wouldn't be a big deal. And then I just never did.

Brother of the year.

Lucy's little eyes go from yellow to red, possessed. The fence is suddenly lit up, and I realize the light is coming from behind me.

Still squatting, I turn to wave as Lucy trots away, and now I wonder: What the hell does it look like I'm doing?

“What are you doing?” Amir says, rolling down his window. He's not being mean, though. He's really just asking.

“Neighbor's dog,” I say. Why did I let Lucy lick my hand? Am I now the kid who smells of mutt tongue and Polo?

I get into the front seat and it's set too far back, so that my already short-ish legs have miles to swim, and Amir goes, “Feel free to adjust the seat,” and I go, “Okay, cool, 'cause I was, like,” and then I don't have anywhere to go with that.

“Hi,” he says, when I've pulled myself forward.

“Hi,” I say.

“Sorry I'm late. You ready?”

“So ready.”

And off to a Japanese film festival in Shadyside we go. I'm actually really excited—tonight they're screening
Seven Samurai
, a 1954 movie that kind of set the standard for modern action cinema. Amir already has the movie theater address plugged into this GPS thing on his dashboard and everything, which is really sweet. He's really planned this out and isn't, like, “acting cool.” There's maybe nothing nicer than somebody just coming straight out and showing you they like you.

“Okay, can I start with an apology?” he says. “After you buckle up?”

He shifts gears and I'm thinking nothing is hotter than a guy who drives stick shift. “Sure.”

“I'm really super embarrassed about what I said about overweight people.”

“You mean how it gives you the willies?” I actually say. “It's okay. You didn't know.”

“It's not okay.”

We zoom by the Andersens' place, down the hill.

“I was just making conversation at lunch,” Amir says. “I have this thing where when I'm nervous, I talk too much.”

“I'm over it, seriously.”

Amir turns onto Saint Clair. I'm sitting here in auto-copilot mode, coasting along on a path I've taken a thousand times, not thinking. But when we get to the fork where I found the firefly, Amir makes a right. He's heading toward the school.

“Oh, shit,” I say, and he goes, “What? What?” and I go, “Uh, nothing.”

Amir gets a text—I hear it buzz in his pocket—and he reaches for it and I can't help myself, I just can't, and I say: “Please don't look at that,” and it makes him laugh, because even I can hear the pitch in my voice: the matronly timber, scolding a kid for doing what kids do.

“Okayyyy,” he says, pushing buttons through his shorts to silence the phone. I hate that I've made this awkward. No—I hate that Annabeth has. “So . . . have you ever seen a Japanese film?” Amir goes. “I think I only saw the original
Godzilla
at a sleepover once, but it may have been one of the one
billion
remakes. . . .”

And there goes the library, and there goes the volunteer firehouse, and there goes the old putt-putt, and I can't look away, I can't look away. We pull up to the very red light that Annabeth ran, right outside the school, and as I'm staring and staring at the horribly specific and distorted portrait of Annabeth, Amir goes, “Yo, I'm sorry.”

This almost snaps me out of it, but it doesn't, not totally.

“Sorry?” I say.

“For driving you
right
in front of your high school on summer break.” I check his face. Nope. No pity. “You must want to get as far away from it as possible!” He still doesn't know. They didn't tell him. Carly and Geoff have allowed that to be my final trick of the night.

“It's green,” I say, when the light changes and reflects off his glasses. You can tell he really needs them, because, in the angle he's using to stare at me, his eyes take on this distorted old-fashioned-Coke-bottle quality. He really does need his glasses and I really don't need mine.

“The
light
,” I say when he's still looking at me as if
I
am the dead kid whose face is spray-painted into the spackled wall of my school, “is
green
.”

Somebody honks. Amir's engine revs up. We pull away, but my thoughts don't. My thoughts linger back at the school, like smoke. They smolder. And yet they are without heat. They are a fire without ashes. My thoughts are one great big nothing.

• • •

It takes us weirdly forever to find parking, and then the line to the front of the theater is Jack-Rabbit-roller-coaster deep, and so by the time we get to the ticket counter and find out they're down to one remaining seat, Amir looks like he's going to lose his mind.

“It's cool,” I say, because it really is. I don't think I can handle a Japanese film right now. Anytime I have to read, my mind instantly wanders, and I don't want my mind instantly wandering. I want my mind instantly obliterated.

She just . . . she genuinely looked like a dog. My beautiful sister. As if an art director said to a gang of middle schoolers:
Please paint a dog on the side of the school and tie a black ribbon around its ears.
And voilà, they nailed it.

“Well, should we get a frozen yogurt or something?” Amir says, and yes, we absolutely should. That's a great idea.

I take the liberty of tasting three different samples at the yogurt place, and it isn't until I'm filling up my official froyo cup with way too many opposing flavors that I see what I'm doing: giving my brain an intentional overload.
“Yes,”
I just keep saying at the counter, when the girl asks which toppings I want, and so after graham cracker crumbs
and
this raspberry sauce thing
and
gummy bears
and
kiwi
and
white chocolate chips, Amir puts his hand very gently on my lower back, not like we're moving up in line but like he's saying,
That's enough, Quinn.

And this is the moment I fall in love with him.

He pays for us. We find weird chairs that have these impractical little tufts of butt padding. Approximately one bite into my yogurt, I look at the thing as if I'm coming out of a particularly vivid hypnotism session, and I start giggling. It looks disgusting. “Holy shit.”

“Is right,” he says.

“What did
you
get?”

“An extremely sensible peanut butter and chocolate combo. Solid. Classic.”

I instinctively reach my spoon across to try his. There isn't a person in my life who I can't do this with. My life is best friends or nobody. My life is Geoff.

Amir pulls his cup away. “Say please,” he says in this twangy way that gives
please
like four separate syllables and gives
me
like one solid boner, and so I say, “P-l-eas-e,” and take a bite. I don't even offer him any of mine, because, really.

“So where are you going next week?” I say.

“Wait, did Carly tell you I'm leaving town?”

“No, you did.”

“Oh.” He laughs too hard. Wasn't a good line and wasn't even a line.

The music in here is blasting, really blasting, so that I have to lean forward a bit to hear him. I'm okay with this.

“I got into this writing workshop thing,” he says, rolling his eyes again. I want him to own how hot he is.

“Oh, no way.”

“Way.”

He eats frozen yogurt slower than anybody on earth.

“So, like,” I say, “what kind of writing workshop?”

“Ah, it's lame. Do you read novels? Don't answer that. Nobody ever gives the answer I want.”

Man, do I get that. Try being a screenwriter and watching your nearly perfect sequence get obliterated by a passing airplane, in the middle of a scene that's supposed to take place in the eighteen hundreds.

“I love novels,” I say, loudly, louder than the music level even calls for.

“O . . . kay,” he says, not believing me, which he shouldn't. I don't love novels, or: I don't like anything assigned to me.

Crap, now he's saying something about San Francisco.

“I love San Francisco,” I say. Everything is love or hate with me these days. I hope I just like or dislike some stuff in my seventeens and eighteens.

Oh my God, I turn seventeen tomorrow. Holy shit, that sounds old.

“Oh, you've been to SF?” he goes, but I haven't been, and this brain-freezing business is no joke. I shake it off.

“Sorry. I'm, like, distracted by how cold this is.” I hold up my goop. We laugh. “I've never been to San Francisco, but there's a
preeetty
campy Bond scene filmed there, over the Golden Gate Bridge, which you have to visit.”

“Bond?”

“
James Bon
—oh. Ha-ha.”

He set me up. Clever guy.

“Anyway,” he goes, “my writing workshop isn't in San Francisco proper. It's going to be farther down on the peninsula.”

I've never totally understood peninsulas. It's like: Are you an island? Pick what you are, peninsulas!

I've spaced out again. He's staring at me. “I'm sorry,” I say, too confidently tossing my cup across the room and absolutely missing the garbage can by nothing less than a yard. We crack up. I pick it up, wipe off my hands, and turn back to see Amir making a big frowny face and pointing at my stomach. When I look down, there is a full-on gummy worm attached to my shirt by means of chocolate sauce.

“Oh, no way,” I say at my shirt.

“Way,” Amir goes. Somehow, in the span of twenty seconds, he's acquired a little thing of warm water and a towel from the front counter. He's squatting low, dabbing at my shirt and kind of fixing me up. It is the sweetest thing.

“I think that should take out most of the stain,” he says, looking up at me.

Some bro-types are leering at us, and Amir says, “Shall we?” and motions to the door, and I say, “Duh,” and we're on the muggy street in two seconds flat.

“You said you were sorry back there,” Amir goes, “immediately after you spilled chocolate sauce on yourself like an adorable invalid and directly before we were nearly hate-crimed into the history books.”

“Whoa, you
are
a writer,” I'm saying, but really I'm stalling, because I can't remember what I'm sorry about. So much, really. Everything.

“Ha,” he goes. “Don't tell my straight-ass parents I'm a writer. They think I'm going to San Francisco to intern for a startup. They don't approve of my clandestine plan to write the great Iranian-American novel, heh.”

It's coming to me now. When I was zoning and brain freezing, he mentioned San Francisco in regards to this writing program. I can fake this.

“So . . . will you know other people . . . at the, like, your writing program?”

“Eh, I can tell you more about the program later. We should decide what we want to do tonight.”

Oh, that's nice. I thought that yogurt and a wardrobe malfunction was sort of “it” for our first date.

“Crazy idea,” Amir says, grabbing my shoulder and steering me into an alley between two brick buildings. Oh my God, is he going to kiss me? Is this it? I still have gummy bear, etc., breath. “Do you like to bowl?”

I hate to bowl. But the poetry of it all. Mom beating Dad on their first date.

“I. Love. Bowling,” I say, and Amir takes my hand, and a field of fireflies appears inside my chest and they all light up at once.

W
e're three rounds into bowling and I don't really totally understand how the scoring works, but for whatever reason I've been able to turn this into a running bit, like I'm Goldie Hawn in some eighties screwball comedy.

“You're up,” I say to Amir, after another of my bowling balls goes straight into the gutter. I did not inherit my parents' genes for this pastime, and in one brief, shining moment, I wonder if perhaps I am adopted. Somehow that would make Annabeth's death feel not so personal.

Amir has a whole stance and everything, where he holds the ball close to him like the thing is a fragile baby, and when he releases it, he grunts a little—
not
as a joke—and the ball knocks down five of the pins, which for me would be cause to go to Disney World, but seems to genuinely bum him out a bit.

“I thought that was a triumph,” I say, but his “Thanks” suggests he's a straight-A student who's never happy with anything but the best. Jesus. Wait'll he sees the
inside
of my house.

“Were you a straight-A student in high school?”

“Still am,” he goes, sitting down again. His shirt is a little too tight and his chest strains against it, and I'm saying this is a great thing.

“That's gotta be a lot of pressure.”

The group next to us lets out the kind of whoop and hoot that only Pittsburghers know how to do. Seriously, you wouldn't believe the pride and commitment to sports if you didn't live here, and even then.

“Quinn,” Amir says, poking my knee with his finger.

“Yeah?”

“I said, You've gotta be a pretty good student, too, right? I mean, you're so quick.”

“You should see me in gym class. I could challenge that notion.”

“Ha, see. Quick.”

I don't need Amir knowing how I just coast by academically, so I do that thing where I pretend to cough.

“Do you want some nachos or something?” Amir goes, and I say, “Or something,” because I like when dialogue echoes in movies, but I'm secretly hoping he really does bring back nachos specifically.