The Worst Years of Your Life (25 page)

Ice cream, Paul said. You want some?

No! I want to go!

After we leave, he said. He had to calm her down somehow. Outside the gate she seemed less agitated, outside the bars, away from the cages. He led her past the duck pond, toward the derelict hot dog stand in faded red-and-white that stood across the pond from the entrance to the zoo. The morning sun was getting hot, Judy was tiring, so he had to drag her a little to get her to come along with him, but she brightened when she saw the boats, little paddleboats that seated two, which one pedaled like a bicycle.

Boats, Paulie! Judy shouted.

Don't you want some ice cream?

I want to go in the boats.

He knew then what a bad idea this trip had been. He was getting hot himself, and the prospect of paddling around this duck-fouled acre of water, exposed to the hot sun and fully visible to any passerby, did not please him. But there was no way around it. He paid the candy-striped boy behind the iron grille and took command of boat 17, an aqua plastic double bathtub, settled her into the sun-hot seat and pushed away. Again he saw the maimed and crippled ducks, their senseless fights, their shit fermenting on the concrete shore, while Judy, in the purity of her delight, saw only the sparkling sun on the water, the happy trees, the smiling clouds and the happy little boat. The sun embroidered on her sweatshirt, it felt like he was carrying a suitcase full of someone else's things. He began to feel a headache.

Three times around the little willow-draped island in the center of the pond, always in the same direction because Judy couldn't get the drift of paddling, they always went left. This tired him out, and he stopped, though he didn't want to. Judy looked to the left and to the right, and then she took his hand in her own hard little palm, led it to her bare forearm and sighed as she felt the soft pressure of his fingertips on her own sun-warm arm.

Oh, she said in drowsy delight.

For some reason this repelled him. We can't, he said, not here.

Just touch me.

Not here.

I want to go home, she said.

OK, Paul said, relieved. Let me put the boat away.

No, I want to go home.

We have to put the boat away.

Mom! she cried. I want my mom!

Abruptly she stood up, nearly tipping the little tub over, and looked around the shore, expecting to see her mother.

Mom! she cried out. Mom! Mom!

A silence spread along the dirty shores of the pond, and every stranger's face was turned toward them. He took her hand, tried to coax her down onto the seat again, but she shook free, and he could not move the boat with her standing up. Twice she nearly fell into the water, and then he gave up, closed his eyes and hoped for whatever there was to hope for, which was nothing, nothing he could think of. The sun was pleasant, though, and the sound of the water lapping against the fiberglass hull, little hollow drumming notes, like a marimba.

Mom! Judy yelled. Mom!

She was nearly crying, baffled, near the end of her rope. Heavy, flustered. He wondered what would happen next, wondered, if he never opened his eyes, if this could still be imaginary. Then heard the sound of an outboard motor start and stop and start again. He followed Judy's gaze: a tin Sears boat with three uniforms in it, the candy-striped kid from the ticket stand riding the motor, a park policeman sitting nervously in the middle, gripping the rim of the boat, and in the prow, standing, a zoo guard in his red uniform, one foot propped on the seat, smoking, looking like an admiral in the Italian navy, gold braid and a peculiar hat, and he was leaning forward, elbows on his raised knee, and staring at Judy and at Paul, and only then, at that moment, as he watched the zoo policeman take one last drag from his cigarette, then hurl the butt into the rushing, tea-colored water, did Paul realize how badly this was all going to end.

I
T'S
J
ULY, THE SUN'S HOT AND WHITE IN MY EYES, AND A DIRTY
kid named Peter rides up, thinking he can use the jumps we built from old real-estate signs. We spent all of June clearing trash and tangled barbwire from this dirt lot behind Taco Bell so we could have a good place to ride our bikes. Jay even had to get a tetanus shot when he cut his arm on an old mattress spring. And Peter just shows up. I think,
Go away, go away,
but Jay and Phil don't say anything.

Peter had crooked bangs like his mom cut his hair in their kitchen, and his teeth and lips are stained purple from juice. He has a crappy bike—a Huffy, from Gemco or Zody's. We have Diamondbacks from real bike shops. Jay even has hundred-dollar Tough Wheels. I didn't go near Peter at school last year. He's the type of kid who'd shove me into a urinal or wind a rubber band and let it loose in my hair or start a rumor that my mom's a lesbian, all for no reason.

But Peter hits the jumps and soars way higher than any of us ever has. His front and back wheel hit the dirt at the same time. He looks over at us and smiles, knows we're watching him, knows he's good, better than us, even though he has a shitty bike and we have good ones.

“M
Y DAD
was runner-up to be an astronaut,” Peter says. The four of us share a plate of nachos covered in bright orange cheese, sitting at a faded plastic picnic table in the shade of a truck. Jay bought the nachos. He always does. His mother gives him five dollars a day because she feels guilty that his dad ran off like my dad did. Jay's dad ran off with their old neighbor, a lady named Deborah who Jay's mom says has a drug problem.

I know Peter's lying about his dad almost being an astronaut, but I don't care. I like his froggy voice. It makes my stomach feel nervous and my neck tingle in a good way.

“Bullshit,” Phil says. “Your dad was a realtor, and he couldn't sell any houses, so now your family's poor.”

I stare down at the stained cement, my dumb, too-skinny ankles, my new sneakers—blue slip-on Vans. When I finally look up, Peter's pedaling away toward Bear Canyon Road, his heavy bicycle rocking back and forth between his legs. Peter has hair on his legs already.

“It's true,” Phil says. “They had to drain their pool because they couldn't afford the water bills.” Phil snatches the last two chips and stuffs them in his mouth with a loud crackle.

“How do you know?” Jay asks.

“My mom,” Phil says, still chewing.

Phil's mom dresses like a teenager in tank tops and really small running shorts to show off her tanned skin. She never wears a bra and I've seen her nipples twice: once when she was driving us to Skate Country and she twisted around to reach in the backseat for Phil's skates and the other time when she leaned over to pick up a penny on their kitchen floor. She looks at me like she knows all of my secrets, and whenever I go over to Phil's house—every time—she asks me, “What do you hear from your father these days, Craigy?” I have to tell her that I haven't heard from him in a long time, then she pretends to be on my side and says, “Men…” as she shakes her head, like she can't believe it. She does the same thing to Jay. Behind Phil's back, Jay and I talk about what a bitch she is. Jay's seen her nipples three times and says he saw her scratch her pussy with a spatula out by their pool. She didn't actually stick the spatula in her shorts or anything, but we joke that the hamburgers she grilled tasted like fish burgers that day. If Phil knew this, he'd kill us.

P
ETER LIES
to us all summer. He says he spent two nights in the tunnels under Tucson Mall and caught an albino cockroach, says his uncle invented Pac-Man, says he was color-blind in fifth grade and now he isn't. Each time he lies, I brace myself for Phil's response, but Phil doesn't say anything, and I let Peter's voice go through me like a chill and ask him questions to make him talk more.

P
ETER AND
I stay at the track longer than the others, jumping our bikes until the sky goes from orange to purple. My arms ache from jumping, but I'm getting better. Better than Phil and Jay, not as good as Peter.

We sit on the warm curb and eat thirty-nine-cent bean burritos, and Peter grabs my hand. Peter's hand is dry and rough and my retarded hand is sweaty. “Your life line is long,” he says. He traces the line on my hand and it tickles into my wrist and up my arm. “My mom taught me this.” He smiles right at me, the right side of his smile hooking higher than the left. “This line means you'll be rich.”

All I can say is “Cool” and hope that he examines every line on both my hands and that my hands stop sweating so much.

“Your love line is short, but you'll be rich so who cares?”

“Not me.”

“You can tell someone's fortune from their head, too,” Peter says. “From their scalp. My mom said she'll teach me.”

“You believe it?” I ask. Peter still holds my hand.

“No,” Peter says, then he squeezes my fingers together, hard, until all the good feelings stop and I pull my hand away.

I
T'S THE SECOND
Monday since school started and everyone wants to talk to Peter because he was on the news. He found a dead homeless lady on our dirt track next to the third jump. He was on all the channels and on the front page of the
Arizona Daily Star.

“Did you touch her?” Lacy Clark asks him at lunch. Lacy has big tits and she French-kisses us at parties. She always wears tight Izods and Jordache jeans. Her purse is grubby, made of pink parachute material.

“I poked her with a stick,” Peter says. “Just to see if she was alive.”

“I would have freaked out,” Lacy says. Her hands are in her back pockets and her eyes are bugged. She looks at Peter like he's a star and sticks out her tits. “Is it true she was covered in beetles?”

Peter smiles at her like he's embarrassed and shy, but he's not. He's faking it. I can tell.

“There were some bugs on her,” Peter says, “but not tons.”

Peter got to meet Steve Fogleman, the reporter from Channel 7 who has a thick mustache and curly brown hair. Steve Fogleman called Peter's discovery of the dead lady “gruesome” and Peter “courageous.” All Peter did was poke her with a stick and call 9-1-1 from the telephone booth at Taco Bell. I want to ask Peter if Steve Fogleman wears makeup, but I don't because he and Lacy are talking about Mademoiselle Rosenblatt, our French teacher and Lacy's and my homeroom teacher, and when I try to add something, Lacy looks at me like I'm annoying her, like I should go away, so I do.

I
T TOOK LESS
than a week and now Peter and Lacy are officially a couple. They sit together at lunch and write notes during social studies. They're so popular that girls besides Lacy have written
Peter + Lacy
on their notebooks. During homeroom each morning, I listen to Lacy brag about what she and Peter talked about on the phone the night before. The girls gather around her like what she has to tell them is important. “He was totally imitating Mr. Thone. I was cracking up! Then he started to imitate Mademoiselle Rosenblatt. It was so funny.”

P
ETER'S HAIR
is combed in a new way: a perfect part down the middle and lightly feathered on the sides—like Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer. All the girls love it, especially Lacy, who raved about it all morning in homeroom. I wanted my hair like that last year, but I have a cowlick and I can't get it to part in the middle no matter how much of my mother's hair gel I use, so I comb it to the side.

I'm glad my hair won't part in the middle like Peter's when Phil calls the style “disco fag hair” at lunch. I watch Lacy's face go slack as she glares at Phil. Peter looks at Phil through half-closed eyes, like he wants to fight.

“What?” Phil says. “It
is
disco fag hair.”

“We all decided it looked really good,” Kim Fenster says. “So you guys better shut up about it.” Kim Fenster has a wide gap between her two front teeth and she only wears concert T-shirts. Her older sister who Phil's mom says is a druggie brings her to see every group that comes to the convention center downtown. Today's shirt is Pink Floyd's
The Wall:
a creepy cartoon of a monster-teacher looking over a pile of bricks. The only band I've ever seen is Styx, and my mom made us leave after like half an hour because my older brother started coughing from all the smoke. He's asthmatic.

“I didn't say anything,” Jay says. “God.”

“Me neither,” I mumble. I kind of want to say how good his hair looks, how I want to have the same style.

“All three of you are jealous,” Kim says. “Losers.”

W
E PLAY
a game of two-on-one that we invented where the guy without a teammate can't be guarded outside the key. It's mainly a shooting game, lame and boring, and I can tell by how slow Jay and Phil move that they think it's lame, too, but no one else will play with us because of what Phil said about Peter's hair. It's hot on the dusty courts under the noon sun and our sneakers squeak on the cement with every move. If Phil weren't such a dick, we'd be inside, hanging out in the common room with everyone else.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Kim Fenster calls me Alpo Mouth during break, because Lacy told her I had bad breath when we kissed at Jay's party in July. Two other girls call me Alpo Mouth as I wait in lunch line. Phil and Jay bark at me and tell me to sit at another table, that my breath's making them sick. I don't feel like pretending to like the stupid basketball game anyway, and it's over a hundred degrees again, so I hide in the library and flip through this week's and last week's
Sports Illustrated
for articles about Jim Palmer or the Orioles. There's nothing good, only some stats, so I read
Rolling Stone
instead. Someone drew tits and a dick on a photo of David Lee Roth. Someone draws tits and dicks on almost every magazine in here.

Phil and Jay find me in the library, and they start barking at me from behind the glass display of Kachina dolls, until Mrs. Rydell threatens to write them up. When they finally leave, Mrs. Rydell walks over to me.

“Do you know those boys' names?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

She looks down at the magazine I'm reading and points to the picture of David Lee Roth. “Did you do that?” she asks, thinking I drew the dick and tits.

My throat bunches up and I feel like I might cry. “No,” I say, and my voice cracks. “I swear I didn't.” I know she doesn't believe me.

Instead of going to pre-algebra after lunch, I walk across the tennis courts in front of a PE class, leave school, and no one says anything. I hike along the Rillito riverbed to the mall, and I spend my last two dollars on Chicken McNuggets. As I head to the far end of the mall, I secretly drop one of my six McNuggets in the fountain in front of Sam Goody. I play the display video games at Sears. They have Asteroids for Atari set up, and because it's a school day, I don't have to wait in line to play. Even though it's not that fun and your ship only shoots in eight different angles, I play so much that my thumb is sore, then I leave and check on the McNugget in the fountain. It's now the size of a potato, all mushy and white, just like I knew it would be. I hang around the fountain for a while, pretend to be waiting for someone, watching, but no one notices the bloated McNugget, and I walk home, imagining a bratty little girl pointing at the McNugget and screaming, or the janitor who thinks it's some sort of jellyfish, calling a scientist to examine it. It will take them weeks to figure out what it is, and there will be articles about it in the paper. Steve Fogleman will report live from the Tucson Mall even though the McNugget will have been taken to a lab at a university weeks before.

A
GUY ONCE WROTE
in to “Ask Beth” and said he thought he was gay. He was only thirteen, and Beth wrote that boys can't really know if they're gay until they're at least fifteen, that a boy's sexuality isn't completely formed until that age. So I have three more years to do what I always do after school: page thirty-six, the Jim Palmer Jockey Underwear ad, Jim sitting on a stool in nothing but the tiniest blue underpants.

I stand at the sink with the magazine propped up on the tissue box. The fan's on and I run the water so no one can hear even if they're pressing their ear right up against the door. I can finish in under three minutes, including setup and cleanup. I've timed myself.

I wash as much down the drain as I can see, then I wipe out the marble sink with toilet paper and flush the toilet paper. I run the water some more so it doesn't look like I've wiped out the sink. I sniff the sink up close. If any water drops splashed on the Jockey ad or even on the next page, I sprinkle water drops on a bunch of other pages so the Jockey page doesn't stand out. I shove the magazine back in the middle of the stack on top of the toilet, and I'm done.

M
R
. T
HONE
makes Peter and me partners for a science project where we have to germinate bean seeds on wet paper towel and keep track of the growth.