What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (5 page)

“What did he
do
?” I asked her again.

“He stole something that was mine.”

“Stole something?” I couldn’t see Ben stealing her money. He makes way more than she does. Had he been wearing her underwear? Maybe I could convince her that transvestites are just normal guys, except for that. Doctor Phil says so. “What kind of something?” I asked, edging up to it.

“Something I told him.”

Oh.

“He put it in a script. I told him something private and he put it in a Goddamned movie!”

“Did you ask him to take it out?”

“Yes, I asked him to take it out!”

“You mean he wouldn’t?” Unfortunately, I can believe that. We know a bunch of writers besides Ben and I would believe that of any of them. One of them actually put his girlfriend’s hemorrhoids into a script.

Mom parked the car in Ben’s driveway and jerked the parking brake up. “He said nobody would recognize it and it was
good
. It was just what he needed.”

“Um. Well, what was it?”

“I’m not going to tell you!”

“I’ll find out when the movie comes out.” If it does. The death rate for scripts in Hollywood is huge. We know writers who have made a living for years and none of their scripts have actually been produced. Producers buy scripts and then abandon them, like somebody who buys too many purses. I don’t know where all the money comes from.

“I’m sick of the movie business,” Mom said. “It’s inhabited by shallow creeps. I work myself to death trying to teach kids to speak actual English and everywhere we go, when people find out what Ben does, they latch onto him and I might as well be the housekeeper.” She glared at the house as we pulled up, although Ben wasn’t in it. “And for that, on top of it, I’m paid practically nothing.”

“Would you really
want
to work in Hollywood?”

Mom ran her hands through her hair and then dropped them onto the steering wheel. “Honestly, no. But it’s the principle of the thing. And then he had the nerve to tell me my novel needs work.”

“He writes movies,” I said. “They blow up cars and save the world in a hundred and twenty minutes. Does he really know what he’s talking about?”

“I doubt it,” Mom snapped.

Grandma Alice came out of the house wiping her hands on her apron and waving a spatula. “I just heard on the television,” she called. “They’re sending everyone home from all the schools!”

“Oh, Lord,” Mom said. “I’d better get back. It’s going to be chaos there, too. Honey, call me tonight, okay? If you really want to talk about this, I will, but you won’t change my mind.” As soon as I got out, she backed down the drive. I saw Ben pull in as she turned the corner; he must have been lurking behind the oleanders, waiting for her to leave.

I thought about cornering him and trying to get him to tell me what he’d put in the script, and to take it out, but I figured he probably wouldn’t do either one. And if he
did
tell me, Mom would go postal. So I just focused on calming him and Grandma Alice down, promising there hadn’t been any guns, and let it go for now.

Ayala High School was all over the news. We ate dinner in front of the TV while the cameras showed bomb-sniffing dogs and everything, not finding any bombs. The sheriff made a statement and Mrs. Richardson the principal made a statement and Noah’s mother made a really furious statement about the sheriff and Mrs. Richardson. I called Lily and she said her parents had been freaked, too, which really isn’t like them. They’re pretty laid back.

“There’s been so much of this stuff,” Lily said. “People going crazy and blowing strangers away. So everybody overreacts. That’s what Dad said, once he found out it was just Noah Michalski mouthing off.”

“But how do you know when it’s just Noah, and when somebody just like Noah has gone nuts?” I asked. That’s the part that secretly worries me. How can you
tell
?

We analyzed it all some more, and then Jesse Francis of all people called me right after we’d hung up.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. How about you?”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t tell if he meant that. But it was extremely cool to have a senior call me and check up on me.

I called Mom, too, but I didn’t hound her about Ben yet because I knew she was still mad.

“How was everything at school?” I asked her.

“Madhouse,” she said. “Parents having hysterics in the halls. I could wring Noah’s neck.”

“It wasn’t all his fault,” I said, to be fair.

“I know Noah,” Mom said. “I used to know somebody just like him.”

“Who?”

“Long time ago,” she said, in a tone that told me not to ask, and hung up in a hurry.

Hmmmmm.

Noah got suspended, but not actually arrested because he didn’t actually do anything. Mrs. Richardson called an assembly to tell us all that this was an excellent example of what happens when you make poor choices, as if life is a multiple choice test and one of the options is
Make a bomb threat in the cafeteria
.

I thought about talking to Felix about how Jesse hit the floor like that, but figured it might encourage him if he’s still seeing Mom. But the upshot of the whole thing is that no one paid much attention to Jesse Francis for a while. Now that it’s all settled down again, he’s just somebody you pass in the hall, not the Freak of the Week. Lily and I eat lunch with him every day. We’ve bonded into a cafeteria trio. I think he likes it that we treat him as if he’s still a high school student and don’t ask him stupid questions like did he kill anyone. All the kids he went to school with his last year here are in college now, or have gotten married and have babies and jobs. They don’t cross paths much with people who’re still at Ayala High carrying eggs around in their pockets.

They
did
made Jesse take Family Living; he showed me his egg. Sometimes you have to wonder who decides this stuff.

“I was thinking maybe I’d get a hollow one,” he told us at lunch. “I think my mom has some plastic ones left over from my brother and sister’s baskets last Easter. I could get one of those little corn snakes they sell in pet stores and put it in there, and let it hatch when Ms. Vinson comes around to check them.”

“Oh my God, that would be totally cool.” I stared at him with admiration—you have to like a mind like that. “You have totally got to do it.”

“Nah,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It would have been funny when I was seventeen,” he said.

“Um.” So now he thought I was immature. “So, when you’re nineteen, you just think stuff like that up, but you don’t actually do it?”

“Life is calmer that way.”

Lily said, “When my dad was in college, he put a frog in a salad bowl at a fraternity party.”

Jesse snorted.

“My mom yelled at him and put the frog in her purse and took it back to the river. That’s how they met.”

“I’ve got to tell Ben,” I said. “That’s a ‘meet cute’ if I ever heard one.” Movie people are always trying to think up adorable ways to get their romantic characters together.

“Be my guest,” Lily said. I couldn’t help thinking about whatever it was my mom didn’t want him to use. It’s bound to be worse than frogs in the salad.

The bell rang and I groaned; Driver’s Ed right after lunch is not a great idea. Mr. Howser always starts us off with a gruesome car wreck video to get us in the right frame of mind.

“Before next week, I have to drive two hours with Mom or Ben,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Driving with Lily doesn’t count—it has to be with an adult.”

“I’ll take you out,” Jesse said to me. “The ‘adult’ just has to be eighteen. I remember. We can take my egg for a ride.”

“Both of us?” I asked.

“Sure. I can borrow my mom’s car. It’s an automatic. The only thing I can’t handle with the damn leg is a stick. How about it, Rudolph?”

“You bet,” Lily said. “My dad talks about our dependence on fossil fuels the whole time I’m driving. I don’t know why he doesn’t just sign off the hours, but he’s overly honest about things like this.”

Jesse nodded. “Outgrew his frog period. It happens.”

So we all went driving on Saturday and had such a blast. We went out to the East End where there isn’t much traffic, and Jesse handed the car over to me. I was a little nervous because it was his mom’s car and what if I ran it into a tree?

“Want some music?” he said while I put it in gear.

“Yeah.”

He turned the radio on and we all sang along to everything while I drove.

I did all right, though, and when we came to where somebody must have been having a party because there were lots of cars parked along both sides of the street, Jesse insisted I practice parallel parking.

“She’s awful at it,” Lily said, leaning between us from the back seat. “And we don’t know these people.”

“All the more reason to practice on them,” Jesse said. He showed me how to line the car up with the car in front of my space, and then just when to cut the wheel back over, and I actually got it in the spot without backing into anybody.

“Atta girl!”

He had me do it twice more until he decided I had the hang of it. After that we drove all over the East End, and Lily got her driving time in too, and we ended up going for pizza at Delmenico’s. Lily and I had decided beforehand that we would take Jesse out to thank him, and we weren’t going to let him pay for any of it.

We started to sit at our usual table at the front window, but Jesse pointed toward a booth in the back.

“What do you like?” I asked him when we’d settled in.

“Pizza.” He grinned.

So we ordered our usual garbage pizza with everything on it, and a pitcher of root beer, which, it turns out, Jesse shares my secret passion for. Lily doesn’t care what she has to drink as long as she gets pizza. Her parents are vegetarians—they don’t insist on Lily being one, but pepperoni and sausage are not household staples for her.

“Oh my God this is good.” Lily took a huge bite and pinched the cheese strings off with her fingers.

“You guys are the most,” Jesse said. “I can’t get over it, you taking me out for pizza.”

He sounded like he thought we were cute, and maybe about five, but I didn’t care.

“Nobody ever took you out for pizza before?” Lily asked.

“Not for a long time,” Jesse said. He looked sad. His face can change in a heartbeat, so that he looks like somebody else.

“You’ve been neglected,” Lily told him. “We’ll adopt you.”

I like adopting Jesse. He’s funny and he knows stuff, not just because he’s older, but stuff that no one at school is interested in. Like, for instance, why the oaks look like something might be living in them.

We were working on decorations for Homecoming out of leaves and papier maché. He was making a face out of his leaves, sticking them on wet papier maché and smoothing them down so it looked like a tree person’s face.

“That’s way cool,” I said.

“He’s the Green Man,” Jesse said. “He’s really old. He’s from Europe, but I imagine he lives here, too.”

“What does he do?” I asked. “Live in the woods?”

“He
is
the woods. He’s one of those pagan things the church spent a lot of time stamping out, and then they just gave up and turned him into the harvest festival.”

Around here there are lots of overlapping layers of belief like that. This time of year, the people from Mexico go to the cemeteries right after Halloween and clean up the graves and put marigolds and candles on them, then they have a picnic and tell their ancestors the news. They call it
El Dia de los Muertos
, the Day of the Dead. The church calendar calls it All Souls Day. Grandpa Joe says it’s because the Aztecs believed death and life were really part of the same thing, and that this is the time of the year when the borders between the worlds are thin. The Church adapted that, the same way it made room for Easter eggs and Christmas trees. People make altars on the Day of the Dead, and put all the stuff their dead relatives liked to eat and drink on them. They make skeleton decorations and dress them up, and if you’re a little kid you get a sugar skull with your name on it, just like you would a chocolate Easter egg.

“Got a date for Homecoming?” Jesse asked me, smoothing a leaf onto the Green Man’s nose. Homecoming is on Halloween weekend.

“Nah. I’m too weird.”

“You aren’t weird,” he said encouragingly. “You’re artsy.”

“Are you gonna go?” It was nice that he thought I was artsy.

“Can’t dance,” he said. “And I’m weirder than you are.”

“I guess I could go with Lily,” I said. “Lots of girls go stag. But that felt kind of stupid in middle school, so I think it would feel double stupid here.”

“And you’re too old to trick-or-treat.” He shook his head and looked sympathetic.

“Yeah. Lily and I went last year, but we got a lot of dirty looks.”