This One's for You, page 6
Never again will I stare at a test paper and watch the numbers on it swarm around like starlings until the time runs out. Never again will I shove an assignment with a shitty grade down to the bottom of my backpack. Never again will I pretend not to notice the invisible aura that follows me everywhere, the mark of being different, puzzling, weird. The world is mine. And I never have to go back to De Anza High School again.
11
Caspian
AFTER THE CEREMONY, DAD AND I say goodbye to Gram, who has to get back to Martinez for a city council meeting, and then we drive down to Berkeley to eat lunch at Izakaya, the Japanese place where we go for special occasions. Dad did the build-out of this restaurant when I was four or five, and some of my earliest memories are of playing in the giant, half-built booths and driving my race cars over long beams of reclaimed redwood. The restaurant is long finished now, a true thing of beauty, with little wooden alcoves, mud walls, stone floors, and a knobby slab bar at the front. When I’m in this room, I can hear my dad speaking to me in the language of perfect craftsmanship—immaculate physical detail, balance, space, squares of sunlight on the ground—way more than he ever does with words.
Yumi, the owner, is one of Dad’s best friends, and when we walk in she is waiting behind the bar of the near-empty restaurant. She has shoulder-length black hair and wears a chic flowy blue linen dress. She claps Dad on the back and gives me a big hug, actually lifting me off of my feet.
“You did it,” she grins at me, as though I have done something truly profound, rather than just slinking through the past four years of my life, mindlessly checking off boxes.
“Thanks,” I say, shoving my hands in my pockets, feeling exposed but also loved.
“Your mom would be proud,” she whispers to me, just as Dad ducks his head inside one of the booths, eyeing the joinery where the beams meet.
She winks and disappears into the back, leaving me alone in the aisle with the awkwardness of her statement. There’s no reality I can check it against, no context. A proud mom would require the existence of a mom. Experiences, memories, stories, mementos, inherited genetics or mannerisms. Someone would have to have said to me, You have your mother’s eyes. Or, Your mother used to hold the guitar just like that. Someone would have had to say something.
I slide into the booth across from Dad and pull my phone out of my pocket. Under the table, I download Instagram again.
Yumi comes back, bringing us a little carafe of sparkling water and telling us to order whatever we want. We get several different kinds of small plates, sashimi and dumplings and skewers. I haven’t felt real hunger in a while, just a bored, empty-stomached feeling, but Izakaya always has a way of breaking my stubborn streaks.
“You know,” Dad says around a mouthful of yellowtail, “I didn’t even know what sushi was until I was almost thirty.”
“Seriously?”
Dad laughs. “Cass. You’ve got it so good. I grew up on tuna casserole and landlines.”
“Gross,” I shudder. “Although sometimes I wouldn’t mind not having my phone.”
I say it as my fingers caress my mother’s picture under the table, so careful not to double tap and accidentally like it.
“Huh,” he says. “Guess I’m rubbing off on you.”
Dad is the one person I know, Gram included, who doesn’t have a smartphone. He wears an ancient Nokia flip phone in a leather holster on his belt. Sometimes he randomly texts in all caps like a meme of a senior citizen.
We eat for a while without talking, which is how we usually do it. A quiet dance of passing plates, refilling water, thinking our own thoughts. Eating in comfortable silence is the soundtrack of our father-son relationship.
“You know,” he says after a while, “I’m proud of you.”
I try not to cringe. “I know, Dad. Thanks.”
He looks thoughtful. And then he tugs at the collar of his shirt and says, “I didn’t really have much of a relationship with my dad. He was kind of”—he pauses, setting down his chopsticks—“unreachable.”
And then he says, “I just want you to know how much I love you.” He says it quickly and then shoves a piece of yakitori into his mouth.
Something about this stirs me up inside.
“Of course, Dad. I know,” is what I say. But what I’m thinking is much more muddled than that. Unreachable. Most days, Dad is a tiny little piece of space dust orbiting the earth, or maybe fleeing from it on a straight and steady trajectory toward oblivion. Most days, I’m just standing on the ground looking up and wishing I had a telescope.
Rescuing us both from the discomfort of any real, dangerous emotion, Dad says, “You excited for school to start?”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to dredge up some enthusiasm. Even with the scholarship and student loans, I know that Dad has sacrificed a lot to get me here.
“You’ve given some more thought to your class schedule? I know that engineering will take up a lot of your course load, but you should take something fun too.”
“Like what?” I ask, mildly surprised. Dad isn’t usually a fan of extras.
He smiles, like he’s remembering something long forgotten. I remember the little crumpled-up poems Syd and I used to find in the couch cushions and under Dad’s bed.
“I don’t know. I took a pottery class once that was pretty great.”
“I thought you didn’t go to college,” I say.
“I didn’t, but I’ve dabbled in community college classes a few times.” He smiles faintly at the windows behind my head.
“Huh, I didn’t picture you as such a Renaissance man.”
My dad laughs, a rare belly laugh, and the ringing sound of it makes me feel so momentarily light that words bubble up and I blurt out, “Well, actually, I’ve been thinking about taking some music classes.”
Dad quietly sets down his chopsticks, the laugh swallowed back up into his enigmatic eyes. “What?”
I roll Kit’s business card in my pocket, scratch the surface with my nail.
CSEB has an incredible music program, is what I wish I could say.
I think I might be good.
Really, really good.
“Actually,” I say, “never mind. Pottery sounds great.”
That’s the end of our conversation because Yumi comes over and slides into the booth next to me. She immediately begins to regale us with tales of my childhood and of Dad when he was a young builder in the Bay Area. She fills up the silence that stretches between us with more and more words. But even as I try to get lost in the comfort of familiar memories, my heartbeat is still erratic from a near miss with the truth.
On the ride home, my fingers worry the edges of Kit Molina’s business card. Bit by bit, the corners bend, unbend, tear apart. By the time we get home, I’ve torn it to shreds. But it’s too late; her number is already in my phone, next to a text that says: Thanks for the ride. And one from Kit that says: Let me know when you’re back and we’ll set something up.
We pull into the driveway at 4:00. Three hours until we leave for Yosemite. Four hours until the doors open at the very first show of the Darlas reunion tour.
“I’ve got to go check on a site up in Novato,” Dad says. “If I don’t see you before you go, have a great time, okay?”
He gives me an awkward pat on the shoulder.
“Be safe,” he says, his voice heavy. “Don’t forget your headlamp.”
I nod. “It’s already in the back of the car.”
Dad nods goodbye as he heads over to his truck, starting the shuddering engine and backing out of the drive. I sit behind the wheel for a few minutes, unable to drag myself inside.
I should be packing right now. Digging up my Smartwool socks and long underwear. Instead, I restart the engine and start driving. I drive down into town, along the main drag, past De Anza High, Thrift Town, Walgreens, Thai Village. I drive out to Hannah’s house and sit in my car at the end of her street like a creep. Then I drive to the reservoir where my dad and I used to take the wooden canoe that he built by hand, and I walk down the trail to the edge of the water. I sit for a while, squinting against the bright sun.
It all just feels kind of surreal. I wish I was having some kind of emotional goodbye, that I was heading off to Juilliard or the University of Chicago or the Royal Academy of Music in London, but instead I’m just stuck here, driving these same roads, going to the same grocery store, living with Dad, spinning my wheels forever.
I skip rocks for a while, watching them slice over the top of the water. Watching them move. My dad can send a rock ten skips out into the reservoir. I remember being a kid, thinking that if I could grow up to be just like him, it would be enough.
* * *
• • •
As I’m heading back down the hill that leads to our cul-de-sac, I see someone walking down the side of the street, a big white swath of fabric billowing behind them like a cloud. It’s Sydney Greenfield, in a dress that’s covered in daisies. She’s not wearing any shoes and her graduation gown looks like it’s about to fly away.
I pull up next to her.
“Need a ride?”
She shakes her head. “I’m almost home.”
I study her face, which looks wild and tired at the same time. Her bangs are a sharp black line across her forehead, her eyeliner smudged at the edges of her dark, sleepy eyes. A pair of chunky platform shoes dangles from her fingers.
“Where were you today?” I ask.
She looks away. “Don’t worry about it.”
I reach across and open the passenger door.
“Come on. Hop in.”
She steps back, crosses her arms, kicks at the gravel with a dirty toe. I try not to stare at her legs, which look somehow both soft and angular. Then a sly look blooms across her face. It’s familiar in a way that makes my heart twist suddenly inside my chest.
“I’ll get in if you tell me about the 24th Street BART,” she says.
I balk. “You want something in return? For driving you a quarter mile to your house?”
She nods, flopping her arm over the top of the passenger door.
“Okay, fine,” I say.
She grins and gets in, dropping her shoes into the back. “These are awful,” she says. Then she leans her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes.
I put the car in gear and swing it back around, away from our neighborhood, away from Syd’s house and the unpacked forty-pound frame pack at the back of my closet.
“I’ll tell you,” I say. “But I don’t want go home yet.”
12
Sydney
THE LAST DAY OF MY FRIENDSHIP with Caspian started out like this: I woke up in his bed, melted by a hundred sunbeams. I was hopelessly snarled in his gangly limbs, enveloped in the smell of birch-bark soap and sleeping teen boy sweat, and something about the combination was so good that for a moment I thought I could stay like that forever: wrapped up in Cass, huffing him like airplane glue.
The thought was jarring enough to vault me into full wakefulness. “Cass,” I hissed. “Get off!”
“Shhhhh,” he mumbled, sliding a hand across my mouth. “Sleeping.”
I kicked my way out from under his leg, which was hooked across mine like the number four. I was trying to strangle the weird new part of me that wanted to turn my body sideways, to press against Cass from collarbone to knee. I’d woken up in this bed on a thousand other mornings; it had never felt like this.
“I gotta go,” I said, trying not to panic. “It’s almost seven.”
Under Caspian’s hot palm it sounded like “Gahagamo. Miahaman.”
I stuck my tongue out to lick Cass’s hand, my usual trick for this situation, and Cass released me immediately, laughing.
“Shit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, oblivious to my lust meltdown and squinting at the grandpa-style wristwatch he always wore, as if he could see the face of it without his glasses or he’d actually understood what I’d said about the time. “You’re right.”
I sat up, watching him fumble around for his glasses, trying to catch my breath. It felt like slow motion, Cass’s shoulder-length hair, dark and thick, falling across his eyes. His chest looked strong and brown from working outside with his dad; I noticed a line of freckles on his left shoulder that looked like Orion’s Belt.
Cass’s hand stopped and his eyes met mine, sliding down to my chest for a millisecond before flying back up again and sort of looking at the wall, color staining his cheeks. My own face warmed and I felt my mouth fall halfway open.
For a second my heart actually ached.
Oh, shit.
I propelled myself out of bed, pulling on my ratty black hoodie.
“See you out front in twenty?” I mumbled.
He peered at me, head tilted to the side.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, turning toward the door. “I just don’t want to get in trouble.”
He laughed, and something about the laugh was so musical and sweet that I accidentally tripped and fell over as I was hopping around, trying to put on my sock. “I don’t believe that for a second,” he said.
I’ve got to get out of here. I smoothed down my hair, shoving all the weird feelings down down down. Then I gave Cass my best devil grin and slipped down the stairs, out the back door, and across the backyard like a neighborhood cat.
* * *
• • •
Now Cass drives us up I-80 and into Pinole, to the trail next to the train tracks and the water treatment plant, the marsh where we used to race our bikes as kids. I climb out of the car and cross the tracks, stepping gingerly in my bare feet to avoid broken glass, walking toward the sand. It’s low tide and the air smells like sulphur as we thread the needle between tall reeds and squawking sea birds. I can sense Cass behind me without even turning around, like I used to when we were kids and he’d trail after me everywhere with his shoelaces untied.
There’s a lot more garbage out here than there used to be, plastic bags and press-on nails, disintegrating fiberglass chunks of an old boat, an extra-large Jack in the Box drink cup. But it still feels peaceful.
We walk down the beach for a while without really talking and I tightrope my way out over the sticky marsh on a long, weathered piece of driftwood. I’m thinking about all this plastic floating out of the bay, out to sea, out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—1.6 million square kilometers of trash-filled ocean—clogging up pelicans and seagulls until their bodies burst. Thinking about plastic always makes me think about death.
Caspian steps out onto the driftwood and the whole thing sinks and rises under his weight.
“Where were you today?” he asks again, and when he looks at me with his serious brown eyes, thoughts of death scatter like dandelion seeds.
“I’m pretty sure it’s your turn to share,” I say without turning around. I’m still not even sure why I’m here, except for the fact that every step toward my house had felt like an act of infinite divisibility, smaller and smaller by half, slower and slower. Maybe I’d never have made it home, creeping down Loma Vista Road forever, in one long loop of my favorite panic symptom: impending doom.
This morning, before graduation, Mom sat me down, with Dad this time, for another talk just to let me know that they are serious. Dad didn’t say a word, dressed in his button-down and Salesforce fleece, itching as usual to get out the door, but I could tell she’d won him over; it’s internship or bust.
“You first,” Caspian says, ever the enigma.
I turn around to face him and we’re standing on the log like Baby and Johnny in Dirty Dancing—Mom’s second favorite movie—except the tension between us isn’t sexual. It’s two years of neglect, a yawning canyon of disuse and distance and growing apart.
“You promised you’d tell me if I came with you,” I say, crossing my arms.
He shrugs. “I changed my mind. But it’s okay, we don’t have to talk.”
He stares at me and I stare at him and all that space between us seems to creak and groan like the driftwood. Then he turns around and jumps back onto the beach.
“Caspian Forrester, you’ve changed,” I say.
He laughs, and it sounds dry and hollow and lost.
When my feet hit the damp, muddy sand, I say, “I don’t know why I didn’t go. It just sort of happened.”
“It just sort of happened that you missed your high school graduation?”
I shrug, picking up a flat rock and pressing the corners into my fingers.
“I hated that place anyway.”
Mountainous hills and hilly mountains ring the bay, softly jagged, green on gray on blue on blue, water, clouds, hills, sky. I remember my dad naming them for me as a child, Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo, other mountains I can’t quite remember.
