In the hallway Mom puts up her palm to signal no questions. Walking past the open classroom doorways where I can see blue jean legs and flip-flops stretched into the aisle and lacrosse shoes dangling from the backs of chairs, it’s hard not to agree with Mom. Silence is safer.
Four days to Christmas and Joe arrives in snow flurries that are barely more than raindrops in white coats. Mom’s banging around in the kitchen like she’s in a hurry or hacked. The smells are sweet, though, Christmassy. I can’t think when she last baked cookies. When we were in grade school, maybe. She must have found a recipe that substitutes honey for refined sugar, another serial killer of humans according to her. Nick helps Joe carry in his stuff. A lot more books than normal.
“My man.” Joe high-fives Nick, who’s chomping at the bit to go see the new Batman movie. They confer in tight side-of-the-mouth whispers. Like I’m already dead and gone. Ticks me off royally, right when I was feeling so mellow for a change. Meredith’s just gone home.
“Hello to you too.” Pretty obvious and pretty juvenile, but I can’t help myself.
“Daniel. You look like shit.”
Big brothers are such idiots.
“You look a little grungy yourself. Too many late nights?”
“You should ever.” He chucks his duffel bag behind the sofa, a badly beaten-down plaid thing with wooden arms that makes me think we’re living in a TV sitcom rerun, one of the unfunny ones. “Want to go with Nick and me to see the Caped Crusader?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s just what I’d like. A taste of immortality. If only on the silver screen.”
Joe has Nick in a headlock and is drumming on the top of his head. His teeth glisten as he laughs. “Didn’t Danny boy miss me? Nick missed me. What’s the matter, Danny boy? Meredith have a new flame?”
“Leave Meredith out of this.”
Even Nick, his eyes on me, starts to shrink away from the conflagration that is Joe. One foot of Nick’s is in the hallway, his hand on the door frame to give him enough leverage to spring himself free. The sound of me grinding my teeth reverberates in the living room so loudly I’m shocked no one else seems to hear it.
Joe lowers his voice ever so slightly. “Guys, guys. Can’t we loosen up a little? It’s Christmas. I came home to celebrate.”
“Sorry.” I stand up and ram my arms in my fleece jacket. “Celebrating is not exactly what’s on my mind lately.”
Surprise of surprises, Nick comes back out of hiding. “Leave him alone, Joe. You don’t know anything about it.”
I don’t wait to hear the rest of the sad story. People can die from suffocation and I need air. A lot of it. If I call Mack from the dry cleaner’s, he’ll come and pick me up. We’ve run this drill before, more often than I like to admit.
As I cut across the backyard to Washington Street, through the kitchen window I see Joe hug Mom. It’s easy to imagine how he gives her the rundown on his exams and then hedges at her question about when he has to be back for next semester. We’re all used to not hurting Mom’s feelings. It comes naturally.
When I call Mack, he’s out. Mrs. Petriano is full of the Christmas spirit.
“How are you doing, Daniel? Merry Christmas. Nice we missed that snowstorm, isn’t it? We’ve been thinking about you. Your mother said you took your exams. I bet that felt good.” I can see her looking around like a deer in headlights. What the hell do you say to your son’s dying friend?
“Yeah—I mean yes. Ma’am. It’s nice to have it over with.”
“You don’t have to be proper with me, sweetie. I’ve known you since diapers.”
“Yeah.” I’m damned if I’m going to correct it again after that home run at making me feel small. “Do you know when Mack will be home? I really need to talk with him.”
“I think he has his dad’s cell phone with him. He said he was going to meet up with friends. I thought maybe he meant you.”
There’s no suitable reply to that when I know he’s been avoiding me since the last time we talked. “Can you tell him I called?”
“Of course I can. I’ll write it down so I don’t forget. I’m getting so fuzzy lately. Early Alzheimer’s.”
She actually giggles and I’m getting claustrophobic, wondering if I can ever end this call.
“Did you want the cell number?” she asks.
“No, I don’t want to bother him. Just tell him I called.”
She’s still talking when I say goodbye.
Mack doesn’t call me back, but in one of my calls to Meredith, Juliann leaks that he’s avoiding her, too. It worries me. Mack mad at the world is not the Mack I know and love. Something’s happened or he’s gone over the edge with the white stuff. I decide to rest up and corner him over the school holiday. He can only hide from me for so long.
I finish the first semester of tenth grade without ever attending a class. Three A’s—Biology, World History, and English—should put me at the top of the class, but then Algebra II wrecks my average with my all-time favorite math grade of B plus. I can’t remember any math grade I ever received higher than a B plus. How can it be that I can get that close but not any closer, no matter how hard I try?
You’re thinking, just like my dad, that the bio grade was a fluke. Science has never been a favorite of mine. The measurement and recordation of each little detail, the constant comparison of one thing against another, it’s just so much minutiae without meaning. The thing is, now it’s so much more important for me to understand biology than history. It’s an incentive I’ve never had before. And Meredith grilled me. She’s an ace at science.
Two days before Christmas Mom sends Nick to the public library Internet to check on plane fares to Mexico. Supposed to be a secret, but they have this big powwow in the front cabin when they think I’m asleep. Dad hogs the cell phone to call his textbook people to drum up more business. He snakes me into philosophical debates, almost out-and-out dares me to discuss the headlines, to focus on bigger issues, but he’s no better than I am at the distraction. What do I care whether the U.S. embassy in Nairobi is attacked again? I’m never going there.
Although Holden doesn’t say much about his dad, I see right away that it’s an obvious black hole in his life, compared with the way my dad is right there in mine. Holden says he doesn’t want to hear the grief from his dad about yet another prep school failure, but there’s more to it than that. Rereading about his secret visit to see Phoebe, I hear a panic that doesn’t fit the crime. You get the impression his father is a big corporate guy. HC never disses his father. So my take, the problem for Holden and Leonard and Meredith—kids whose fathers are mostly absent from their lives, too important, too busy to really connect with their kids—is bigger than you think.
Parents are already nosy, right? Born that way, by definition. They want to know what their kids are doing, eating, thinking. It may be natural, but too much of that nosiness isn’t healthy. Especially once a kid is self-sufficient. Sixteen or seventeen for a guy, a little later for a girl because of all those protectionist issues with females. Like in the studies they do with chimpanzees on the Discovery Channel, a kid has to separate himself from his parents. You would think if adults were so smart, they would make sure the schools taught you how to forage, how to cook, how to lease an apartment, instead of algebraic formulas or when the Mongols tried to take over the world. Those are not skills crucial to making your own way in the new-millennium world.
Every parent’s goal, from the first step to potty training to driving a car, is to have his or her kid survive on his own. Checking books out of the library is not a survival skill. Playing soccer is definitely not a survival skill.