‘It’s because the mystery money stopped coming,’ Tina said. ‘Right?’
Mom said, ‘Partly but not entirely. Dad tried for a bank loan, but they wouldn’t give it to him. They went over his business records and did something—’
‘A two-year profit projection,’ Dad said. Some of the old post-accident bitterness crept into his voice. ‘Lots of compliments, because those are free. They said they might be able to make the loan in 2016, if the business grows by five percent. In the meantime, this goddam Polar Vortex thing … we’re way over your mom’s budget on heating expenses. Everyone is, from Maine to Minnesota. I know that’s no consolation, but there it is.’
‘Honey, we’re so, so sorry,’ Mom said.
Pete expected Tina to explode into a full-fledged tantrum – there were lots more of those as she approached the big thirteen – but it didn’t happen. She said she understood, and that Chapel Ridge was probably a snooty school, anyway. Then she came out to the kitchen and asked Pete if he would make her a sandwich, because his looked good. He did, and they went into the living room, and all four of them watched TV together and had some laughs over The Big Bang Theory.
Later that night, though, he heard Tina crying behind the closed door of her room. It made him feel awful. He went into his own room, pulled one of the Moleskines out from under his mattress, and began rereading The Runner Goes West.
He was taking Mrs Davis’s creative writing course that semester, and although he got As on his stories, he knew by February that he was never going to be a fiction-writer. Although he was good with words, a thing he didn’t need Mrs Davis to tell him (although she often did), he just didn’t possess that kind of creative spark. His chief interest was in reading fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern. He had gotten a taste for this kind of detective work while writing his paper on Rothstein. At the Garner Street Library he hunted out one of the books Mr Ricker had mentioned, Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, and liked it so much that he bought his own copy in order to highlight certain passages and write in the margins. He wanted to major in English more than ever, and teach like Mr Ricker (except maybe at a university instead of in high school), and at some point write a book like Mr Fiedler’s, getting into the faces of more traditional critics and questioning the established way those traditional critics looked at things.
And yet!
There had to be more money. Mr Feldman, the guidance counselor, told him that getting a full-boat scholarship to an Ivy League school was ‘rather unlikely,’ and Pete knew even that was an exaggeration. He was just another whitebread high school kid from a so-so Midwestern school, a kid with a part-time library job and a few unglamorous extracurriculars like newspaper and yearbook. Even if he did manage to catch a boat, there was Tina to think about. She was basically trudging through her days, getting mostly Bs and Cs, and seemed more interested in makeup and shoes and pop music than school these days. She needed a change, a clean break. He was wise enough, even at not quite seventeen, to know that Chapel Ridge might not fix his little sister … but then again, it might. Especially since she wasn’t broken. At least not yet.
I need a plan, he thought, only that wasn’t precisely what he needed. What he needed was a story, and although he was never going to be a great fiction-writer like Mr Rothstein or Mr Lawrence, he was able to plot. That was what he had to do now. Only every plot stood on an idea, and on that score he kept coming up empty.
He had begun to spend a lot of time at Water Street Books, where the coffee was cheap and even new paperbacks were thirty percent off. He went by one afternoon in March, on his way to his after-school job at the library, thinking he might pick up something by Joseph Conrad. In one of his few interviews, Rothstein had called Conrad ‘the first great writer of the twentieth century, even though his best work was written before 1900.’
Outside the bookstore, a long table had been set up beneath an awning. SPRING CLEANING, the sign said. EVERYTHING ON THIS TABLE 70% OFF! And below it: WHO KNOWS WHAT BURIED TREASURE YOU WILL FIND! This line was flanked by big yellow smiley-faces, to show it was a joke, but Pete didn’t think it was funny.
He finally had an idea.
A week later, he stayed after school to talk to Mr Ricker.
‘Great to see you, Pete.’ Mr Ricker was wearing a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves today, along with a psychedelic tie. Pete thought the combination said quite a lot about why the love-and-peace generation had collapsed. ‘Mrs Davis says great things about you.’