Stupid Fast

Chapter 53: FIRST THREE DAYS




You know, if I think about it, I was really upset. Why is it so hard to know why you’re behaving the way you are when it’s all going down? I don’t know.

The following three days were hazy. Grandma Berba washed my sheets for the first time all summer (every morning because I bled on them), and for like three days, almost all I did was sleep in my clean bed.

I got up to eat (huge doses—there was good food in the house). I got up to hang with Jerri. I did the paper route.

Andrew, Grandma, and I went together. Grandma Berba drove. Andrew and I dropped off papers. (I was slow because on top of a slightly achy back, I had a gravel burn the size of a small child on my leg and ass.) We’d go super early in the morning so nobody could see us. Andrew and Grandma delivered the nursing home so I wouldn’t have to see Dad’s old girlfriend, Kelly Mayer. Everything else was dark on the route. So early.

All the lights were out in every house, including Aleah’s. She changed her practice schedule, not so she could hang out with me but so she could help Andrew with piano. I guess that was nice of her. She biked over to our place each day, and they played and played and played. I didn’t even watch but listened from my clean sheets below. I couldn’t go upstairs.

Because.

I was so embarrassed and mortified. Aleah couldn’t possibly be interested in me. I’d freaked out. I’d told her about squirrel nut. She’d called me a simple boy and an innocent child, and that’s not good. You want a boyfriend who’s simple and innocent? Date a baby? No thanks. My chest hurt.

One time, while I was downstairs listening to them play, I did turn on my phone to see if she’d called or texted, but there was such a blizzard of texts from honkies (I’m sorry, but I have to call them honkies) and voicemails from Cody and Coach Johnson asking me to contact him that I shut the phone back off. I couldn’t deal.

Anyway, she didn’t need to call. I was downstairs. And Aleah knew I was there while she was with Andrew. How could she not? Where would I go? She didn’t ever come down to see me. That’s all the information I needed. Aleah didn’t come see me. And it made my chest so heavy, extremely heavy, because I didn’t mean to have childish thoughts that popped out of my mouth. I couldn’t take them back.

At least I had clean sheets.

***

I also got up to use my computer. I didn’t check email. Google searches. That’s all I did.

I had Googled “Steven W. Reinstein” before. I remembered the results, which I thought weren’t about my dad. I redid those searches and knew they were about my dad. I saw pictures I’d seen before and archived articles I’d glanced at before. Tennis pictures. Tennis articles.

STEVEN REINSTEIN LEADS NORTHWESTERN PAST PURDUE.

COURT COVERAGE KEY FOR REINSTEIN.

REINSTEIN IS FORCE OF NATURE.

REINSTEIN BRINGS NCAA SINGLES TITLE TO NORTHWESTERN.

All of it was on the Northwestern website (except one small picture and paragraph on the NCAA website). He wasn’t all over the Web or anything. (I suppose he played tennis before there was an Internet.)

I had for several years seen, over and over, a particular picture on the Northwestern website of a big Jew-fro dude in a purple T-shirt explosively hitting a tennis ball, a grimace on his face, sweat shooting up in the air everywhere. A dude who happened to have my dad’s name, who really happened to be my dad.

I stared at that picture. I downloaded it to my computer. I blew it way up. Dad. There. Probably rode to the courts on our dead Schwinn Varsity. Steven W. Reinstein, while he was in college, looked exactly like I would if I were four years older. He was enormous and obviously hugely powerful. He was a force of nature.

It made me miss him, and even though I’d decided not to be mad at poor Jerri, missing Dad made me so mad at her. I had nice feelings about Dad pent up in my muscles because of years of lies (he’s sweet and kind—wrong). But I should never be mad at Jerri. She was his victim, and the notion of me being so low and terrible that I could even fathom being angry at Jerri made me hate me and then I thought I better get the hell out of bed and go eat a sandwich, which Grandma Berba would prepare and which would taste much better than Kwik Trip white bread with a hunk of cheese on it. She bought some ham, which was good. Wheat bread.

Even when I ate, I boiled in my guts about everything.

Grandma Berba bought lots of stuff. For example, she bought me new clothes that fit.

“You can’t go back to school in high waters. Here, try these.” She threw me jeans. (I could only hope they fit in a month—they do, by the way.)

She bought Andrew a whole wardrobe full of little polos and blue jeans and tossed out his pirate wear. (“Thanks, Grandma,” he beamed.)

She did lots of other stuff too. She cleaned up and threw out the Schwinn Varsity. She weeded the jungle garden. She mowed the lawn. She washed every corner of the house for hours on end.

“Why is all this junk pulled out of boxes?” she asked.

Andrew shrugged.

On the third day, she drove Jerri to Dubuque, Iowa, to see doctors and therapists.

I didn’t like Jerri going to Dubuque. I didn’t like her not being close by. I had a job. When I wasn’t sleeping those three days or on the computer or delivering papers or eating, I’d be next to Jerri watching TV in her room, laughing too hard, to make everything normal. That’s what I had to do. My job was to make Jerri know I think she’s great and know she can count on me because I’m not like my dead dad, who I missed more and more every hour, which really pissed me off.

Very upset.

Grandma Berba came down to my room before they left for Dubuque, after I asked to go with, then pleaded, but was turned down.

“Felton,” she said. “You can’t fix your mom.”

“I can help.”

“It isn’t your job. You’re the kid, okay?”

“I want to help.”

“Be a kid, Felton.”

“I want to…”

“No. I’m here to take care of you. Your job is to be a kid.”

Oh, man.

It was decided in Dubuque that day that Jerri would leave. She was put on serious medication, which made her sort of dull and retarded but resistant. To get better, to make sure she wouldn’t hurt herself, she’d go away. She’d be checked into some kind of mental health facility in Arizona that Grandma knew about (it looked like a freaking vacation ranch with doctors—I checked it on the Web). Jerri was leaving.

“She can’t leave!” I shouted at Grandma Berba.

“She needs to get better,” Grandma said back.

The voice in my head said: She’s leaving you.

And so, three days passed. Three days closer to Aleah leaving, which didn’t seem to matter anymore. Three days closer to Gus coming home, giving me an opportunity to officially lose my only friend. Three days closer to school starting, which I didn’t want to think about at all. In four days, Jerri would go, which made me cry. And it was three days closer to my sixteenth birthday, which happened to be in three days.

Who cares about birthdays? I didn’t want to. I probably did care though. I know I did.