The Stud Book

Nyla tried hard not to be the kind of mom she never wanted to be. Still, in the car with Arena she couldn’t help but say it: “What were you thinking?” Her old car seats sank in the middle, forcing mother and daughter to rest in grooves they’d made over years of driving together.

Arena said, “I don’t know what everyone’s freaking out about.”

“You’re expelled, for one thing.” Nyla had to work to keep her foot from pressing on the gas pedal and racing home, as though home were some kind of safe place, a place where Arena could be a kid again.

“It’s not fair,” Arena said, and sounded like every child ever called on the carpet.

One thing Nyla had learned through raising children was that kids’ emotions run deep. They resonate against the tight landscape of inexperience, but even from the first day they’re about the same struggles as adults, navigating unsteady terrain between love and loneliness.

A truck in the next lane released a dark cloud of diesel, visible where it cut across the arc of a streetlight. The world smelled like breast cancer in the making. To live in a city means living with other people’s choices.

Arena said, “Dulcet was kicked out of high school, too. You don’t rag on her for it.”

“That was twenty years ago.” Dulcet had been kicked out for smoking hash on school property. She didn’t graduate; she went to summer school instead. Nyla could’ve been kicked out, too, back then, but on that particular day she was working on a letter to the editor of the Oregonian about landfills and the use of Styrofoam in the lunchroom, petitioning for change. Her decision to stay in the library that afternoon involved perhaps an hour, and separated her reputation from her best friend’s ever after. She could smoke hash all summer! She could stand outside the party store midafternoon looking for old men to buy them booze, and nothing changed—she’d become the good girl. Now she said, “Besides, that was different.”

“Right.” Arena looked out the window, then dragged a strand of dark hair across her cheek.

Nyla should’ve been spending more time with her daughter, not opening a store and reading Peace One Day.

This was her fault.

Arena was a good student, with a distinct learning style. She wasn’t a fast reader, but was committed to ideas. She’d been reading one book all year—Red Azalea—that’s how dedicated to ideas Arena was. She read the pages backward and forward and drew illustrations in the white space.

Now there would be a hearing. There’d be a big fine. There’d probably be a social worker sent to the house. There was a yellow slip of paper in Nyla’s bag documenting the charges and dates in question. Nyla said, “You’re kicked out of Maya Angelou High.” Arena’s high school, in a lousy neighborhood, was close to bottom rung. The school slogan was “Still I Rise!” a line from an Angelou poem.

Arena said, “I’m not the only one who does it, you know.”

Nyla said. “Dulcet only sells prescription drugs to friends. Adults. And only when she’s broke.”

Arena blinked her eyes. “Dulcet sells drugs? To which friends?”

Nyla realized she’d screwed up. In a fast effort to redirect, she said, “We’re talking about you.”

Arena said, “I mean at school, now. Other kids sell it. It’s really not that big a deal.”

Nyla wanted to say all the right things, only the right things, and at the same time she wanted very much to scream. She said, “Listen—just stay away from those people.”

Outside the sky was dark. In the winter in Portland the days were short, the sky was so often solid clouds, and what little they saw of the sun set by four o’clock. Now it started to rain, a fine mist that built up on the windows and blurred the lights of oncoming traffic. Nyla’s wipers made a muddy smear across the windshield. A scrawny man lurched across the street at a crosswalk. His hair was scraggly, his teeth half gone.

“You see him?” Nyla pointed at the man as he struggled to cross the street. A history of meth showed in his flat lips and missing teeth. He dragged one leg. “He’s a cautionary tale.”

“Mom!” Arena looked appalled. Her mom had taught her to be kind. They served men like that food at the mission. She said, “You don’t know his story.”

“I’m old enough to know a few things.” Sure, it was wrong to turn a man into a symbol, but this was about saving her daughter. “You need to rethink your actions.”

Arena said, “Kids like to have something to buy. Makes ’em feel street-smart.”

Nyla sputtered. She could hardly hold back her fury. “Does that man look ‘street-smart’? Does he look any kind of smart?” She tried to pace her words. She squinted through the muddy windshield and said, “You think you’re doing kids a favor?”

The windshield cleaner only made the smudges worse. Arena said, “Mom, are you still using water for wiper solution?”

“Solution. Ha,” Nyla said. “That’s a euphemism for poison. It doesn’t solve anything. Put enough ‘solution’ in the groundwater and we’ll all have liver cancer.”

Arena ran a finger over the glass from the inside. “Can you even see?”

“Ignore the windshield.” This was her baby girl! What about all she’d done—the breast-feeding, the co-sleeping, the family camping trips, the day trips to the mountains? “You need to take this seriously.”

Arena said, “It’s not serious. It’s a game, Mom. I’ve got more at home. A whole box.”

Nyla said, “A box?”

Arena fiddled with the car’s stereo. She picked up something she found on the dash—a seashell or a rock. Nyla’s car was cluttered with nature brought inside.

Nyla said, “Meth in a box?” It sounded so corporate. Drugs had come a long way since Nyla was in high school, since Dulcet was expelled. Those days looked innocent, back when the focus was on homegrown pot and magic mushrooms that popped up in local parks.

Arena looked at her mother, and her mouth opened. “Meth? That’s what they told you?”

Nyla nodded.

“Crystal meth?” Arena asked again.

Yes. Arena was being expelled from high school for selling crystal meth. Her daughter! Her good, quiet, thoughtful girl. A student had turned over evidence to a school security guard. He’d pointed Arena out and said she sold him the powder. Nyla had to meet with the guard, the principal, and the police. The wipers slapped the windshield, moving lines of mud across and back.

Arena said, “Mom. It was Crystal Light, not crystal meth.”

“What do you mean?” Nyla’s voice quavered. She drove a little slower, easing her foot off the pedal.

“Crystal Light? A drink mix, like Kool-Aid for grown-ups.” Arena quoted a slogan older than she was: “I believe in Crystal Light because I believe in me.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“YouTube.”

The car ahead of them showed only red taillights haloed by rain, and Nyla almost ran into it—had to put the brakes on fast. Then the line started moving again.

Nyla took a yoga breath, then said, “You’re telling me you sold kids Crystal Light, the drink mix?” She let this new version of the story sink in.

Arena nodded her head the same way she’d been doing her whole life, yes, like a child. Yes to all those questions over the years: Did Santa bring you something nice? Do you want a tuna sandwich? You mean you didn’t sell children hard drugs?

Yes, yes, yes. Nodding, nodding.

“The student had powder. Did you tell him what it was?”

Arena said, “Mom, it was in a Crystal Light stick. It was a package.”

Nyla was so relieved, she felt half-sick. She asked, “You didn’t fold it inside a bindle?”

“A what?”

“You know, a paper wrap? You take a square and fold it in half, and make triangle, then fold the ends in—”

“You sure know a lot about drugs, Mom. But no, no ‘bindle’ or whatever.” Arena picked at the car’s threadbare roof liner.

Nyla had to check one more time. “It definitely wasn’t crystal meth, then?”

She needed a meditation tape! She was ready to laugh and vomit at the same time. Her body didn’t know what to do with the chemical systems of alarm, how to turn it around so quickly—on a dime, as the saying goes. On a dime bag, she thought.

Arena said, “No, Mom. They put it in their water. I bought a box of six. They buy it for a dollar a pack. There’s fruit punch, lemonade, caffeine flavor—”

Nyla cut in, “Caffeine isn’t a flavor, honey.”

Arena said, “Whatever. Energy flavor, then. There’s one for your skin. Every jock with acne bought it. Are you crying, Mom?”

“I’m not,” Nyla said. But she ran a finger under one eye, then the other. She said, “Crystal Light is a corporate product with artificial sweetener, artificial color, artificial flavor, and way too much packaging.” Her voice was shaky. Nyla was dizzy with relief, afraid to give in to this new and improved version of events.

Arena said, “Not at all, Mom. They have real sugar in some of them. Studies show women who drink Crystal Light drink twenty percent more water on average.”

Nyla said, “You’re quoting ads as truth?” This wasn’t how she raised her children. She wiped her eyes again.

Arena looked the other way when she said, “I am.”

Nyla added, “They drink chemicals.”

Arena said, “You are crying. Mom?”

Nyla’s nose had started to run. She said, “Did you tell Mrs. Cherryholmes it was Crystal Light?”

“I thought she knew.”

“Well, Crystal Light’s not exactly high crime.” Nyla tried to quit being so emotional about it. She couldn’t stop her voice from quavering.

“They don’t like us selling anything at school. And I sold packets individually, or whatever. Where it says ‘Not for individual sale’ on the side?”

Her darling child!

Nyla exhaled. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She took another deep breath, started to laugh, then choked up again, and felt herself lost in an emotion between elated and crushed, and that’s what it meant to have children: happiness tempered with terror, panic laced with love. “We’ll clear it up.” She gave two more squirts from her water-filled windshield cleaner reservoir and left muddy rivulets down the glass.

Arena nodded.

Outside the car it was dark, raining, and cold, but in the car she felt close to her strange, quiet girl. She missed Celestial, who had always been so ready to tell Nyla everything, who thought out loud and asked questions. But maybe now, with Celeste at Brown, she and Arena would learn to talk. This problem with school could be a catalyst.

Arena asked, “Mom, what do you think happens when we die?”

“You’re not going to die. You’re just expelled.” Nyla was happy.

“We’ll all die. What happens then?”

“I have no idea.” A strange question. Nyla kept her eyes on the sea of orange and red taillights in the stop-and-go traffic, each light haloed by rain.

Arena said, “I met this cool guy?”

Nyla froze. This was it—the moment of mother-daughter bonding she had hoped for. Nyla had to be careful not to scare her shy daughter away.

“Let me show you a picture.” Arena dug in her backpack. Nyla held her breath, ready to see what kind of man or boy Arena took an interest in, ready for any clue to her daughter’s internal life. Arena pulled out her worn copy of Red Azalea. She leafed through it. There between the pages she found a photo. “Here.”

In the dark car it was hard to see what Arena held. Nyla tried to catch a glimpse as they passed under streetlights. “What’s that?”

The photo looked like twin taillights in the rain.

“It’s him,” Arena said, “and me. We share the same energy field.”

Nyla looked again. She looked closely. She gave her daughter her full attention, forgot to brake, the taillights brightened, and she saw her daughter’s head jerk forward then back as they slammed into the rear of the car ahead of them.





Ben couldn’t stop to check his makeup; he was late for an underwriters powwow where they’d hash out details on tricky loans. Early that morning, Sarah had worked on his face, using a tube shaped like a bullet casing or a lipstick container, only the makeup inside was pale green. She tapped green dots under his eyes then across the cracked bridge of his nose. “Green covers bruises,” she said, leaning so close her breath beat against his lips.

A temp passed Ben in the wide corridor of their office, arms full of folders. She eyeballed him up and down. “Nice look!”

Was that ironic or sincere? He was wearing Dockers and a button-down, along with his smashed nose. Maybe that auburn-haired, ponytail-swinging temp could tell he was hidden under an oil-free coat of beige? The temp was young and thin, and slung her files like she had no investment in any of this.

He didn’t have time to talk, not even with a sexy, ironic temp who knew how to sling files. It was his first day back.

He’d sat on the edge of the bathtub at home while Sarah leaned over him; her nightshirt hung low, all cleavage and freckled skin. She’d put her tongue to the corner of her lips and tapped the green makeup with a fingertip. Her eyes scanned Ben’s face, looking everywhere except back into his eyes.

The beauty of Sarah was she knew how to take charge.

She patted a cool liquid foundation over the green dots and used her second finger to work the makeup down and out, toward his ears. She found a fat brush in her bag of tricks and swirled it in a plastic dish. “Setting powder,” she said, and gave the brush two good raps against the porcelain sink. He could still feel that brush coming at him with its crazy tickle, obnoxious and soft and sexy at the same time.

He’d watched this routine his whole life; now he was an insider, brought in on the makeup ritual.

“Powder makes it so it won’t travel,” Sarah said. “Longer coverage.”

“How long?”

Sarah shrugged. He lost heart, and said, “I don’t know about this.”

“Think of it as war paint.” She dropped the tube of concealer in his blazer pocket.

Wearing the face Sarah made him, he walked with long strides down the open corridor between cubicles and saw his meeting, already started, through a conference room window at the far end of the offices. People were seated around a rectangular table, trapped in the soundproofed capsule of office space.

Ben nodded through the window at his coworkers and offered what he hoped was an enthusiastic, warm yet professional expression. It was hard to look friendly with a smashed face. He felt the warrior paint of his makeup where it lay heavy on his skin. Would it crease?

His boss, Trisha, swiveled and turned a lever. The white blinds tipped. The room was cut off, his smile wasted on the dusty contours of louvered blinds. Had she done that on purpose?

Her timing was precise.

Not one person in the office had welcomed him back yet after his bloody nose vacation. He’d expected to groan at an office card on his desk, or to crowd in the break room for well-wishes and cheap cake. He didn’t want the card or the cake, but he wanted the connection a card could stand for. They circulated cards with every birthday, new baby, divorce, promotion, and vasectomy.

But apparently not for a crash in the john.

They acted like it didn’t happen.

That’d be fine, except it did happen, and it felt weird to leave so much unsaid. Could he be on the verge of losing his job and everybody knew but him? Or had somebody seen him with his pants down, nose pouring blood, blacked out? He had given them reason to look away, and here they were, still looking away.

What if there were pictures? Oh, God. Totally possible. Everybody had a camera phone. There could even be a camera hidden in the bathroom, some kind of corporate Homeland Security.

He’d Google it. Key words: bathroom, underwriter, nosebleed, cock.

He’d run jacking off through YouTube. How many videos would that call up? His palms started to sweat at the thought. His neck tightened.

He opened the conference room door. His coworkers were deep in discussion, a file on the table. Most people who worked at that level of the bank’s mortgage lending office were women, and the women were all divorced single moms, high school educated, who’d climbed the ladder from claims processor on up. This was their ceiling.

Management was all the same kind of tall, large-knuckled men. There were three managers with corner offices on that floor. Ben was tall, but apparently not tall enough.

He’d drifted into the pink-collar ghetto.

He found a chair, and kept a wary eye to see if anyone noticed his makeover. The underwriters didn’t look up from their pages. The only other man in the meeting pushed a credit report, bank statements, and a home appraisal toward Ben, without looking at him.

Trisha was assessing the file. She said, “So we’ve got low income going on.…”

“But trending upward,” the man said, and he raised a finger toward the ceiling. “And job stability.” That man was very small, with narrow bones and compact ears. He’d never be management.

Ben scanned the credit report. The primary borrower worked in a munitions storage facility in eastern Oregon, not far from where Ben grew up. The borrowers were a couple, a man and a woman. The wife, the secondary signatory on the loan app, was in nuclear waste containment.

He looked closer at the county on the form.

It was the same nuclear waste facility Ben grew up downwind of. There weren’t too many of them. He could picture the low, broken grass that lined the highway, the silhouette of industry against his old running ground. That woman had a long commute on empty roads.

She had great job stability. Nuclear waste would be around longer than the ozone.

He touched the edge of his eyebrow, then drew his hand away. If he didn’t touch it, the makeup would last longer. He tried not to think about his face.

Every file tells a story. It’s an underwriter’s assignment to read the story and decide if the financial narrative arcs toward happy or tragic. Each debt is a choice; character shows in accumulated debt.

In one month, four years back, the husband had racked up a major balance with an appliance store. After four years of minimal payments, it was still a high enough debt load to mean a top-of-the-line refrigerator, or a lower-priced full kitchen set: Either way, Ben would bet that spending spree indicated a first marriage.

The man’s name had been taken off a previous home loan, but the loan still made its way to the man’s credit report. That was a sure sign of divorce.

The two current borrowers shared an auto loan and a maxed-out credit line with Ethan Allen furniture: the sweeping outlay of fresh debt, fast signatures, an exuberant new start.

That’d be a second marriage.

Weddings are only the first step in learning to blow money together in the name of love.

The credit history of each borrower detailed the pursuit of happiness; love and money were mingled. When a dishwasher broke, or a garage door refused to open, when the transmission blew out on what had been a new car, the marriage would feel it.

Divorce was a cumulative response to designed obsolescence, warrantees running out.

He and Sarah lived with a nicked dining room table they found on the side of the road, and when he looked at the dings and scratches of somebody else’s life, he knew they’d done okay: They’d made a home for that table. They’d made a home without the false promise of happiness through overspending.

Credit reports were clean, pared down, beautiful in the details; debt illustrated the skeleton of interactions stripped of both romance and couples counseling, stripped of everything except the money trail.

Ben lost himself in the borrowers’ history and forgot about his own broken face, the makeup mask. He rubbed a hand along his chin.

Trisha said, “Eighty K in savings. Where’d that come from?” Her hair was thick as a wig, a blond helmet. Her face was well fed. She furrowed her eyebrows, then flipped back and forth through bank statements.

The applicants didn’t earn enough to have savings. Not in the past year. Their tax papers didn’t show interest earned, meaning they didn’t have money in savings the year before.

Another underwriter, a woman in her late thirties, with an actual pink collar sticking out from under a home-knit vest, asked, “Should we go there?”

That was underwriter’s shorthand: go there. Were they required by regulations to ask about the source of funds?

An older woman, breathing through her mouth, cut in, “I wouldn’t go there.” With twenty years’ experience, this woman always moved like her back hurt. She had a bag of potato chips open on the table and chewed like she meant business; those chips didn’t have a chance.

The man said, “I’d go there. If we don’t go there and the loan is audited …” He looked to Trisha.

The woman in the pink collar looked up and down the table.

Trisha said, “We’ll go there if those funds are necessary for closing.”

Ben’s head hummed, the bruise over his sinus cavity ripe and singing. He put two fingers to the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He used his thumb to move the chip of bone that sat on the side of the bridge of his nose, just under the skin. That chip was his tiny friend, with him but not part of him anymore.

The man on the loan was a veteran. He could qualify for a VA loan, a more complicated form, but they’d chosen the simple route.

Ben cut in. “It’s a conventional loan. If it’s not part of closing, we’re not required to go there.” He heard himself say it: go there. The phrase itself was a hit of poison.

Where was anybody going?

He pressed against his nose, and the pain radiated. It cut against his thoughts, and he liked the way that pain kept him present. The rest agreed, No, we won’t go there. Let’s not go there. We don’t have to.

They called off a major voyage.

The potato chip eater shook her bag upside down in celebration, crumbs tumbling into her thick palm. The way the makeup rested, visible, on the pink-collared woman’s face was what Ben thought of as a suburban mask. It was smooth, perfect, and a shade too dark. He saw now the line along her chin, where foundation came right to the edge of her pale neck. Why did people do that?

It was the lights. Then it dawned on him, and the moment froze—was his own haze of beige cream too dark in the flicker of fluorescents? It made his stomach knot. He tried to see himself in the aluminum bar of the office chair: There his face was warped.

He wanted to leave—put his hands to his face and flee. He was an actor in potentially f*cked-up costume. He tried to focus on the job: Get it done and get the hell out of the meeting.

He flipped past the credit report and on into the appraisal. Where a picture of the house in question should’ve been, there was a photo of a squat and gleaming corrugated building cut halfway into the hillside, surrounded by land, on the edge of a river. It was a grain silo. He said, “Is this a farm sale?” He squinted at the numbers: It was a slight quarter acre, with a low estimated land value. He looked at the photo again.

“Now you get the situation,” the man said. “No comps.”

Ben asked, “Of what?” Comps were meant to be comparable home sales to show relative value. There wasn’t even a house here.

The man said, “Our borrowers plan to live in a grain silo.” He reached over and turned Ben’s pages for him until he found one with a few blurry faxes of interior rooms. “That’s our home.” He tapped a finger to the pictures.

The silo’s outer walls were curved. Windows lined the walls, looking out over the hills. The kitchen was modern.

Ben examined what passed for comps: old farmhouses, old kitchens, broken screen doors. He knew those other houses. One was his old best friend’s uncle’s house, or just like it. He knew the layout: two bedrooms, one bath, no dining room at all.

They were the working-class shacks of his hometown.

He flipped back to the subject property. The silo was sleek. It was a castle, a turret. One picture showed a spacious, simple bedroom with a bed in the middle of the room. An individualist’s dream—somebody had personally converted that silo. It was like nothing he’d ever seen.

Trisha looked for the appraiser’s signature. “You can’t just take a house, make a few adjustments, and say it’s equal to a grain silo.”

The veteran and his second wife, with their bad health and their Ethan Allen debt, wanted to move into the silo and make the dream their own.

The small man said, “What about a geodesic dome?”

Trisha said, “A dome’s not a silo. We’ve done domes.”

The pink-collared underwriter in her genuine pink collar tapped the eraser end of her pencil against the table.

Trisha declared, “No precursor.” She pushed the file away.

One glossy photo showed how the sun hit the curve of the silo’s corrugated aluminum and sprang into a gleaming star, shining like a fever dream.

The army vet’s file told a simple story: The man had done everything a man is asked to do. He finished high school, joined the army, got married, bought appliances, had kids, and got divorced. Like a good soldier he got back in the action and married again. He worked forty hours a week at a job nobody wanted. His wife put in forty at her own toxic industry. All they wanted was to buy a grain silo on the edge of nowhere and call it home.

Ben said, “Three bathrooms?” That was a lot, for a one-bedroom. He pulled the blurry photocopies of photos closer to his face.

The pink-collared single mom looked at Ben. She said, “Want to go there?” She smiled, and tapped her eraser against her white teeth.

Somebody laughed, or coughed, or stifled a laugh. Three bathrooms.

Then they all looked away. Was that on purpose? He got it—he was Ben the bathroom guy. He wanted to say the word again, to check. He dared them. He tried it out. He said, “Full bathrooms, each one.”

Nobody looked at him.

He said, “No half baths.”

They kept their eyes on their pages. There was one throat clearing. He’d run that through YouTube: Ben + bathroom.

Trisha said, “No comps, we can’t go there.”

Ben wanted to go there, literally—find his way to a rolling hill with no neighbors—a cheap, gleaming grain silo of a home like a fort. Better yet would be a missile silo, insulated and hermetic. Just Sarah and him. It wouldn’t matter to him if they never got pregnant. He’d be happy with Sarah.

Trisha said, “Not in this lending climate.” She pushed the papers away.

Sorry, borrowers! Sorry to anybody who might want out. No precedent means no money. Banks don’t lend on the rebel dream.

Ben started to fold his pages closed. Then he ran a finger under the single glossy photo of the silo house and pulled it from its glue. He slid it into his blazer pocket. He saw the soft smudge of concealer where his mask had rubbed off on his fingers, onto the empty square left where the picture had been.





Arena couldn’t go back to Maya Angelou High—what the kids called My-High—until her mom talked to the principal. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transferred. She was expelled, and that was a massive transfer of energy: transferred from school to what?

She wore a T-shirt that said UPTOWN IS NEARTOWN. NEARTOWN IS DOWNTOWN. What the shirt didn’t say was the logical conclusion: Uptown was downtown. It was a syllogism, and syllogisms were beautiful. There was a name, PETE’S DINER, and a street address for uptown or downtown in some other city. Arena loved that shirt.

She flipped through her dad’s vinyl. The records were old and warped, had that great smell of their old paper covers, and they were hers. Her dad had written his name on them: Pete. One name only.

The Wipers. The Jackals. Those records told her that her life would’ve had a different sound track if he’d stuck around. Her mom listened to new age flutes with a trickling waterfall in the background that made Arena have to pee.

How was that remotely relaxing?

She looked at Lou Reed’s picture on the front of Transformer and said, “Hello, Father.”

On the back of that album there was another guy dressed as a hooker on the left-hand side of the cover, and then as a cowboy with a major boner on the right side, hot for himself. She put Lou Reed back in the stacks, because all the albums needed a fair chance to be her father’s voice for the day.

She closed her eyes, walking her fingers along the frayed paper spines. When she felt the right energy—one thin slip of a record casing calling to her—she slid an album from the stack and pulled it to her lap. Only then did she open her eyes.

Television, Marquee Moon.

That was auspicious. Tom Verlaine’s vulnerable, venerable croak would be today’s voice of her father’s wisdom, punked out and bitter.

Okay.

She opened the dusty, smoke-colored cover of an old Sears turntable. She took out the vinyl, held it so gently between four fingers, and blew across it. Someday those black discs would break, and the last bit of her dad would go.

Her room was jammed with clothes in piles, books in stacks, her bed. But the stereo was a temple and lived in a cleared space.

She put the album on the system, dropped the needle, and let Tom Verlaine channel her father.

She sat cross-legged, hugging her knees. Television, the band, was her father’s broken heart. Arena drank it in and waited for the sentences that would speak to her.

It was like reading tarot cards, or throwing the I Ching. It was better than a horoscope.

It didn’t take long before Tom Verlaine sang, “I understand all destructive urges … I see no eviiiiiiil—” The words stood out like a letter written to her. That was her dad!

He understood.

Tom Verlaine wouldn’t fault her for being expelled from school or even worse. Her father understood Tom Verlaine. If uptown was neartown, and neartown was downtown, Tom Verlaine was her papa and he understood everything.

Her dad’s unconditional love went on until the album ground to the end, the needle’s voice turned to a hiss, and the disc kept up a pointless spin. Arena lifted the arm.

To play it again would ruin the magic. Her job was to interpret her father’s wisdom, and what she heard was love.



Downstairs, almost noon, her mom was on the couch and on the phone. She was wearing her “sardine apron,” an apron she’d bought at a garage sale and used mostly to keep sardine oil off her clothes. Nyla ate a steady diet of sardines for her health. The house smelled like fish and olive oil. There was an empty tin with the lid peeled back on the coffee table.

She hung up the phone as Arena came down the stairs. Her hair was still in yesterday’s ponytail. Her mascara had traveled beneath her eyes. Nyla said, “Well, that went exactly nowhere.”

Arena knew without asking: Nyla’d been on the phone with Maya Angelou High. Instead she said, “Don’t you have to open the store?”

Nyla said, “I have to go down to your school.”

There was an awkward silence. Arena didn’t want to think about school.

“Maybe afterward, I could take you out for lunch,” Nyla said.

Her whole life, Arena had never spent so much time alone with her mom as in the months since Celeste moved out. Before, she’d gotten by with listening. How did anyone ever know what to say?

“Mom?” Her voice sounded uncertain. Nyla cocked her head and waited. Arena asked, “Can I show you something? It’s near your store.” Arena heard herself say it: Near. What did that mean? When did something near quit being near and move into far? What was in between?

The words echoed in her head: It’s near the store, we’re near the store. Uptown, downtown, neartown.

Her mom made as much sense as anything: Expelled + lunch date = good again. She could feel her mother’s brain compute the math. But Nyla didn’t understand destructive urges. Her mother was about preserving the planet and every ecosystem on it. Her mother was about trapping energy, preserving her children as babies in photos all over the house. Arena said, “I want to show you the Temple Everlasting of Life on Earth.”