THE PART-TIME HOLIDAY HELP MRS. PETRIDIS had hired didn’t know Harry Potter from Langston Hughes. And one of them—usually Chad—stopped me every ten seconds to ask for help locating a book because apparently the alphabet confounded the hell out of him.
I hadn’t seen Mrs. Ross come in, but I was at a table eating my lunch when she approached, carrying a stack of GED prep books. She stopped when she saw me. Her eyes widened slightly, and she looked like she didn’t know whether to run or pretend like I was invisible.
“You don’t have to leave,” I said. “I know you don’t remember Tommy.”
Mrs. Ross didn’t respond, but she didn’t run away either. She set her books on the table farthest from me and sat facing the window.
After Tommy disappeared, I’d scoured my journals for traces of him. But instead of my history with Tommy, I’d found one without him. Instead of me approaching Lua in sixth grade at Tommy’s urging, we’d met because she’d stolen five dollars from me and had gotten into a fight when I’d called her out on it, earning us both detention. According to my journals, I had taken Sonia Jackson to the eighth-grade Halloween dance. And afterward we’d gone with a group of her friends to see the newest movie in the Dr. Deadeyes franchise where, in the dark of the theater, Sonia had held my hand and kissed me.
Tommy had slipped out of some parts of my history easily. Parties we’d attended together became parties I’d gone to with Lua or Dustin or alone. Dates Tommy had taken me on had simply never happened. I’d even apparently dated a boy named Erik Bode in tenth grade whom I’d met through Dustin. It hadn’t lasted, because Erik’s father, who hadn’t known Erik was bi, freaked when he caught us making out on Erik’s bedroom floor and transferred Erik to military school.
But other events, pieces of my history in which Tommy had been tightly intertwined, made less sense without him. The first weekend after I got my car, we drove to Orlando for no other reason than that we could. I got us lost in the city and we stopped in front of a phone company to figure out where we were and how to get home. Without warning, Tommy had run inside the building and returned less than a minute later with an armful of Orlando phone books.
We’d laughed about it the whole drive back to Cloud Lake.
Without Tommy, I’d taken the trip alone. For no reason that I had explained in my journal, I’d driven to Orlando, stolen a stack of phone books, and driven home.
My journals were filled with a hundred memories like that. Events that lost all meaning without him.
If my memories had been replaced with ones that made sense, I might have eventually come to believe I’d dreamed him. But whoever or whatever had erased Tommy had left behind too many inconsistencies that defied explanation. Like the phone books. That’s what convinced me I hadn’t imagined Tommy.
Even if I tried to explain all that to Mrs. Ross, I doubted she’d believe me. Instead, I watched her while I ate my lunch and wondered what had filled the Tommy gaps in her life. Tommy had blamed himself for his mother’s situation. He’d believed if she’d never gotten pregnant with him, she wouldn’t have married and stayed with an asshole like Carl Ross, and she would have finished high school and gone to college. I knew from when I’d called the police on the Fourth of July that she didn’t have any children, and that she was still married to Mr. Ross—and the faded bruises on the backs of her arms were evidence enough he was still an abusive prick—but why had she dropped out of high school if not to have Tommy? Who or what, if not Tommy, had kept her from leaving her husband?
I doubted she would have responded favorably to me asking, so I kept my questions to myself.
Twenty minutes remained of my lunch break, but I overheard Chad arguing at the register with a customer, so I gathered my trash and trudged back into the war zone.
Hours later, at closing time, Mrs. Ross was still working. I approached her table and cleared my throat. She flinched but didn’t look up.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that we’re closing.”
“What time is it?” she mumbled.
“Nine.”
Mrs. Ross’s eyes flew wide. “Nine?” She rubbed her eyes with the balls of her hands. “Do you know anything about binomial equations? I swear it must’ve been the devil who invented algebra.”
“Actually, algebra’s roots go all the way back to the ancient Babylonians.”
“Either way, anyone who says they love math has got to be soft-headed.”
I knocked my skull with my knuckles. “Ten on Mohs hardness scale.”
Mrs. Ross laughed and her cheeks glowed, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them—and how much she reminded me of Tommy—until that moment.
“You’re a weird young man.”
“You’ll get no argument from me. I suck at math, but if you need help with the writing sections, I’m your guy.”
Mrs. Ross opened her mouth to speak, but whatever she’d been about to say was lost when Mrs. Petridis yelled at me from the back room to lock the doors and bring her the till to count.
“I should get home,” Mrs. Ross said. She scooted back her chair and stood. “My husband will be wondering about his dinner.”
I wanted to stop her. To ask her about Tommy and find out what her life had been like without him and dig through her memories for any stray scraps that might remain. Even if my friends and family had forgotten Tommy, I couldn’t believe his own mother had. But I didn’t want to scare her away again.
So I said, “FOIL.”
Mrs. Ross stopped at the door. “What?”
“FOIL,” I said again. “It’s a mnemonic for solving binomial equations.” It was also the only thing I remembered from Mrs. Alley’s freshman algebra class. “First, outside, inside, last. You multiply the terms in that order. FOIL.”
Mrs. Ross stared at me like I’d spoken Akkadian, but a hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “FOIL,” she said, nodded, and then slipped out the door.
1,780,000,030 LY
WARREN’S GOING-AWAY PARTY FELT MORE like a “go away” party. Mom, Dad, Renny, and I sat at the breakfast nook wearing party hats and eating gyros and mushy saganaki from the Greek place up the road. I’d positioned myself between my parents to act as a buffer, and every time they looked like they were headed for a fight, I changed the subject. I refused to let them ruin one of our last nights with Renny.
He wasn’t leaving for four more days—January second—but this was the only time Renny, Mom, Dad, and I could coordinate our schedules.
“Where’s training, again?” I asked right after Dad remarked about the dryness of his gyro, an obvious knock at Mom’s decision not to cook Renny’s last meal at home.
“Fort Benning,” Renny answered with his mouth full.
“Fun.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Dad said. “Your drill sergeants won’t let you sleep until noon.”
Mom had barely touched her dinner, because she was waiting for the éclair pie in the fridge—which was the only reason we ordered takeout from the Greek place. Seriously, the pie was amazing.