“No choice.”
He waves his arms like a distraught stick figure. “Because free will is an illusion?” Is anyone not pissed at me today? “Maybe you need to think this over.”
“That’s helpful. Maybe you need to go screw yourself.”
“Maybe you need me to tutor you on Robert Frost and vocab, asshole.”
The most ridiculous part of the day is that I like the poem.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Only some guys don’t get to screw around in the woods in Wherever-the-Hell, New Hampshire, bird-watching or whatever Robert Frost was doing. They get stuck on a third path that leads straight out of the woods.
“Have fun telling your mom,” Calvin says.
? ? ?
Unfortunately, I’m not doing that well breaking it to my mom that I’m heading out of the endless subdivisions and strip malls of home. She’s the kind of mom who, if you have a condom in your wallet, will find it and want to know what it’s doing there. You’d think she’d have been happy she had one stand-up kid: she wasn’t. It’s hard to figure, if she notices something that small, how I’m going to slip out of town.
I love my mom—she went through worse than I did—but I’m going rogue, and there’s nothing she likes about rogue on me. I’m thinking I’ll tell her over dinner, but she slides a platter of pork chops across the kitchen table and clears her throat, generally a preamble to me being in for it.
“If this is about mouthing off to Mr. Berger, I’m not apologizing for how I interpret a poem.”
“Jackson, look at me and tell me you didn’t cut class this morning.”
“I haven’t cut all year! How can you ask me that as if I did it?”
I don’t ever catch a break from her. When I cut one day after APs last year, she acted like I was headed straight to lockup. She made me paint the garage two coats of Navajo White. By the second coat, it was ninety-five degrees outside, and the garage looked fine without it.
The way she sat quietly for her whole married life when she had this in her is a testament to my dad’s powers of intimidation.
“Is this a random check to see if I’m a repeat offender? Does the house need painting? Thanks, Mom.”
“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t look sorry. “The motion detectors went off this morning, and the dogs were in the yard. If you came home, that would explain it.”
All of a sudden, I don’t care what she thinks I did. “When did they go off? Is there security footage? Did the patrol come by?”
“Calm down! Security malfunctioned. It happens. The fire probably destroyed some wires. There’s nothing to worry about—unless you cut.”
“Seriously, Mrs. Manx?”
“There hasn’t been a peep from your dad’s business associates in years. There’s no reason it would start now.”
The ways she says business associates could make plants wither.
“Somebody was in our house. What does the security guy say?”
“Jack, enough! It was a hiccup in the wiring.”
It wasn’t a hiccup in the wiring.
“Try not to get so overwrought!” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.” I might hit the ma’am too hard—I go to a school where five hundred kids are forced to speak as if we were alive during the Civil War, so it happens.
“Try that again without the smirk.”
Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. It doesn’t matter how respectfully or disrespectfully I do this. I have to get to Ohio now. By Thursday, by the second Don calls, I need to be ready. The second after he calls, I need to be gone. I need a plan and I want a beer, which means that I have to push a mound of string beans around my plate until I can get to Calvin’s.
? ? ?
I’m sprawled in Calvin’s desk chair, flanked by his computers and their many monitors, and the equipment that takes up half his room. He and Monica are cross-legged on the bed, holding controllers and playing Mermaid Ninjas. Monica made Mermaid Ninjas. It’s the most boring game ever conceived unless you’re really into mermaids. I sit there while they nuke angry mermen and evil aquatic elves.
“What happens if you pause the game?”
Calvin doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. “I’ll lose my trident.”
“I’ll buy you a new one. Come on. Get me out of Nevada. Some way I don’t fail senior year.”
“Good luck,” Monica says. “People with two years to go in this mind-numbing hell don’t get why a few more weeks is such a big deal. Don’t you want all your Jack Manx end-of-year whoop-dee-do? Don’t you want to see your name on several fake gold plaques?”
I resent the hell out of the fact that, thanks to Don, I can’t stick around and collect my fake gold plaques. But some guy was in my house, tripping the motion detectors, taunting me, and he wins. The only question is whether my future has to be the spoils of war.
“How can two people who despise Pueblo so much not get this?”