“If whatever you do works, can I come?” Monica says, cuddling up to Calvin as if I weren’t there.
“This isn’t a joke! This is my life!”
Monica and Calvin snap to attention.
“Damn,” Calvin says. “Go with that. Suppressed rage. Very black raincoat.”
Monica yelps, “That’s not funny, Calvin! Just because—”
“That’s the point,” he says. “That’s why it’ll work. Scare them. Go all Manx on them.”
Monica is too embarrassed to look anywhere but her lap. “In case you don’t know, Manx, that’s not how anybody thinks of you.”
“Ignore her,” Calvin says. “That’s what everybody thinks.”
Tell me something I don’t know.
? ? ?
The headmaster always stares at me like I’m slime that snuck into his school when my application got stuck to someone else’s admission folder. The last time he had to hand me a trophy, his look could have melted it down.
So here I sit in his office, using my slimy lineage to my advantage.
“Do you think it would be okay if all my seniors up and left before graduation?” he asks.
“No, sir. But I can’t take the pressure. I need to be outside, not around people. . . .”
“You can’t go camping in a few weeks?” But he looks worried as hell.
I get his point, but this guy’s a douche. He treats me like a criminal fuckup: hello, meet the criminal fuckup.
I say, “I feel like I’m going to explode.”
You can tell this is why he didn’t want me at El Pueblo in the first place, because I’d turn out to be the kid who exploded all over study hall and CNN.
“Should we call Dr. Biggs?” He’s reaching for his landline, hoping he can foist me off on the counselor before I combust.
“I had counseling when my father died. No more—I can’t take it.”
Well played: Headmaster Enright looks like something’s stuck halfway down his throat.
“If I call up your teachers, they’re all going to tell me your final papers are in?”
“One left. I’ll have it on your desk tomorrow.”
“And you’ve got this camping trip planned out—we’re not going to find you stoned and playing video games somewhere?”
Insult me some more. Six years of honor roll, and you think I’ve been waiting for the day I could get stoned and play Call of Duty Black Ops II for a month in my room? Yes, sir.
“No, sir. Zion. Then Yosemite. Then Mercer freshman orientation.”
I watch him balance the pain of doing me a favor against the pleasure of getting me out of his school. I watch him start to beam as pleasure wins.
15
Cat
Now that I’ve got the burner, the whole time I’m planning my field trip to South Texas Tech, Galkey, I’m distracted by terror (good) and obsessed with how easy it would be to call Olivia (bad).
Back when the broken pay phone by the Five Star was front and center in my fantasy life, the fact that I couldn’t call home was a lot clearer. Half the little silver number buttons and the entire receiver on that phone are gone.
End of story.
Plus, according to Law & Order, you can trace pay-phone calls to a shed in a field full of sheep in Romania if you know what you’re doing.
But it’s a different episode of Law & Order that clinches it.
I sit on the saggy king bed I’m supposed to be making, wanting the police not to be able to track the villain’s burner so bad, I can hardly bear to watch.
The villain gets away.
I tear out of there in broad daylight, pedal the red bike as far into the ranchland on the edge of town as I can go and still get a couple of bars. I’m clutching the phone so hard, I’m afraid it’s going to crumble into black and silver plastic shards right in my hand.
I have to squeeze the words out individually. “Are? You? Alone?”
My heart is blanched white, the blood wrung out of it. Not because of my situation, for once, but at the realization of my complete lack of self-control.
“Nick!”
“Shhhh!”
Her voice drops to a whisper. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
Collapsing lungs. Constricting throat. Eyes full of tears that sting worse than at the eye doctor.
“I just want you to know I’m okay. I’m sorry. Then I have to go.”
“You can’t do that!” Olivia yelps. “Why are you in rehab? Steve’s acting like you were cheering on crack.”
I’m where? Steve’s acting like what? Rehab because why? Three hits of marijuana in Ann Arbor last summer and maybe too much party beer? The only thing I did in the backseat of the Camaro that wouldn’t make Steve go ballistic is I turned down a whole pharmacy.
Before I remember that it doesn’t matter what Steve says.
Before I remember that even though Olivia is rattling on as if everything’s the same as always, nothing is the same.
She’s the person I talked to about everything—cheats-before-spring-formal Connor, and Steve’s antiquated ideas of how girls should act, and what I was wearing to school the next day. Now she can’t know anything.