From behind me, Jason walks into my line of vision, keeping his head down. It seems like I may have struck a chord, but I’m too high on adrenaline to really know. He gestures to the other guys, and they stalk out of the woods in the direction of a stretch of main road where kids always park their cars when they come to drink.
I trudge the opposite way, resisting every temptation to look back at Gideon, and end up at the edge of Ruth’s wrecked garden, surveying the damage. A line has been crossed. He’s just not the same person anymore, right? He wears their dumb clothes and teases their weak targets. Still, the same little hopeful recorded message plays over and over in my head: Maybe the short, chubby comedy nerd is still in there somewhere! At what point do you start writing off the only person who you thought really got you?
I hear the shutter door bounce twice, and before I can warn her, Ruth pops out, wide-eyed, in an uncharacteristically feminine kimono with her hair in a scrunchie high on her head.
“Are you okay?” I ask Ruth.
“I’m fine. I was sleeping.” She surveys her garden.
“Do you want me to . . .” I helplessly sort of move my hands around in a way that feels appropriately sympathetic. She shakes her head.
“We can’t do anything about it tonight. Besides, it’s easy to grow them back.”
Still, I’m mad on her behalf. “Ugh, those guys are—”
“Those aren’t guys; they’re kids. Please, go to bed. You can help me take care of it tomorrow if you want. This is way too much late-night excitement for someone past menopause.”
She sighs, a brief cloud passing over her usual laissez-faire attitude.
Even if she’d never admit it, I know how much she loves looking at her garden.
Back in bed but wide-awake, I wonder if I even know Gideon, or know anyone really. Is this the moment I’m supposed to realize Gideon’s actually a shitty person who just happens to have excellent taste in comedy? Or is this the moment I realize I’m too judgmental and living in my own weird cerebral universe and have unrealistic standards for boys, or just for life?
It’s been bothering me more and more that I can’t ever see anything objectively, that every observation I make is filtered through my personal lens whether I like it or not. I mean, all my favorite novels are like that. F. Scott Fitzgerald basically is Gatsby, so obviously it’s Gatsby’s book, and Daisy comes off like a flake. But maybe in Daisy’s unwritten book, Gatsby is a flashy, patronizing asshole who thinks he could win her with money and fancy stuff. And that might be an even better book.
Eventually, sometime around when dawn breaks and I hear the jingle of Dawn’s keys landing on the kitchen island, I fall asleep wishing more than anything that I could float outside my head and see things for what they truly, honestly, objectively are . . . and kill the tiny voice in my head that constantly questions whether that truth even exists.
Whatever. One thing at a time.
Chapter 13
THANKS TO THE MORONIC SHUFFLING OF JASON TOUS— I can tell by the imprint that it was his neon green-and-yellow Air Jordans—the zinnias cannot be salvaged. But some of the American Beauty roses are okay, and the snapped lavender bunches can be dried and hung. (Ruth is not the sort of person who would do that, but Dawn is at least the sort of person who would make an obsessive Pinterest board full of intricately hung dried lavender and then not do it.) “I’m gonna come back and fix this as best I can tomorrow, okay?” I ask.
Ruth shrugs and nods. I can tell she’s still pretending she doesn’t care as much as she does about her flowers. Apparently there is no expiration date on this “pretending not to care” nonsense. I have a hunch that she thinks openly caring that much about a garden is encroaching on Tuesdays with Morrie territory.
Instead, I focus on the eggs, which oozed like gross gelatinous grenade-lumps on Ruth’s roof until they half froze in the chill. As I scrape and wipe them away, the smell of weed drifts tellingly by. Underneath me, Ruth is sitting on her porch, wearing the same rumpled high ponytail she slept in. She’s vaping. Who the hell got her a vaporizer?
“I’m gonna pay you extra for this,” says Ruth.
“No, don’t.” I make a face as I shovel the remnants of one cracked egg into the plastic bag on my arm.
“What?” she yells from below.
“Don’t pay me extra!” I call back. I think agreeing on a certain amount of money an hour is fair, but I don’t like bonuses; they always feel like charity.
“That’s very sweet of you,” she says.
Finished, I sidle on my butt over to the ladder, climb down a few rungs, and jump the rest of the way. I wipe my flat palms together with a sense of accomplishment.
“Your roof is normal.”
“Not as long as I’m living under it,” she quips.
“That’s true.” I peel the disgusting icicle-eggy gloves off and balance them on the porch rail.
“So . . . it’s a destruction holiday,” Ruth says, trying to grasp the concept of Mischief Night, which I explained to her as I prepared for aborted-chicken-zygote battle this morning.
“In essence.”
She exhales a white cloud that lazily rises. “Did you know them?”