AS I’M DRIVING BACK TO SCHOOL FROM THE LIQUOR store, I keep thinking about this TV show I used to watch in New York, The Confessor. The title character, the host, is a dude called Antoine Abbotson, who’s short and smiley and wears a navy blue suit. Each show, he brings in three people who each have a secret. The idea is, the Confessor bids up the price to get them to confess that secret on live TV. But if he hits a certain dollar threshold—a concealed number somewhere under $50,000—the contestant walks away empty-handed. Sometimes, though, the people on that show make bank. One woman got paid $47,000 to explain to her husband that the front room in their house smelled awful because she’d pooped into their upright piano while sleepwalking, couldn’t reach down far enough to extract the resulting poop after the fact, and never had the heart to tell anyone.
It’s strange, watching that show, seeing how people price their secrets. My family hangs their eccentricities around their necks when they walk out the door every day. There’s Uncle Jeremy, who won a trophy for having the longest mustache in New York State. There’s my cousin Cabret, who dropped out of college to start her own private-investigation service. And you can’t forget Great-Grandma Louise, who at age ninety-one lives alone in a cabin in the Catskills and still checks her traps every morning for dead animals.
My family values honesty for a couple of reasons: first, the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt not bear false witness”; and second, my family is full of givers. Givers palm off their secrets with every handshake; they lay it all bare.
Me? I keep one secret from my parents. It’s boring, and everyone at school knows it: I sell drugs. Not hard drugs, just weed and booze, but I’m not about to tell my mom and dad. They think my money is leftover from sweeping aisles down at Brent Hardware, where I work over the summers.
It’d break their hearts if I ever told them, but as selfless as they are, what they give me never feels like enough. I always want more, and Paloma only makes it worse. This place seemed unreal when I got here freshman year: a dollhouse town, unimaginably small, and it’s shrunk since then. I’ve met everyone. I’ve been everywhere. There’s nothing left to collect now, except profits from deals. It gets depressing, sometimes.
As I turn into the junior lot, the cases of beer make a chorus of metallic clinks in the back of my truck. Then a scuffed-up Camry looms out of nowhere, its horn blaring. My foot jerks toward the brake pedal. Too late.
The Camry smacks into my front bumper, and I lurch forward. The sound isn’t so much a crash as a thump. “Car thump” doesn’t sound as dramatic as “car crash.” I feel sort of gypped.
In the sudden stillness, I take inventory of my body, scribbling a mental list across my mind’s eye:
? Icy skin.
? Pulse in strange places—earlobes, forearms?
? No pain.
I’m in one piece, at least, and I have something to cross off my “Never Have I Ever” list.
The wounded Camry pulls into a spot, and I park beside it, bolting out to check the damage. My truck door squeals as I swing it shut.
The Camry came out unscathed, except for a tiny dent under one headlight. My pickup, on the other hand, looks as if it got into a fight with a Transformer. The Camry must’ve hit the last thing keeping my front bumper attached. Now it dangles askew, a lopsided leer.
My jaw tightens, and I bury one hand in my hair. Look at me, worrying over a broken, mud-encrusted pickup. What would my middle-school friends think?
It takes a minute to shake the thought. First of all, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have saved up enough for a new car, a nice one, before graduation. Second of all, I’m out of touch with everyone from the Pinnacle School, so their opinions don’t matter.
Still, I can’t get rid of the complex that place gave me.
My middle school was a private academy in Brooklyn’s richest neighborhood. I was a scholarship kid, the poorest person there by a margin so huge, it was humiliating. Everything about me stood out, from my haircut to my clothes to my commute. An hour’s trip separated our apartment in Coney Island from Pinnacle’s cushy spot in Brooklyn Heights, and I did homework on the Q, wedged into a corner of the train car beside my mother.
Pinnacle kids never seemed to think about money, but around them, it was all I saw. Every break, my Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded: photos of spring trips to the Maldives, skiing trips to Aspen, and summer homes in Europe. They wore their wealth effortlessly. The preppier crowd had polo players and Golden Fleece logos on their pastel clothes. The “alternative” kids wore baggy woolen tops and artfully shredded leggings, but it was the same old story of unspeakable amounts of money, just translated into a different language.
I don’t miss that place. I still feel embarrassed about my family because of it. I still worry how we look to people, even here in Paloma, where we’re now comfortably lower-middle class.
“Lucas, you okay?”
I look up from my bumper. The sight of a familiar face floods me with relief—I’ve dealt to Matt Jackson since I started freshman year.
I nod at Matt. “You good?”
“Yeah. You wanna call the cops?”
“Cops.” I glance at my truck bed. “Right.”
Matt eyes the tarp that covers the cases. “We don’t have to. My car’s fine, so if you’re okay driving around with your bumper half off, be my guest.”
“Thanks, dude. Appreciate it.”