Anywhere but Here (15 page)

I assume Dad is thinking about this too, until he turns away.

“I'm going to work,” he proclaims. “You should get your ass to school.”

Great. That went just perfectly. If filmmaking doesn't work out, I'll be sure to put drug and alcohol counselor on my list of career options.

As the door shuts behind him, I squeeze my head in my hands as if I might squish a solution from my brain. And I do, eventually, once I calm down enough to think straight. The answer is this: I'm leaving town. Whether or not my dad can keep his life together, I'm getting out.

Greg and I are killing zombies. He's killing most of them by himself since he gets absorbed in the game and forgets to share the controller. But that's okay. Tonight, I'm content to sit on his living room couch and provide moral support.

His date with Lauren went really badly.

This probably shouldn't make me so happy. I
want
Lauren to move on. That girl deserves everything she wants out of life. But not necessarily now. And not with Greg.

I smile, just as Greg blows the head off some dead creature with a chain-saw-massacre-style blood splatter. He takes my expression for approval. Apparently, this new gaming system was a present from his dad, probably to make up for bailing on the marriage.

“Good graphics,” I say.

At least there's no sign of a stripper in his dad's life. Maybe Greg's not fully appreciating what he now has: two available parents, two bedroom choices, and a supply of guilt-driven gifts. Some would say he's got it made. He should probably stay home and enjoy it instead of chasing certain ex-girlfriends.

I find myself grinning again. Greg told me Lauren had seemed into things at first. Then they drove over the border for pizza and couldn't find anything to talk about in the car. On the way home, Lauren had some sort of food poisoning and threw up. Basically, their relationship is doomed.

“I don't think zombie blood would actually spurt,” I say as he kills another batch. “Aren't they already dead? Do you think their hearts still beat?”

Greg snorts and turns up the volume.

“Watch this,” he says, switching to the sniper rifle. Zooming in, he targets one across a courtyard and fires. There's the blood spurt again. And this time, a single eye pops from the zombie's head and rolls onto the cobblestones.

If there's one thing in the world that would be a turnoff for Greg, it's a girl throwing up in his car. He loves that car. In video game terms: epic fail.

“Nice shot,” I say.

“I should play video games for a living.” He nods.

“If we were getting paid, we'd be loaded right now. I think we've been playing for five hours.”

“I'm going to be like that kid in the news who had a seizure,” he says.

“Or the guy who dropped dead after forty-eight straight hours of online raiding.”

“Cool,” Greg says.

Then, after a minute, he hits pause and rests his head on the back of the couch. “We couldn't do this with Lauren and Hannah, you know.”

“Nope.”

“So who needs 'em?”

“Exactly.”

•  •  •

The next night, as Greg and I sit at a wrought-iron table on the sidelines of the school Halloween dance, I'm thinking I should have taken his theory more seriously. We should have stayed home and played video games.

For one thing, Lex has been glaring at me all night. She's about the height of a
Wizard of Oz
munchkin, so it shouldn't be disconcerting. But it is.

“You're right, you know. Women are just as bad as everyone says,” I tell Greg, yelling over the music.

“Nope,” he says.

“Seriously?”

“They're worse.” He scowls, crossing his arms over his chest.

Lex is pouring punch at the table along the side wall of the gym. Between filling glasses, she pauses to sneer at me again. I shake my head. Lex and I have never been close, but she's Lauren's best friend. We've spent a lot of time together, and she's never given me the evil eye before.

“Why is she doing that? Do you think she hates doctors?” I'm dressed in a lab coat because Hannah was desperate to wear a sexy nurse costume and convinced that we had to dress in coordinating outfits. Her idea, not mine. But after seeing her in her white miniskirt and those stockings . . . Well, if all I had to do was turn up at the Halloween dance with a stethoscope, that seems a small concession.

Greg is chewing on a stalk of wheat. Other than that, he's dressed in the same clothes he wears every day. According to him, he's in costume as a farmer.

He mumbles something around the wheat, but I can't hear him over the music.

“What?”

He removes the stalk. “She doesn't hate doctors,” he yells. “She hates you.”

I nod. “But why?”

“Can we talk about this later? I'm watching your girlfriend dance.”

I shoot Greg a look. It seems a little early to be commenting about another girlfriend of mine. But the guy has such an expression of joy on his face, it's hard to take that away. Who can blame him? Hannah is gyrating against a vampire. A witch, an alien, and some sort of odd tree/clothesline combination are dancing around her.

“That girl is like a porch light attracting moths,” Greg says.

“You know that kills the moths, right?”

“Who cares? You're a lucky man, Cole.”

Hannah now has an alien grinding against her. Shifting out of his crotch reach, she beckons me to the dance floor. I'm considering it when something icy and wet sluices over my head and down my neck.

“What the—?” I leap to my feet, wiping my face on my arm so I can see. Lex is standing beside my chair, empty glass clutched in her fist. Her teeth are clenched and her limbs are tensed like the psycho girl in a Quentin Tarantino film.

“How can you just sit there like everything's normal?” she spits.

I open my mouth, then close it again. Isn't everything normal? This seems like a trick question.

“Do you know where Lauren is tonight? She's at home, feeling like crap.”

“Okay . . .” What does she want me to do about this?

“She's a mess!” Lex says, as if I might have missed the point.

“Sorry?” I offer.

“You're not sorry.” Lex has a very strange way of moving her lips more than is necessary to form her words. I've noticed it before, but it's more obvious when her face is this close to mine.

“Lex, it's more than three—no, four—months after Lauren and I broke up, and I'm supposed to know that she has the flu?”

Normally I would be mad. I do, after all, have a trail of sticky juice trickling down my back. But I'm starting to wonder if Lex is having some sort of mental break. It might be best to keep her calm.

“Lex, you know I'm not a real doctor, right? This is a costume. Cos-tume.” From the corner of my eye, I see Greg crack up.

Lex throws her cup at me this time. She's only a hairsbreadth away from me and the cup is plastic. I don't think it has quite the effect she's hoping for.

“You're a bastard.”

With one last glare, she turns and stalks out of the gym.

I collapse back in my chair. Greg is laughing so hard he's wiping tears from his eyes. He extracts a flask from his pocket and passes it over.

“Like I said,” he yells. “You're a lucky man.”

Hannah is waving me toward her again. When I shake my head, she comes to get me, hands outstretched. Her breasts . . . well, they cannot be contained by that nurse uniform.

“Come dance,” she shouts.

“I can't!” I lift my arms, exposing my purple-with-punch lab coat.

“What happened?”

“An unsatisfied patient.”

“Poor thing!” She leans toward me, smiling. “We'd better go. I can nurse you back to health.”

It is the best offer I've had all night and I allow myself to be led from the gym.

“Lucky man,” Greg calls after me. “You're a lucky man.”

Which could be true, if Hannah comes home with me. And if Dad's out of the house. And if I can concentrate on this girl's nursing skills, not on the crapload of craziness in life. If all those things happen, I might possibly be a lucky man.

•  •  •

Dad got a load of logs delivered for firewood. I get home from a trip downtown on Sunday to find him bucking them with his chain saw.

When I see him in his work shirt, sweat stains spreading from beneath his arms, and when I smell the mix of gasoline
and dusty-sweet sawdust hanging in the cold air, it's like a dose of relief is injected into my veins. I feel it traveling through me. I guess I hadn't realized how worried I've been that Dad might become permanently sunk in his recliner, remote control in one hand and beer in the other. Maybe I've been waiting for the day when he doesn't haul himself up in time for work.

I'm about to offer my help when I see the beer sitting on a stump, a few steps away.

Of course he couldn't leave his drink inside.

I stomp by him and into the house. Over the buzz of the blade cutting into the next block of fir and the chips flying like wood turned to waterfalls, I doubt he even notices I'm home.

Now I need a beer.

Upstairs, I crack open a bottle and wander to the kitchen window, where I can peer down into the driveway. Dad's got a rhythm going. The chain saw slices through as if the log's a jelly roll. Sweep, sweep, sweep and the tree lies in pieces, ready to be axed into woodstove-size chunks. Dad's done this every fall that I can remember. A couple years ago, my mom and I would have been out there with him, rolling hunks of wood out of his way and, later, stacking the chopped pieces into a neat, jigsaw-puzzle pile under the overhang of the carport.

Below me, Dad pauses to arrange a new log. He sets the chain saw on a large stump in the middle of the driveway. Then
he kicks some rounds out of the way and begins to roll a new log into position.

The chain saw's still roaring.

As I watch, it vibrates its way through a slow circle, the blade getting closer and closer to the backs of Dad's legs as he struggles with the next log. He's not looking.

I glance at the stairs, calculating the amount of time it will take me to run down to the garage door, skirt past the saw, and alert Dad to the danger. Too long. The blade will be at his leg before then. I could bang on the window. But even if he hears me above the motor, he might step back into the blade when he turns.

There's no way to warn him. It's like watching a horror film when you know the murderer's lurking in the next room and the lead actor steps closer and closer. All you want to do is shout at the screen, but there's no way you can stop the lead as he puts his hand on the handle and the door creaks open. . . .

Here, there's nothing to do but stand with my breath locked in my lungs, one hand clenched around my beer bottle so tightly the glass might shatter. The saw blade rattles on its stump, creeping still nearer.

He turns. At the last possible moment, he turns. With a surprised look at the blade, Dad dances out of the way and steps around to grasp the handle. Then, without much of a pause (because, unlike me, he hasn't spent the last moments in a frozen
panic) and without glancing up (because he doesn't know I was about to watch him amputate a limb on our driveway), he's bucking the next log. Slice, slice, slice, so casually it should be illegal.

I consider locking myself in my room. Next year, I'm not going to be around. If he cuts himself up, he'll bleed out before anyone notices. Part of me thinks he may as well practice his independence now. But of course, I put my half-empty beer in the sink, dig my work boots out of the closet, and head outside.

Once there, I take a deep breath. There's really nothing better than the smell of freshly cut wood and air just cold enough to remind you that you'll need the woodstove soon. If I help stack the damn wood one last time, it's not because I'm going to stick around and become Dad's safety net. It's because I happen to like the smell of sawdust.

After I roll a few sections out of the way, Dad turns off the saw. He holds it in one fist, as if it's as light as a beer, and wipes his face on his other sleeve.

“You know Sheri?” he says.

“Not as well as you do.”

“Don't be a smart-ass.”

This is somewhat deserved, and I remain silent as I roll another log.

“That night you picked us up on the street, that wasn't the first time I seen her.”

You know, there are appropriate places for this sort of thing. In Catholic churches, for example. There are dark, carved-wood booths with heavy curtains across the front where you can confess your sins to a priest instead of your son.

“I mean, it hasn't been all that long,” he says. “And I sure as hell didn't plan for this to happen, but . . .”

“Whatever, Dad. No worries. I'm going to go over to Greg's for a while.” If he's going to emote about Sheri, he can buck the logs by himself and cut off his leg for all I care.

“I'm trying to tell you something here. Will you hold your horses for a damned minute?”

“You know what? I don't really want to hear it. Mom's been gone barely more than a year. A year. It's bad enough that you're screwing a stripper. Now you want to tell me your love story? I don't want to hear it.” I give the log a kick, which hurts, and which also feels a little juvenile after I've done it. I suppose I can't be the mature one in this family a hundred percent of the time.

“Sheri's expecting.”

“Expecting what?”

“She's pregnant.”

“She's
what
?” I was worried about the chain saw, and he's dropping fucking atomic bombs.

“Sheri's pregnant,” Dad says, not looking at me. He's gazing
out over the street as if the answer to his problems might drive up. He's still holding the chain saw. This is good because if it were on the stump, I might be tempted to pick it up and use it as a weapon. I might make that horror film into a reality.