Ask the Passengers (4 page)

I read books about schools that have gay/straight alliance clubs. These are fictional books. And so I believe gay/straight alliance clubs must also be fictional. We certainly don’t have them here. We have a sign in the entrance hall that says
THIS IS NO PLACE FOR HATE
, but that doesn’t actually make it no place for hate.

If we have anything, we have Holocaust deniers. We have neo-Nazis. We have the Ku Klux Klan. They leave invitations in our mailbox every few years with mints—individually packaged melty mints with the KKK symbol on the wrapper. It’s 2012 and we still have them.

This whole town is frozen in time. Stuck in one place. Motionless. Except for me, because I just quit trig, which proves motion is totally possible, even if it means I now have to go home and tell my parents and listen to my mother talk about how quitters never win and winners never quit.

“Look at me!” she says. “I wanted to quit art school in my first semester, but did I? No. I carried on and went all the way through and got my master’s. And that master’s is feeding this family now!”

The only good thing about this conversation is that Friday is pizza night and I get to eat slices of white pizza with broccoli and garlic and drink a birch beer while I listen.

“Couldn’t you get a tutor or something? I don’t think it
will look very good on your school records that you quit something, will it, Gerry?” She pours herself another glass of red from the bottle next to her glass.

Dad sighs. “You’re not heading for the sciences, are you, Astrid?”

“Nope,” I answer. I’ve told them my plan a hundred times: Move back to New York City and be an editor.

“It was only pissing you off, dropping your GPA and making your life harder. It’s senior year. You’re supposed to be having fun.”

“Oh, my God,” Mom says. “You sound like a hippie!”

“Pass me the wine,” Dad says. He rarely joins her, but it’s Friday and the stapler-stealing-and-breaking person at work hasn’t come out to apologize yet and it’s driving him crazy.

He pours himself a glass and looks her straight in the eye. “Just because you don’t know how to have fun doesn’t mean the kids can’t,” he says. “Astrid knows what she wants to do. Who gives a shit if she dropped trig? She was never going to use it!”

“It’s quitting,” she answers. “And quitters never win.”

“Oh, my God, you’re like a broken record, Claire. You know, some quitters
do
win. Plenty of them.” He adds, “Why can’t you just be nice to her for once?”

The question hangs in the air for a minute. Ellis gives me a jealous look. As if it’s my fault that this whole family doesn’t revolve around her. Sheesh.

Mom looks at Ellis and me. “Go upstairs.”

We sit there for a second because we don’t know what to do. We’re not done eating yet.

Ellis quietly says, “But I’m not done eat—”

“Go upstairs!”
Mom yells.

We go upstairs. But the two-hundred-fifty-year-old walls and floors are thin, and we hear the fight from our bedrooms. All the usual stuff. She can’t have fun because Gerry is a loser. Gerry doesn’t understand her
needs
. Gerry can’t even hold a steady job. Gerry never
listens
. Gerry cares more about “your fucking stapler than your wife.” Gerry is the perfect example of “quitters never win” because he quit law school.

After ten minutes of this, we hear Dad’s chair move. He doesn’t say a word and starts running the water for the dishes as she clip-clops up to her office because, you know, “someone has to work around here.”

I don’t like how pot has taken my dad away from me, but I like how it’s given him the balls to stick up for me like that. I send love from my bedroom.
Dad, I love you for saying what you said at dinner. I know it was hard because Mom has chopped off your balls and baked them in a testes casserole, but thank you for trying. It means a lot.

Ellis comes to my door. Sometimes she’s like a real sister—the way we were when we were little when we’d watch
The Wizard of Oz
and she’d curl into my side when the flying monkeys would come. Sometimes she needed me, I guess. Not very often anymore.

“I’m sneaking down. Want me to bring you back some pizza?”

“Nah, I’m good,” I say, even though I’m still kind of hungry. “Thanks anyway.”

I COULD HAVE PICKED
any job—the usual fast-food places or playground summer positions. I could have stayed with friends of the family and interned in New York at some publishing house, as Mom suggested. But in June of junior year when Mom pushed (
if you don’t get a summer job now, I’ll get one for you
) I chose Maldonado Catering. Juan and Jorge (neither of them a Maldonado, for what it’s worth) are both really nice. Jorge interviewed me and gave me the job in about twelve seconds.

“Want to know why?” he asked in a thick Puerto Rican accent.

I nodded.

“Because you didn’t bullshit me and tell me that you know what you’re doing. It means we can teach it to you
our way
, man.”

Now it’s October, and I know three things. I know how to devein shrimp really fast. I know how to open clams really fast. I know how to do inventory. (Okay, I know a lot more than that, but some days I feel like that’s all I do. Especially the shrimp-deveining part.)

I start my day at 5:35
AM
with inventory for next weekend’s jobs, which are listed on a roster next to the inventory clipboard. The walk-in freezer is full of boxes, and I sit on the one in the back corner and relax. I wish I could live in here.
I’d put the bed there.
It’s the only place I feel comfortable anymore.
And a bookshelf there.
I’m not nervous about what Mom would think.
A dresser with a few T-shirts and jeans in the corner.

There is nothing else like the sound of a walk-in freezer’s door opening. It’s a loud clunk of the huge handle followed by an air-suck sound. It’s a big sound. Like something circus equipment would make. Logger sounds. Or those science-fiction bay doors on spaceships with air locks.

I pretend to look for a box of frozen pastry shells in case it’s Juan. But I feel my stomach twist because I know it’s not Juan.

“Need help?” Dee says.

“Just checking the dates to make sure I get the right ones.
Damn, there are a lot of shells here this month.” I say this in case anyone is outside, listening. In case anyone knows.

Dee lets the door slam behind her, and it sounds even bigger than it does when it opens. The swirling white air dances around the caged freezer lightbulb, and she pushes me right up against the dappled stainless-steel wall and kisses me with both her hands braided into my hair.

This is not our first kiss.

Dee is my real best friend, I guess. Kristina doesn’t know about her, and Dee doesn’t know the truth about Kristina, and that’s the way I want to keep it.

Dee is the funniest person I have ever met in my life. Her laugh is big and confident. She’s laid back and doesn’t like to gossip. She’s also kissing me. A lot. And I’m kissing her back.

Before I met her here at Maldonado’s, I only knew her as the neighboring school district’s badass hockey star who would periodically get mentioned in small-town gossip. I think the first thing I ever heard was from Ellis. I’m pretty sure she used the word
dyke
in her description, too. Because if you want to be a small-town girl in U. Valley, that’s what you say.

The first time I saw Dee was at one of Ellis’s hockey games last year. She smiled at me, and I never forgot it. Or more accurately, I always remembered it. And I checked the hockey schedule and went to the away game at her school, too, just to see if she’d smile at me again, and she did.

I smiled back. That was right about the time Tim Huber broke up with me, too, so smiling wasn’t something I did very often.

I didn’t know she worked at Maldonado’s when I interviewed. Believe me, my first day of work was some sort of proof that everything happens for a reason. I’d thought about her smiles for eight months at that point. Probably every day.

On my second day of work, she said, “Anyone ever tell you that you’re gorgeous?”

I didn’t answer, but I asked myself the question for a whole month. She must have thought I was ignoring it or just thought she was joking around. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. I was considering it. Astrid Jones. Gorgeous. I’d never really thought about that. Tim Huber said things like
cute
or
sweet
or, one time,
hot—
which turned me off completely because I knew he was only saying it to see how far he could get me to go with him.

But when Dee said I was hot a month after she’d asked me if anyone had ever told me I was gorgeous? She meant it. “I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. You’re hot!”

That was the day of our first kiss.

Now she’s laughing while she kisses me. “You’re not going to tell me to back off again, are you?” she asks.

“Mmm. Hmm,” I manage while still kissing her neck, her ear. “Back off,” I say. I bite her earlobe.

So far in my life, Dee is the only person who wants to totally ravish me. I have to stop her all the time. I swear she’d do it right here in the walk-in freezer if she could. Right now. Before six
AM
. With morning breath. Next to a box of frozen taquitos.

“I dream of this all week,” she says.

“Me too.”

“We have to find more ways to see each other,” she says.

“I know,” I say, but the best I can do is go watch Ellis play hockey for the one game where Dee’s school is the visiting team. Or, well, the go-to-Atlantis-with-Kristina-and-Justin daydream, but I haven’t told her about that yet. Because it’s stupid.

At the moment, we talk twice a week outside of work. Between her hockey schedule and my paranoia, that’s about all we can manage. Plus, her mom is a bit of a stickler about phone minutes, and Dee only gets fifteen dollars’ worth a week.

Anyway, not being constantly connected makes the whole thing more intense. It’s better that way.

Dee and I are washing fruits and vegetables.

“You done with the mushrooms yet?” Juan asks.

“Almost,” I say. I finish them, put them in a container and take them over to him. I stop for a minute to watch him slice them. He is like ballet with a knife. “You’re a natural, you know that?” I ask.