B00B9FX0F2 EBOK (2 page)

J
ason caught a tantalizing whiff of his mother’s lamb chops before he heard her voice. “Babycakes, is that you?”

“If by
you
, you mean
Jason
,” he shouted from the hall, tossing his book bag down at the foot of the stairs. His mom was always using cutesy nicknames that embarrassed him. As if being called “dumpling” in public wasn’t bad enough, she used the same terms of endearment to address her husband, Mark. Jason was loath to be too closely associated with his stepdad, a mustachioed real estate agent whose boisterous and borderline slimy personality would fit right in at a used car lot. Jason and Mark got along fine so long as they weren’t speaking to each other. But when they had to interact beyond polite dinner table conversation, Mark quickly grew frustrated with Jason’s indifference to professional hockey and unwillingness to act like one of Mark’s poker buddies. For his part, Jason was reminded of how much he missed his dad, who was always traveling for work.

His mom, clad in black yoga pants and a loose T-shirt, was standing over the stove, tending to a frying pan. “Sweet pea, will you try these and tell me if they need more salt?” As a radiologist at the Oakdale Hospital, Claudia Moreland wasn’t some sort of Suzy Homemaker offering Jason fresh-baked chocolate cookies as he did his homework, but she prepared dinner almost every night, and Jason loved her cooking. He speared a
thinly sliced potato with a fork and popped it in his mouth, scalding his tongue with oil.

“Hot, hot!” he gasped, fanning his open mouth.

His mom couldn’t refrain from laughing. “What did you think was going to happen?”

“You couldn’t have warned me?” he asked when he’d finally swallowed.

“You couldn’t have noticed you were eating them straight out of a frying pan that’s still cooking over high heat?” she shot back. “Now tell me, are they okay?”

“Yeah, Mom, they’re great.” He grabbed another forkful, and this time blew on it before taking a bite.

“How was your day?”

“It was okay,” Jason replied. “The same.”

“All right, well, I think we’ll eat when Mark gets home. Do you have homework to do until then?”

“Sure, yeah, I’ll be in my room.”

Jason did have homework, but as soon as his door was shut he logged in to Facebook. The little red “1” at the top of his screen made his breath shorten.

Jason clicked the link Lacey sent and saw that it was a video of the Mountain Goats covering the Jawbreaker song “Boxcar.” He’d seen it before, which wasn’t surprising. They were his favorite band, if you could call the Mountain Goats a band. It was sort of just one guy with a guitar, John Darnielle, though recently he’d been recording and touring with a bassist and a drummer. The music was both darker and less whiny than guys with acoustic guitars usually were, and Lacey loved it every bit as much as Jason did.

As the video played, he pictured Lacey watching it in her school’s computer lab, imagining her mouthing the words and bobbing her head, squealing quietly with glee as soon as the song ended, while a disapproving teacher looked on.

He read the note again, savoring every word. These messages were like a window showing him a narrow sliver of Lacey’s life. Sometimes he wanted to pry the window open with a crowbar
and take in the entire picture. He’d never say it out loud for fear of sounding like a creepy stalker, but he wanted to know how she spent every waking moment — everything she said, who she sat next to in class, what she ate for lunch, the most-played songs on her iPod.

When he’d first messaged her, he’d known it was a long shot. It was her quote that caught his eye.

It was the same one he had on his page, from one of his favorite Mountain Goats songs. They weren’t the only two people on Facebook who listed it, but Lacey was definitely the prettiest. Something about her sleepy smile caught his eye. Her profile picture was a candid shot, not posed or stiff like the pictures of lots of girls Jason went to school with. Her eyes weren’t fully open and she looked like she was about to burst into laughter. The moment was so genuine, Jason felt like he knew her instantly — and instantly wanted to know more. Brighton wasn’t far from Oakdale. Plus, what did he have to lose? A pretty girl he didn’t know might reject him, so what else was new?

It had taken three months for her to respond. By the time the message came, he almost deleted it because the name Lacey Gray meant nothing to him at first. But she had a face that was
hard to forget, and images of it flooded into his head when he reread the notification e-mail. Yet when he clicked the link to her message, she was almost exactly as he remembered, looking simultaneously carefree and wise. What he wouldn’t give to be the person who put that smile on her face.

Haha, sooo funny that we both have that quote. I love that song!!!!!! I saw the Mountain Goats play at Brighton Ballroom last year and I literally lost my voice from singing along. Totally worth it. One of the best nights of my life!! What other music do you like? I loooove tMG, and Bon Iver and the Decemberists, but I also really like dance music. Lately I can’t stop listening to Robyn!

Anyway, thanks for messaging me. Tell me the music you’re into and maybe I’ll make you a mix ;)

Jason had never considered himself prone to good luck, but he wondered if he’d won the lottery. She was naming all the artists from his iTunes most-played list. And was she flirting with him? He didn’t have a ton of firsthand experience in such matters, but after a decade of observing Rakesh’s social successes, he was pretty sure that wink at the end was a good sign.

Lacey,

Thanks for your message. We have the exact same taste in music! Except I don’t dance that much, but I have been known to sing some Robyn in the shower, haha.

This is kind of embarrassing, but I’m really into ’80s teen movies right now. Love watching them on the big screen at art house theaters and thinking about what it would have been like to see them when they first came out, before they’d been copied a million times. Have you ever heard of the Rosewood Theater? It’s near my friend Rakesh’s house and we’ve been going to midnight movies there since we were in middle school. That was where I first saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — even in 7th grade, Rakesh was just like Ferris. I guess that makes me Cameron, only my dad doesn’t have a Ferrari.

He was about to tell her his dad didn’t even live with him, but something Rakesh had once said rang like an alarm bell in his brain: “If you can’t play hard to get, at least don’t be a psycho about it.” He was complaining about one of his many admirers, and at the time, Jason had just rolled his eyes, but as he began getting to know Lacey he had newfound sympathy for the thick-eyebrowed freshman he’d noticed following Rakesh from class to class.

They had continued like that since their first exchange, sending each other MP3s and playlists they found on indie rock Tumblrs. He recommended ’80s movies for her to see —
Some Kind of Wonderful
,
Pump Up the Volume
,
Heathers
(which he couldn’t believe she hadn’t even heard of). She forced clubby remixes and YouTube videos on him. He had brought up the possibility of them meeting in person a few times — once by suggesting they get tickets to see Sleigh Bells in the
city. He’d held his breath after sending, and hadn’t thought of anything else until he got her reply. Lacey took a day longer than usual to answer, and when she did, she failed to mention anything about them meeting, but he was so relieved and heartened that she hadn’t disappeared completely that the next week, when they were IMing, he wrote, “I hope you don’t think I’m weird for saying this, but I really want to meet you.” A minute went by, and then she answered, “me too” and then a moment later “ugh, so annoying, mom came in my room. Brb.” She hadn’t been right back, but she e-mailed the next day as usual. There was no mention of them meeting, so he’d listened to the voice telling him to slow down and held his tongue.

Jason watched the video she’d sent again. He was about to start formulating a response when he heard the front door open from downstairs. Mark was home. He slammed his laptop shut and grabbed his history book in case his mom came to his door to announce dinner was served.

When Jason finished washing the dishes that night, he returned to his room, shutting the door carefully behind him. Normally, there were clothes strewn about the floor and half the time his comforter could be found on the floor after he’d kicked it off in the night, but his mother had read him the riot act the previous weekend: Either he cleaned up his room himself, or she did, and there was no telling what she would throw away if she got her hands on it. And so he spent Sunday afternoon folding gray and white T-shirts and placing them in the wooden dresser that had belonged to his father when he was a kid. Jason
alphabetized the records he’d bartered for at Vinyl Exchange and won in late-night eBay auctions and stacked them in crates he’d dragged in from the garage. He’d made the bed with new navy-blue sheets his mom had bought him, and once everything was in place, she had helped him hang concert flyers and vintage movie posters he’d collected on his bare white walls. All week, Jason had been admiring his handiwork. A hand-printed sign for a Wild Flag show he’d been to that summer adorned the wall above his bed, and Ferris Bueller, mischievous as always, gazed down at him as he did his homework. His mom had looked on silently as he’d hoisted the last frame, a color poster for
The Big Sleep
, one of his dad’s favorite movies, onto the back of the door. Jason knew she didn’t like to think of his dad if she could avoid it, but he was always grateful she never bad-mouthed him the way other divorced parents sometimes did. Instead, she’d told him he’d done a great job cleaning up, and then, before it turned into some sort of Hallmark moment, added, “Now you may return to your regularly scheduled destruction.”

Settling into his desk chair, he logged in to Facebook. As he’d hoped, there was a green dot next to Lacey’s name, and he forced himself to slowly count to ten before opening a chat with her.

It was the first line from the Jawbreaker song. He’d been planning to use the line since the second he’d opened the video.
He hoped she’d think it was clever, but now he worried she’d think it was mean. After a second, she answered with another quote from the song.

Lacey had never mentioned a brother before. For the life of him, he could not remember a word Mr. Sharp had said about derivative functions in the last two months, but everything Lacey had ever told him was cataloged in his mind. She drove a standard-transmission Volkswagen that had once belonged to her grandfather, she hated chocolate, and she drank her coffee black. And she had a brother. For weeks, Jason had been
meticulously drawing a mental picture of Lacey, and each time she fed him information he filled in new areas, as if bringing her to life. Each fact was like a new shade of paint studied closely before applying it to the canvas.

They went back and forth like that for the next half hour. Normally, when Jason was around girls, his brain went blank and his tongue tied up. When he imagined himself going on dates, he pictured himself opening doors and pulling out chairs and wowing with stories of his rock star heroics. But in real life when he tried to hold open doors for his classmates he felt like a security guard at the mall. As for the rock star thing … well, he had an 11:00
P.M
. curfew on school nights. But with Lacey, everything was just as he imagined it should be. Yes, it was Facebook chat and not a hipster club in the city, but each conversation with her was like a date with his dream girlfriend. So why did he feel so weird about just asking her out?