Better Nate Than Ever (20 page)

And John Williams, who wrote the awesome movie score, happened to be at the bar, slurping on an oyster, and he leaned over to me and said, “You’re not missing anything; these oysters taste like a flipper.”

Then John Williams began conducting the amazing flying sequence, of E.T. going across the moon on the bike. I’m not sure where all the instrument sounds came from at the bar, but still. It’s a freaking dream.

The clearest part is that Freckles lowered me to the floor, behind the bar, and gave me The Heidi—
the fizzy adult drink I wasn’t allowed to try—just because finally being on Broadway: Basically I was an adult anyway. And he started shaking my shoulders and saying, “You know what this means? It means you don’t have to face those boys back at school. It means you don’t have to go back to classes that you daydream through. It means you never have to throw another basketball in another mandatory P.E. class. It means you don’t have to suffer through your dad asking you if you’ve met any cute girls yet.”

And I took a big fizzy slurp of The Heidi, and hiccupped, just like in life but less related to how upset my stomach was, and Aunt Heidi flipped me around and shook my shoulders too, shouting, “I’m so proud of you, Nate!”

And that takes us to
^*
the present.

“Nate! Nate!” I can’t remember the last time I woke up with a smile, Aunt Heidi’s long hair sweeping my forehead, my body wrapped in a hundred old blankets, swirled around me like soft-serve. I must have really tossed and turned, and (for the record) the one thing Western Pennsylvania has over New York is a better bed situation. Yikes, futons
suck
.

“Nate!” She’s shaking my shoulders, just like in my dream, except instead of John Williams’s score playing, there’s sirens in the background, again, and the tick of a coffee machine.

“Eh?” I sit up, practically head-butting Aunt Heidi.

“Get up, right away,” she says, and I blink a bunch and say, “Is it time already?”

“I’ll explain in a second.” She’s listening to somebody shouting through her cell phone, and jogs away from me back into her bedroom.

I swing my legs around (futons
are
really low to the ground, so that’s one asset for a midget like me) and stand up, my knees cracking. A rite of passage! It’s like New York has grown my joints up, if not my feelings.

Heidi calls out, “Hop in the bath, quick,” and hurries me in. I pass the kitchen and see 3:44 on the microwave, and that just seems weird. Gosh, we’re up early.

Ten minutes later, when I’m through with the scrubbing routine (she and Freckles share a lot of really cool bath products, including a whole Kiehl’s thing that’s made out of kale and lye, according to the packaging), I towel off and look in the mirror. And if I’m not mistaken, I catch sight of a teeny tiny moustache. I don’t want to get all worked up about it—there’s the chance I forgot to wash my face and this might just be a rim of chocolate from the hot cocoa Aunt Heidi made me before bedtime last night—but it’s nice to see what I might look like in a few years.

Oh, wait, a zit. Great.

Knock knock
from outside. “Hurry up, Nate, I need you to get dressed.” Yikes, girls are pushy before sunrise.

I slip on a fresh pair of undies and dig around in their medicine cabinet (there’s basically nothing more fun than a harmless peek at someone else’s toiletries, right gang?) and Freckles has some cool, exotic Arm & Hammer deodorant that I decide to try. If it works for someone as friendly as him, I might as well give it a test run.

Just as I’m barely exiting the bathroom, Aunt Heidi hands me a glass of orange juice and tells me to sit on the futon. “And stay there. And be ready to go.” That part she’s really clear about. “Pack up your phone and everything.”

I grab my lucky rabbit foot and hold tight. Heidi looks like she’s about ready to explode.

The sky is still Pepsi-black, and I wonder if Libby’s asleep right now, if she pulled an all-nighter decorating the porch for Halloween tonight. Her house is famous for its dramatic displays, but I’d bet they’re scaling back this year, with Mrs. Jones so sick.

I bet when I get home and Dad chops my head off with an axe, I could go as my dead self for Halloween if he throws my face on ice quickly enough. At least I’ll get a little candy before they bury me.

But nobody better hand out any Reese’s Pieces.

And then, sitting here on the futon, I hear Aunt Heidi’s cell phone ring again from her bedroom, and she runs to an intercom thing by the front door (very cool, very space-age) and presses a buzzing button. She steps out into their hallway, leaving the door an inch ajar.

The heck?

What follows is a growing mumble, two voices starting polite, quiet, like when a lady buys stamps at the post office and gives the minimum amount of respect required to the teller. And as I’m fondling the rabbit foot and making sure my fly is zipped up and wondering if we woke Freckles, out he comes from the bedroom, wearing pajama bottoms and—oh, how funny—no shirt.

“What’s up?” he says, rubbing his eyes. Gosh, nobody back home is built like him, other than the varsity swim team. But he’s so much older than them, like some animated character: AdultBoyMan, with a high schooler’s fatless body and a kind adult’s face.

“I dunno,” I say, “I think Aunt Heidi’s having a fight with someone in the hallway.”

He kind of cocks his head back, processing the whole thing, his hair a mess, and yawns. “Why are you dressed?”

“I think to go to the bus station.”

“At four a.m.?” he says. He knows something’s up,
like when Feather could tell we were going to have that one, famous Pittsburgh tornado, and kept knocking Mom’s
Sleepless in Seattle
commemorative plates off the wall with his tail. I still swear it wasn’t an accident, it was like Feather’s warning.

Now Freckles goes and peers through the crack in the door, and steps back, and looks at me, and then peers through again. “Oh, God,” he says, and then he jumps out of the way and the door flies open, unhinged.

And there she is.

“Nathan Evan Foster, wait outside.”

And Mom—
Mom!
—walks right up to me, stumbling over herself, simultaneously surveying Aunt Heidi’s tiny apartment. It’s an apartment I’ve already grown defensive of, loving the fact that, in only five hundred square feet (Freckles and I talked dimensions), there’s no chance a burglar is hiding in the attic, waiting to kill you.

Mom grabs me by my wrist, the rabbit foot flying away from me like some crazed infant squirrel, and she flings me across the room, the coffee table dancing behind us. She’s a wreck. And it’s almost completely my fault.

Also, she called me by my middle name, which I hate for you to hear.

“Get downstairs,” she says, “and wait in the Grand
Caravan. I’m—I’m serious.” Except imagine all of that more slurred. “How could you do this to us, Nathan?”

“I did it for
me
, Mom. Not
to
you.”

“We were terrified.”

“You don’t—you can’t know how bad it is in Jankburg. For someone like me. You don’t know the words they call me. It gets worse every da—”

“
I’ve
got some words for you. In the car.
Now.
”

I can feel Freckles holding his own breath.

“I hate you,” I say, rushing past Mom to the hallway. And when I think she’s going to call out after me, to remind me that “I’d have killed you if you’d gotten yourself killed,” she doesn’t. She says—so quiet I can barely make it out—“I’d have died if you’d gotten hurt.”

Aunt Heidi’s still outside the door, her face the color of a robin’s chest. Not red, like you might think, but bright amber like a Technicolor fire.

And as I zombie-walk to the elevator, she just touches my shoulder.

“You’re not going anywhere with her.”

A
minute later I’m in the lobby, and it’s really nothing special. It’s really just a basic plain lobby, and lemme tell you: If you think everything in New York is high class, like the inside of a yacht or something, it isn’t. Sometimes it’s just another hallway; sometimes it looks just like your junior high school.

Aunt Heidi’s lobby looks like the guidance counselor waiting area back home, a bulletin board here advertising exterminators instead of basketball tryouts; a garbage can overflowing with the
New York Times
instead of the
General Thomas Junior High Gazette
.

(Anthony used to write a sports column for the
Gazette
, when he went to my junior high, but as soon as he left for high school, they lost advertisers. Like, for real.)

Well, the whole thing upstairs is clear.

Just as soon as Mom heard from Heidi, she must have packed up a dusty bottle of booze, jumped in the minivan, and time-warped to New York. She’s a heck of a driver, Mom is, when motivated.

I guess her A train wasn’t running local this morning.

Mom didn’t actually drink and
drive
, by the way. She’s not
that
dumb. In the old days, whenever she had to confront something scary, she’d just get to wherever she was going and sit in the car and drink until she got up the courage to go inside. According to her diary.

I walk over to a dying potted plant, in this city full of potted plants, wedged in a corner of Heidi’s first floor lobby. Looking like nobody’s given it any attention or love in forever. If E.T. were real, we could gauge his health based upon this plant. This plant that he’d bring back to life, just ’cause that’s what E.T.s do, that’s what they’re good at.

When Libby and I stayed up the other night and studied the movie for my audition (
her
mom has a Blu-ray player), I’d forgotten that in the beginning of the movie there’s actually a
lot
of E.T.s, like a million, spread out all over that magical forest. And the funniest thing is, all they were doing was looking for plants. They just go to other planets to check out the scene and pick up a few ferns. I wish E.T. were here now
and could make this sad plant sprout back up, pop out its planty chest, and make something of itself. I wish everything were healthy. I wish Mom could have just stayed home, back on Planet Jankburg. Could have let me ride out my trip in dignity. Daring myself to come back to New York when I’m old enough. I wish Mom hadn’t had something to drink.

My phone rings: 412. Oh, God.

“Hello?”

“Nathan Foster.”

“Hi. Hi, Dad.”

“Is your mother okay? Is she—is she there in one piece?”

“She’s okay, Dad. She’s here. I—” But I stop. He’s heaving for air.

“What in the Lord’s name were you thinking, Nathan? Going all the way, without our permission, to a place like New York
City
?”

“I know, Dad. I’m a rotten kid.” My throat closes like a fist. “I’m a rotten son. I—I’m grounded until Christmas break, at least. I know you’re always praying for me and I . . . I wish it were paying off for you. I really do.” I really do. “I was stupid. I’m the stupidest son you have, and it was the stupidest thing I’ve—”

“Nathan.” He swallows. Coughs. Grips the phone so hard, the plastic handset creaks. “It was some kind of brave, boy.”
Click
.

Brave?

“Hey, Nate,” from behind. I turn around and—oh, God—I guess I’m sobbing a teeny bit, or about to.

Freckles is in jeans now, and a T-shirt and a corduroy jacket and backward ball cap. “Come on, buddy, let’s get out of here for a little bit and get you some breakfast. There’s a good diner around the corner.” And just like that I follow him out onto the drizzly street.

I do that kid thing where I don’t say anything. I feel like anything I say will reveal how young I am or how much I don’t understand about adults, about my own confusing parents.

“Do you like waffles?” Freckles says, and I want to say, “Is Christine Daaé’s high note pre-recorded in
Phantom
?”, but it seems too early in the day for that kind of insider stuff (and only Libby’d laugh, because it’s her line anyway). So I just go, “Uh-huh.”

We order waffles. Well, I do. Freckles orders an egg white omelet (
what?
) and coffee and water, and about a thousand minutes go by before he says, “Well, that was awkward back there, huh?”

“Yes!” I say, and luckily the waiter comes over and sets down toast, for the table, because I can just stuff my mouth and not talk.

“This isn’t my business,” Freckles says. People always say that just before they try to get you to say
secrets and stuff. “But has your mom shown up drunk to places before?”

“Oh, a long time ago.” I’m mumbling through a mouthful of horrible rye toast, toast that tastes like it was baked three years ago and set out in the sun. “It’s an old problem that she sort of has under control.” Or had.

The waffles appear out of nowhere—there must be some diner conveyor belt back there—and the waiter sets down a whole jar of syrup for me, in a real glass bottle that’s totally sticky and gross but, again, solely for me, which is cool. “Wow, this place is fast,” I say like an idiot.

Freckles yawns and drinks his coffee down in about a single gulp, and he giggles and points to lipstick on the rim, and we smile over that one.

“That isn’t from me, believe me, Nate. I haven’t worn lipstick since college.” He laughs at his own joke. “This place isn’t known for cleaning their germy dishes, but it’ll build up your immunities before you get home. You can go back to Jankburg the strongest little boy around.”

“Ha,” I say. I like that, that single “ha.” I think I picked it up from Freckles and it’s fun to employ it so quickly.

Freckles gets a text and looks at this phone, and he says, “Just a sec,” and presses a button and steps
away from the table and stands in the rain, the drizzle turning into a downpour. A woman walks by the window, and she’s wearing a catsuit, a whole catsuit with leather boobs and ears and everything. And that’s what’s so cool about New York, how much it can open your mind; I barely even did a double take, thinking catsuits were a total norm here, until remembering it’s Halloween, that she’s actually in costume. That said, I’m pretty sure I saw another lady in a catsuit, yesterday, and it wasn’t even Halloween then.