Better Nate Than Ever (21 page)

“Okay,” Freckles says, sliding back into the booth, “not to rush you or anything, but when you’re done, we’re going to go back home.” Home. I wish. Home on the futon. “Back to my place. Your mom is taking a nap, and Heidi wants to talk to you.”

Great. I think about ordering another round of waffles, just to eat up some time, and then remember that it wouldn’t be too effective—
that’s
how fast the food comes here. I bet they literally have a tree in the back that just grows waffles all day long. A potted city tree, of course.

I’ll buy time another way: Ask anyone over twenty-nine about their love life and you can stop the clock cold for fifteen minutes, minimum. (A famous and rare Libby theory.)

“Hey, Freckles,” I say—but I call him his real name, which I still haven’t told you because I don’t
like it, so you can just stop wondering—“were you and Aunt Heidi ever boyfriend-girlfriend?”

He laughs and says, “No. Nope, Nate.”

“Oh, that’s cool.”

“Yep.” He’s scrolling through an e-mail on his iPhone, pretending to listen to me. Adults can never just talk to me without the distraction of some activity keeping them firmly in their own world. Unless I’m being reprimanded at school for forging sick notes from Mom. In that case, adults seem to have no problem at all shutting their phones off and describing what a miserable future a kid like me is setting himself up for.

“She’s really pretty, though,” I say to Freckles. “Don’t you think Heidi’s pretty? I think she’s really pretty.”

“She is, for sure.”

“Does she ever talk about a boyfriend?”

Freckles shifts on the banquette and sets his phone aside. “There’s some character who’s been bouncing around for a while, yeah. I’m sure Heidi can tell you all about Troy. Troy is—very special.”

“Like super nice?”

“Oh, like super elusive. Beefy and hunky but kind of drinks too much, and . . . I shouldn’t . . . it’s not really my place to talk about him.”

I clear my throat. “Maybe
you
could just date Aunt Heidi, then? And cut out the middleman?”

Freckles licks his lips. “Heidi’s not . . . really my type.”

“She’s so cool, though!” I say.

“She is cool, but I—I date other . . .
men
, Nate.”

Oh my gosh. “Oh, wow. Okay, that’s cool.” I don’t want him to feel uncomfortable or judged or anything, so I play it really cool. It’s nice that he’d trust such a huge secret to me, though.

“So, yeah,” Freckles says, and laughs.

He pays for the waffles and that weird white omelet, and I grab a couple handfuls of (free!) mints by the door (like
completely
free, and already unwrapped, too).

“It’s all going to be okay, you know?” Freckles says, leading me back “home,” past dumpsters and a pizza place and a few business guys. I like it out here, this Queens scene. It’s like a slower, 1950s version of the real city across that cool bridge we cabbed over last night.

“Pittsburgh’s got a bunch of bridges too,” I say for some stupid reason.

“I remember,” Freckles says, “from that Chekhov play I did after NYU. We took publicity shots on a bridge.”

“Weird,” I say, stepping over an abandoned shoe, “because I didn’t think there were any giant bridges with sports stadiums in the background during the
Holocaust.” There’s a lot of stadiums in Pittsburgh—like one stadium per every normal boy.

Freckles laughs about my Holocaust one-liner, and it doesn’t even sound like a condescending adult laugh. It’s, like, totally real.

Libby’d be so proud.

We get back to the lobby of his building and walk to the elevator, and I don’t want to face her. I don’t want to see Mom, who is everything difficult and set at a slower speed, everything forty-five minutes outside of Pittsburgh.

But I swear that, following Freckles from behind, looking at his body in those jeans (they’re really, really nice jeans and they fit him really, really well), when we pass that little potted plant in the corner, there’s something different about it.

One of the leaves that was falling over—yellowed, dying, drooping like a waterslide that nobody’s allowed on—has pumped up a little, is climbing to the window.

Might even be alive.

“N
ate, we’re so happy you stayed in town,” Rex Rollins the casting director says.

(There’s a part I skipped over where Mom sobered up.)

“To be honest, Mr. Rollins, I never planned on leaving,” I say, my legs not even shaking, rooted again on the centered
x
.

(There’s something where Freckles and I got home from the waffle place, and Mom was asleep on the same futon I slept on, and she murmured something about being happy that it smelled like “My Natey.”)

“Would you mind just waiting in the hall for ten minutes?” Mark or Marc says. “We’re running just a little behind.”

(Which might have been the nicest thing my mom has ever said about me. That she likes how I smelled. That she was overjoyed to see me again. That I wasn’t
punished after all. That she probably just wants her ATM card back.)

“No
problemo
,” I say, “I’ve got no other plans.”

(There’s a part where Aunt Heidi and Freckles took me out, again, just as soon as we returned from waffles—not back to the diner, but for a walk around the block, to talk about Mom. The rain went away, and every other person was in a Halloween costume. All this, before the sun was barely up. Like New York is so ready for a party, full-on grown-ups are willing to go as Groucho Marx to work, to ride the subway in a scratchy fake moustache.)

“Jordan! I heard from my friend that you got a callback, too. It’s, like, the big news on Facebook.”

(I didn’t know who Groucho Marx was, but Aunt Heidi explained.)

“Oh,” Jordan says. “Hi, Nate.”

(There’s a part, on that walk past grown-up Groucho Marxes and little girls heading off to school in princess dresses, where Aunt Heidi told me I was going to stay in New York another night, because Mom wasn’t feeling too hot. Because Dad is with Anthony and the dogs, and might even take them on a guy camping trip. Even with Anthony’s calf muscle being torn.)

“Nate, could you just stand against the wall while we measure your height?” the blonde ringlet-haired
casting woman says—with no boiling Starbucks in sight.

(There’s this part where Aunt Heidi said Mom and Dad had a big fight on their anniversary trip to the Greenbrier in West Virginia. And Mom’s distraught, and for the first time in a long time is actually asking
Heidi
for advice. But I didn’t want to get into all that here.)

“Absolutely I will,” I say, wondering why I need to be measured. “Would you like me in my shoes or out, when I stand against the wall?”

(Because after we’d finally circled their Queens neighborhood so many times that if we were the sun and Heidi’s apartment were earth, an entire month would have gone by, my Nokia rang.)

“Looks good. You’re four eight. He’s four eight, Rex.”

(And
E.T
. called.
E.T
. phoned me. Phoned home.)

“Come on in, Nate,” Rex Rollins says. “The team is ready for you again.”

(And the director “wasn’t satisfied with any of the female midgets they’d seen audition for the role of E.T.,” the casting director explained to Heidi—when I almost threw up on the sidewalk and she rescued the phone from my quaking hand.)

“Nice to see you all again!” I say, or scream-cry. “I’m sorry I’m auditioning in the same outfit.”

(But that they
were
“haunted” by
my
“explosive, nervous, stuttery energy.”)

“Would you like me to stand on the
x
again?”

(And while I’m not technically a midget or a puppet expert or a girl, Mr. Garret Charles, of all people, responded to my knee crawls, and could picture me “bringing to life an alien creature with a weird voice and an underbite and a waddle.” All the qualities back home that get me nearly killed could actually get me nearly famous, here.)

“That sounds great, Nate, and don’t worry about the outfit,” says Calvin, the nice assistant director with Ken-doll blond hair.

(And I’d be “reading for the Elliott understudy, too,” especially since I have experience covering big roles in the past. Who knew the vegetable pageant would be such a stepping-stone? And could I please come back in today, right away? And could I please be prepared to perform my same monologue for the team? And meet the official director this time?)

(And I sat on a fire hydrant and had a mild hyperventilation. And Freckles and Heidi laughed and laughed and hopped and hopped, looking like two nice people going as two nice parents for Halloween. Parents of one good kid who gets a lot of things wrong, most of the time, back home, but might be getting everything right, here. A kid who might have found
someplace where he doesn’t have to change anything about himself, to fit in.)

(A kid going as himself for Halloween, but the best version, the ultimate.)

A better Nate than ever.

“L
ibby-dibby?”

“Natey-the-greaty, what blows?” She’s trying out new catchphrases again. I kind of like this one.

“I got a miracle callback this morning! I got a callback and I’m here, now. I just left the room and they told me to wait in the hallway, so my aunt is buying me a Vitamin Water to celebrate!”

From Libby’s end of the call, I can hear familiar locker slams (my heart speed racing in auto-response), and Libby says, “I’ve only got a sec before last period’s over, but I’m so proud of you. Like, beyond. I’m in the science lab hallway, and several people, in fact, are asking me why I’m jumping up and down, and
I’m not telling them
.” She’s yelling by the end.

Jordan Rylance comes out of the audition room and sits down next to his leopard-coated mother, who is eyeing me, appropriately, like I’m a gazelle who she’s
going to drag into a tree and chew the head off of.

“It’s been nutso, that’s for sure. My mom showed up
drunk
to my aunt’s this morning—not kidding.” For some reason I say this loudly enough for Mrs. Rylance to hear. Like it’s a badge of honor.

“What happened in the
audition
?” Libby always knows how to skip through the murk of a story.

“I met the director, and they made me do my monologue, and—get this—I did the bus speech from the Greyhound Station. And they
loved
the—I think they said—‘the sense of immediacy and place,’ which sounds amazing, whatever it means.”

“It means I’m an incredible writer and you should always perform my monologues,” Libby says, and some girl passes her in school and calls her a fat-girl name and Libby doesn’t even respond to her, that’s how into this conversation she is. (I don’t have the heart to tell Libby I ended up changing parts of her Greyhound monologue. To make it my own.) “It means,” she continues, “I’m meant to be your speechwriter when you run for President of New York.”

“I can’t disagree, Ms. Libby Jones.”

“Did you do the scenes again? Did they ask you to read the sides?”

“Yes, only this time I read for E.T.! For E.T. the alien! That’s the crazy part. I did all these wacked-out lip trills and blips and blops.”

“Like from our animal seminar?” Libby says.

“
Exactly
like that. I channeled the duck you made me play when we were working on lowering my center of gravity. And, in fact, the director told me to pull it
back
, that I was so physically expressive, I’d have to make sure I didn’t actually kill anyone.”

“Rock star.”

“And they asked if I was afraid of enclosed spaces, because the makeup and bodysuit for E.T. is evidently going to be very, very thick, and I laughed and said, ‘Enclosed
spaces
? I’ve practically lived in toilets and lockers for the last three years. I have highly developed, like, cooling-off mechanisms and am perhaps even
more
comfortable being compressed, than not.’ And then I lied and said I was going Trick-or-Treating as a Mummy, tonight, for that very reason, and they all howled.”

I can almost hear Libby shaking her head in disbelief. “Rock star, Natey. Boss Rock star. So what’s next?”

“Well, they just—thanks, Aunt Heidi”—I uncap the Vitamin Water and inhale it—“asked me to wait in the hall while the team talks things over.”

“Eeeeek! Hot
Doonesbury
, Nate.” (A musical based upon a famed political cartoon your grandparents read; big ol’ bomb.)

A clanking school bell rings all the way through
the phone, nailing my eardrum, and Libby says, “Stay with me. I’m going to sit in the front of the school bus with the losers, and keep talking to you.”

For the record, Libby always sits at the front of the bus, being, as am I, a loser.

“There’s news here, too, Natey-pants.”

“Shoot, cowgirl.” I’m trying on all sorts of personas today. Wild West Nate! Feels great. Somebody get me a pen: I’ve even got some ideas for a new autograph.

“James Madison, the boy zero—you with me?” Libby says.

“Yes’m?”

“—tried to plant a stink bomb in the faculty bathroom today,
but
one of his stupid Bills of Rights got the prank wrong. He bought the whole package, allegedly, in West Virginia—”

“Well, there’s trouble right there.”

When you’re from Jankburg, PA, West Virginia is the only thing you can feel even remotely superior to.

“And James lit a
firecracker
instead of a
stink bomb
. Like, a big, pink, bursting-in-the-sky firecracker.”

“Holy
Doonesbury
!”

“And turns out Mr. Skinner was in the faculty john dropping a deuce, and the firecracker rolled underneath the stalls and practically burned his ta-ta off.”

“No way!”

The casting people come out and walk right over to
Jordan Rylance, and his mother stands up and thrusts her breasts so hard into Rex Rollins’s face, I think she’s actually going to break his nose. I put the phone by my side and watch as Rex shakes Jordan’s hand.