Californium (6 page)

But there's no way I'm getting into any of that. “Hold on,” I say and I'm down the steps, running through the yard, and yelling back, “I've got one.” The water flies off my legs and most of the drippy stuff's gone by the time I'm in the house and fishing through the pockets of my jeans. Then I'm back on the deck, holding out the drawing of me with nothing to say.

“Who gave you this?” Treat says.

“Edie,” I say. “One of the girls from the Howdy Dance.”

Keith leans out of the water to see it up close. “You got a note? Sweet.”

Treat shakes his head. “This is serious shit.”

I set the note down and climb all the way into the water. “I know. I don't exist.”

“What are you talking about?” Keith says. “You got a note. From a girl.” He turns to Treat. “A cute girl.”

“It's not a note,” I say.

Keith looks back at me. “It is too. It's just in hieroglyphics.”

“Okay. Then it's hieroglyphics for a guy who doesn't exist.”

Treat's nodding, but Keith's shaking his head. “How can you be nonexistent if Astrid talks to you?”

“All she does is say, ‘Hey, neighbor!' when we take the trash out. She even called me ‘trash buddy' at the dance. That kind of sucks.”

“It doesn't suck,” Keith says.

Treat looks hard at me. “That cheerleader chick everyone thinks is so great is your neighbor?” Me and Keith both nod and Treat takes in a huge breath. “That does suck.”

“How?” Keith says. “How can a cheerleader talking to you, the head cheerleader, ever suck? Unless you say, ‘Excuse me,' and she says, ‘There's no excuse for you,' and you say, ‘I don't need an excuse; I got a hall pass,' and she says, ‘You could've fooled me,' and then you say—”

Treat fires a stream of water right into Keith's face. “Okay, I get it.” He looks at me. “Not that it's my style, because a cheerleader's opinion doesn't matter, but we're going with de facto power here—”

“De what?” Keith says.

“De facto,” Treat says. “Not who we wish had the power, but who actually has the power. Cheerleaders have it. So that ‘Hey, neighbor!' crap doesn't mean anything good. She has to talk to him just to be civil. But it's like making friends with the neighbor's dog. You pat him on the head and say, ‘Who's a good boy? You're a good boy. Yes, you are,' but you're never going to take him for a walk.”

Keith knows I don't have a dog and I'm pretty sure he's
trying to figure out if Astrid does. Treat must see it too, because he looks right at Keith and says, “What I'm saying is she probably doesn't even know Reece's name.”

“She knows my name,” I say, even though I'm not sure she does. The weekend before school started, Astrid was on the side of her house messing with her trash cans, sort of rearranging them. It gave me an excuse to hop up on the wall and ask if she needed help with anything.

She had a grocery bag rattling with beer bottles. She smiled and right then could have asked me to drink whatever was left in every one of those bottles and I would have said,
Bring me a straw.

“You're a lifesaver,” she said. “Can I put this in your trash? Some of my friends came over last night and brought beer without telling me.” I came around and took the bag and she gave me the smile again, toothy and perfect, her head tilting to one side. “Thanks, neighbor. I owe you one.”

I tell Treat and Keith all about this and they're both quiet, watching me like I'm the last guy to cross the finish line. “Crap. She doesn't know my name, does she?”

Keith shakes his head.

Treat's head doesn't move. He's thinking hard, and then he says, “The note's a good confession, Reece. It's one thing if you don't matter to a cheerleader. Who does? But if freshmen girls aren't seeing you—”

“I knew it,” I say. “I don't exist.”

“Theoretically,” Keith says.

Treat looks over at him. “Hypothetically.”

Keith watches the bubbles coming up and popping around
him for a second. “Well, theoretically, hypothetically, metaphorically. I know I exist.”

Treat shakes his head. “Not really. But we're only a couple weeks in. You guys still have time to make an impression like I did.”

I glance at the Mohawk. “No way. My dad would leave an impression on my face if I came home with a Mohawk.”

Keith raises his fingers to the surface of the water, letting the bubbles boil through them like he's controlling some witch's cauldron. “We could throw a big party. Like that Ted guy did.”

“Sure,” I say, “and invite all the people who don't know who we are.”

Keith shrugs and keeps watching bubbles. Treat nods slow and steady, and it's like he's about to talk, only he doesn't. I've counted something like fifty bubbles before Treat says, “You guys are posers.” He doesn't say it mean, like you might think. He actually sounds nice about it. “Your clothes are good. You just aren't legit.” He looks at Keith. “Do you know who the Dickies are?” Keith laughs and says that's not a real band, but Treat's nodding, serious. “How about the Germs? Do you guys know ‘What We Do Is Secret'?”

“We're keeping this secret?” Keith says.

Treat splashes him. “No. That's a Germs song.”

I laugh like I knew that.

“I'll make you guys some mix tapes,” Treat says. “That'll help.”

“Make sure you write
The Germs
on it,” Keith says and gets this funny grin. “So my mom will be afraid to touch it.”

“Sure,” Treat says, “because we know she'd have her hands
all over
The Dickies
.” He smiles and splashes himself in the face. “There,” he says to Keith. “Now you don't have to do it.”

As soon as Keith smiles, Treat closes his eyes and puts his finger up to his lips. Me and Keith are looking at each other, like,
Is something going to happen?
and then something does. The water jets click off. Without the motor running, you can hear the last bubbles on the surface of the water breaking open and fizzing like a giant glass of pop. Treat's arms rise above the surface, the water running off them in a steady trickle at first, then drips and drops. He has us raise our arms too, and we hold them there a minute until Treat opens his eyes and says, “Now, we are in balance.”

It feels pretty good how nice Treat is even though he looks so fierce, but I'm not feeling the balance. I don't see how wearing my clothes and knowing any song by the Germs is going to make me look different to Edie or be able to talk to Astrid. When I say that, Treat nods like he knew all along there had to be more. “We need to find the balance in our actions and not just our thoughts.”

“Sure,” I say.

“The tapes will help. There's something else, though. Something I was saving until you guys seemed ready.”

Keith leans his chin out like a dog begging for a bone. “We're ready.”

Treat closes his eyes. “Everybody knows guys in bands. They exist on a whole different plane.” He opens his eyes. “So we'll start a band. A punk band.”

Keith's nodding. “I totally concur with Treat's theoretical hypothesis: I don't even know who van Doren is and I know him.”

“Van Dorken,” Treat says. “That's what everybody called him before he started Filibuster.”

Keith says he's heard that too. It's kind of hard to believe, if you ask me. Not with the way everybody worships the guy. And even if it is true, I'm not van Doren. Our band that doesn't exist isn't Filibuster. “How will this change anything?” I say. “I'll go from being the guy nobody notices to the guy in the band nobody's ever heard of.”

“Come on,” Keith says. “A band!”

Treat reaches his hand out toward Keith, like,
Hold on.
“Listen, Reece.” His voice is soft like Uncle Ryan's the time he saw me drop a fly ball and told me after the game it was okay, nobody's perfect. “Just imagine: The next time you see that cheerleader chick walking out to her car, you say, ‘Can you give me a lift? I need to go jam with my band.'”

Treat waits. His hair and the clothes he wears to school already make him look like the lead singer of some kind of band. Keith nods slow and serious. I've seen a guitar and little amp in his closet, and he said he'd had a few lessons once. It almost makes sense, and even with the two of them staring at me, I can see Astrid's face, surprised and happy as I'm standing in front of her with some guitar clinging to my side. We're at the curb, next to our trash cans, and I start strumming a song for her. Only, I don't really know how a punk song starts, and now my guitar is a baseball bat. But Astrid smiles anyway and says,
Keep going, neighbor.

“Okay,” I say as Astrid's face goes away and Treat and Keith are right there, waiting. “I guess I'm in.”

M
e and Keith have this game we play called Berlin Wall. One time, after they'd started lighting up the soccer fields behind my house for night games, we noticed how those huge floodlights make night shadows. We bolted from the dark side of the brick bathroom building to the shadow of a pole. Then we went from the pole to the shadow of a tree, sneaking all the way to my back wall. “Who are we hiding from?” Keith said. “The East Germans,” I heard myself say, and suddenly it all became clear: The people in the park were border guards; the cinder-block wall separating my backyard from the park was the Berlin Wall. Our mission: move from one shadow to the next, staying still and waiting for the guards to look the other way, then sprint for the wall. If we got up and over fast and smooth we were safe in my backyard, West Berlin. Anything else and we were caught up in barbed wire or worse, shot.

We haven't told Treat about the game because we know it's
kind of stupid and we're not sure whose side he'd be on anyway. Plus, that would mean he'd know where we live and might want to come to one of our houses. How do you explain your huge friend with the bleached Mohawk to your dad when he doesn't even like ballplayers with bushy sideburns?

.

Our first band meeting is Saturday morning in Treat's room. We sit on Treat's bed as he fires through a stack of cassette tapes and plays different songs for us. The guitars sound like low-flying planes with some guy screaming in short bursts about who knows what because the music's so distorted. We're just getting to the Clash, which actually sounds like real music, when Treat's mom says it's time to go. They're heading to Treat's grandma's house in LA.

If we still lived in Jersey, I'd run home to catch the Saturday
Game of the Week
. My dad would be waiting for me, trying to get Brendan to sit down for an inning or two and trying to convince Colleen the reason some balls are called foul balls is because of the funny way they fly through the air, like chickens. But my dad's at work, so me and Keith stop in the park to practice some new moves for the Berlin Wall game.

I've been reaching the wall three steps before Keith, slamming my back against the blocks, dropping my hands down, and locking my fingers just as Keith gets to me. His right foot lands in my hands and I pull up hard, launching Keith to the top of the wall. It's about our tenth try and Keith finally makes it to the top without dangling and needing a second push. He reaches
back to pull me up, just the way we planned. But as Mr. Krueger said on our first lab day, “If everything worked out the way we had it in our heads, we wouldn't need to experiment.” Right as our palms slap together, Keith slides off the wall, landing in the grass next to me and going into a crouch.

“Did they shoot you?” I laugh. “We're done for!”

Keith gives me a
shush,
his finger pressed to his lips until we both hear the voices on the other side of the wall. Some guy says, “I don't think this will work even with an extension cord.”

“You're right,” says a girl. Astrid. “The patio's the best spot.”

Keith grins like we're real spies now. I'm wondering where Astrid was about five minutes ago when I fell off the wall like I'd been shot and screamed, “Freedom!”

“Yeah,” the guy says. “That'll guarantee everything is level.”

It stays quiet until we hear Astrid's glass sliding door thud and click shut.

Keith looks up at the wall. “Astrid's having a party.”

“How'd you get that?”

“What do you think she was talking to that guy about?” Keith bobs his head. “She's having a party. Tonight.”

I look up at the wall, three inches of scratchy cinder block between my yard and hers, between both our yards and the park. “Do you think she saw us?”

“No way,” Keith says. “I dropped as soon as I heard the door.” He smacks my chest. “My instincts are trained for that stuff.”

“Well then, did she hear us?”

“Who cares,” Keith says. “She's having a party. We can spy on it tonight and see how cheerleaders get down.” He hops up the
wall without any help from me, first time ever. “Treat is going to be so bummed, hanging at his grandma's while we hang with cheerleaders.”

I hop up onto the wall next to Keith. “You mean gawk at them.”

Keith taps his lips with his finger, fake serious. “Observe. We'll observe their behavior.”

“If by ‘observe' you mean slobber on ourselves while watching Astrid and her friends, then okay, we'll observe them.”

.

Keith shows up at my house after dinner with his backpack on. We say we're going to study for the periodic table test that's coming up, which is partly true. We are having a test; we just don't know when. Mr. Krueger says not knowing when you'll be tested is the best way to learn. “Anybody can memorize something for one big day,” he said. “You have to live it if you really want to learn it.” He spun around in his chair like he was surrounded by it. Our first quiz hadn't gone so good. “Come on, people,” he said. “Live it. I know it's hard when you've got to know it to live it, but you can't start living it if you don't try to know it.” He looked down at one of the quizzes in his hand, then around the room nice and slow. “Someday soon I'm going to give you a sheet of paper with a blank table on it. You'll have to show me everything you know, and then I'll know if you've been living it or not. You can't fake that.”

Up in my room, Keith unzips his backpack and pulls out the biggest pair of binoculars I've ever seen. “My dad used to find Skylab's orbit with these and we'd watch it.”

“What did it look like?”

Keith adjusts the binoculars. “Nothing really. A blip.” He holds the binoculars up to test them. “Except when it started falling back to earth and burning up. You could really see the smoke trail.”

I hold up the flash cards I've made of all the elements. “We've got to make this look good. My mom could come barging in here at any second.”

Keith takes one of the cards and looks it over. “Nice,” he says and hands it back. “We're not really going to study, though.”

“Why not? How long can we stare at a party that we're not actually at?”

It turns out, you can stare a pretty long time. The regular party stuff got boring pretty fast, a bunch of upperclassmen standing around holding beers, talking and not really doing anything, and Astrid didn't seem to be anywhere. Then the football players showed up and we started connecting some dots. Like, we know Petrakis is dating Kylie Smith, who does the announcements every morning during first period, but we had no idea what she looks like. Then this girl with short brown hair, about half the size of Petrakis, came up and gave him a long kiss. She tucked herself under his arm and has pretty much stuck there ever since. It's so cute my insides go cough-medicine warm every time I peer over at her.

The only studying we've gotten in is figuring out which elements are most essential for a good party. Keith says you've got to have aluminum because you can't crush an empty beer bottle on your head. We decide neon only works if you're old enough
to go to bars, but silicon could work anywhere. “Especially on Kylie,” Keith says.

“Nah,” I joke, “on Sergio Ortiz.”

It's funny, I think, because Sergio is famous for ripping off his shirt every time he scores a goal for the soccer team. But Keith's face is totally serious. “You know he likes to get all-the-way naked at parties, right?”

“What?” I shake my head. I've never heard that, but there's Sergio down in Astrid's backyard, his letterman jacket on a lawn chair and his shirt already hanging out his back pocket.

Keith nods and says it's okay, that it wasn't as gay as he thought at first since I didn't know. We're quiet for a minute, maybe two, before Keith picks up the flash card for tellurium. “This one is cherry,” he says. “
Te
is almost
Ted
.”

“It's too bad the atomic number is fifty-two and not two,” I say. Keith just stares at me. “It would be
Te
two, then. Ted Two?”

“Sweet,” Keith says. “Maybe our band will play at Ted Fifty-Two.”

I laugh. “If we're ready by then.”

About eight thirty I get Brendan in the room to test us on some of the flash cards. It's a perfect move because he'll leave us alone the rest of the night if he thinks we're really studying. Colleen wanders in too, but as soon as I give her a couple blank flash cards she leaves for her crayons.

A few minutes after Brendan leaves, a band starts setting up on Astrid's back patio. From my room, we can only see the front edge of the drums, and it's hard to tell who's messing around with the guitars and amps because the back porch light makes everyone a
silhouette at first. A skinny guy with a crop haircut is winding the cord around the microphone stand. When he stands all the way up, the park lights make him 3-D. “That's Gus/Gary,” I say. He's wearing jeans and a stupid tank top that looks like a British flag, and he's saying, “Check. Check. Check,” into the mic. I guess he got to come to Astrid's party because he's helping the band.

People start crowding around the porch and Keith's got the binoculars out, saying any second the whole band will come walking out the glass sliding door. But they don't. A couple guys who were just standing around pick up guitars and start twanging them a little. Another guy climbs behind the drums and thumps the bass a couple times. Gus/Gary is still at the microphone when a frumpy-looking guy in a plain white T-shirt steps up next to him. Everybody cheers and Gus/Gary puts his arm around the frumpy guy and says into the mic, “Thanks, you bastards.”

Everyone cracks up and then Gus/Gary pulls the frumpy guy closer and says, “Ted!” A roar goes up and people start chanting, “Ted, Ted, Ted.” Ted throws his arms up, his belly flops out of his shirt, and Gus/Gary shoves him into the crowd. Everyone keeps chanting, “Ted, Ted, Ted.”

“Holy shit,” Keith says. “
This
is Ted Two.”

Gus/Gary shakes up a can of beer and pops the top, sending a stream of suds over the crowd. The guitars scream, the drums roll, and Gus/Gary throws the can over everyone, out into the darkness of the yard. He yells into the microphone, “Fuck you; we're Filibuster!”

The whole backyard roars like they've elected a new pope, and Keith pulls the binoculars down and grabs my arm. “Holy shit. Filibuster!”

“Van Doren's band?” I point at the lead singer, at Gus/Gary, even though Keith's looking through the binoculars again. “
That's
van Doren?”

“Guess so,” Keith says. “Van Doren's the lead singer.”

It's amazing. Gus/Gary still looks like Gus/Gary, but he's van Doren now and he's all over the patio, pogoing, pushing the people at the front of the patio, pushing the other guys in the band, swirling his head, swirling his whole body. The music zooms like race cars flying by, and the only word I can make out is
fuck,
which seems to be every other word. The song lasts about a minute and a half, then just stops. Everyone erupts into cheers. The people in front slap hands with the guitar players, but when they reach for van Doren's hand he gives them the finger. Then there's a
tap-tap-tap
from the drummer. The next song starts, and it sounds like the first song.

“These guys are
awe
some,” Keith says.

They're not awesome. I mean, it's not like I expect them to sound like Billy Joel or the Bee Gees, but Uncle Ryan used to listen to Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, and even with all those guitars and the weird lyrics you can tell those guys know what they're doing. It is cool how the guitarist in Filibuster plays with one hand and slaps people's hands with the other. And the bass player is leaning back, his head up at the sky all peaceful, like he can't even hear the sonic boom coming out of his amp. Van Doren's bent at the waist now, leaning out toward the crowd, both hands hugging the mic. His body is perfectly still, but his head thrashes in a blur and he spits out every word like a cat with a hairball.

The backyard is a hurricane. There's a mass of guys circling,
all in the same direction, bouncing off each other, kind of light at first, then faster and harder. Some guys spin while they circle, all of them smashing into each other randomly. Even a couple girls are in there. Not Astrid, though. She's off to the side with some of her cheerleader friends, bobbing her head a little to the music. Her hair is pulled into a sideways ponytail, like maybe she's ready in case she decides to jump into the hurricane too.

By the fourth song, me and Keith are swirling around the room and crashing into each other. It only goes for about a minute, and just when we're getting tired, the song ends. We catch our breath; then it all starts up again.

As the last song ends, with Keith holding his arms up in the air like all the cheers coming from Astrid's backyard are for him and me spinning in my desk chair, holding two pencils in the air like I'm a drummer, my dad comes booming through the door without knocking. “Are they done?”

Keith drops his arms but his legs are still spread out funny from the pose. I spin the chair back to the desk and shuffle the flash cards. “I think so.”

My dad walks straight over to the window and looks down at Astrid's yard. “I wonder if Alex knows about this.” He turns to me. “Is this one of those punker bands?” I can't believe my dad even knows those words. “Do you know these guys?”

“I don't
know
them. I've heard of them.”

My dad shakes his head and starts walking out of the room. “Well, I wish I hadn't heard them. But if I do again, I'm calling the police.”

Keith doesn't have to tell me how bad it will look to be the
guy whose dad breaks up parties. But he does anyway. “You need to signal Astrid somehow.”