Empress of the World (6 page)

“Oh, that’d be just what he needs,” Battle says, “to get wasted when he’s already upset.”

Katrina shakes her head. “Jeez, go all ‘just say no’ on me, why don’t you, preacher’s daughter?”

“Shut up,” says Battle, walking away. She stays ahead of us all the way to the river. My ankle only hurts a little, I want to tell her.

When we find Isaac, the first thing I see is that he’s torn up all the grass around where he’s sitting. Lumps of grass and dirt are everywhere.

“Hi! We’re having a picnic!” Katrina says brightly.

“Have it somewhere else.”

I’m ready to leave. Then Battle says, “We read the letter. Be mad if you want, but we thought you might want to talk.” Meanwhile, Katrina hands him a Ding Dong and a can of Coke.

Isaac opens the Ding Dong package and peels the chocolate off the top. Then he rolls it up like a cigarette and puts the tip of it in his mouth.

“Hey, light this one up for me, Katrina,” he says. He sucks it all the way into his mouth, loudly.

Battle sits down, carefully avoiding the area Isaac has devastated.

“Do you want us to leave?” asks Katrina.

Isaac suddenly looks different, in a way I can’t quite define. It’s as though he’s actively shaken off one mood and is trying desperately to put another one on.

“No—I was just kidding before. You can have your picnic or whatever.” He wipes off the chocolate crumbs from around his mouth and gulps down some Coke.

“So did you know this was coming?” Battle asks.

“You guys? No, otherwise I would have had, you know, a picnic blanket all laid out.”

Battle glares. “Not us. The divorce.”

Isaac takes a long sip of Coke. “Ah, the breakfast of champions,” he says.

Katrina and I sit down. I pick up one of Isaac’s dirt-grass lumps and start pulling on individual strands of grass, trying to see if I can pull one all the way out without it snapping.

“Were they fighting a lot?” Battle persists.

Isaac takes a huge bite of Ding Dong and says, muffled through it, “Oh no, they were in total and perfect harmony every moment, exhibiting great parenting skills to me and my baby sister. Jesus, what do you think?”

“Do you have any idea where you want to live yet?” I ask.

“Yeah. Not with either of them.”

The dirt-grass lump crumbles in my hands. Now my hands are all covered with dirt, and I don’t have anything to wipe them on but my shorts. I’d rather not. I don’t want to look any sloppier than I do already. I rub my hands together and get most of the dirt off, but they still feel gritty.

“And I have to write this fucking position paper, and something’s fucked up with my word processor,” says Isaac, looking at Katrina.

“Not for long,” she says. “Geek girl to the rescue!” Then her face turns an intense shade of pink, and she adds quickly, “You guys come too, you might learn something.”

Judging from his expression, a crowd scene was not what Isaac had in mind. But he doesn’t say anything as we all troop back to Prucher Hall to go up to his room. I wipe my hands off on my shorts when Battle’s not looking.

We’re not ever supposed to be on the guys’ hall, officially, but Isaac and Kevin have both mentioned that their RA doesn’t seem to be capable of noticing anything short of a nuclear attack. The gossip is that he is trying to use this summer to write his master’s thesis, and so all he does is sit at his computer with his headphones at top volume.

But unfortunately, the RA seems to be taking a break. He’s standing in the hallway outside his room as we approach, and he says, “Hey, where are you all going?”

“Study group,” says Katrina promptly. “Isaac has the notes we need on his computer.”

The RA wrinkles up his face in thought. “I guess that’s all right. Just leave the door open, okay?”

We all nod seriously. But when we get to Isaac’s room, we can’t help cracking up.

“For God’s sake, don’t close the door, because if you did, we would just all be compelled to have sex with you immediately,” says Katrina. “He must think you are a major studboy!”

“And you don’t?” Isaac challenges.

She says very quickly, in a higher voice than usual, “Yeah, he must have been having visions of all kinds of goings-on—ooh, step back now, I’m going to boot up your hard drive. . . .”

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Isaac hasn’t decorated his room at all. The only things identifying the room as his are the clothes and books on the floor. Suddenly he blushes and kicks a pair of underwear underneath the bed.

Battle and I sit on clear parts of the floor. Katrina sits cross-legged in Isaac’s chair and peers at his computer screen. Isaac hovers close by her.

“I’ve got it,” she says after a few minutes, “you moved your Office Folder into Queries, so nothing will—”

She’s interrupted by the sound of Isaac’s phone ringing.

We stare at it as it rings, all obviously thinking the same thing: that it’s one of his parents. It keeps ringing, and it doesn’t seem like the person on the other end is going to hang up any time soon, so Isaac sighs and grabs the receiver.

“Hello? Oh hi.”

Pause.

“I’ve been busy. This is an intensive program, you know.”

Pause.

“What do you mean, have I met anybody? Of course, I’ve met tons of people—my class alone has twenty-five people in it.”

Katrina raises one eyebrow. “Girlfriend,” she mouths, and Battle nods. We get up.

Isaac says, “Don’t go.” Then he says into the phone, “No, not you. I’ve got some people in my room.” We sit back down.

Pause. Isaac starts to hold the phone some distance away from his ear, although the voice on the other end is not getting any louder. Then he puts his mouth close to the receiver again and says, “Yeah, I know. Yeah. Listen, I can’t talk much longer. I don’t want to run your phone bill up.”

Pause.

“Yeah, I know your dad pays it. I’ve gotta go.”

He hangs up.

“Harsh,” says Katrina.

“It was nobody important,” says Isaac.

“Dang, I guess not,” says Battle.

The phone starts ringing again.

“Let it ring,” says Isaac.

“It must be hard to concentrate on anything right now,” I say, speaking more loudly than usual to be heard over the phone.

“I don’t even know what they’re doing with me and Rebecca,” Isaac says with a kind of outrage in his voice. Then he unplugs the phone.

“Rebecca’s your sister?” I ask.

“Yup. She’s ten. You’d like her,” he says to Katrina. “She’s a lot like you.”

Katrina blushes for no apparent reason. Then she asks, “Are they going to do one of those ‘Dad gets the boy, Mom gets the girl’ things?”

Isaac opens a desk drawer and slams it shut. “They’d better not.”

“One of them might want to move away,” Battle suggests quietly.

Before Isaac can respond, Katrina jumps in. “That’s exactly what happened with my ma, she couldn’t get far enough away from my dad. It sucked having to leave New York, but I was already kind of in the middle of an identity shift, and then when we got to Santa Fe, nobody knew anything about who I was before, so I got to be whoever I felt like being.”

I wonder what Katrina was like before her parents got divorced. I wonder how she dressed. Right now, she’s wearing a white Oxford cloth shirt over a blue glitter tube top, a Catholic-school-uniform-looking green and red plaid skirt, and purple motorcycle boots. And she has glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton earrings.

Meanwhile, Isaac is pondering the new identity idea.

“I’ll be a jock—drink lots of beer and treat women like shit! Oh, wait—to be a jock you have to have athletic ability. Damn.”

We’re laughing. Isaac continues: “I’ll grow my hair out and get a guitar and write sensitive songs about love and death and the fate of the planet. Being completely tone-deaf wouldn’t get in the way, would it?” He pauses to gulp down more Coke, and then goes on: “Now I’ve got it! I’ll wear badly fitting clothes, overeat, carry a really thick book, and hold forth about the continuity problems on last week’s Star Trek! That always gets the chicks.”

“Ooh, baby—the thicker the better!” says Katrina.

Battle and I shriek, and Isaac says, “What’d I tell you?”

“The book! I meant the book! Jeez, you guys!” Katrina grabs a pillow from Isaac’s bed, throws it at him, and misses. He hurls it back, and it hits her right in the head.

“I dunno, Battle—I think we ought to leave,” I say, grinning.

Battle says, “You got that right.” We get up and start for the door.

“Bye, guys!” calls Isaac, scooping up the pillow in preparation for another strike. “Come back any time!” He starts to close the door. Then Katrina pushes past him and says, “Let’s talk more later—right now I need to have a serious discussion with my girls here.”

Isaac’s face falls. I’m the only one who sees it, though. He closes the door.

Katrina starts in on us immediately, although she can’t keep from laughing.

“Very funny, you two. I say one thing—just one thing—”

I say, “Katrina, just face it. He’s hot for you.” Battle nods.

Katrina rolls her eyes. “That is so unlikely. You heard him—I remind him of his friggin’ baby sister! It’d be about as likely as the three of us getting the hots for each other.”

“Bye, you guys—see you soon,” I say, and put the receiver down. My ear is warm. I must have been on the phone with Mom and Dad for over an hour.

I don’t remember anything they said.

Or anything I said.

Earlier tonight, I tried to write my objective description for class tomorrow. Ms. Fraser said that we could describe anything: an object, a place, a person—the only requirement was that whatever we chose had to exist in the world somewhere, it couldn’t be made up. It’s supposed to teach us how important it is to be unbiased when you’re describing an artifact.

I always write things out in longhand before I put them on the computer, so the ripped-out page from my notebook is still crumpled into a ball on the bed.

I was just about to tear it up when the phone rang. I pick it up, uncrumple it, and look again at what I wrote.