Firecracker (5 page)

W
hen I was ten years old, the Kriegers went to Paris. It wasn't exactly a vacation. My grandfather and father had a meeting with some Saudi Arabians in the restaurant at the George V hotel. One morning, I was supposed to stay in the room but found myself getting incredibly bored. Vivi was sorting through piles of clothes, and Lisbet was seated in a plush velvet chair, enamored of the pigeons outside the east sitting room window. I couldn't take it anymore, so I snuck out. I say “snuck out,” but I actually just opened the door and left. No one even noticed. I wandered over to the restaurant in search of my grandfather. I'm hazy about what was actually happening there. In my imagination, one of the Saudis was negotiating to purchase Lisbet, but that was probably just wishful thinking. I knew I wasn't supposed to be there, and after the whole incident was over, I was sworn to secrecy. (I mention it now because the non-Kriegers who were involved are no longer alive.)

I hovered around the maitre d' podium for a little bit, slowly inching closer to the table where my grandfather and the others sat. “What is it, Puppy?” he asked when he finally made eye contact.

“I've been in the room all day. It's horrible.”

He wasn't mad. He just smiled. “How about you handle the rest of the day, Dirk?” he said to my father, who started breathing heavily from the shock of it. Grandpa got up and took my hand. “Let's get our butts the hell out of here. It's boring to me, so I can only imagine what it's like for you.”

We started walking fast—practically running. He was old even then, but he could outrun pretty much anyone. We went through a gate and past a length of tourists, and then we stopped. “Here we are,” he said.

“This is a museum. If I wanted to be bored, I could've stayed in the hotel with Lisbet.”

“This isn't a museum, Monkey. It's the mother-fucking Louvre.” He pronounced it
Loov-er
because he refused to speak any French.

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“Don't worry. I didn't take you here to learn about art. I'm trying to stay awake too. But I am going to teach you something.”

“Well, that's just great.”

He pulled my arm and we moved past the line. I don't know if he got special treatment or something, but no one stopped him. He looked like he knew what he was doing. We moved into these long hallways full of paintings. People were shoving their way over to the
Mona Lisa
like they expected her to do something other than be a painting, and Grandpa and I laughed a little before we moved on.

“I want you to find your painting,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There's a ton of paintings here. I want you to find yours. You'll know it when you see it.”

I kind of had no idea what he was talking about, but I looked around quickly as we walked through. Most of the stuff was about Jesus or wars or Jesus in wars or ladies taking baths, and I didn't really care for any of it. But then we crossed into another room, and I understood what he was talking about. I'd seen a painting of this girl. She was smiling mischievously, like she knew she'd done something wrong or was secretly teasing someone. She wore a boa that moved around her like a snake and her hands were encased in long, golden gloves.

“Well, I'll be. It's like you're looking in a mirror, huh?” Grandpa said.

“Kind of. I guess. Is that what you meant? Is that my painting?”

“There's only one way to find out, isn't there?” I wasn't sure where he was going with it, and he seemed a little bothered that I wasn't catching on. “Take it,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I sure as hell know I'm not speaking French. You heard me. Take it. It's your painting.”

He wasn't smiling, so it seemed like this wasn't a joke. In fact, he was checking over his shoulder to see if he could spot cameras or security guards. I reached my hand out and ran my fingers lightly over the frame. Nothing happened.

“Take it,” he told me again.

And so I did. I pulled at the golden frame, surprised by how easily its weight shifted into my hand. Then I heard a horrible wail from an alarm. It whined and screeched until I let go and jerked my hand back. The painting wobbled and leaned sideways, so that the girl in the portrait was smirking at the ground. Two men in uniform appeared right behind me a moment later. “Astrid, what are you doing?” my grandfather asked in a shocked tone. “Don't touch that!” I turned to look at him, and he winked at me. He then spoke quietly to the two guards and flashed his congressional ID. He did that a lot when we went on trips. With that ID, he actually had diplomatic immunity, which meant that he could technically commit any crime he wanted to in another country and they couldn't do anything about it. I don't know how often he actually exercised this power, but I once saw him steal a Pez dispenser from a store in Berlin. The guards nodded to him, and we walked out of the museum.

“If you were quicker,” he said, “you would have that damn painting. Astrid, never let anyone stop you from having everything you want.”

“It's impossible, you know. I never could've had it.”

“Impossible for everyone else, sure,” he said. “Not for you and me.”

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

I woke up in the nurse's office. I wasn't alone. That boy from class—the one with the weird shirt—was there. And he was staring at me.

“How long was I out?” I asked.

“You weren't really out. You were sort of muttering.”

“What did I say?”

“Ms. Sharp asked if she should call an ambulance and you said, ‘Not sure, I left my medical degree in my other purse. Why don't you figure it out yourself?'”

“Sounds like me,” I said.

The nurse came from around a corner and handed me an ice pack. “Put this on your head,” she told me. And then she looked at the boy and offered him a Popsicle. I had a pretty good feeling that an ice pack and a Popsicle were her go-to treatment options for everything. If you have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and you seek treatment from the school nurse, you're going to get an ice pack or a Popsicle.

“You probably shouldn't sit up,” he said.

“Are things blurry to you?”

“No. It's just you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “the world probably hasn't fallen out of focus for everyone since I've been out of it. How long have I been here?”

“Two periods, I think.”

“That's a solid plus.”

“I'm Noah,” he told me.

“A pleasure, I'm sure,” I said. “I'm Astrid Krieger.”

“I know. I've heard about you. You're the girl who gets in trouble all the time.”

“Thanks for the information, Einstein.”

Noah blinked a few times, then leaned forward, propping his head on his palm. “Did you say that sarcastically because I said something you obviously already knew . . . or because you knew my name is Einstein?”

I looked at him, a little bewildered. “I didn't know you were named Einstein. I was being sarcastic.”

“Good.”

“Your name is really Einstein?”

He nodded. “Noah Einstein. Do you faint often, Astrid Krieger?”

“First time. Did I hit anything on the way down?”

“My desk,” he said.

“Yikes,” I said. “I didn't feel a thing.”

“If you're okay, it's okay. It sure beats doing anything else. We missed math and gym entirely.”

“If we can make this a regular part of our day, we could miss morning classes for the whole year,” I said.

“That might lead to a permanent concussion.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, taking the Popsicle meant for him off the table. I ate it until my tongue was really purple. I stuck it out to make sure. There was something about me sticking out my tongue at him that made Noah's face fall. I had no idea why. Maybe someone he knew had a weird tongue disease, and he tried to think about it as seldom as possible. My thoughts were interrupted by a long, sustained beeping sound, which signaled the end of the period. According to my schedule, it was now time for lunch. “Do you know how to get to lunch?”

“Kind of,” he said. “It's my fourth day.”

“Did you eat lunch all of your first three days?”

“Nearly.”

“Then you're not giving yourself enough credit,” I said.

“Are you going to fall over again?” he asked as I began to stand up.

“I'll give you warning.”

I always considered myself pretty skilled in figuring out what someone might be good at even if no one else could see it. I thought about a situation when I might need to execute some sort of elaborate plan and how I could use a guy like Noah. I couldn't think of one, but I figured he was worth having around anyway. Noah never found the cafeteria. After several tries, I had to ask a passerby. As far as Noah was concerned, from that point going forward he and I were friends.

I
love lunch. Particularly in school, but also just in general. I mean, what is there not to absolutely love about lunch? It's this break in the middle of the day where you get to eat and think about stuff and no one is pretending to teach you anything. When I was at Bristol, I would have my lunch in the dining hall. We were served by the work-study kids, and the food was usually pretty excellent. We could also go to a restaurant instead if we wanted, but there were only like two restaurants in the whole town and everyone would go to this diner that was supposed to look like the 1950s and people who worked there had to call you “Daddy-o” or “Betty.” No thanks. When I didn't go to the dining hall, I went to my room and I could be free of everyone for an hour. So it was especially bad that lunch at Cadorette was as terrible as the rest of the day. You weren't allowed to leave. You had to be in the cafeteria, and the cafeteria was just full of the worst parts of the school—the worst parts of being seventeen in general—all jammed into one giant awful room.

I probably don't need to tell you what it's like in a public school cafeteria. I mean, it's very likely that you've been to one (or are sitting in one right now). And if you've seen one, I'm sure you've seen them all. But I'll describe it anyway in case you are homeschooled (in which case, your mom is probably really upset that you're reading this book because of the cursing. SHIT! SHIT! FUCK! SHIT!).

There were tables everywhere, and at every table sat an assortment of people who looked more or less like one another but unlike every other group in the cafeteria. Lucy was very excited when she described this breakdown to me and Noah. “You know, everyone sits with their friends.” She didn't think much about the implications of her own seat at a fairly empty table way in the back corner. I was sitting there too, and I had a good idea of what it said about me. As far as Lucy was concerned, everyone was her friend, even the people who didn't look at her or listen to her. “I'm sure it was like that in your old school. I'm sure there were even more kinds of people.”

“Just two kinds,” I said. “Rich assholes and foreign people.”

Lucy laughed, assuming I was joking. “But what about you?”

“Well, I don't speak Chinese, so . . . ”

“It must've been terrible, then. All sorts of . . .
not nice people
.”

“I don't need nice people. I just need useful people.”

“I don't understand,” she said.

“It's what I'm good at. Everyone has a use. They don't always know what it is. I can usually figure it out.” It was weird saying this to someone like Lucy, who pretty much had no use other than knowing the map of the school by heart. But she kept smiling the whole time I was talking, like she wasn't really listening anyway.

“Does being a friend count? As a useful thing?”

“No, Lucy,” I said. “Being a friend does not count.” I was suddenly pretty hungry. I looked around for the waiter.

Noah stood. “We have to go up,” he said.

A few tables in front of us were filled with a bunch of boys wearing black T-shirts of seventies heavy-metal bands. They were probably having the same boring conversation about Led Zeppelin and guitars that boys had been having at that table for forty years.

In front of them were theater girls and boys. Some of them had on top hats. One of the girls had an actual monocle.

In front of them were the football players, all intently interested in a group of dull-looking girls. At the head of the table was the lazy-eyed girl in the stomach shirt from my English class. Those at the table—and frankly, it seemed like those everywhere—were waiting to hear whatever it was she was going to say next. They were almost panting. It was something resembling worship. It made absolutely no sense to me because I'm pretty sure the only areas in which she had any expertise were upper lip bleach and birth control.

Noah, Lucy, and I had to walk past her to get to the food. As we passed, she whispered something that made the whole table laugh. Not like the kind of laugh you might make when something is funny, either. It was the kind of laugh you make when you want someone to hear you laughing. I turned my head. It was just an instinctive move. People were being entertained by something, and I wanted to know what that something was. I turned to see what was so hilarious. But then I realized that they were laughing at me. It was the third time it had happened that day. First with the “princess” guy outside the school. Then with the “Ass-trid” boy in my English class. And now they were just laughing for no apparent reason. Just because they sort of knew who I was. This wasn't how I was used to being treated. I was used to being disliked, sure—even hated. I was used to being feared. I was not familiar with what it felt like to be openly mocked.

“It's okay,” Noah said to me. “Ignore them. Let's get food.”

I didn't understand girls at Cadorette. Up until now, my life had been filled with girls who were called Tibby and Bitsie (there are a hundred different nicknames for Elisabeth in my world). Girls with large vocabularies. Girls who spoke multiple languages. Girls who lost their virginity to Greek shipping magnates.

My very first day at Bristol, in chapel, Liddy Pierce came up next to me uninvited and, with some misguided sense that because our families owned neighboring villas in Italy, thought we were the sort of pair that would become friends. She sat down, looked around at half the student body, and sneered, “You know, there was a time when Bristol didn't even allow Jews.”

I didn't look up from my fingers. “You know,” I said, “there was a time when your parents and a surgeon had to decide whether the operation would make you a full boy or a full girl.”

I glanced up in time to see Liddy's face turn completely white. After that, she walked away and never said a word to me ever again. “I know a guy who could shave down that Adam's apple,” I yelled after her.

A really good insult only works if it's true. Thankfully, that one was. I'd spent the day before school boning up on administrative records. Survival isn't a race; it's a dance. It takes a certain grace and it also takes a lot of work. It's always best to be prepared.

But I was unprepared to deal with a girl whose parents had regular jobs and cooked dinner and shopped at outlet malls. She might have a switchblade in her teeth. I met girls like that in jail. But then again, girls had liked me in jail (they really had). These girls didn't like me. I had no idea what to do with them.

So I walked away. Noah, who had just met me that morning and only knew me as a girl who got in trouble a lot and fell on people's desks, was a little relieved I was avoiding confrontation. “People like that—they laugh at everyone,” he said. This didn't make me feel better. I wasn't everyone.

“That's Summer Wonder,” Lucy said, referring to the lazy-eyed girl. “We've been friends since second grade.”

“Her name is Summer Wonder? Those were actual words that her parents thought sounded okay together?”

Lucy got nervous. “She can hear us.” Lucy talked about her with a reverence that necessitated every detail be whispered. “Her father is Marvin Wonder,” Lucy whispered. Then she nodded as if that was a satisfying biography.

“I have no idea what a Marvin Wonder is,” I told her.

Lucy scrunched up her face in a sort of frustration and pointed out the window across Mastracchio Road where a billboard showed a cartoon of a heavy, smiling, bald man making an introductory gesture toward a Ford truck. In bubble letters, the billboard read
Marvin Wonder Ford: The Lowest in Town
.

“The lowest what in town?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“Lucy,” I said, with whatever sliver of confidence I had after Cadorette Township High School had chipped pieces of it away all day, “I'm Astrid Krieger. Do you know who my father is?”

I walked back over to Summer Wonder's table. “I don't want to do this,” I said. “But there's something I need to tell you.” I paused for what felt like forever. Her table quieted, anxious to hear what I would say. No one said anything for, like, a minute. “Oh man,” I said, “I was really expecting something perfect to pop into my head but, Jesus, nothing's coming. Nevertheless . . . ” There was a Twinkie lying on one of her friend's cafeteria trays. I picked it up and smushed it between my palms until my hands were covered in cakey goo. Then I wiped the doughy mess onto Summer Wonder's head.

I shrugged as if to say “not my best work,” but it stopped her from laughing for sure. It also made it look like a bird had pooped in her hair. Everyone looked paralyzed by shock and confusion. No one knew what to do or what to make of me, so I didn't face any resistance as I walked away. I just really didn't want to be at that school anymore.

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

The rest of the week was just about as bad as I had imagined. And I have one hell of an imagination. I wasn't lucky enough to fall on someone's desk again, so I had to go to all my classes. English, math, and gym were in the morning.
Oh my god.
Gym!
I had really thought I'd at least manage to get out of gym class. I mean, I'm good at getting out of stuff like that. It's kind of what I do. But somehow I lost that ability. I'd been failing at everything since I got kicked out of Bristol.

There were about five gym teachers. I focused on the oldest, manliest one and said, “I can't do gym, sir.”

“Why is that, young lady?”

I didn't have a creative answer, but I had one that usually made men uncomfortable: “My period. I'm having my period.”

But he didn't get uncomfortable. He just responded with, “Me too, dear.” The oldest and manliest gym teacher was a lady. And then she insisted that I sign up for the basketball unit.

“But I don't like basketball. Honestly, I don't know anything about it. We didn't have the same sports at my last school. I assume you don't offer equestrian dressage in this gymnasium. Is there something in gym that involves sitting?”

“That's the reason you have to play basketball. It might surprise you. I think you might be a great basketball player.”

That moment changed everything. The rest of this book is about how I became an incredible basketball player. I was a hero to the whole school. I won the big championship. I then became a professional basketball player and basketballed all over the world. But you already know that because I'm so famous for my basketball skills.

THE END

Okay. This is not a book about how I realized I was a great basketball player. Though I did realize something else: that if I just stood there, no one could really force me to do anything with the basketball. This was my goal for Cadorette in general: if I just stood there, people couldn't really give me any problems. At Bristol, I'd been different. I was always moving. I always had a plan and a reason. It was never to do homework or study or to maintain good grades but to intimidate everyone I disliked. I was trying to win at life. My family was already rich and powerful, and I'd been given a massive head start. But instead of winning, I'd just ended up at Cadorette. I didn't know how to win anymore. This place worked in entirely different currency. My wallet was stuffed with Confederate money. In a way, I'd already lost.