More Happy Than Not (10 page)

We go wait for her by one of the brown picnic tables in the second court. This is the same spot where Brendan broke the news to me that he was going to spend the summer in North Carolina with his family when we were thirteen. I started drawing comics when he wasn't around and he came home to find himself drawn as a Pokémon trainer.

Mom comes downstairs in my eighth-grade gym shirt, and I wish she had left her keys at home so Thomas wouldn't see all her supermarket discount cards. “Hello.”

“Hi. I'm Thomas,” he says, offering a hand.

“Elsie,” she says with a smile, shaking it. “Please tell me that's not sweat on you two.”

“Sprinklers,” I say.

“Thank God. What are your plans tonight, boys?”

“The movie we just saw bombed, so I thought I could show Stretch here
Jaws
,” Thomas says.

Mom looks at me. “You didn't call and tell me you were going to the movies.”

“I got back in one piece.”

Her eyes fall on my scar and then back at me.

“He knows,” I say.

Thomas cuts in, “If it helps, Ms. Elsie, I can give you my address, my phone number, and my mother's phone number. But I feel like Aaron hasn't lived until he's seen
Jaws
. You're more than welcome to join us if you haven't seen it yourself.”

This gets my mom smiling again. “I saw it in the theaters when I was a young girl. Thank you.”

Thomas almost looks jealous that she was alive when the movie came out. Maybe he thinks Back Then was a better time to be born. I personally think Much Later would've been a better time instead of Right Now.

“I'll be at the supermarket late tonight anyway, so you can go,” Mom tells me.

I'm smiling like a dumb-idiot. I haven't gotten this excited about a sleepover since Fat-Dave's mother took us all to buy the newest Throne Wars game at midnight, and everyone stayed up all night playing at his house.

“Thomas, please make sure he's asleep before two, remind him to use the bathroom first, and don't let him spend more than a dollar on candy.”

I would make a you-know-what joke for how embarrassing she's being, but it would prolong the agony. Mom hugs him, and then me. She thanks him for letting me sleep over, takes down all of his information—address, his number, his mother's number—and we start walking away.

“Your mother's cool,” he says.

“Yeah, when she's not treating me like a little kid. I should probably go grab some clothes to sleep in.”

“Don't worry about it, I have stuff.”

We're only going a couple blocks down, but as someone who will likely never have enough money to go see the pyramids in Egypt or boat down a canal in Venice, this day away from home already feels like I'm headed to another country.

The orange cord follows
us to the rooftop and snakes across the pebbled ground, where all evidence of my night with Genevieve is gone. Thomas props the projector up, but it's still light out so we can't watch the movie yet. I lie down with my arms spread out like I'm going to try and make a snow angel.

“What are you doing?” Thomas asks.

“Drying off.” I shut my eyes, but can still see spears of orange and feel the sun cooking my face. I can't tell how much of my drenched shirt is water and how much is sweat. Summer sucks that way, but winter can go die twice because I always refuse to leave the house—even whenever Genevieve wants to go out and build snowmen and take silly couple photos.

“No homo, but you should take your shirt off,” Thomas says.

I look up and his shirt is already off and he's draping it over the ledge to dry. I sit up, take my shirt off too, throw it
at him,
and sprawl out. The baked pebbles burn, but it's not any worse than the sand at Jones Beach. Speaking of which, two shirtless guys on a rooftop isn't all that different from two
shirtless guys at the beach, so we really shouldn't have to No Homo this.

Thomas plops down next to me. “I used to watch movies with Sara up here. Well, we would start watching something and then start messing around.”

“You had sex with your ex up here?”

He laughs. “Nah, never sex. Just other stuff.”

“Was she your first?” I ask.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah, Sara was my first too,” I say. Thomas smacks my shoulder so hard it leaves his handprint. I punch him above his heart but his chest is firmer than mine. “Your breasts are hard.”

“They're called pecs, and I paid a lot of money for them.”

For some reason I feel uncomfortable talking about his body, probably because it's better than mine. “Do you miss Sara? Be real.”

“No and yes,” he answers. “I had to break things off with her because we really weren't right for each other anymore. I just miss having someone to call and go out and have fun with. But it never
had
to be Sara.”

“I get that.”

We drop it and talk about random things as the sun falls out of sight behind the city's buildings: video games and favorite comics; how much we hate school and the hot teachers and girls who make it easier; his birthday coming up—on the same day Genevieve gets back—and how he's never smoked before, not even a cigarette. He looks disappointed when I admit to blazing up with Brendan and the others a few times. To keep it light, I admit something incredibly shameful: “I don't know how to ride a bike.”

“How is that even possible?” he asks.

“No one ever taught me. My mom doesn't know how to either, and my dad was going to but never got around to it.”

“I'll have to teach you then. It's a basic life skill, like swimming and masturbating.”

The sky is dark
now.

The quality of
Jaws
is really poor since a) the movie is old, and b) we're watching it on a brick wall. But I wouldn't trade in this experience for a perfectly clear DVD on a big-screen TV.

It's getting chilly, but I can't pull myself away to get my shirt because I'm too concerned about the girl running into the ocean like she doesn't know she's in a shark movie. “How many times have you seen this?”

“Lost count,” he says. “More than
War Horse
, less than
Jurassic Park
.”

After some serious “Oh shit!” moments where the shark eats more people and the survivors' boat blows the hell up, we put our shirts back on, pack up the projector, and carefully go down the fire escape—even though the roof door is open.

“Ma should be sleeping by now so we need to be quiet,” Thomas says, opening the window and climbing through.

His room smells like clean laundry and pencil shavings. The walls are green and decorated with posters of movies and pictures of his favorite directors. I step over the balled-up socks on the floor and see the toy basketball hoop fixed to the door where he must play when he's bored. Drawn all over the door are deadlocked games of tic-tac-toe, quotes from Steven Spielberg movies, doodles of dinosaurs, a spot-on drawing of E.T., and lots of randomness I can't make out.

His bed isn't made but it looks comfortable, unlike mine. My bed is basically one level better than a cot. He even has his own desk, whereas the only surface I can sketch on is a textbook on my lap. There's an open notebook on the desk where it looks like he crossed out some music notes he was composing in favor of a screenplay he hasn't gotten very far with.

Thomas opens his closet door—something else I don't have—and starts throwing some shirts on his bed. “Come find something to sleep in, Stretch.”

I check out the shirts. Most are too baggy, too tight, too childish, too geriatric, and, I shit you not, too extraterrestrial. It turns out the last shirt was a gift from his aunt's visit to Roswell, New Mexico. I settle on a white T-shirt and quickly change into it. In the corner of the room behind his laundry basket is a board with a pie chart and several notes thumbtacked to it. It reads:
LIFE CHART
.

“What's this? Old school project?”

“That's what I've been working on the past couple of days,” Thomas says, changing into his Snoopy pajamas and a tank top. “I decided I would direct myself on the course of life I want to take. You know, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, except not something that will make me so obsessed to figure out every last detail.”

I have no idea who this Maslow guy is, but Thomas's chart seems plenty obsessive. Thomas carries the board across the room and props it against his dresser. We sit down in front of it. The categories in this pie chart are divided by school/work, health, self-actualization, and relationships.

“I think I'm doing okay with health. I eat right and work out. I'm struggling a bit with financial security because I can't seem to find a job I love. The money in my savings account can't even buy me a movie ticket.”

At least he
has
a savings account, something that might suggest he once had enough money worth putting away. If I get birthday or Christmas money, I usually slip almost all of it inside Mom's purse since she knows where we need it most. It sucks paying for a home you don't love living in, but it beats the alternative. See? Silver linings.

“I'm finding my biggest struggles are with love and purpose,” Thomas continues. This chart is the work of a madman who wants his happy ending; I should imitate his insanity. “It might've been a blow to my self-esteem after breaking up with Sara. But chilling with you kept me from falling into a black hole about it, I think.”

“You're welcome,” I say. My phone vibrates inside my pocket and I see it's Genevieve. I screen it. I'll hit her up before bed.

“I'm serious. You gave me something. Whatever it is, I can't get it from my missing father, overworked mother, or ex-girlfriend. So maybe you have to help me figure out my true potential.”

I study his room for a moment. This place belongs to someone who lives as many lives as possible. There are unfinished sheets of music, movie scripts. (Later I learn that there's even an abandoned musical in his closet about a robot that time-travels back to the Mesozoic era to study dinosaurs while singing about surviving without technology.) There are boxes of Legos stacked in the corner, a colorful tower from when he wanted to be an architect and set designer.

It's like when you're a kid, and you want to be an astronaut before accepting it might be impossible—even though everyone says nothing's impossible, and they go so far to pinpoint moments from history to make you feel stupid. But you move on anyway. You know your capabilities and circumstances, so you start thinking that maybe being a boxer would be cool even though you're too skinny. No problem, you can bulk up. But that all changes when you want to write for the newspaper and dream of having your own column, so you start doing that. And one day when you're writing someone advice on how to be more organized, you think about piloting a ship into space again.

This is how Thomas lives his life, one misfired dream after the other. That journey may stretch for a lifetime, but even if he doesn't discover that spark until he's an old man, Thomas will die with wrinkles he earned and a smile on his face.

“If you help me stay happy so I don't end up like my dad, you got a deal,” I say.

“Deal.”

9

BEYOND DEAD ENDS

T
he only thing that sucked about last night was that I never got a chance to call Genevieve back. It's the first thing I think of when I wake up.

Thomas's desk chair creaks—the one where he sat last night to show off his “mad origami skills.” (Except when he tried to make a seashell it just looked like crumpled paper.) I sit up and rub my eyes. I can tell it's early because of the slant of the sunlight through the windows. I can't believe he's already awake, hunched over, writing something while quietly tapping his foot; it's like he's taking a final exam and doesn't want me copying off of his test.