My Most Excellent Year (11 page)

Dear Nat,

A year after Tick and I decided to be brothers and our parents realized we weren’t kidding, they knew that the sleepover routine was going to get old fast if we kept having to remember to bring things like our pajamas and clean socks and comic books and sleeping bags whenever one of us spent the night. So we both began moving in piece by piece—starting with the comic books. That was six years ago, and now Tick has his own bed in my room, his own dresser and desk and DSL port, his own toothbrush in the bathroom, his own half of our closet, and his own bulletin board for his Red Sox scorecards and the picture of his mom that he just put up last week. Meanwhile, I have all of the same things on
his
side of town, except
for my Suzanne Pleshette production stills in place of the Red Sox junk. Whenever I stay over, Nehi sleeps on my bed and not Tick’s. He knows who the real diva is.

Our room at Pop’s is definitely the cooler of the two. The green-shingled house is almost a hundred years old and plunked halfway down a hill in the middle of a narrow little neighborhood street. There’s no front yard and only a couple of feet of grass in the back, but inside it’s a whole other century. We’ve got sliding doors and secret panels, a stone fireplace and wooden beams, and a living room that’s big enough for either thirty people or a half-finished diorama of Washington, D.C. But the best part is the original servants’ quarters on the top floor, especially after Pop turned two of them into one big hideout for me and Tick. (Since it’s the same size as my room at home, Tick and I figure that they must have been really little servants.)

Once Mom and Dad and Pop discovered they’d each inherited an extra eight-year-old without expecting it, they came up with one set of ground rules for both of us, no matter which house we were sleeping at.

“We’re sunk,” groaned Tick. “Whose idea was it to let them talk to each other?”

“Don’t look at
me
!”

The only difference between their two empires is that Mom and Dad gave us thirty minutes after lights out for Galaxy Fighters on the ceiling or View-Master slide shows on the wall, and Pop let us have forty-five before he told us to knock it off and go to sleep. These days, I don’t know what we’d do without the extra fifteen minutes.

•   •   •

Tonight’s Topics

1. The time Tick’s mother sat with him on the Plum Island beach at night and told him to pick out his favorite star so they could name it “Anthony.”
   
2. Going to China with Dad someday to see where my great-grandpa was born and wondering if they have Slurpees there yet.
   
3. An invisible boy who Tick says he’s seen twice at Amory Park and who tells him what pitches to swing on. Either my brother has an overactive imagination or else he needs Ritalin.
   
4. Why Route 128 is also I-95 South and I-93 North. And how.
   
5. A hard and bitter peace.
   
6. Claudette Colbert’s childhood. (Tick’s usually in the bathroom during this one. Some people have no interest in broadening their horizons.)
   
7. Plots for getting Pop and Lori together. As in really together. (Has Tick thought far enough ahead to figure out that his adviser would be his stepmother? Or should I let him be surprised?)
   
8. Where the hell I’m going to find a closing act for the talent show since we’re almost out of time and Phyllis didn’t go for the idea of stepping in with Sophie Tucker’s “Red Hot Mama.”
   
9. Why Rhode Island accents are annoying.
   

But there’s one new addition. Ever since fifth grade, I’ve been a little worried about what would happen if my brother and I grew up and discovered that we liked the same girl. Would we fight over her? Would we stop speaking to each other? Forever?! But now that somebody’s calling me Wonderboy, I’m pretty confident that girls will never be a problem for us as long as we live.

“Are you asleep yet?” I whispered, living on the wild side by pushing the edge of our forty-five minute envelope. From the other half of the dark bedroom, Tick yawned.

“I’m thinking about Alé’s eyes when she’s trying to be mad at me,” he sighed dreamily. Well, since nobody ever upstages me and gets away with it, I stared up at my own part of the peaked ceiling and sighed right back.

“
I’m
thinking about Andy’s nose when it wrinkles.”

“
I’m
thinking about Alé’s hair.”

“
I’m
thinking about Andy’s smile.”

“Alé’s sparkle.”

“Andy’s butt.”

“Too much information, dude.”

Maybe I was wrong. This is more fun than I thought.

Love,

Aug

Dear Nat,

I changed my opening number in the Follies from “Maybe This Time” to Daisy Clover’s “You’re Gonna Hear From Me.” You’re lucky the show goes up during one of my Natalie Wood obsessions.

Tech rehearsals went as well as the
Titanic
did. Ricky Offitt ac-cidentally bit the reed off his saxophone in the middle of “In the Mood” and wound up with splinters in his tongue. Tick won’t let anybody find out about his secret JFK monologue until the night we go on (our cover story is that he’s doing the “Friends, Romans, and countrymen” speech from
Julius Caesar
, which is about as believable as William Shakespeare playing center for the Celtics), so he made up for it by forgetting three verses of “Casey at the Bat.” In today’s version, Casey came up to the plate with nobody on base, which defeats the whole purpose since who gives a shit whether Mudville loses 4–2 or 4–3? And Stu Merliss thought it would be really funny if he farted on every downbeat. It so wasn’t. In the meantime, Alé timed the whole thing to make sure that we came in under an hour, but with all of the screwups we ran longer than the Italian Renaissance. I’m getting out of this business before it
eats me alive. No money in my budget for sequins, no crowd-pleaser to bring down the curtain with, AND WHO NEEDED TO SEE ANDY WEXLER IN BASEBALL PANTS A SIZE TOO SMALL??

“Do you want to come over to my house for dinner? You don’t have to.”

“I’m there. When?”

Oh, God, my heart hurts.

Subject: URGENT!!!

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

1. Lee Meyerhoff just peeked over Andy Wexler’s shoulder, and before he could scroll up or turn off his monitor, she pretended not to see “Augie Spidey Augie Spidey Augie Spidey” written in 11 different fonts. You’re winning, dude. Now if only I could get Alé to do that (even though the whole Spidey thing is getting a little barfy).

2. Lee says you should NOT meet Alejandra at 1:00 in front of the Lycée tomorrow for the production meeting. Instead show up at 11:30, walk the halls like you belong there, and keep your eyes and ears open. She also says you should try to find the room where they’re holding the class in Jazz Dance, because you’ll probably find
your closing act inside. “Somebody needs to be dragged out of her shell, whether she likes it or not.” Whatever that means. You’re lucky you like boys. Girls are so over-complicated.

3. Lee says if either one of us ever tells anybody that she’s spying for us, we’ll never get out of high school alive. Her reputation is at stake and we’re expendable. No matter how cute she thinks we are.

4. Get rid of this e-mail now!

Dear Nat,

I got to the Lycée at 11:30 like my coded instructions told me to, but I still didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for. “Keep your eyes and ears open.” Great. I’m having an anxiety attack and Lee Meyerhoff thinks she’s Yoda. “Use the Force, Luke.” To play it safe I brought my French book along, so that any time a teacher passed me in the hall, I’d lower my head and flip through the pages so they’d think I was looking for “
ou est le bureau de poste
,” “
je m’appelle Barbra
,” or preferably eighteen conjugations of “I love you, Andy.” The Lycée actually surprised me—it looks just like any other school. I was expecting little Eiffel Towers and Arcs de Triomphe on the walls and souflettes in the cafeteria.
“Augie Spidey Augie Spidey Augie Spidey.” Okay, I’ll admit it’s an encouraging sign, but there could be other more normal reasons for it. Maybe he was practicing his typing and that was the first thing that came to mind. I mean, it makes sense. No, it
doesn’t
make sense. Wait. What if he was
figuring out how to cut and paste, and those happened to be the first two words he picked to paste? If Lee had kept watching he’d probably have added Jim Cheyunski and Chewbacca. Who am I kidding? He loves me.
Now
what do I do?
The only thing that snapped me out of my panic was that somebody was playing the
Chorus Line
CD at the end of the hall, and they’d picked the Prince Charming of all showstoppers—“The Music and the Mirror”—to listen to first. So I stuck my head back in my book and “
comment allez-voused
” my way in that direction, figuring I’d hang out and listen until my eyes and ears found what they were supposed to find. Which would have been a plan if I hadn’t peeked through the window in the classroom door and suddenly realized that what I
really
needed to learn was how to say “holy shit” in French.