Songs for a Teenage Nomad (2 page)

When I Come Around

…Mom screaming at me to turn Green Day down. Rob has a headache. We’ve known Rob three days, and he already gets to be the volume police. I sprawl on the lawn, the sky above me tangerine, lighted tropical colors everywhere, like the world has been swallowed by a mango smoothie…

The box sits in my lap, but I’m afraid to open it. The wood is smooth, the color of cream, heavily polished. There is no lock. I have never seen this box before.

And I wasn’t supposed to find it. I’m certain of that.

When I got home from school today, I just wanted Golden Grahams in my favorite bowl. The ceramic one with the duck painted on the side that I made at one of those paint-it-yourself places with my mom’s ex-boyfriend, Blue Aerostar Greg, when I was eight. He had outlined the duck for me in black, and I painted in the yellow. Greg was the only one of my mom’s boyfriends who wrote a note with my name on it when he left. They all drove away in Fords, but he was the only one who left a note just for me.

But I couldn’t find the bowl. Instead, I found this box. Shoved against the back of the shelf over the stove. I sit on the counter with it in my lap, all around me the sound of the empty kitchen. I’m supposed to be getting ready for the Welcome Back Dance at school. I hate dances, but Drew and Alexa talked me into going.

I open the box.

Inside, I discover some of my mother’s old driver’s licenses, all with different married names and various hairstyles. Mom blond. Mom with braids. Always smiling, newly married, hopeful. Before everything goes wrong. There is a Polaroid of me at my tenth birthday with chocolate cake all over my face. I smile at the memory. The first and last time my mother baked my birthday cake from scratch. I ate it, even though it tasted like sand.

Under the picture, nestled in a curl of blue silk ribbon she used to tie in my hair, is a gold wedding band. A man’s band. Maybe Red Mustang Ted’s. I’m pretty sure she sold all the others. Sometimes when it doesn’t work out, Mom’s not as sad as other times. She was sad after Red Mustang Ted. It’s probably his. I find a smooth rock from Arizona and a key with a plastic tag that reads “Waves Inn.” We stayed in that run-down inn near the beach for two weeks after Mom split with Nick, a personal trainer she met in Santa Barbara who always wore workout suits and way too much musk cologne. Neither of us misses Nick. Even if he did drive a very sweet ’67 Ford Fairlane.

There are a few more pictures that other people must have taken. My mom is in all of them in various smiling poses. In them, she is the light in the room. She’s always the light in the room. Until the current guy leaves. I’ve never been able to guess when he’ll leave. I just know he will. I flip through the rest of the pictures. I’m not in any of them.

Shrugging, I push everything aside. Another box, small and dark, rests at the bottom. A music box. Small, gold flowers curl around the broken lock. I open it. The music box part has been removed, revealing black velvet that has been cut away in places.

Nestled there is a single black-and-white photograph. A man. Dark-eyed. Smiling at the camera beneath a white cloudless sky. He wears a pea coat with the collar turned up against a wind that tousles his hair. “
Jake
,” it says on the back, and below that, “
Winter
.”

My breath catches. I have his eyes, and I see myself in the hard line of his jaw. A picture of Jake Smith. My father. Under a white winter sky.

***

Music pulses hollowly as we walk through the doors. Small, white twinkle lights trail like ivy around the walls of the gym. A makeshift dance floor covers the gym to half court where a curtain has been pulled to separate the gym into two parts. The basketball hoops have been pulled up into dark, crouching vultures in the rafters.

Drew wrinkles his nose. “Smells like feet,” he says above the din of Duran Duran. “
Welcome to the Awesome
’
80s
,” says a sign hanging on the far wall.

Toby and Tala move past me. I just met Toby outside, and I’m convinced he’s really too tall to look at. Tala’s neck must hurt all the time. He sees the sign and frowns at Tala. “You didn’t tell me about the ’80s theme.”

Smiling, Tala squeezes his hand. “You wouldn’t have come,” she says, pointing to Eli and Alexa standing by the snack table.

“They’re supposed to be watching movies at Sara’s,” Drew mumbles. I’m quickly discovering that Drew hates to be out of the loop. We follow him across the semi-empty dance floor, Toby and Tala’s hands laced together in a casual weave of fingers.

“What’s up?” Drew asks Eli.

Eli pops the top from an Oreo and licks the white middle. He hands the cookie top to Alexa. “Sara only wanted to watch
Fight Club
for the ten-millionth time. I refuse to watch Brad Pitt’s naked torso anymore. Besides, there’s food here.” He pauses. “Hey, Calle.”

“Nice outfit.”

Eli always seems to be in something leather or plastic, a vinyl shirt, slick pants, or the thick bracelets he wears on both wrists like manacles. Tonight, he wears black pleather head to toe and a pair of red Converse sneakers. Leather ones.

“Thanks.” He leans forward to pluck another Oreo from the stack. A blush deepens the smatter of freckles on his face.

I smile, feeling off balance in this new place with the music around me and the warmth of all the bodies. I’m still reeling from the first glimpse of my father. His picture is tucked away in the folds of my song journal, but I put the box back over the stove. No need for Mom to know I found him. Not yet. Before the dance, I plugged Jake Smith into Google, but more than fifteen million results came up. Where to start? My father might be somewhere in those pages of people and lives.

“We need to talk.” Alexa cuts into my thoughts, pulling my arm and starting toward the bathroom. I follow her. The swing of the bathroom door spills a ring of light into the dimly lit gym as two giggling girls pass us in their exit. Alexa pushes the door open, and we enter the bathroom. The walls are tiled with tiny pale-green squares; paint chips off the stalls; and half of the fluorescent light fixture pulses on and off in slow, shuddering lapses, casting us into bleached light, then shadow, then light again.

“Okay, so…” Alexa starts, sticking her face close to the mirror and wiping beneath her eyes for stray mascara. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Eli’s crushing on you.”

“Oh…” I stumble, dismantled. Boys don’t like me…that way. “I don’t think so…”

She looks at me quickly, our eyes meeting in the mirror before she digs through her black Dickies bag and plucks out an eyeliner. She lines her eyes in thick, smoky violet, two sideways parentheses. “Oh, he does. But don’t worry. It’s just the way Eli gets…he gets crushes on
everyone
, so don’t worry. It’ll pass.”

Like the flu.

“He used to like me too,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Whatever.” She pushes through the swinging doors again.

Is she mad at me? I don’t want to come between her and Eli. If there’s one thing being the new girl teaches, it’s that you don’t mess with the mounds of history that were here beforehand. That’s dangerous. Best to keep under the radar.

I follow Alexa back to the snack table. Drew holds a cup of sweet-looking pink punch and talks to Tala about the play auditions yesterday.

Eli glares at Alexa, who shoots him a wide smile. She doesn’t look mad.

Drew is trying to talk above the Bon Jovi playing. “I think the cast list will be up Monday. It’s not like her to wait this long.” He takes a tiny sip of punch. “This stuff tastes like battery acid.” He takes another sip. “Want some?” He holds the cup out to me.

“I’m going to get some water,” I tell them. “Is there a water fountain?” Tala points to the wall close to the door. I’m surprised Tala even knows where the fountain is. She never seems without her black Sigg bottle.

Behind me, I hear Eli say, “What the hell did you tell her?” but then I’m lost on the dance floor, which moves in small clusters of wriggling bodies. It is easy to cut through them to the fountain. I bend over it, the water cool against my lips.

Someone slams into me.

My face crashes into the fountain as water goes streaming down the front of my shirt. Pain surges through my face. My song journal tumbles to the floor. Fumbling, rattled, I look up, the dance a woozy, swirling rush around me. Feeling something wet down my front, I wipe my crushed nose. Sticky, not water. Blood.

The boy from English class looks back, his eyes wide with concern and embarrassment. He’s holding a toppled ladder. The end of the sign he’d been hanging dips sadly on the ground, a large tear down its middle.

“Oh, jeez. I’m so sorry.”

He scrambles to pick up my journal and hands it back to me. My father’s picture has fluttered out, and he hands that back too. I stuff it quickly inside the pages, hoping I’m not getting blood all over it.

He takes in my face. “I’m so sorry. Oh, my god! You’re bleeding. I wasn’t watching…the ladder slipped…are you okay…I’m so sorry,” he keeps repeating, struggling to right the ladder against the wall. He grabs a handful of napkins someone left on a chair. “Here.”

I press the napkins to my bloody nose and clutch my journal to me. I nod, pointing to the ladder. “You know, you should get a license if you’re going to be operating heavy machinery.”

He laughs. “Yeah. That’s funny.”

We both know it isn’t. I pull the napkins away and look at the dark-red blood.

“Jeez, that’s bad.”

“It’s fine.”

He jams his hands in his pockets. “So…you’re in my English class.”

“Yeah.” I’m at a loss for words. Desperate, I morph into a parrot. “English class.”

“Sam.”

“Calle.”

“Hi.” We both look at anything but the other. My heart is beating ridiculously fast. I focus on the Cure’s “Why Can’t I Be You?” which is inducing a frenzy on the dance floor. My mom loves this song.

“Samuel!” Blond Girl from English flounces over beside him.

She wears a matching shell-pink halter top and miniskirt, strappy heeled sandals that I would break my neck in, and a diamond necklace that stands out against her smooth, tanned skin. I feel like a dump truck next to her.

“What happened? Oh. My. God. Did you
fall
off the ladder?” I have
never
understood girls like her, voices shrill and dramatic, speaking as if a ladder falling marks the twenty-third most tragic thing to happen in her life today. “The sign. It’s ruined. The raffle starts in twenty minutes!” She shakes her head at the torn paper.

“The ladder slipped,” Sam apologizes.

“This wouldn’t happen if Kayla could
ever
finish anything on time!”

“I almost took Calle’s head off.”

“Who’s Calle?” This girl has no power of deduction. I am, after all, the only other person directly involved at the moment.

“Me,” I say lamely, muffled by napkin.

“Oh.” She turns to Sam. “Samuel.”

“Amber.”

“Will you
please
help me tape this sign up? If Kayla couldn’t manage to get it up
before
the dance at least we can get it up before the raffle.” She sighs, studying the sign like a homicide detective at a murder scene. It’s all very grim, this slaughtered sign. “We’ll have to tape up the middle.”

Sam smiles at her. He has slightly crooked Tom Cruise teeth, charming teeth that haven’t been fixed into conformity by braces. So white. “Sorry about your face. It was nice meeting you, Calle.”

“My nose thanks you.” But he doesn’t hear me.

Like a shadow, I walk back to the snack table where Eli has left half a plate of Oreos. He’s gone, and so are the rest of them. I get more napkins for my nose and watch Sam tackle the ladder once again as Amber waves a roll of masking tape at him from below.

The music has shifted to OMD’s “If You Leave,” practically my mom’s favorite song ever. Pulling my journal from my bag, I wipe a smudge of blood from one corner of my father’s picture and make sure it is tucked securely inside. I find an empty chair in a corner as memory floods me: Mom crying at the end of
Pretty in Pink
when Andrew McCarthy chooses Molly Ringwald in the parking lot instead of the snotty rich girl he’s supposed to be with. Through her tears, Mom telling me, “That’s never happened. Nobody ever chooses me…”

Perfect Blue Buildings

…Mom plays Counting Crows all morning in the yellow light of the apartment. I am a shadow lingering about her. She looks through me, wanders the rooms. The curtains are drawn tight against a brown LA sky. Ted is late again, and Mom cries while she sings…

“She can’t put Icy Hot on her face, stupid.”

Eli looks crushed. “Why not?”

“It will, like, burn her face off.” Alexa snatches the tube away from him and shakes her head at me like he’s a toddler who just keeps eating paste.

I spent the weekend nursing my cherry-tomato nose and raccoon bruises. I had hoped it would look better by Monday. No such luck.

“It looks bad, Cal.” Eli pokes at my nose.

“Ow! It’s fine if you don’t touch it.”

He sighs and offers to carry my backpack. Shaking my head, I watch down the hall where Sam hoists Amber’s pile of books into his arms. She talks on her cell phone. Probably to someone at another locker.

Alexa follows my gaze. “Ugh, did he even apologize?”

“Sure. I mean, who doesn’t apologize when they hit someone with a ladder?”

“Her.” Alexa points a finger at Amber, who is now walking past us. She doesn’t notice the other finger Alexa gives her.

“Hey, why did the blond girl die in the helicopter crash?” Eli doesn’t wait for an answer. “She got cold and turned off the fan!”

Alexa laughs and, curling her arm around Eli’s shoulders, walks with him toward the theater. I follow, watching them.

At every other school, I’ve always been too nerdy or too alone, a girl without a history. With the drama kids, it’s different. They don’t mind that I’m always writing in my song journal or listening to my headphones, don’t care about my jeans and sweatshirt, my one-toned hair, my big bones. Eli has bleached the tips of his black hair white, and Drew has started wearing eyeliner and a crushed velvet cape. He chooses among three different cape colors, depending on his mood. I’m tame to these kids. For the first time, almost mainstream. A word said with amusement, and a little scorn, in this group. Weird. With them, I feel safer than you’re supposed to feel in high school. I hope I don’t screw it up.

They’re well into rehearsals for the fall one-acts, three short plays by different playwrights. Alexa begged the drama teacher, Ms. Hecca, to let her do the entire set in black, white, and various shades of magenta, and has been frantically sketching designs for the past several weeks. Last night on the phone, she asked me to help paint the set, so I’m going to check it out. I’ve never really been into anything after school before. Maybe this will be different.

Drew is the lead in
The Actor’s Nightmare,
and we’re meeting him at rehearsal after school. We walk the path to the Little Theatre. The school has emptied at the final bell, students whirling away in cars and buses or on foot, a daily exodus off campus toward downtown, toward home, toward anywhere. Just away.

As much as I try to ignore it, my father’s picture creeps back into my mind. Each day, at home, I check the cupboard for the cream-colored box. It’s still there, where Mom thinks she’s hiding it. At night, I look at his picture, the edges already filmy with my fingerprints. Online searches aren’t helping. I don’t know enough to find him. At school, though, I try to think about other things, not the man in the pea coat with the wind in his hair.

I take a deep breath as we near the theater. Eli and Alexa look so natural heading to drama rehearsal, discussing Alexa’s weird German teacher (for some reason, there’s a cot in her classroom), book bags casual over their shoulders. This is who they are, perfectly cast as high school drama kids. Everything around us is as it should be. The air, faintly stained with cold, is still warm in patches. I can hear the football team knocking into each other on the field that sprawls just beyond the main gym. I want to stop feeling like an extra in a movie who gets cut out of the picture in the final edit.

Up ahead, the Little Theatre squats in the central part of campus, dwarfed by the main gym and mini-gym nearby. The music building, which houses both music and the art department, peeks out from behind, the smallest of all four buildings. All of them were recently painted a thick-looking royal blue. Four perfect boxes in varying sizes, a nuclear blue-box family. The rest of the school buildings, the “academic” cluster, ignore the elective boxes; they sit solemn in their intellectually superior beige paint, peeling and scarred from past, painted-over graffiti.

“Hey, you guys.” Drew waves at us from the door of the Little Theatre. He’s in the red cape today: happy. “I’ve been waiting here for like an hour.”

“Maybe you should stopping cutting seventh period,” Eli jokes.

Ignoring him, Drew holds the thick, smoked-glass door open and we walk in. The interior reveals flat black walls and a smooth cement floor. A bunching of black curtains bookend the glass doors so that if they are pulled flush across the smoked glass, the room becomes a square black box. Rows of lights grip bars on the ceiling; it smells of dust and old makeup and, faintly, of pepperoni pizza. Students sit on the floor or on one of the two ripped couches slouching against the far wall. They stare at scripts, eat apples and SunChips, and drape their arms around one another.

My eyes try to take it all in at once.

Drew watches me absorb it. “It makes school bearable.” He takes my arm and tows me toward one of the slouching couch groups. I see Tala eating chips in the midst of a faded orange couch. Tala, Drew tells me, is the assistant director.

“Hey, Tala. Calle’s here. Where’s Hecca?”

Tala looks up and smiles at me. “In the prop room. They’re trying to squeeze Gaven into the old Hamlet costume for his scene with you.”

“Good luck.” He lets go of my arm, grabbing for some of Tala’s corn chips.

Through the smoked glass of the theater door, I notice Amber walking alone toward the football field. She practically glides, her long legs the perfect length for her boot-cut jeans, the sunlight catching her hair. You’d think the girl had her own lighting designer.

Drew says, “Hey, can you show Calle what we need her to do?”

“So…you’re in?” Tala asks.

I turn away from the window. “I’m in.”