S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller (4 page)

“Did you talk to S’wanee?” he asked.

Marcie glanced over her shoulder and took a drag. “I left them a message the other night,” she answered wearily.

“Yes, but did they call back?”

“It’s only been two days. Plus it’s a slow school.” She streamed smoke outward. “I think they’ve made that clear.”

“They sent me an application,” Cody said. “They want me to apply. They’re waiving the application fee.”

Marcie swiveled an eye and then looked back out at the pool for a long moment. Her shoulders were so small in her robe.

“So go for it, kiddo,” she said, her back to him. “They’d be lucky to have you. You’re a good catch, you know.”

“It’s just an application,” Cody said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know what an application is.” She turned and smiled at him. “I think you should do it.”

•   •   •

The S’wanee/Monteagle University Application for Undergraduate Admission was fifteen pages long, straightforward, and required only moderate effort. Just the facts, please.

Name, address, birth date, Social Security number, etc. The “Family” section gave him pause. He’d long ago made peace with not knowing who his father was; he’d nothing to compare it to. But S’wanee’s inquiry made him self-conscious, almost ashamed. For the first time, he felt it unusual to have no information whatsoever. The right side of the page stayed blank.

To compensate, he included as much about Marcie as he could. Even so, half her column was empty. She had no college or graduate school. Fortunately, they didn’t ask about her high school, since he couldn’t confirm that either. His “Family” page looked sparse and mysterious. He felt like a ghost.

Things heated up on the “Academics” page. Cody had worked hard and done well in school. Marcie had encouraged that, following his report cards and checking his weekly grades and calling his teachers when she thought they’d shortchanged him. “I don’t think you read his paper
carefully
enough,” he’d heard her lecture one, blaming the teacher for Cody’s less-than-stellar grade. “Maybe you and I and the
principal
can read it over together?
Carefully
?” Cody reckoned his mother was responsible for boosting his GPA a third of a point from her strong-arm tactics. Nevertheless, he’d given her a solid foundation to build upon.

S’wanee’s e-mail said not to worry about high school transcripts; they’d requested them electronically. Ditto the teacher evaluations, not necessary now. S’wanee understood teachers were hard to track down during the summer, and the admissions department was on a tight deadline anyway. Cody was relieved. He didn’t trust any of his old teachers with an assignment this pivotal. He couldn’t, at this moment, remember their names. They probably didn’t remember his either.

Page four asked Cody to list his extracurricular activities: hours per week, honors won, offices held, letters earned. Cody withered. The application had spaces for twelve different activities. Did anybody really have that many, or did they make them up? Cody had wanted to be a joiner; he’d wanted to write full-time for the school newspaper, to letter in cross country in the fall or track in the spring, to build sets for plays, to paint spirit banners for the football games. What he did, however, was leave school at two and go work at the mall. For another school, maybe he’d lie and pad. That was common. S’wanee would never know, never check. But he couldn’t. He wrote, “Technical Service Adviser—Apple Store, thirty hours/week.” It was simple, accurate, and he was proud of it. S’wanee would understand. This was a scholarship application.

Disciplinary History: none. He’d never expended the necessary effort to get into trouble. He hadn’t been that needy for attention. Cody knew someday he’d regret being a bore in high school, but right now he was glad.

Cody knew what was coming, any page now, and he dreaded it, and now it faced him. There was only one topic: “Indicate a person who has had significant influence on you, and describe that influence.” His ex-girlfriend Kimberly had had a tutor help with her writing samples; there were classes and books on writing college essays, because this was the important part, what they read and analyzed and critiqued. How they got a feel for you.

In the empty white box, the word count blinked and would keep track up to five hundred words, which seemed so very many. He opened a blank Word page to test his thoughts, to list and organize and make sense before he put them in the application.

Now Cody wished he were more self-centered, had spent more time thinking about himself and his feelings and emotions. That came naturally to his high school classmates and other kids. There was always a cloud of babble around them—in the hallways, the lunchroom, the parking lot, the mall. Talking, texting, tweeting, sharing every detail of their days and nights. The taps were always open. It was the constant background hum in his life, like traffic or the air conditioner in his room. He had no practice of his own.

Cody zigzagged his memory for a teacher or coach who’d had any influence, much less a significant one. There was very little to mine. His mother’s temporary husband had tried to exert a fatherly influence on him, but it had been fleeting and artificial, and Cody could only remember one afternoon with him in their Palo Alto apartment, when his stepfather had taught him to tie his shoes, a major victory that had eluded his mother. It was a skill he used several times a day, but it lacked the import and substance he needed here.

His grandmother Svetla in Sofia sent handwritten notes several times a year, full of advice in spotty English. She sent longer letters with the small presents for his birthday in January. Her Old World advice had once been wise and occasionally inspirational, considering they’d met in person only a handful of times. As she grew older, however, it had devolved from the vaguely practical “Never economize on your teeth” to the oddly ponderous “Eat a cooked fruit every day.” In the past year, her letters had turned to warnings about girls and sex and the troubles he could get into. They were hardened and off-pitch and in old-woman handwriting, and they made him queasy.

Then there was Marcie, his good and best friend. But that wasn’t influence; it was companionship. He was her sidekick and audience, but he hadn’t learned from her or developed any skills or insights from their friendship. He tried to weave an essay out of their relationship, but after an hour, he hadn’t finished a sentence.

It was 2:13 a.m. He laced up his Nikes, slipped out of the apartment, and went running on the streets.

He ran often to unclog his head, and he ran fast, without stretching or warming up or earphones. He just went racing through the quiet night. For the first time, he noticed his big feet slapping against the pavement, his long strides stretching farther and faster, until he was at full sprint. His mother was so petite and birdlike in her walk and mannerisms. They had very different wiring. Even their coloring was different—Marcie was olive and slightly Mediterranean; Cody had a pale, freckled face and copper-colored hair.

Cody thought and planned ahead and brooded and puzzled and got stymied and frustrated and kept it to himself. Marcie was impulsive and mercurial and loud and often sloppy. She rode life where it took her, and Cody had clutched her back, bouncing along fitfully since birth.

He was breathing harder and sprinting faster.

What had emerged in him over the past two years? Why this acute unsettledness that had nothing to do with his “temporary” city? Where did the restlessness grow from? It wasn’t anger or adolescent moodiness; it felt like a natural evolution and permanent development, and he welcomed it. He wanted adventure and to go places, whatever that meant. But his mind had, recently and instinctively, started winnowing down those generalities and strained toward specifics.

This evolution pulled him farther from his mother, as much as he loved her. She’d done nothing to trigger these latent and fuzzy yearnings. They’d lain coiled in his DNA and quietly, gradually coursed their way upward to overtake his physical self, along with his deepening voice and chin stubble. It wasn’t a coincidence they had all arrived together.

Cody looked at the street sign. He was very far from home. His mind was churning out thoughts disorganized and scattershot. But the tap was open.

He sprinted back, wet and winded now. It was 3:07 a.m.

He sat down at his laptop and wrote until dawn. About the father he’d never met and knew so well.

•   •   •

“You ready, kiddo?” Marcie called from the living room a few hours later. “Joan says there’s a forty-five minute wait at the Tunnel.” Marcie gauged all traffic throughout New Jersey off Joan’s Lincoln Tunnel report from New York’s NBC affiliate. It was usually indicative.

“Almost,” Cody called back, toweling dry. He’d slept for ninety minutes and was wide-awake and alert.

He’d double- and triple-checked his answers on the application for accuracy. He’d checked the box affirming its truthfulness. He’d revised and spell-checked his writing sample.

He dressed quickly and went back to read his essay once last time, but stopped.

He’d faced as much of himself as he could for one night. He hit “submit” and then ran out the door.

•   •   •

By the time he’d reached his car in the parking garage, his iPhone had dinged. S’wanee had received his application.

“I finished it,” he said on the drive.

“Finished what?” Marcie asked, rolling down the window.

“The application. I sent it in.”

“That was fast,” she replied. “We don’t have time for Starbucks now. It’s too hot for coffee anyway.”

They rode silently, listening to the radio. Marcie looked out the window and drubbed her fingers along the armrest, nonsensically.

T
he days creeped, and Cody relished them. His motor was running, and it felt good. He noticed the life around him with sharper senses. Inexplicably, he remembered his customers’ names when they came to retrieve their fixed computers. He shared their relief when their data was intact.

“You forgot to take your break again,” his boss reminded him on Tuesday afternoon.

It was mid-July, and the mall was busier than normal with summer sale shoppers. The Gap had already put up its “Back to School” window posters of beautiful, smiling people his age at an old-school college football tailgate. They were pushing vintage varsity sweaters and tartan skirts and printed khakis. In the chilly mall, the clothes looked right. He wondered how much a sweater would cost with his mall discount.

Across the country, and maybe even the world, students already set for S’wanee were shopping for the fall, too. Maybe his future classmates and friends. His roommate. Maybe his girlfriend. He wondered how many of them S’wanee had reached out to, had pursued as aggressively as him over the past few weeks. Of course, they were one step ahead; they were
in
, while Cody was in a surprisingly happy limbo.

Even on slow days, it was always showtime on the Macy’s main floor. Today it bustled like a bright, cheery train station. Cody paused against the cavernous entrance and spied on his mother in her white lab coat halfway across the floor at the Clinique station. She had quarantined a customer on a high stool and was excitedly making her over, explaining each product she hoped to ring up. Even in the crowds, Marcie’s dazzling smile jumped out. She was a radiant.

Seeing his mother in her element, Cody saw her fresh as more than just a friend and companion. She was a survivor. She had carried him for nine months, probably alone. She’d gone into labor and likely driven herself to the hospital in pain. There was no one to hold her hand when she gave birth to him, no one waiting outside. She’d carried him back home in the same car, stayed up countless nights for months, feeding and rocking and soothing him all by herself. His baby pictures were always of him solo, never with his mother, since there was no one else to work the camera.

She’d proudly shown off her fatherless baby and thereby instilled in him the same pride. She’d carried him into department stores and put him in their local ads, which she still saved. She’d likely have molded him into a child star had he not grown more disagreeable and less photogenic as a toddler. That dream quashed, she parlayed his stillborn modeling career into her own Macy’s sales job and loved him just the same.

Other than shoe-tying, she’d taught him everything and been with him every day for seventeen years. She was fierce and relentless, this tiny doctor-looking creature hovering around yet another stranger just to make ends meet. And she was more beautiful today than ever.

Smiling, Cody turned and walked back through the mall. He didn’t want to interrupt her sale. He’d catch up with her later.

•   •   •

Cody suspected, with guarded hopefulness, that Marcie had a new boyfriend. Or at least a promising new prospect.

Her glow was more visceral, her usual cheerfulness less a defense and more authentic. Most tellingly, she took longer walks with the dogs after work that week.

Cody knew the drill. Longer walks meant cell phone conversations Marcie didn’t want him to overhear. “We can’t afford walls!” she’d joke, tapping the thin, hollow partitions that divided up their apartment.

Marcie never brought her dates home, even the ones she liked. And she didn’t sleep around. Only after she had a “proper boyfriend” would she even introduce him to Cody, usually in public at a restaurant. When it came to boyfriends and sex, Marcie was very “proper.” That suited Cody just fine.

But if Cody were possibly-maybe-potentially going to be going away, he knew she would need a companion. He didn’t want his mother to get lonely. She hadn’t had a “proper” boyfriend in this town yet. He wondered where she had met this one.

On her Wednesday walk, she was gone a very long time. A good sign.

“Do you have a date?” Cody prodded when she finally returned. The dogs were exhausted.

“Aren’t you nosy,” she said, laughing. Her mood had brightened markedly in the past two days. Another good sign.

“When do I get to meet him?” Cody asked.