The Downside of Being Charlie (12 page)

“Yeah,” I croak, wishing so bad I could tell him the rest; wishing the words in my head would actually come out of my mouth. But they don't, and we sit there again in silence. He doesn't tell me it will get better. He doesn't tell me not to worry. He tells me it sucks and sometimes kids get a raw deal. It's not fair but it's true, and if I need to talk to someone, he'll listen.

“Here.” He reaches in his pocket and pulls out his wallet. He slips a business card out and hands it to me.

“Give me a call whenever. I'm serious,” he says. “Anytime.”

The card has an image of a vintage looking camera in the corner, and in the middle there's a phone number and an e-mail address along with:

“Luka?” It's weird when you learn a teacher's first name, especially when it's a name like Luka.

“Oh, it gets much worse. Luka Sue, actually,” he says. I turn to see how gullible he thinks I am.

“No way,” I tell him. Who the hell names a boy Sue? Luka Sue?

He still has his wallet in his hand, so he digs out his driver's license and drops it on the table. Luka Soo Killinger.

“Oh, but it's Soo.” I say even though I've never heard the name Soo. I kind of laugh and shake my head.

“Doesn't matter how you spell it. It's still Sue,” he says. He takes back his license and tucks it into his wallet.

“Actually, both are names of songs. My mom was obsessed with Johnny Cash. One of his songs was about a
boy named Sue, S-U-E, but, well, anyway, guess you could say she had a sense of humor and was a bit of a free spirit. I'm just glad it's not my first name, you know?”

I nod and look down at my hands. Silence.

“Charlie,” he says, “parents . . . they're never perfect and lots of times are very different from who we think they are or who we want them to be.”

I nod and stare at the card in my hand. He's getting too close to the truth. The silence hangs in the air. I feel like I'm going to suffocate.

“Harrison,” I say finally.

He looks at me funny.

“My middle name,” I tell him. “Charles Harrison Grisner.”

“I would have killed for a name like that,” he says. I try to laugh and it helps.

I sit there for another minute. I can tell he's just giving me time, but I'm ready to go.

“Well, I guess I better go to lunch,” I say because I don't know how to end this weird TV-sitcom moment. I get up to leave.

“Okay. But listen . . . ,” he says, “anytime, all right?” I look over at him, and I can tell he means it. He's not just playing the part of the concerned teacher.

“Yeah, okay . . . thanks.” I put the card in my back pocket and make a mental note to put it somewhere safe once I get home. I grab my backpack.

“See you later . . . Sue,” I say as I leave.

“Later, Harrison,” he calls out.

Sixth period drama rolls around and I watch the door, hoping she will be in class. If Charlotte's not in class today, I'm just going to put my head down and hope the world ends. The door opens, and she comes in and slides into her seat next to me.

“Hey,” she says with a sweet smile. Just having her this close makes everything else go away. “I looked for you at lunch. . . .”

“Oh, sorry, teacher kept me after class.”

“Bummer,” she says, and then looks at me with a coy shyness I'm sure she doesn't actually feel. “So . . . ,” she continues, dragging out the word, “last night was fun.”

I smile, suddenly remembering last night. I laugh nervously as a thousand butterflies flap like mad in my stomach.

When the night comes flooding back, I need a glass of water. I haven't even had a chance to relive the kiss since it happened—how her lips felt and the warmth of her mouth. The butterflies multiply to a trillion.

“Yeah. Very, uh, wow,” I say. I'm a bumbling idiot. “I mean, very cool,” I manage, finally.

“We should do it again sometime,” she says, “like, maybe tonight?”

I swallow hard, laugh for no reason, and nod. Her eyes flicker, satisfied with my reaction. The bell rings. The last of the presentations start, and she sits back and flashes a smile every time I look her way. When the bell rings ending class, she asks me to come over to her house to watch a movie tonight. Her house, just the two of us—no Mark, no Danny, no annoying other girls. Just
us. Charlotte and Charlie. And even though I start warning myself that this is too good to be true, I agree and thank God for creating Charlotte VanderKleaton. I'm thankful she's here because if I didn't have her to look forward to, I wouldn't have anything else. If I've found my way to Charlotte's heart, I want to bury myself there forever, even if she doesn't remember or notice I'm there. I don't mind, just as long as she lets me stay.

Ahmed drops me off at home, and I head inside trying to focus on what happened after drama. I make a dash for the stairs, still fantasizing about tonight. Would we kiss again—or maybe more? The thought makes me feel like laughing, screaming, and jumping. It's all busting to get out, so I start yelling and dancing around because I can't help it.

The phone rings and I answer it slightly out of breath from some improv moves that would thoroughly impress Ahmed.

“Hello?” There's no answer on the other end, and for a minute I wonder if it could possibly be Charlotte joking around. But then I remember she doesn't have my home number.

“Hello?” The silence on the other end is broken by some muffled noise. I think I hear a voice, but I'm not sure.

“
Hello?
” No response.

If I were normal—if my life was normal—I would hang up. But because I'm me, I hang on to the phone and wait. I know exactly who it is.

“Mom? Mom, say something, it's Charlie,” I say, though, of course, she knows it's me. “Mom . . . where
are you?” She still says nothing. “We're okay. How are you?” Still no answer and I start to feel helpless. Mom's done this before, and eventually she says something. “Are you coming back soon? We miss you.” And even though I say it, it doesn't sound genuine, even to me. “Mom? Mom?” No answer. I stay on the phone for another couple of minutes trying to get her to say something, but she doesn't, and I wonder how long I should stand here with the receiver to my ear, talking to myself. When she doesn't respond, I start getting mad. I don't have time to do this.

“Mom, I want to talk to you but I have to go. Just . . .” I sigh and curse myself for being such a shitty son. “Just take care of yourself and come home, Mom, okay? Come home.” No answer. I hang up and immediately feel guilty. Why couldn't I just talk to her for another minute? Maybe she was going to say something the second right before I hung up. Maybe she was thinking of coming back and now she wouldn't. And it would be because of me.

I grab my backpack and head upstairs. Maybe it's because I just talked to her, but when I pass Mom and Dad's bedroom, my mind plays tricks on me and I swear I see some blurry figure standing near Mom's easel set up near their window. I stop dead in my tracks and go back to look, but nothing's there. I go in and look around, but still nothing.

I look at the canvas still on the easel and the brushes with dried-up paint that no one bothered to clean up. I haven't been in my parent's bedroom since Mom left, which is why I haven't seen her latest painting. It's
different than what she usually paints. The usual flowers, vases, and fruits are nowhere to be found in the grayish brown, black, and blue swirls. I stare at it. The streaks and swirls outline a head and face if you look hard and long enough, then there are two dark smudges where the eyes should be. No nose. No mouth. Instead there are ribbons of murky gray that explode all around the face, which snake around the neck. The ribbons look like they're strangling whoever the person in the painting is supposed to be, which can only be Mom. This was a painting of herself. This is how Mom feels. I stare at it for a minute. I should've stayed on the phone longer. When I leave their room those swirls of gray, black, and blue stay in my head, tightening around Mom's neck.

I hang around doing nothing, trying not to think about where Dad is or what he's doing while I'm here, answering Mom's weird phone calls and staring at her messed-up paintings. I hide in my room and then wander around the house. I hate that he's not here because it means that I'm not enough and that Dad doesn't care enough to stick around either.

I look in the fridge and can tell that at some point before he left, Dad went shopping and stocked up on healthy foods. There's fruit and lettuce and fat-free dressing, but the last thing I feel like doing is fixing myself some stupid low-cal meal, slapping a smile on my face, and pretending it's the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. I order a pizza instead, and when it arrives, I tell myself I'm only going to eat one slice. But I don't and end up eating two. And then since I didn't stick to my original plan, I grab a third. And then I've fucked
up so bad already, I eat two more, which means there's only one slice left which looks pathetic. It only reminds me how many I already ate, so I stuff it in my mouth. It doesn't even taste good, but I eat it anyway because I don't want to look at that slice all by itself in the cardboard box.

I stare at the empty box and feel even worse.

I go to the kitchen and open the fridge for something to drink, but there's only water, which at this point seems about as stupid as a diet soda. I know I should stop, but I can't. Fuck it.

I run down to the basement where I know Mom always keeps a few liters of soda. Grape, Orange, or Cola. I can't decide. It's been so long since I felt the fizzy comfort of any of them. I open them and take a big swig of each. My stomach feels like I'm going to explode, and just when I am, a huge belch hisses right out of me. Pieces of pizza come up with it, and I start to gag. I think of all the food sitting in my stomach, and I can picture Fat Camp Ramona with frosting around her mouth when I had come up on her hiding in the woods. She was eating cupcakes when we were all supposed to be on a nature hike. It was pathetic. Imagine what I must look like now. The soda bubbles up like Alka-Seltzer, and it makes the pizza become an effervescent trail of chunks coming up my throat.

I run to the basement bathroom and make it just in time. It all comes up, clumps of food kerplunk in the toilet with such a thud that the water splashes up on my face, making me gag even more so that the rest of it all comes up. I kneel there, the pizza in the toilet and
watery grossness dripping from my nose. I'm spent, exhausted, disgusted, but I feel empty. I feel like all those words I hold in and stuff down came up, too, and are swirling around in the bowl with the rest of it. I can just flush all of it down and get rid of it. Like it never existed. Like nothing happened.

I
change my shirt, brush my teeth, wash my face, and head to Charlotte's. Even though this is monumental and very likely the best thing to happen to me in my whole life since our kiss, I feel like crap. All I can think of is that stupid phone call and painting. Why did she have to call today, right at that moment? Why couldn't she wait until tomorrow so I could at least enjoy tonight? Why couldn't Dad be there to answer it instead of me? But now, I won't be able to enjoy tonight because all I can think about is Mom and how she could be dead. Maybe she called me as she was dying and that's why she didn't talk to me. Maybe the blurry figure I thought I saw in her room was her ghost. Maybe Mom is dead right now while I'm on my way to Charlotte's house, and Dad is somewhere with some other woman. What if Mom is looking down at us right now and thinking how glad she is to be dead and far away from the worst husband and son?

I get to Charlotte's house, and I'm not even sure how I got there so fast. When she answers the door and says hey the same way she always does in drama, my thoughts of Mom still don't go away. I mumble hi and smile and meet her mother who is in the kitchen and
looks like an older version of Charlotte. She's baking cookies—actually baking cookies—and looks really dressed up like she just got home from work. She flashes me a big red lipsticky smile and says, “Nice to meet you, Charlie. Hope you like cookies. They're made with the best Belgian chocolate!” She seems very cheery and immediately makes me think of chefs on cooking shows and how they talk into the camera. I nod because I don't know what to say, and she flashes me another huge smile.

Then her smile suddenly fades when she turns her attention to Charlotte. “Oh honey, why don't you pull your hair back? I can't stand seeing it in your face that way,” she says, shaking her head.