The Elephant of Surprise (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 4) (5 page)

Talk about the Elephant of Surprise. Kevin Land, Well-Established Asshole, was delivering meals to the homeless?

CHAPTER FIVE

That Saturday night, I went out to a movie with Min and her girlfriend Leah, just like I'd promised earlier in the week. Gunnar and his girlfriend Em came too.

At first, I was having a good time. The five of us had done stuff as a group before, lots of times. It had never felt like it was two couples and me—like I was a fifth wheel. I mean, I'd had a boyfriend, Otto. He lived in another city, but I'd had him.

But now Otto and I had broken up, and that night as I sat in the theater watching the movie with my friends, it felt totally weird. Isn't that funny? Absolutely nothing was different: it was the same five people, doing basically the same thing we'd always done—even sitting in the same place where we always sat in the theater. But because I no longer had this almost-imaginary, eight-hundred-miles-away boyfriend, I felt like I was all alone.

After the movie, we went to get something to eat on McKenzie Street, which was the one small neighborhood in our town that was even the slightest bit hip and/or trendy. And as we walked down the sidewalk, I was suddenly hyper-aware of how we were arranged—Em and Gunnar walking side-by-side, Min and Leah together, and me.

"Where should we eat?" Em said from up front. She was this sort of bookish type with baggy clothes in earthtone colors and tortoise-shell Harry Potter glasses.

"How about Ethiopian?" Gunnar said. "They have that whole thing where you eat with your hands."

"I don't know," Leah said. "I think I'm sick of Ethiopian." Right then, Min stumbled a little on the sidewalk in front of me. "How about pizza?" Leah said.

"Sounds good to me," Em said.

That decided, we headed toward the restaurant. As we crossed the street, Min drifted back toward me. "Well?" she said.

"Well what?" I said.

"Leah." When I didn't say anything, Min said, "You forgot all about it, didn't you? You said you were going to watch and tell me if she seemed weird!"

"No!" But the truth is I had forgotten. I'd been preoccupied with feeling like a fifth wheel, but I didn't want to admit that to Min. I glanced up at Leah, who is tall and blond and was wearing army fatigues. "I haven't noticed anything yet, but I'll keep looking."

As chance would have it, it was the pizza place where, almost a year earlier, I'd first met up with the other members of the Geography Club, this secret gay alliance I'd been in. I remembered how it had felt so hush-hush, like we were spies meeting for a rendezvous. If you'd told me then that a year later Min and I would be out and proud, and that I'd have just broken up with my almost-imaginary boyfriend, well, I actually might have believed you.

After we ordered, we sat at the table—me on the end, of course. Then we talked and played tic-tac-toe in the parmesan cheese we'd shaken onto the tabletop. Gunnar, of course, was too busy photographing and posting the conversation to, you know, actually
participate
in any of it.

"How long are you going to keep this up?" I asked him.

"I'm not sure," he said. "I'm pretty sure I'll just know when it's time to quit."

"No one's even following your posts. You know that, right?" Well, no one except Otto, I thought.

"No," he said. "I don't know that."

"Gunnar, I'm your best friend, and last week,
I
unfollowed you."

Everyone laughed at my joke except Gunnar.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "Being followed isn't the point."

"Then what's the point?"

He thought for a second. "I'm not sure. It's an experiment. Sometimes you don't know the point of an experiment until after it's over. Besides, it's a record of my life. Do people write in a diary because they expect other people to read it? No, just the opposite. They're writing for themselves, to have a record of what they did and thought."

"No one writes in a diary anymore," I said. But even as I said this, I knew Gunnar was making sense.

*   *   *

The pizza took a long time, and I was getting tired of feeling like a fifth wheel, so I volunteered to go see if there was a problem. But on my way to the front counter, I saw Leah slip away to the bathroom. I hadn't really talked to Leah the whole night, not like Min had asked me to, so I stepped over to head her off, to talk to her one-on-one for a minute or two.

But she wasn't going to the bathroom after all. Instead, she ducked into the video game room—currently empty—and pulled out her cell phone. I didn't really think anything about it. So what if she was making a call? She was probably checking in with her mom or maybe a friend from school.

I didn't want to interrupt her phone call, so I started to turn away. 

But at the same time, she looked over and saw me.

Right away, she mouthed four words into the phone—I was pretty sure it was "I'll call you later"—and then immediately shut it off. Even now, I wouldn't have thought anything about this except for one thing:

She looked guilty.

Leah looked like she'd been caught doing something she wasn't supposed to be doing. Was Min right? Was there really something going on with her?

Then she smiled at me—a
big
smile. "Hey!" she said.

"Everything okay?" I said, stepping closer.

"What?" she said. "Oh, yeah! Unquestionably!"

I'm not stupid. I knew she was totally lying.

*   *   *

Later, we went for a walk down McKenzie Street. Em and Leah were now walking together ahead, and Gunnar was busy filming a fire hydrant (or something), which gave me a chance to pull Min aside.

"Something's going on," I said.

"What?"

"With Leah."

She stared at me. "Are you making fun of me?"

I was a little offended by this: I didn't make fun of my friends! But then I remembered how I'd been totally making fun of Gunnar all dinner long at the pizza place.

"No, I'm serious." I explained how Leah had looked suspicious in the video game room. "You need to talk to her."

No one can look at you like you're a total idiot like Min can look at you like you're a total idiot. "Do you really think I haven't tried?" she said. "She's
lying
. That's the whole
point
. No, we need a plan. But we'll have to be discreet."

"Are you serious?"

Min wasn't even listening to me—she was already busy planning Project Expose Leah's Secrets. But I didn't care because it was at that exact moment that I noticed Venus staring at us from across the street. I immediately looked around for Wade too, but she was alone.

I know this sounds like a huge coincidence, our running into her so soon, and maybe it was. On the other hand, Wade and Venus basically lived on the streets—and if there was any street in town where they'd be most welcome, it was here. I wondered how many times I'd walked by them before and just not noticed (or
pretended
not to notice because I didn't want to get involved).

I waved to her. "Venus!" I called to Em and Leah up ahead of us. "Wait up, you guys!"

Venus ran across the street to join us (almost getting hit by a car in the process).

"Russel!" she said. She gave me a big hug, which surprised me even though it shouldn’t have. She was wearing the same thing as before—that grimy flight suit—but now she smelled like honey and turpentine. She felt even skinnier than she looked.

"Hey, Gunnar! Hey, Min!" Venus said, and of course she hugged them too.

"This is Venus," Min said to Leah and Em. "We met her at school earlier this week."

I could tell that Leah and Em were a little surprised that we knew someone who looked like a street bum—or I guess
was
a street bum. Then again, both Leah and Em are really cool, nonjudgmental people. Smiles had already replaced the curiosity on their faces.

"Where's Wade?" I asked Venus. (I couldn't resist.)

"Oh, he's home," she said.

I didn't dare ask her where home was, so instead I said, "So what brings you out here?" But I immediately felt stupid. What did I
think
brought her out there? She was probably looking for dinner.

"Oh, we live around here," Venus said.

Yes!
I thought. Needless to say, I really, really wanted to see where they lived—and Wade.

"Oh?" I said, determined to sound casual. "Where's that?"

But before she could answer, Min said to Leah and Em, "Venus is a freegan."

"Vegan?" Em said.

"No,
freegan
," Min said. I was a little afraid that Venus was going to say that we couldn't
tell
them what a freegan is—that we could only
show
them—and I was in no mood to spend an hour walking to the garbage dump and the homeless camp, not with Wade so tantalizingly close by. But Min quickly ran through their world-view—how they'd taken the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" to its absolute extreme.

"Wow," Em said. "Interesting."

I focused on Venus again. "So you live around here, huh?"

"Sure do," Venus said. "Wanna see?"

"Sure," I said, still forcing my voice to sound as nonchalant as possible. I turned to the others. "That okay with you guys?"

I don't know what I would've done if someone had said no, but fortunately, everyone else looked almost as curious as I was.

*   *   *

The house was four blocks from the main drag of McKenzie Street, and it looked just like any other house in the neighborhood: an older two-story with a white brick façade and no garage.

Actually, if anything, it looked a little nicer than the other houses on the street. It had been painted recently, and the yard was perfectly maintained—the grass neatly trimmed, the flower beds all weeded.

Venus led us inside where it was a completely different story. The furniture was ratty, the walls were bare, and the carpets were dirty (one of the stains was red, but I was pretty sure it was wine, not blood). There was a dog-eared copy of
Curious George
on the floor and some papers with a cartoon elf on them. It smelled like candle wax and stale sweat.

The house was loud with voices. Six people played cards around a coffee table: four guys and two girls. They basically ignored us, but I noticed that except for one guy in his forties, they were all college-age-ish. They were also all pretty scruffy (and the guys all had beards), but they didn't seem unhealthy—except for one girl, who looked sort of anemic, pale and frail. Unlike Wade, their clothes were all pretty tattered and dirty. The anemic-looking girl had sewn together a rip in her pants with what looked like dental floss.

Gunnar, of course, took photos of it all for his online profile.

"Hey, I know you guys!" said a voice from the kitchen. Wade stepped into sight. "Min! And Gunnar? And Russel." I couldn't help but notice that he'd acknowledged me last, and he didn't hug us the way Venus had. Then again, maybe he didn't want to come across as too forward.

Wait. Ignore all that. These contradictory thoughts of mine will drive you crazy if you let them. God knows, they drive me crazy.

I will say this: Wade's white t-shirt was spotless again. I know I was totally relying on stereotypes, but at this point it was all I had. That t-shirt was also
tight
, which means I had a better look at his body. It was a mountain I definitely wanted to climb.

"So," I said, still determined to sound casual. "This is your house."

"Well, it's not 'our' house," Wade said. "We don't really believe in personal possessions. But it's the house where we live."

"How exactly do you manage that?" Min said. To her credit, there was still no judgment in her voice.

"It started out as a foreclosure," Wade said. "It hadn't been occupied for at least a year. When we first moved in, the neighbors were really happy to see us. They thought someone had finally bought the house. That's the thing about property. Who's to say who really owns what? How do I know you didn't rip off that jacket? We all just sort of take each other's word.

"Then word got out that we didn't own the house and weren't paying rent to the bank, and it got a little ugly. But freegans aren't really the same thing as squatters. It's a movement for us, right? It's not just us being lazy or angry at the world. So we understand you can't just piss people off and expect to get anywhere. That's why we take care of the places where we live. We're all in this together—in our communities and on this planet. That's the freegan motto. Once the neighbors realized a house with a bunch of freegans is a lot better than a house with a bunch of squatters, or even just an abandoned house, things got better."

As Wade was talking, I couldn’t help but think: if this had been any neighborhood other than the one it was, the neighbors would have been on them with torches and pitchforks, no matter that they painted the house or mowed the lawn. But attitudes were a little looser in this neck of the woods. Even so, I definitely saw the strategy of keeping the yard so spotless. Why ask for trouble?