The Great American Whatever (15 page)

And maybe I told Amir that the text I sent to Annabeth after our fight that day was something like “
YOU'RE DEAD TO ME
,” and by “something like” I mean
exactly
like.

We texted constantly, so when she didn't reply to “
YOU'RE DEAD TO ME,
” I wrote back “
ok ok ok i was kidding jeez
.” When she finally did text me back that afternoon, I turned off my phone in a huff, without even reading it. Without realizing it would be her last text ever.

I get up from the tub, slow with plenty of shakes. My underwear is so heavy with water that I feel as if I'm in diapers. I wish I were. The chance to start over.

“Quinny,” I hear Mom say quietly from the bottom of the stairs. “Come on downstairs. Somebody's got a surprise at the front door.”

I towel down. I hate surprises. I throw my wet underwear in the sink and I head to my closet, not to get changed but to grab that film competition application from the top of my untouched textbook pile.

“One sec, Ma.”

I put on my maroon robe and walk the application to the toilet, to brush Amir's note to the floor and to flip open the lid and to flush my half-finished summer plans down the drain, where they belong. And as I'm watching it try to fight and struggle to swirl away, I'm wondering one more
maybe
about last night.

Did I tell Amir the big act break, the big drama of my life story? That Annabeth was killed right after sending one last text to somebody in her phone listed as “Win”?

“Do you folks know who a ‘Win' might be?” the police asked Mom, that night, when they showed up after school to find half the neighborhood ladies huddled around her in the kitchen. A coalition of moms, each of them happier than the next not to be mine.

“Do you folks know who a ‘Win' might be?” they asked, and my mom looked up and said, “That's what Annabeth called her brother.”

I was already upstairs with my earplugs in, never having turned my phone back on after school—but Mom has told and retold her version of the story to me as if I'll come up with an alternative ending to it. The definitive director's cut. The one that leaves the audience smiling instead of stunned.

I wonder what Amir actually thinks of me now—the lightweight who turned himself into an only child. The boy whose big sister coasted out of the last period of the day and right through a red light while sending one last message to me. A message that not even my mom has seen; that I
still
haven't had the guts to turn my phone on and read, calcified and preserved somewhere in my room like the only pirate treasure you'd never want to find.

I tie the robe shut, hide Amir's serial-killer note under my pillow, and exit my bedroom—but not before nearly tripping over a pair of bowling shoes, which are sitting by my door like polite foreign exchange students on the terrible summer immersion trip that is my life. I must have accidentally worn them home last night. Like mother, like son.

“Qui—”

“I'm
coming
,” I say to her, heading down to my first morning as a seventeen-year-old.

S
o, Geoff is standing at the front door holding an ice cream cake. That is happening.

“I don't like ice cream cakes,” I say to him, like a jagoff. You think hangovers are going to be a joke, and then . . .

“I know,” he says, holding it out. “It isn't
from
me.”

I squint at him, and then Mom's behind me like an annoying sidekick, with: “That's the Geoff I know, face clean as a baby's butt.”

“I don't think babies' butts are really all that clean, Mrs. R.,” Geoff says, rubbing the place his “mustache” used to occupy. Geoff has been kind of a dick to me these last couple days, but now he's looking at Mom like the two of them used to have an act on a cruise ship.

I look through the plastic packaging of the cake box:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WIN
is spelled out in frosting, and it takes my breath away. Seriously, it's like the cake steals my breath, like some children's book villain, and I think:
Did my sister send Geoff a message from the grave, to deliver to me?
Unlikely. The two of them were always at each other's throats.

“Well, let me put that in the freezer so it doesn't melt,” Mom says, taking the cake from me and making her way into the kitchen and then back to the sunroom. My hands are cool and my head is hot. Also, Annabeth knows I hate ice cream cake, so:

“Amir asked me to buy it for you,” Geoff whispers.

“Well, ask Geoffy to come in, birthday boy!” Mom shouts.

But he stays put. “It's cooler out here,” he goes, leaning in and looking past my shoulder. “What is your mom
doing
in there?”

I hear it, too—some kind of rhythmic ripping of fabric. Every few months Mom goes through a crafts phase.

Ignore. “So, wait,” I go, stepping outside and letting our screen door
thwap
shut behind me. “Amir, like, asked you to buy me an ice cream cake?”

“Yup,” Geoff says, blocking the sun. His eyes are the bluest blue. Leave it to a straight boy to have the most classic features and then squander them with terrible gold neck chains and jeans choices. “He said: ‘Go get one of those Carvel cakes, but have them do a million flavors that don't really go together. It'll make Win laugh.' ”

And so I laugh. “Oh, yeah—long story involving crazy froyo choices. From last night.”

“Wow, you already have inside jokes. Also: Wow, I thought only Annabeth called you Win.”

Now I shield my eyes too. “She does. I mean, she did, but he kind of came up with it too.”

“Also,
also
: Wow,” Geoff says, bypassing my various contributions to this conversation, “you're standing outside in a bathrobe. And you stink. I can't believe you got wasted for the first time without me.”

“The other day you didn't care about coming in on me naked in the shower. Now you're judging me in a bathrobe.”

“That was different. This is in public.”

A crow flies by us, and we smile at the idea of my street being somehow “exposed.” All that's missing around here are tumbleweeds and those zombies. And a lemonade stand.

“I gotta jet,” he says. “You know Venessa.”

“Aw, I was hoping you could help me put in the AC.” Nothing. “Man, that lady is
tough
on you.”

“You have no idea.”

Mom's back, talking through the screen behind me. “What are you two doing out here? There's birthday cake to be eaten.”

“It's not even noon, Mrs. R.!”

“That's never stopped me before!”

She has a way of sounding proud about these sorts of statements, as if you can't get to be her size without a strangely American version of discipline. Which, let's be honest.

“Thanks for the cake,” I say to Geoff, and I try to twinkle a secret separate thanks to Amir. We'll see how that plays out.

“Oh,” Geoff goes, “something else.
Not
from you-know-who. It's from
me
, just so you know who to give credit to.”

He runs to his car and scurries back with something from the front seat. I hate that Mom's witnessing all this.

“What the heck,” I say, eyeing a small package in a little pink bag. Suspicious. It's as un-Geoff as it comes.

“It's a regifted bag,” he says, his voice cracking, not out of emotion but out of growing up, “but the gift is new.”

“Look at that,” Mom says, right over my shoulder. God, does this lady love anything pink.

“Mom, aren't you
busy
cutting me
breakfast
cake?” I say, and she does her version of dashing away to leave us alone. “Aw, man, G-force,” I say, unwrapping the present. “You really didn't have to get me this.”

“Yes, I did. This will be cheaper than the amount of gas I've purchased, delivering you messages and, like, cakes.”

He heads back to the car.

“I thought you refilled the tank for free at your dad's dealership.”

“Yeah, well, speaking of my parents,” he says. “You can thank them. My mom insisted I buy you that cell phone. It's been freaking her out not to hear me laugh around the house.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody sends me funny text messages anymore,” Geoff says, and he starts his Corolla and drives away.

• • •

“So, one more time: You're ruining your favorite black dress because why?”

We've eaten half the cake already, and it's a big cake. We're also standing at our kitchen island, as if by not sitting, we're somehow actively counteracting the calorie load.

“I want to cover all the trees in our yard with these scraps.” This means Mom wants me to. She hasn't been outside for longer than five minutes since December. “I want us to have a mini-forest of ribbons. It will be beautiful.”

“Why don't I just ask Mrs. Devlin for some extra ribbons? I'm sure she has them. They organized the damn tribute.”

Mom's eyelid quivers. Stupid, Quinn. This is the first project Mom's had in a while, and she wants to defend herself, but I can see the words getting stuck in her lips like leaves in a gutter that Dad isn't around to clean out anymore.

So I write the line for her.

“
Actually,
” I say, “I can see why you'd want to use your black dress fabric. That way it's more of a personal effort.”

She breathes again. “That's right. That's right.” And holds up the torn remains.

“Want some more cake?” I say, side-eyeing the stuff like we're in an abusive relationship. My stomach hurts. My everything does, but I'm also the best kind of distracted.

“No thanks,” Mom says, wiping the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin and smiling big. “Do you want to hear about your birthday gift now or later?”

“Um, wow. Maybe . . . now? No, later! It'll give my day a sense of purpose.”

Really, I'm sort of dying to activate this phone and text Amir.

“Well, okay,” Mom says, pressing her thumb into cake crumbs that have settled into the counter grout. “But can I give you a preview?”

“Previews,” I say, “are my favorite thing.” And then I switch to my movie-trailer voice, which always gets her. “
In a world
where movie trailers are better than the movies they are actually previewing,” I say, and she giggles and we're good.

“Well, I found
this
stuck between two sheets of Grandpa's old newspaper,” Mom says. She pulls forth a deeply yellowed twenty-dollar bill. It looks really old-timey, almost like funny money from the Wild West. “It's yours,” she says, laying it in my palm. “And I'm feeling real inspired. I'm going to go through
everything
in this house and start clearing stuff out and just, I don't know . . . Maybe there's more treasure to be found in this old shack yet.”

“Or bills to be paid,” I mutter, putting my hand on the stack. It is now above my head on the counter, a practically comical sight if you believe that pain is an essential element to laughs. Which, by the way, I do.

“Happy birthday, my handsome little man,” Mom says, kissing me on the cheek.

I'm three steps out of the kitchen, wondering what my first text to Amir should be, when Mom calls out, “There's Advil on my shelf in the medicine cabinet, Quinn. Don't take that useless store-brand stuff on Daddy's.”

I guess I really do stink and look awful, because when I put my foot on the first step, she also says, “Be careful?” Be careful.

I think she means just the general
Be careful
of knowing you're seeing your only son hungover for the first time and don't know how to talk about it, so you'll just give advice on how to treat it, once he's safely out of eyeshot. Or maybe she means
Be careful
about other stuff. Be careful about following too many of your instincts, about falling in love with someone who loves you less, about being too wisecracking or smart-alecky or forthcoming with your heart. Basically be careful about being you. You're only a Roberts, after all.

“I will, Ma,” I say, “I'll be careful,” just as I'm tearing open the cell phone box and slicing an epic cardboard paper cut into my hand. But: Ignore, because I am so thankful my new phone is an entirely different model than I or Annabeth ever had. (I used to have a Droid. Maybe all I need to be happy again is a new operating system.) I don't need any more reminders of the past. My life is all future now. All future, all the time. Watch out.

I trudge up the stairs and into my room, typing “
There's 1/2 an ice cream cake with ur name on it
,” to Amir. And then I punch in his number from my corkboard and hit send before I can talk myself out of it.

My hand is really bleeding now, but then, almost right away, I get an immediate response—so immediate it's not even cool, it's just nice—and it says: “
Glad to see you've joined the land of the living this morning. Chase the cake with some Advil. Coming to my party tonight?
”

I don't have any idea what he's referring to, but also: My hand doesn't even hurt, at all. Amir must have mentioned a party to me last night. Probably right after I cried in front of somebody for the first time in forever.

“
Wouldn't miss it
,” I type, and I smile and hit send at the very same time.

I
'm in our yard, tying one of Mom's black dress scraps to our birch tree, when this hot-looking car pulls onto our street and kicks up dirt and silently maneuvers onto the Devlins' driveway. Yeah, it's one of those silent cars. The little ones that look like they're made in Japan or maybe California.