The Great American Whatever (6 page)

It's been a while since I've pumped gas. Annabeth drove our only car, that day. We haven't gotten it replaced.

“Holy shit, Quinn Roberts,” I hear. Even though the pump clicks off at that very moment, my hand reflexively turns back into a fist, clamping it back on. Auto-fists are what auto-happen whenever I hear Blake Thompson's voice.

“Hey, Blake,” I go, unclenching my hand.

“Hey,” he goes.

I turn to see which kind of face he's making at me. It's always a face with Blake Thompson, but it's his arms that I zero in on. They're overflowing with snack foods—Utz chips and Mountain Dews, you get the idea.

“You want one of these?” he goes. Apparently I'm staring at a Clark Bar.

“No, it's cool,” I go, and then Geoff's flip-flops are
s-lapping
back across the parking lot. He gets in front of me like he's a mother lioness.

“Need something, Thompson?” Geoff goes. I slink away and open the passenger-side door and just stand behind it as if it's a shield.

“No, we're good,” Blake says. He turns abruptly toward his truck, and as he does a Sierra Mist falls out of his arms. It rolls onto Geoff's foot. Geoff tosses it into Blake's pickup truck window for him, and Blake takes off without saying anything else, his truck belching smoke, one of his rear taillights blinking like a carnival.

We're pulling out of the gas station and are a full one minute back into the trip before Geoff goes, “Buckle up”—my mom was always strangely lax about making us buckle up—and then, “That was weird back there.”

I know what he means but I don't, either. “Yeah,” I say.

“Did Blake give you shit when I was inside?”

“No,” I say, opening Geoff's glove compartment for a Jolly Rancher. He's out of my favorite flavor, but I'll persevere. “No, he didn't give me shit at all. He was oddly nice.”

“Well, that's cool,” Geoff goes, turning onto my driveway without using the turn signal. Thank God. It was beginning to bother me how conscientious Geoff has been seeming.

“Yeah,” I say, but I'm not thinking it was cool. I'm thinking I wish Blake
had
been a total jagoff to me, back in the Marathon Gas parking lot off I-79, because then we'd be back to how life was before December twentieth. Blake Thompson being nice to anybody means they are permanently in the leper category—officially not worth picking on.

I am now the guy people pity. Don't pity me, people! Make fun of my haircut. My dad's cologne, even. Treat me like you treat everybody.

“You wanna get out?” Geoff says, because I guess I'm just sitting here in the driveway, buckled up, looking at the birch tree where Annabeth and I tied the stray dog we were so excited to find, which Dad didn't let us keep.

• • •

I've got a Hefty bag out and I'm filling it with three expired Healthy Choices at a time. Then I'm on my knees, twisting open jars of cinnamon applesauce and trying to figure out if anything in the fridge is still edible. QUESTION: Can jelly grow mold? (ANSWER: It can!)

I'm not being that quiet about any of this, either. Mom's upstairs in her room watching her stories on full blast, so I should be good.

Ten minutes and two full Hefty bags later I've moved on to confronting our pantry, which is also where Dad kept this big animal-cracker barrel for loose coins. It's the most unlikely thing ever, sitting there on the top shelf. In order to put your spare change into it, you have to get out the step stool—which is missing its top ladder rung—and balance on the top without falling and dying. And so we never do.

If this isn't a metaphor for the Roberts family's approach to “savings,” I don't know what is.

Oops, never mind about me not disturbing Mom. I hear her door swing open upstairs and these gravelly voices from her police procedurals filling the stairwell. It's actually nice to have a man's voice in the house again.

Surprise: Here she comes.

“Hi, Mama,” I say when she steps off the stairwell, the bun in her hair blocking the fake stained-glass moon in the window above our front door.

“Babe, what're you up to in here?”

“Just clearing stuff out, Ma. I've decided we have to start eating better.”

She negotiates walking quickly into the kitchen, which you'd think would sound like a thunderstorm but is instead something even more ominous—the low groan of a boiler about to explode. That was the original ending of
The Shining
, by the way: In the novel, the boiler explodes and kills them all. Obviously vastly different from the movie. Spoiler alert.

“Quinny,” Mom says, her forehead in a twist. “Why would you throw away all this good food?”

I pull a Cocoa Krispies box out of the Hefty bag and shake it. There is a delayed response from inside, the cereal
ca-chunking
against the box like it's been awakened from the terrible reality of being, well, Cocoa Krispies
.

“I don't know if we can call this food ‘good,' Mama.”

“But that was her favorite.”

I lower the box. I stick my head into the Hefty. She's right. I've just completely disrupted the museum that was Annabeth's life. Shit.

“Well . . . maybe I could toss out some of the stuff she never touched?” I pick out a string cheese from the Hefty bag. Annabeth hated string cheese—even before it was flecked with green, like this one is now. “Like this?”

It starts with a quiver. Mom's breakdowns always start with a little quiver. Either chin or eyelid, and you really have to be artful about spotting it. She is a beautiful woman but also a large woman.

“I suppose,” she says, but it's her chin this time. It's quivering.

I touch her on the shoulder. It's not okay. She's not ready for this.

“Go watch your stories,” I say, “and I'll put everything back.”

She looks away. She is embarrassed. She is
grieving
. Dammit, Quinn, don't embarrass your mom. You are smarter than this.

“Just for now,” she says. “For now, I want everything back the way it was. I'm just not ready.” She places her hand on the counter, right on top of that postcard advertising BOLD summer haircuts.

“I've gotta pee,” I say, and I dash up the stairs. “I'll put all the food back in a sec!”

“I took the liberty of doing your whites while you were out!” Mom calls out, just as I'm discovering a stack of underwear outside my bedroom in the most perfect pile you've ever seen. I stare at it as if a baby has been delivered to my door.

“You went in my room?” I say. I didn't have to pee. I just had to get away.

“I'm tired of seeing you in that T-shirt,” she says. “And I cleaned out some of the clutter, too.”

I stomp my foot down once, hard. I'm mad and I don't know why. Why am I mad to see clean laundry? And then it hits me.

I throw my door open and skid across my floor, rug-burning my knee with something even worse, because I don't have a rug. Ignore. My lamp topples over, but I ignore that, too, frantic as I pull my desk out from the wall, to search beneath it.

It's there, streaked with sweat: the form for that student filmmakers' competition, which Mom never even knew we were thinking of applying to. The application feels like a bomb in my hand, ticking off all the things I was going to do but didn't, until
BOOM
.

See, in order for us to even apply to the competition, I would've had to
first
finish a full-length screenplay. That was the plan: I'd finish my screenplay, Annabeth would shoot a few scenes, and what the hell, we'd apply to this competition thing. If we'd gotten in, it would have meant a real mentor and, better yet, a couple of weeks away in LA this summer. Nothing sounds better than “away” right now.

Tick-tick-tick . . . BOOM.

I take the application across my room. I open my closet. I jump up and slide it on top of the teetering stack of textbooks I haven't touched since December twentieth.

“I'm happy to do your colors, too,” Mom calls from downstairs.

My lips taste like contact lens solution, like salt and saline and oyster brine. I'm still mad but I'm also not. “Okay.” I don't understand how somebody as skinny as me is supposed to keep all of these conflicting emotions inside without bursting a few seams.

Entire seasons have shifted since the last time I did a proper load of laundry. I gather every last black sock and blue sweatshirt into my broken hamper and I walk them all down to the basement, where Mom is now leaning into the washing machine.

“Thanks,” I say. I kiss her on the cheek. My mouth descends a full inch into her face, like when you haven't ridden your bike all year and the first time on you're like,
Dammit, Dad needs to fill up these tires.
Mom's cheeks have that kind of give to them.

It's adorable.

I go upstairs. I find my earplugs. And now I'm lying on my bed, wondering how Geoff and I could have been so incredibly intent on getting me a new AC today and then have completely forgotten to install it after the party tonight. How it's just sitting in the trunk of his brand-new Corolla while I broil.

The house shifts. Left to right. Left to right. Here she comes.

“Knock-knock,” Mom says, standing outside the threshold of my room. I love how she's suddenly pretending to respect my privacy, even though she barged in here earlier and straightened my desk and did my whites and threw away my towering pizza box art. “I found something in the back pocket of your shorts.”

“Oh.” Earplugs: out. “You did?”

I am the least scandalous teen on earth, so I'm not sure why I'm instantly nervous. What do I think Mom might have found? Not a condom. Not a cigarette. A nothing. I have the secret life of a retired librarian. All I do is read screenplays and watch movies. I don't even know if 7UP mixes with vodka, because I forgot to take a sip almost the moment I was handed the red cup tonight.

Mom makes her way across my room and hands me a tiny slip of paper.

“I lied, earlier,” Mom says. Red flag. Mom never lies. “I said I did your laundry because I'm tired of seeing you in that T-shirt.”

I cover myself up. I'm in my old robe, but it feels weird for Mom to see my bare legs on my bed, or something.

“Okay?” I go. “My feelings weren't hurt, don't worry. I'm tired of that shirt, too.”

She waves away my words. “No, I mean—I saw that you went into Daddy's closet. You left it open after.”

“Oh.”

“And I won't have you wearing that man's clothes.”

Just in case he comes back, by the way. She hates him, but mostly she hates him for leaving, and so we'd better not disturb his stuff. She hates him and she wants him back, and her daughter, too, while you're at it, God.

“Oh, yeah, of course, Mom. Yeah. I hate his clothes, too.”

She attempts a smile. False start. “Maybe when we get the next grocery delivery, we can add some new cologne to the order too. Because I won't have you
smelling
like him either.” And she flips around and attempts to make a quick, witty exit.

When the last stairway step has stopped squeaking, I unfold the slip of paper Mom gave me, and I hear a gasp. And it's me who's gasping, and I taste humidity in the intake and I gasp again.

It's just, I am so shocked by what I see that my writer mind takes over, as if I'm watching the movie of my life from overhead—a removed witness who still believes this screenplay has a chance of ending happily.

INT. QUINN'S BEDROOM – NIGHT

Quinn sits up straight on his twin bed. His maroon robe falls open, but he doesn't adjust it. He is too distracted.

We see his eyes widen as he stares at a slip of paper in his hand.

Over his shoulder, we see it's the exact same slip of paper on which the Celebrity name “Mario Lemieux” had been written earlier tonight -- only now, written above “Mario Lemieux,” in different handwriting, are the words “I had no idea who,” and underneath “Mario Lemieux” is written: “was either.”

QUINN

Oh my freaking God.

We tilt down to see what Quinn sees: that underneath “I had no idea who Mario Lemieux was either” is a name, and a phone number.

The name is “Amir.”

CUT TO:

EXT. QUINN'S ROOF – NIGHT

Quinn dances around in the rain, his robe fully open, his mouth filling with the holy water of redemption.

Except, hello—no. Because you can't stand on our roof without falling off. And it's not raining out.

Who cares, though? The first part of the scene is really happening. I couldn't have written it better. Amir doesn't know who a legendary hockey player is either. Amir is not majoring in Irony. Amir is not straight.

People:
This is what we know so far.

INT. QUINN'S BEDROOM – NIGHT

Quinn paces, staring at the slip of paper and giggling. But there is fear on his face too. Or maybe just annoyance. . . .

Ugh. When Rory C. Lewis came out at school last year, the principal called a Diversity Assembly to honor him, which was the forty longest minutes of my
life
, and I'm including gym class in that tally. Rory gave a speech on the beauty and drama of being different, and got kind of an obligatory standing ovation.

But the truth is: Nobody ever made fun of Rory because he was gay, even before he was out, even though we could all tell he was gay. We didn't care that he was gay. We made fun of Rory because he is
annoying
.

I'm still not out. It just seems like such a hassle to
come
out. I want to just
be
out.

I look at the sheet of paper. My hands are making it flutter. I wonder how Amir got this into my back pocket. Maybe when I backed up into him at the sink. I wonder if Mom knows what this piece of paper means. Maybe . . . not, actually.