The Secret Side of Empty (2 page)

“Oh, and you too, of course . . .
M.T.
. . .” She still stumbles over my “new” name, because the last time she came east to stay a week with Chelsea’s family, we were still in eighth grade and I still went under my full name, not my initials. You can tell she doesn’t approve, but she doesn’t have the guts to say so. But I can imagine she’s also glad she doesn’t have to try to pronounce my real name.

“Yeah, that would be awesome,” says Chelsea. “We should definitely go, M.T. You think your parents would let you spend a weekend up there? I could drive. Road trip!” She stares at me way longer than any driver should take her eyes off the road, so I feel obligated to stop this little college-visit train.

“Yeah, I’m actually . . . I think I’m not going to college.” I’ve been meaning to drop this on Chelsea for a while, ever since she started taking weekend visits and SAT prep courses junior year.

“What!” she says, but it shocks her enough to look back at the road. “Oh. Very funny. Haha. Is it that you want to go to a bigger school? With your grades you should be able to get in anywhere.”

“Yeah, college, I mean, who cares, right? More indoctrination, being told what to read and what to think. I think I want to get out there and live, you know what I mean?”

Even I don’t know what I mean, but I think I put on a pretty convincing performance. I mentally pat myself on the back for using a big word when lying about not wanting any more education.

Siobhan is sputtering. I have just blown up her world. “I don’t understand,” she says. “Are you talking about traveling around for a year or something? Doing the backpacking-through-Europe thing? Deferring enrollment? A gap year?”

“I’m talking about not going to college,” I say.

While Siobhan is still sputtering in shock, a car full of boys pulls up next to us. They hold up McDonald’s bags to the windows and make weird faces at us.

“Who are those guys?” says Siobhan. “Do you know them?”

“The driver plays in my brother’s tennis league. None of the other ones looks familiar,” says Chelsea.

“Isn’t that Sarah’s old boyfriend in the back?” I ask.

Chelsea squints and looks at them. “Mmmm . . . maybe? He looks familiar, yeah.”

The driver rolls down the window and says something. They’re on my side, so I roll down my window.

“My friends just bet me I couldn’t throw a fry and have you catch it.”

“Your friends are going to win that bet because I am not a trained seal,” I say. His friends all laugh.

“We’ll give you a present!”

“Chels, green light, take off!” says Siobhan. Chelsea guns it. The boys race to catch up, weaving past other cars until we get to another red light next to each other.

“We have soda!” says one in the back.

I turn to Chelsea. “Soda is intriguing. I’m kind of thirsty.”

Chelsea calls back in her best flirty voice, “We’ll take soda, but there will be no fry catching.”

Everyone but the driver gets out of the car and comes over to ours. In the middle of the street. One of them—a cute one with big, dark green eyes—carries two Sprites and an energy drink. I roll down the window and take them, then hold up the energy drink. “Do we look lethargic?” I say to him.

He smiles, and it’s like lamps have been turned on in his eyes, lighting up his whole face.

“It’s what we’ve got,” he says.

The light turns green and his friend takes off driving. They all run after the car.

Chelsea giggles. “The driver is kind of cute.”

“I like Soda Guy.”

“Yeah, he was totally checking you out. But let’s make this interesting for them,” says Chelsea, turning off the main drag, then driving fast a few blocks ahead and coming on to the strip going in the opposite direction.

We drive about a block until they pass by us, going the other way. All their windows open up and one of the guys pops out of the sunroof. “How did you guys get over there?” screams the driver. Chelsea shrugs and smiles and accelerates a little too fast.

“Oh my God, Chelsea!” says Siobhan from the backseat, the “oh” a little scream. I hear screeching tires. The guys have done a U-turn and are behind us again. At the next red light, they pull up.

The driver hangs out his window. “You trying to lose us?”

“Honey, if I was trying to lose you, you’d be lost,” says Chelsea.

A chorus of boys say, “Ooooh,” at the challenge.

“Yeah?” says the driver. “Let’s see.”

I’m disappointed, because I want more excuses to talk to Soda Guy. Where is the fun in losing them?

Chelsea switches into NASCAR mode, peeling off the main strip at the next light. She blazes through a red light and, surprisingly, the boys don’t follow. Chelsea makes one turn, then another. I think we’ve lost them, but when I turn around, I see them about a block behind us.

“They’re still following us!” yells Siobhan.

“Not to worry,” says Chelsea, making another right, then a left, then a right and . . . turning right into a dead end.

Before Chelsea can put the car in the reverse, the boys pull up and block our exit. And all get out of the car and walk toward ours.

“Lock the doors! Lock the doors!” says Siobhan.

“Relax, they’re just playing around,” I say.

They stand around our car, like now that they’ve caught us they don’t know what to do.

“Come out,” says Soda Guy, standing by my window now, mouthing the words in an exaggerated way. I get a better look at him. He’s got messy brown hair and glasses I hadn’t noticed before.

I jerk my head in Siobhan’s direction and shake my head. “I can’t,” I say.

“We won’t bite,” he says, making a chomping motion with his hand.

I open the window about a dime’s width.

Siobhan screeches from the backseat, “Are you crazy?”

“Hey, see, that wasn’t so bad, right?” he says.

I smile.

“Are you from Oakberg?”

“Willow Falls.”

“Yeah? I’ve never seen you at school,” he says.

“That’s because I don’t go to Willow.”

“Ooooh, mysterious. So are you, like, a girl genius who finished college at seven? Are you now practicing medicine?”

“Something like that.”

I hear Chelsea giggle at something Tennis Guy just said to her.

Siobhan is getting more frantic by the minute. “Chelsea, there is a lady looking at us from her porch over there.” Siobhan is seriously so annoying. But it’s not Chelsea’s fault. You can’t judge people by who they’re related to. I am the poster child for that.

“We’re cornered and we’re late,” I say to Soda Guy. “Can you offer assistance?”

He scrunches his nose and tilts his head to one side.

“I think it would be more fun if we could talk for a while longer,” he says.

I hear Tennis Guy and Chelsea discussing the logistics of a good drag race. Tennis Guy is clearly into Chelsea. But then most guys are. Another one of the guys in the car nudges the back of the car a little. Siobhan jumps.

“We really have to get home,” I say to Soda Guy.

He nods. “Okay, maybe next time?”

I nod.

He nods again. For a second it’s awkward, the two of us bobbing our heads at each other and him not moving. Finally, he says, “Mission accepted. I’ll get them out of the way for you.” He grabs another guy by the shirtsleeve, whispers something in his ear, and they head over to Tennis Guy’s car. Suddenly I hear the car peeling out of the dead end in reverse.

Tennis Guy and the other guy realize their friends are driving off with the car and leaving them behind. They start screaming at them and sprinting after the car. The coast is clear. The lady Siobhan had pointed out to Chelsea is still staring at us. There is a little kid standing next to her, kind of behind her leg. She motions to me, so I roll down the window a little more.

“I didn’t know what those guys were up to, so I called the cops. Are you guys okay?” she says. I nod at her, but my heart starts to pound.

Cops. I can’t do the cop thing. “Chels, let’s go home,” I say.

“We’re fine,” Chelsea calls out. “Tell them it was just a crazy teenage mating ritual!”

The woman shakes her head at us. Siobhan punches Chelsea in the arm. I sigh in relief when Chelsea guns it out of there.

A
n army of Central American men with big machines strapped to their backs are swooshing away every leaf on the unnaturally green lawns that I am biking past. These Guatemalan and Mexican men—that’s who people around here think of when they think “Spanish.”

They know better than to pigeonhole and stereotype, the residents of this fine suburb. They’re college educated. They’ve got some stamps on their passports. They know about South America and Central America and Spain and all that stuff. But these guys and the women who keep the inside of their houses spotless and their kids’ diapers changed are their first thought when “Spanish” comes up. Not me, who comes over to help their kids with math and is in contention for valedictorian. Not Greek-, French-, Russian-faced me.

At the bottom of the hill, where the road curves, I take a right and head down past the commercial district, where a few halfway decent restaurants and weird stores keep opening and closing—“Get Thee to a Sunnery,” the tanning place, and “Yoga for You.”

At the end of the stores, I hang a left into what little “affordable housing” there is in this town, a small apartment building with a tired-looking gray façade and a dead bush by the front door.

I lock up my bike in the little courtyard in the back and run up the three flights of stairs to our two-bedroom. I open the door. My mother never locks it. When you live a quarter of a mile away from houses with Hummers and Jaguars in the driveways, it’s pretty logical to think your two-bedroom is not going to be the first place hit.

My mother is in the kitchen, looking all drained, as usual. Maybe once, like in the wedding picture in the hall, she was pretty, with bright pink cheeks and shiny, long, straight brown hair. But now she looks like a dishrag washed too many times with stuff that’s other colors. As soon as I spot her, she makes me mad. I don’t know why.

Slam!
My little brother runs into me full speed, nearly knocking me down. I know it’s coming, but he always catches me off guard. Although he’s a skinny kid who eats only once in a while, he packs a lot of force.

“You’re going to knock me down!”

“What took you so long?” he says, bear-hugging me.

“Joey, I wasn’t gone that long.”

“It’s Ho-say,” he says. He says “Jose” like a gringo. Mentally, I curse my parents for the ten-thousandth time for naming him Jose instead of Joseph. Or Connor. Or Duke. Or something else that would fit around here. When he was born, I gave them the “We’re in America now” speech, but they didn’t listen. Joey doesn’t seem to mind.

“Anyway, Ho-say, what have you been doing while I was out?”

“Watch cartoons with me!”

“No, seriously.” But I know resistance is futile. He always wins at getting me to watch
SpongeBob
with him, so I know I might as well just give in. “Okay, but just one episode.”

“Two. The new one where Patrick and
SpongeBob
have a fight is coming. New episode!”

I follow him into our living room and sit on the couch. There are holes in the wicker on the sides of the couch, where first my little fingers and now his have poked through absently while watching TV. I spy a hole I created during one particularly long winter of watching
Johnny Bravo
. The cushions are a yucky pea-green soup color, worn through near where the back of your knees go.

He puts his hand in mine, and it gets sweaty in sixty seconds flat, but he is zombie-fied. He stays that way during the two episodes of
SpongeBob
—jaw slack, hand in mine, saying every three minutes or so, “That was funny, right?” He leans his head on my shoulder, as if doing that will convince me it was. It works. I laugh.

“I have a book I want to go read, little J man.”

“But it’s summer.”

“School’s about to start, and I want to finish the reading list.”

“I thought you said you read all the ones you were supposed to read.”

“I did, but I want to read the whole list.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“Okay,” he says. “You read here with me and I’ll watch cartoons.”

The kid is going to make a hell of a negotiator someday.

I hear the front door slam and I tense up. He’s early. Not good. Usually I can count on him coming home when it’s time for me to go to sleep, so I can retreat to the room my brother and I share and stay out of his way. But now it’s dinnertime and he’s already here. So many things can go wrong in three hours. So many things usually do.

He walks into the living room, and you can almost see the cartoon dark squiggly lines over his head. He carries his mood around him like an angry cloud. I stare at the floor to avoid eye contact.

“So, you don’t say hello to your father?”

“Hello,” I mumble at the brown linoleum. Eye contact is bad. But not talking is bad, too.

Jose runs off the couch and wraps himself around our father’s legs, creasing his black pants. “The robot, the robot! Let’s play the robot!” Jose jumps up and down while still holding on.

My father takes off his red waiter’s jacket, messes up Jose’s gold, curly hair, and pries him off, saying, “In a little while,” and walks a few steps to our kitchen/dining/everything room.

“What’s for dinner?” my father asks.

My mother looks a little more wrung out than five minutes ago. “Lentils,” she says.

“Lentils again?” he groans. I have to give it to him on this one. Damn lentils. Another meal brought to you courtesy of a ninety-nine-cent bag of beans. Maybe if I just don’t eat until school starts I’ll look skinny and I can wear those black jeans to our first dance. Lentils are the best motivation for a starvation diet when they are the only things in the house to eat.

O
n the first day of school, I breeze into homeroom, where my all-time favorite teacher, Ms. North, is
finally
my homeroom teacher. Geek alert: it’s kind of a thing I’ve been looking forward to for years. I can’t exactly explain it, but I want to be around Ms. North as much as possible, like she’s got some secret code I need to crack. Bonus: she’s also my first period class. So I don’t have to navigate much of anywhere until well past 9:00 a.m.