This Must Be the Place: A Novel (19 page)

Tossing aside his history book—
American Passages
, it was called, though everyone at school referred to it as
American Assages
, which Eugene thought was a stupid joke because it didn’t really mean anything, it just sounded like the word
ass
, ha ha ha, that’s so freaking clever—he opened last year’s yearbook. His entire class, all forty-three souls of varying intelligence and humanity, stared back at him from a single double-page spread, tiny black and white heads that produced an almost universal spasm in his gorge. He really hated them. He barely knew why, or how he had become the kind of person who hates others. It was like the urge for sex: one day it just happened, and he didn’t know how to make it stop. He hoped one day it would go away, but from what he had already seen of adult behavior, he wasn’t counting on it.

He scanned the pictures, taken almost a year ago. Everyone already looked older than these versions of themselves, leaner, less chubby. Jenny Heckle had shaved her head over the summer (she had potential, he supposed, but she seemed so mad all the time; he didn’t think he’d be safe with her), but there she was, crystallized on last October’s picture day, long blond hair draped over one shoulder. Next to Jenny was David Katz, one of the few people Eugene didn’t want to punch in the face. Annemarie was a huge bitch. Janice was dumb as a dump truck. And just like that, Eugene was at the bottom of the page, staring at Heather Zink (ugh, no) and feeling more frustrated than ever. Usually he didn’t tease the urge, didn’t get it all worked up for nothing, and this was why. He thought about Dolley Madison again (trying to find her under all those skirts and petticoats, like doing the breaststroke through waves of bedsheets) and went into the bathroom.

When he came back he picked up his yearbook, growled under his breath, and was about to toss it back into the pile of crap on his floor when his brain hiccupped and he thought:
Oneida Jones
. He hadn’t seen her picture; where was she? She should have been between Carrie and David, but she wasn’t; and then he saw at the bottom of the page
Not
pictured: Oneida Jones
. Mysterious. He tried to summon Oneida and came up with a vague outline of big dark hair and dark furry eyebrows over dark-rimmed glasses. He had barely paid attention to her, ever, but more importantly the thought of her didn’t make him feel like throwing up. It made him want to remember what she looked like, if they’d ever spoken, and why he didn’t hate her in the same lazy way he hated certain other people he barely knew and yet still knew enough to loathe.

She was listed in the index next to a single page number, and it took Eugene a solid minute to locate her in the Key Club group picture. He had it narrowed down between two pale blobs surrounded by dark hair-clouds when she popped out of the lower edge of the picture. The photographer had set them up on the chorus risers, but Oneida was standing on the ground, off to the side a little, arms crossed and not looking at the camera.
I’m not one of these stupid sheep
, she said to Eugene.
I’m in Key Club because I’m smart and I’m here because they made me come, but I see things they don’t, or can’t, because they’re all too busy saying cheese. Also, my tits are a lot bigger than you remembered.

The next day in school—as though Eugene needed a sign that he was on the right track, which he didn’t—Dreyer assigned group projects in American History and called Oneida Jones’s name two seconds after she called his own. He had been trying to get a good look at her all day, and when she turned her desk in to form a group circle, a little part of Eugene he didn’t even know existed cracked in half and flooded his entire body. He wasn’t sure if he was happy, horny, or an unholy combination of both, but it took every bit of his considerable will not to giggle out loud.

Because Oneida Jones was a hot mess. First of all, that hair—holy shit, it was insane; there was so much of it, and it was so curly and thick. It reminded Eugene of the buffalo hide his Uncle Phil had hanging in his dining room, so dense and furry that, when Eugene was little, he could grab two hunks of it in his hands and lift himself up off the floor. Oneida’s ponytail ballooned behind her head like a cloud the color of dark chocolate, and if her features hadn’t been angular, or her face so pale and grave, she would have disappeared into all that hair completely. But her nose was long and straight, her chin stubborn, and her eyes large and greenish behind her glasses. Eugene, really looking at
her for the first time, was reminded of how blind everyone at Ruby Falls High was, for someone like Oneida Jones—basically a hot female Wolverine, minus the adamantium claws—to be essentially invisible.

The idea of a hot female Wolverine, or more specifically, of Oneida in Wolverine’s yellow and blue costume, flashed over Eugene like an instant fever. He ducked out for the bathroom when Dreyer’s back was turned. When he came back, so relaxed he felt positively noodle-y, Oneida glared at him and slapped a paper on his desk without uttering a sound. It was a description of the assignment, and she’d written on the top in red capital letters
FIRST GROUP MEETING @ DARBY-JONES SAT 2 P.M
.

Eugene was thus presented with his first deadline in what he had already begun to think of as the Oneida Project. He had three days until that first meeting: three days to figure out the best path to Oneida Jones’s brain. Her heart, he figured, would follow: winning her brain seemed a bigger challenge, more befitting his talents. After dinner that night, when Eugene would normally retreat to his bedroom and attempt to do homework, which would normally result in marathon masturbatory sessions involving any number of historical and/or literary females (they were reading
The Scarlet Letter
—what else was he supposed to do?), he sat in the living room with a can of root beer and watched night fall over the hills through the giant picture windows.

By the time he was sitting in total darkness, Eugene was forced to admit that he had no idea how to get in Oneida’s brain. He was
shit
at this. He didn’t understand women, though he did understand enough about Oneida to know that you could potentially understand women and still not understand her. He had no precedent for any of this, no practice, and no confirmation that his instincts weren’t broken. He had last kissed a girl named Lily during the one and only summer he’d spent at camp. She’d tasted like cherry Kool-Aid, and she’d kissed him back at first but then freaked when he licked the sugary red stains from the corners of her mouth. It had been an unsettling situation, to say the least.

Eugene usually prided himself on being the only person with his eyes open, the only person with a clue, and to be this thoroughly stumped before he’d even attempted the Oneida Project? He belched softly and crushed the root beer can between his palms.

From her bedroom in the back of the house he could hear his sister practicing her bass guitar, ripping through a song by the Violent Femmes that their father had sung to them when they were babies (or so he told them; Patricia might have remembered, but Eugene had to take his word for it), to teach them how to count.

She sounded good. Of course she sounded good, he thought; all she did was play that bass, every hour of every day, when she wasn’t working at the McDonald’s on Route 31. Patricia was four years older than Eugene, and had graduated from Ruby Falls High the previous spring. She had never pretended to want to go to college. She was going to save up some money (her
own
money, she was adamant), move to New York City, and start a band. Help turn some rat hole into another CBGBs. Eugene thought it was pretty embarrassing—and so, so uncool—that Patricia was realizing her counterculture queen dreams by working the drive-thru at McDonald’s, but when it came to Patricia, he’d learned long ago to shut up and stay out of her way.

It hadn’t always been like that. When Eugene was still a kid, Patricia had treated him like her favorite toy and Eugene had loved every second of it. He was her audience and her roadie, carrying her amp around the house and nodding sagely when she decreed this particular corner of the living room to have the best acoustics. She taught him everything she knew about music, about punk and rock and roll and new wave; she played him
London Calling
and Talking Heads and taught him to thrash around like a lunatic without breaking his neck; she promised to pierce his nose with a safety pin when he was old enough to “really appreciate it.” Eugene adored his sister, probably because she was a younger, blonder version of their father, Astor, whom, if it was possible, Eugene adored even more. But that had been years and years ago, before the thought of girls in general and his sister in particular became equal parts troubling and enthralling—and, in Patricia’s case, a little terrifying.

Lately, Patricia’s status as a post-graduate lame duck had thawed something between them. They had spoken to each other—not merely to convey vital information but conversationally. She had pulled him into her room to play a new album for him, had asked what he thought, and genuinely seemed to care about his opinion. Eugene tried not to
think he was acting like a kicked dog, pathetically happy to be shown a little kindness from the master who had done the kicking. Because he
was
happy, desperately so, that Patricia seemed on the verge of rediscovering her favorite toy, even though it was a toy she had already broken once.

Eugene shuffled through the thick carpet in his bare feet and grinned as a blue-white charge leaped from his fingertip to the metal knob of Patricia’s door. He pressed his cheek to the cool white paint and heard her growling along with the bass line.

Patricia’s playing got louder, and he opened the door. She was wearing the same red sweatpants she always wore and a lumpy gray sweater that might have belonged to their father at some past, even skinnier, place in his life. She sang in her bird-thin little voice, nodding at him to come on in.

She had arms like bendy straws; they both did. Wendells were not exactly hearty. They sang together through four headaches, five for loneliness, six sorrows, seven n-n-no tomorrows. “Eight!” rumbled Eugene, plumbing the gravelly pit of his voice. It still surprised and pleased him, how deep his voice had become. A part of him was irrationally afraid it would go away, that the Gods of Puberty would realize they’d given him the wrong throat and take it back.

Patricia took the second to last line—nine, for a lost God—her reedy little body and voice wavering. They landed feet first together on ten, ten, ten,
ten for everything everything everything everything!

Patricia let the bass flop listlessly against her side and, by way of a greeting, flipped her little brother off. “What’s up?” she asked, unslinging the strap from her neck.

“Not much,” Eugene said, fidgeting in her doorway. “You’re a girl, right?”

Patricia looped her thumbs in the waistband of her sweatpants. She had terrible posture.

“Last time I checked. You’re a boy, right?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Eugene said. He felt awkward, but the only place he could think to sit in her room was on her bed, and
that
wouldn’t be weird. Not at all. “I have a question. About girls.”

This improved Patricia’s posture markedly. She crossed her arms
and leaned back appraisingly. “Holy flipping crap,” she said. “Little Wendy has a crush. Who is it? You’ve got to tell me now, you can’t just—”

“Oneida Jones,” Eugene said. He thought he trusted Patricia.

She froze, and her eyes widened. “Shut up.”

“Is that OK? Should I have run it by you first?”

“It’s just that . . . God, Wend, do you know anything about her? Like, at all?”

Eugene crossed his own arms and leaned into her doorframe. “Do
you
?” he said.

“I know she’s a complete freak.”

“Like we’re not?” Eugene said. He didn’t like the way this conversation was going. His heart started to beat faster.

“Oh, way freakier.” Patricia raised her brows at him knowingly. “Like, scary freakier. You know what they say about her?”

Eugene backed up a little bit. Patricia advanced.

“She has a taste for the blood of virgins. Male virgins.”

“Oh, shut up!” Eugene said, flushing. “You don’t know anything about her, do you?”

“Ha! No clue,” Patricia said. “But I’m sure she’s a hot piece of snatch.”

“Shut up,” Eugene said.

“Excuse me: I’m sure she’s a lovely young piece of snatch.” Patricia grinned at him and threw herself backward on her bed. “So what’s your question?”

Eugene noticed for the first time that his sister’s room was a total pit. She was lying on the bed but the mattress was barely visible under a giant pile of dirty clothes and blankets and pillows. The posters on the wall, of Kim Deal and Flea, were coming untacked at the corners and rippled with age. Books and guitar tabs littered the floor, and a small pile of rumpled McDonald’s uniforms was emitting the unmistakable funk of fast food service, of grease and salt-infused polyester.

“Has Mom seen this mess?” he asked.

“That’s not your question. And, like, none of your business.” She sat up, crossed her legs, and patted the empty space opposite her. “Oh, come on!” she wheedled. “It’s like I finally got that little sister I asked Santa for.”

Grimacing, Eugene perched on the edge of her bed and rubbed his nose, wishing she would open a window and let in some fresh air. Patricia twiddled her thumbs and asked if she could paint his nails.

“How do I get to a girl’s brain?” he spat out.

“Skull saw.” Patricia rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. It depends. I mean—what’s this girl like?”

Eugene shrugged.

“I see. You don’t know her, but you like her. How very boy of you.” She grabbed her feet with her hands and fluttered her fingers and toes. She was built like a pretzel, all skinny, looping limbs. “OK. First thing: you can’t get her anything lame like flowers or candy or jewelry or a stuffed animal; Jesus, God forbid. And the fact that you’re aiming for her brain tells me—frankly, Wendy, it tells me you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”