This Must Be the Place: A Novel (24 page)

“It shouldn’t.”

“Good.”

“I have to tell you something.” He sniffed. “It seems important.”

“Go ahead.”

He licked his lips and looked up at her. “No one knows I’m here.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one knows Amy is dead. No one on this coast; you’re the first. I couldn’t—I couldn’t tell anyone. Before you.”

“You mean your family thinks you’re still in LA? And that Amy is still—that everything is normal?”

“I have to call them, don’t I?” He wanted to take his hands out of hers but Mona instinctively held on, pulled him back. “How do I explain—this?”

“You don’t,” Mona said. His palms were sweating. “You stay as long as you need to, Arthur. You hide. Amy broke your heart and your brain. I’m not blaming her; she didn’t wake up and say,
Today I am going to die and take Arthur’s whole world with me
—but she did. So you just—call your family if you want to, pretend you’re home and everything’s hunky-dory, I don’t care. They’ll forgive you. But take the time.”

“I can’t ask you to do that. I’m not that person; at least, I don’t want to be.”

“Arthur.” She steadied her voice. “Let me tell you about grief. It’s a sneaky son of a bitch with no heart and no conscience and absolutely no sense of timing. My parents had me when they were both older and they both died relatively young of heart disease, only a few months apart, a long time ago now. But you know when I finally realized they were gone?
Two years after they were dead
.” Mona inhaled.

“It was Oneida’s first day of fourth grade. She came home with a split lip because some jerk at school tripped her on the playground.
She’s crying and clinging to me—clinging, Arthur, like I can save her life—and I squeeze back, but the whole time I’m thinking;
I want my mom. I want my dad.
And it hurts all over again, worse than before, because I never took the time to realize that they weren’t coming back.

“So don’t be in such a hurry. Stay. Stay for the weekend, Arthur; stay for the week. For the month. Stay here as long as it takes for you to realize what it means that Amy is never coming back.”

She almost kissed him. She was close enough to, and she wanted to—she wanted to so much that it frightened her. But she couldn’t tell if she was being supportive or pushy, selfish or insane; if her intentions were pure or if she was a manipulative head case. She didn’t know why she’d said any of that to Arthur. She’d never said any of that to anyone.

“I’ll tell you about that summer,” she said. “I
want
to tell you. Now, why the hell do you think that is, Arthur?”

Arthur laughed nervously.

“Your breakdown might be catching,” Mona said. Arthur looked at her steadily, silently. He had dark half-moons under his eyes; he was still exhausted, still hurt. He didn’t have the strength to run away again.

“Promise,” he said. “Promise to kick me out if I stay too long.”

“Pinkie swear,” she said. “The most sacred oath there is.”

She hooked her pinkie with Arthur Rook’s and they smiled at each other. Mona felt light-headed—light-headed but oddly excited—and a kind of awake that had nothing to do with her morning coffee. Possibility, newness: they were things she thought she had learned to live without. She hadn’t known the lengths to which she’d go to keep them in her life, hadn’t known her own desperation.

Don’t ever take my picture, Arthur,
she thought.
I’d blind you.

10
WWPTD?

What, thought Eugene, would Robert Plant do?

“He would dance around in tight pants,” he said to his empty bedroom. It didn’t seem like spectacular advice, given his present situation. He doubted his crushing failure with Oneida—what had he been
thinking
, luring her to his lair?—could be forgotten by writhing around in uncomfortably low jeans.

What would David Byrne do, then? “Dance around in a huge puppet suit,” he said, and sighed. He needed to find some new heroes, heroes who did more than dance.

“Let’s go, Gene!”
Tap tap tap tap tappity tap tap.
His mother was tapping her drumsticks on his bedroom door. “You’re gonna miss the bus, and you don’t want to have to wake your sister for a lift.”

Eugene stared at the poster tacked above his bed, one corner drooping free, wishing, for the millionth time in the three days that had passed since Sunday, that he could melt into the landscape with Dalí’s clocks. He could feel his limbs going soft and warm, oozing over his mattress like the crayons he once left on the stove. He hated himself for scaring her like that, hated himself for telling the truth, hated the truth for being so—so dumb-jockish. Now Oneida thought he was just another horny teenage guy.

Maybe he was.

“No,” he said, sitting up and balling his fists. The last thing Eugene Wendell was was some average teenage asshole. He was an artist, a surrealist, an anarchist. He was himself, unique, and he was better than the rest. And he chose Oneida, not because she was a girl, but because she was a weird girl, a specific girl. He needed her to know she was
chosen. He needed to tell her so, if not to change her mind, if not to buy himself another chance, then to let her know she was wrong to think of him as another asshole ruled by an indiscriminate dick. It made him sick to imagine Oneida Jones running home that day, freaked the hell out, under the total delusion that his dick wasn’t discriminate (which it was, it
was
—his dick was a frickin’ chick sommelier, comparatively speaking).

And if she did change her mind, if she did give him another chance—the thought was too goddamned awesome to contemplate. She had tasted like lemonade.

He grabbed a mostly clean T-shirt from his floor and pulled it over his head. Ran his fingers through his hair. Looked in the streaky mirror over his dresser. Eugene frowned at the zit that had sprung up overnight (on his chin, bright red—how the hell did that happen?), and, instead of his usual morning glower, he flashed a grin. It looked a little frightening, a little wolfish. He brought his lips closer together to cover his teeth, and said to his reflection, “I am not Wendy.” Eugene was ready to go to school.

But it was Wendy who got off the bus at Ruby Falls High. He hadn’t realized, until that moment, just how used he was to playing the part. It was second nature to lurch and swagger everywhere, to slit his eyes and grimace, to grin when a seventh-grader, staring, looked away nervously. Then again, maybe this was some kind of bizarre female voodoo; if Oneida believed he was Wendy, believed he was capable of Cro-Magnon violence and no more, he
became
Wendy. Changing her mind took on an even greater importance.

It had been easy to avoid her thus far. They had only a handful of classes together: second-period gym, but they were separated while the girls did aerobics and the boys lifted weights; fifth-period lunch; and seventh-period U.S. history. Dreyer hadn’t made their groups meet during class all week, so there’d been no reason for them to speak or even look at each other. Of course, there was a good chance today, Wednesday, would be the day for group work—and that meant Eugene had six periods, approximately five hours, to prepare himself for a tearful confrontation. Or a cold shoulder. Or a knee in the groin.

First period: tech ed. Eugene spent the entire fifty minutes sanding
a block of wood, grinding the corners against the sand belt until it was smooth and round, mind wandering to the composition of his opening lines. Should he say her name? Give her a nickname? Or stick with a classic like “Hi.” Eugene worried briefly that Oneida would rat him out to Andrew Lu and Dani, how he’d fake-canceled the meeting, but then thought she might be too embarrassed to bring it up at all, which both relieved and made him feel like an even bigger jerk. Second period (gym) he spent in the nurse’s office with an upset stomach, which was real for once. By fourth period—geometry—he was seriously considering skipping the rest of the day. He managed half a piece of pizza for lunch and spent the rest of the period staring at a wall, trying not to think at all. By the time Eugene arrived in sixth-period study hall, he was so anxious he could barely blink.

And then the bell rang and there was nothing to do but go to history class. He took his normal seat at the back of the room, underneath a laminated poster of the Declaration of Independence. Dani came in first, chewing a piece of gum so hard her jaw was spasming. Oneida was next, paler and weirder and more beautiful than ever. Eugene’s stomach fell out like a trap door.

In the flurry of people arriving just before the bell, he didn’t notice Andrew Lu—that is, until he saw someone out of the corner of his eye hoisting an acoustic guitar case down the narrow rows of desks. Andrew set the case—flat black, new, nothing like Patricia’s bedraggled one, which was peppered with stickers and odd stains—on the floor and sat down, looking around expectantly. He caught Oneida’s eye and gave her a thumbs-up, and Oneida, a beat late, waved awkwardly.

Holy shit.

Eugene barely had time to register that something was going on between Oneida and the Lu kid before Dreyer closed the classroom door and announced that they were going to spend the entire class working in their groups.

“Yes,” she said. “Because I had better things to do last night than put together a lesson plan.” She sat at her desk and began to call roll.

Shit, thought Eugene. Shit shit shit. So there was a chance that Andrew Lu already knew what he’d done, there was a chance Oneida had
run to him, spilled the beans, and—what then? It wasn’t as though his image could be ruined; it was already awful. His heart sank a little. He’d never intended to actually live up to his own reputation.

The classroom was plunged into controlled chaos as people spun their desks to face one another, recombining rows into circles and horseshoes. Dani tossed her bag against the wall and sat next to Eugene. Oneida and Andrew Lu came over next, side by side, and turned in two vacant desks. Andrew had brought the guitar.

“What’s in the case, secret weapon?” Dani asked. Eugene could see her gum, a flash of purple between white teeth.

Andrew Lu smiled. “Sort of, yeah,” he said. “We can get to that in a minute. First we should go over what we were supposed to do on Sunday.” He looked at Eugene but Eugene saw no accusation or anger in his face. Well, that was something.

Oneida cleared her throat and Eugene, for the first time at this close distance, looked at her. It was an involuntary reaction, his head had only turned toward sound, but their eyes skittered and locked for a fraction of a second. Just long enough for Eugene to see Oneida blush from her chin to the tips of her ears. He wanted to crawl under his desk and die.

“Have we decided what we’re actually going to do for this stupid project?” Dani’s voice, for once, was a merciful distraction. “I thought we decided when we met, like, forever ago, but I don’t know. The more I think about using the Beatles, the dumber it seems. I mean, this is
American
history, right? Shouldn’t we do a report on an
American
band?”

“The Beatles
were
practically an American band,” Eugene said. Jesus, she was dumb.

“Oh, right, because Americans get all crazy about something, it automatically makes it American? We have to co-opt it to—to legitimize it?” Dani was wearing silver earrings like tiny chandeliers. They made a jingling noise as she bobbed her head.

Andrew Lu shrugged. “That’s a good point,” he said. “But I think it’s fair to include the Beatles as part of American history. I did some research online this weekend, and it sounds like they were a huge part of the sixties, in America and everywhere.”

Eugene was torn. Andrew Lu wasn’t dumb, and he wasn’t wrong; but Oneida, now that Eugene was paying attention, clearly hung on his every word. He had never felt real jealousy but this had to be it, burning in his chest like he’d swallowed a hot potato whole. It wasn’t unfamiliar. It felt, horrifyingly, like the inexplicable anger he couldn’t control. He gripped the edge of his desk. Took a deep breath.

“I’m not arguing that,” Dani continued. She shook her head. “Of course they were huge. Which also makes them totally obvious, you know? Everybody already knows how they influenced the world, so it’s just—” Her brow furrowed. “It feels too easy.”

“Well,
duh
,” said Oneida under her breath.

“
Well, duh
what, Jones?” Dani bristled.

“You’ve got me curious, Group Three.” Dreyer appeared out of nowhere, looming above their desks, hands clasped behind her back and head cocked to the side. Eugene couldn’t help liking Dreyer. The way she strode around her classroom, going on and on about the Swamp Fox and the Boston Tea Party, reminded him of a general preparing her troops on the eve of battle.

“What’s with the ax?” she asked, and nudged the guitar case with her foot.

“Yeah, Andrew, what’s with the ax?” Dani asked, and snorted.

“I’ll show you,” he said, and ducked down to open the case. He had to stand; the seats in Dreyer’s classroom were hybrid desk chairs that wouldn’t allow him to sit and hold the guitar at the same time. The effect, as Eugene couldn’t help thinking the Lu kid knew, was that everyone stopped what they were doing and paid attention to him.