This Must Be the Place: A Novel (5 page)

They had the same American History class, and Oneida, who sat three rows behind him to the left, would spend the whole period waiting for him to answer one of Mrs. Dreyer’s questions. He’d raise his hand, and she’d notice how smooth and muscular his upper arm was, and then he’d answer the teacher’s question correctly and confidently, without stuttering or rambling or adding extraneous detail, as Oneida was wont to do whenever she was called upon because Dreyer didn’t
think she was participating enough. One day, after Oneida had given a miniature treatise on the Whiskey Rebellion under such duress, Andrew Lu had actually turned around, made eye contact, and smiled. Oneida felt she’d been plugged to an electric generator; her entire body was shocked. It made her violently aware of a hunger she didn’t even know she had, and she’d spent the rest of the day hiding in the drama club’s prop closet, in the loft above the auditorium stage, sulking and crying and generally feeling sorry for her freakish, friendless self.

The fates aligned: Mrs. Dreyer assigned Andrew Lu and Oneida Jones to the same group history project. The worthy souls were being given a chance to recognize each other at last. That the other members of their group were two of Oneida’s least favorite people at Ruby Falls High, not to mention in the world, hardly seemed relevant. That is, until they were sitting in her kitchen and wouldn’t shut up.

“I don’t know why anybody still cares about the Beatles,” Dani Drake said. She jiggled her leg against the kitchen chair and rubbed her temple with her pen. “They’re just . . . they’re so
done
, you know? Everybody knows they’re, like, the gods of pop music, but who cares
now
? You know? God is dead, so if the Beatles are God, wouldn’t it follow they’re
also
dead?”

“Who would you rather we write our reports on?” Oneida asked. She reshuffled her stack of loose-leaf history notes until all the pages were straight and neat. Oneida was proud of her compulsive tendencies. They made her feel older than fifteen, more in control, able to stop herself from grabbing a hunk of Dani Drake’s bangs and bashing her head-first into the kitchen table.

“Oh!” said Dani with mock urgency, gazing heavenward. “Oh, you’re right! There’s no other band in the history of music that could possibly be more important than the Beatles! How stupid of me!”

Wendy chuckled into his can of soda, which surprised Oneida: she never would have thought Eugene “Wendy” Wendell possessed anything approximating a sense of humor. What he did have was a reputation: he was to be feared and avoided. It was commonly known that he drank grain alcohol with every meal, kept a Bowie knife duct-taped to
his thigh, and that the white rope of scar running from his temple through his eyebrow was the result of a broken bottle fight with a hooker from Syracuse. The hooker won, but Wendy was still a badass mother-fucker. It didn’t seem right for him to chuckle, even if the joke was mean.

“Guys—I don’t think the Beatles are irrelevant, but for the sake of argument who else could we write this report about?” said Andrew. Oneida felt a little hurt. She tried not to hold it against him; being a good leader was mostly a question of diplomacy, after all, and Dani Drake lived off the bones that were thrown to her. Andrew had become the group’s de facto leader, a position Oneida would normally have insisted upon holding herself had she not been immobilized by his physical presence in her house. In her kitchen. She wanted to run her hand through his thick black hair, wanted to will Dani and Wendy into nonexistence so she and Andrew Lu could sit and talk, just the two of them, on a Saturday afternoon, talk about anything and everything:
The Scarlet Letter
, which they were reading in English. What was his favorite movie? What had it been like to grow up in China? She wanted it so badly that she felt a little sick.

“I vote for The Clash,” Wendy said.

“Uh, ’scuse me—
no
.” Dani wrapped her bright blue gum around her finger and pulled a long strand from her teeth. “They’re basically the Beatles of punk.”

“The Sex Pistols are the Beatles of punk,” Wendy said.

“No.”
Dani leaned forward on her elbows, the better to challenge him. “The Sex Pistols are the
Stones
of punk. Want to quit talking out of your ass?”

“Want to kiss it?”

“Ooh!” Dani chirped. “Nice one!”

In what was clearly an attempt to neutralize the situation by ignoring it, Andrew pulled out the assignment sheet their history teacher had passed out three days ago and studied it intently. The project required them to write their own research paper around a single theme and then give a group presentation on four “remarkable lives,” as Mrs. Dreyer had put it. Oneida’s group had at first been excited to pull musicians out of Dreyer’s old ball cap, but whether to write about four separate musicians or four members of a single band was proving difficult to decide.
Oneida was torn between wanting the session to continue indefinitely—no matter how much she wanted it, Andrew Lu would most likely not stick around for cocoa and conversation without the excuse of a school project—and wanting Wendy and Dani out of her face as quickly as possible.

“We have to write about the Beatles,” she finally said, adjusting her glasses.

“No shit, Shirley,” said Dani.

“Well, they’re the only group we’ve mentioned so far where there’s a lot of information about all four members,” Oneida said to Andrew. “So unless you want to get stuck writing about, you know, the
other
guys in U2, we have to write about the Beatles.” She tapped her pencil on her notebook.

“That’s a great point,” Andrew said. Oneida felt her stomach tremble. She flushed and grinned. “I’ll take George,” he said.

“John!” Oneida said, raising her hand.

“Frick, I guess I’ll take Paul,” said Dani. “I look forward to exploring his pathological desperation to be liked and the ensuing artistic toll on the genius of John Lennon.”

Wendy rubbed his scar. “That leaves . . . what’s her name? Yoko Bono?”

“You’re really witty for a sociopath,” Dani said.

“Ringo,” Andrew said. “Ringo Starr, Wendy. OK?”

Wendy shrugged.

In a flurry of closing notebooks, the study group disbanded. Dani clomped through the kitchen and onto the side porch, and the relief Oneida felt upon hearing the screen door squawk behind her was palpable. If pressed, she probably wouldn’t have been able to quantify exactly what it was about Dani that drove her insane, but the cumulative effect of her gum-snapping, Beatles-trashing, obnoxiously quippier-than-thou ways incited Oneida to imagine acts of great physical violence befalling her. Oneida wouldn’t have said that she and Dani were enemies—nothing had ever occurred between them around which to base an epic loathing—but
damn
, they irritated each other.

“You don’t like her very much, do you?” asked Andrew Lu. He stood beside her on the porch as they watched Dani Drake weave her
bike down the unpaved gravel drive. His sudden proximity made her jumpy and she nodded, not trusting her voice. She needed to be comfortable around him. He wrinkled his nose and leaned into her side—he was only slightly taller, so the effect was of Andrew Lu pinning his hip to hers, like they were contestants in a three-legged race—and mumbled conspiratorially, “That makes two of us.” Then he hopped off the side porch and climbed on his own muddy bike. He even waved as he pedaled off.

Oneida wasn’t sure it had actually happened. She raised her arm to return the wave a beat late, and ended up waving at Andrew Lu’s retreating backside. She thought about how warm he had felt when he leaned into her, how ridiculously aware she had been of his solid mass. Oneida Jones was not the kind of girl who touched other people lightly, and she didn’t take it lightly when other people touched her, no matter how fleeting the gesture. It wasn’t that she didn’t like to be touched; she just didn’t trust it, or trust herself to interpret it.

She tucked a curl behind her ear and gnawed first on her right thumbnail, then her left. What she had wanted to happen—had it happened? Had Andrew recognized her worthy soul? Wind rustled through the trees, exposing the pale underside of the leaves. Her mother always said that when the leaves turned over, it meant a storm was coming. It was late September but it still felt like August: humid and gray, the air thick and anxious.

A thump from behind snapped her to attention. Wendy was still in her kitchen, opening and closing the cupboard doors.

“What are you . . . doing?” she asked, her arms popping with goose-flesh. She had volunteered for the first study session because nobody else did, plus the Darby-Jones, by its boardinghouse nature, had a perpetual open-door policy. But she felt defensive about Wendy rifling through her mother’s pots and pans—intruded upon—and her body tensed.

He shook his soda can, the few remaining drops swishing quietly. “Just wanted to recycle,” he said. He crushed the empty can between his palms and tossed it into the sink. It made a bright metallic
clank
and Oneida frowned, thinking of the vintage porcelain basin her mother adored.

Wendy walked right up to her and examined her face intently. He
didn’t blink. He was less than a foot away. The only thing she could think to do was stand very, very still.

“So,” she said, her voice catching. “Are you looking for something?”

Wendy didn’t say anything. He stared. He still hadn’t blinked. His scar, up close, was mesmerizing, a twisted vine of white and pink that cut a half-circle down from his temple, so that his eyebrow was like a line of Morse code: a dash and a dot. Oneida focused on the scar for too long—long enough for Wendy to realize she was staring at it.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

Wendy thrust a spoon at her. Oneida flinched, badly.

“Hey,” she said. Her mouth seemed to have dried up. She coughed. “Hey, what are you doing with—”

“What does the back of this spoon say?” he asked. “Can you read it for me?”

She gritted her teeth. “It says Oneida,” she said. “So what?”

“
So you’re named after a spoon
.” And he grinned, a huge wolf grin that sent a cold charge up the back of her neck.

“I’m not going to discuss this with you,” she said. “But let’s just say that both the spoon and I are named after the same geographic location and Native American tribe.”

“Oh—oh, I see. What’s your Indian name, Chief Red Spoon?”

“
Hey
!” she said, but Wendy just laughed.

“Shouts with a Spoon?”

“Get out,” she said. She knew she was blushing horribly and she hated it, hated it, hated it—hated this stupid body of hers and its stupid blood. She shoved Wendy hard. He held up his hands in a
don’t shoot!
gesture and backed up until he was on the porch.

“See you around,” he said, “Sitting Spoon.” Then he cackled and kicked the porch door open. For the first time since making the word her own, since co-opting it out of a sense of personal pride, Oneida spat it out as a gasping curse as she watched Wendy disappear.

“
Freak
,” she said.

Less than thirty minutes later, the thunderstorm hit. Rain poured down the windows of the Darby-Jones in unbroken streams, splashing off the
sills, flooding the driveway, dripping into a blue saucepan on the side porch that Oneida had to empty constantly. She tossed another panful out the door and returned to the creaky pink- and orange-striped beach chaise where she did her best thinking, hidden away from the hustle of the rest of the house, nestled among lawn chairs, coolers, and a cracked flowerpot she had painted with misshapen pansies in the first grade. She’d brought the E volume from the old set of
World Books
in the study; E was one of her favorites (
Egypt, Einstein, electricity, elephants
), but today she wasn’t interested, not really. Today she was a mess of nerves: because of Andrew Lu, because of Eugene Wendell, and because of the thunderstorm itself, which made the porch shudder and groan.

She hated being teased. She hated that Wendy thought it was funny to upset her, because—why? Was she absolutely
hysterical
when she got upset? But she knew how to cope with being teased. What she couldn’t cope with were secrets, and Andrew Lu was a complete mystery, as inscrutable as the Chinese characters she had watched him doodle on the cover of his notebook. An echo of the voice she’d quelled at twelve piped up:
Why would he like you? Why would Andrew Lu, who is beautiful and brilliant and smells like coconut and coffee, whom strangers smile at when he walks through the hall, who has probably eaten sushi with real chopsticks and has traveled farther away than Syracuse—why would he like you?