Ricky Zaplin lives in an apartment with his dad, Rick Sr., all six foot six of him with his walrus mustache. When Rick Sr. isn’t at his gas station he’s in front of the TV, a beer and a bottle of nasal spray on the tray close by. The two Ricks don’t talk much; they’re more like roommates than father and son. Ricky’s mom lives in the apartment downstairs, from where she still wants to be part of her son’s life.
This is the version Claire is able to put together from different comments she’s heard.
Today is her first time over at the apartment. They’re in Ricky’s bedroom, among his piles of clothes and collection of car parts. A stolen stop sign hangs on the wall. They stand by his window and smoke his pipe and, like every time, Claire sucks in too deeply and ends up in a coughing fit.
She’s never been alone with a guy in his bedroom before (other than Bryce, and he’s not really a guy). When Ricky suggested hanging out here today, she asked, “Who else is coming?”
“Just you and me.”
So here they are. He takes money from his pocket and places it in an almost-full shoebox from under the unmade bed.
“My bank account,” he says, tilting it so she can see.
After that he sits, shoves the loose clothes to the side, pulls her down next to him. The mattress groans under them. “I really like you, Claire.”
“I like you, too,” she answers in a voice that doesn’t sound like hers. She closes her eyes and as he keeps going, telling her more, all the things he likes about her.
She’s a million miles from home. An astronaut.
His face is sandpaper when he kisses her but it doesn’t matter. He takes his shirt off, revealing a thin stripe of hair leading to his outie belly button. His gold chain dangles between them. Claire would feel self-conscious about her shirt coming off but she’ll do it for him if he asks.
She opens her mouth to tell him about a recent sermon – “Help in Troubled Times” – and how Pastor Mark said God can send an angel to lift each of us up right when we need it most, how we might not even recognize the person as an angel. She thinks Ricky might be hers. But saying it out loud? That she doesn’t think she can do.
Claire runs her finger over a pink
X
of raised skin on his bicep. “What happened?”
“I needed to, y’know, feel pain,” he says. “Real pain. So I heated up my knife on the stove and…” He trails off, staring at the mark. “After that I got it. Like, really got it.”
He kisses again, forcefully, folding over her, his weight like a pile of blankets on a winter morning. He brought her here to
do it
! It’s so obvious – why didn’t she see that until now? Everyone knows that the way to get out of it is tell the guy you’re on your period, but Claire doesn’t know if she wants to get out of it.
Stairs squeak outside. As fast as he kissed her, he’s up off the bed with his shirt back on. “Dammit, my old man’s home.” He spray-paints the air with Lysol until the room smells like a hospital.
Claire hears the apartment door open and close. The floor squeaks with each footstep. Ricky puts a finger to his lips.
Through the wall, the sound of pee hitting water.
Ricky leads her out, shutting the front door silently behind them, tiptoeing down the stairs.
In the car she asks, “Why did we have to go?”
“He doesn’t know shit about my life and I don’t want him to start now.”
“I thought maybe you’re embarrassed about me. Because I’m a freshman or something.”
He puts his right arm around her, steers with the left. “I’m not embarrassed. Can we go to your house?”
“Not a good idea.” Her mom could be home, or Bryce could see Ricky and have a heart attack, or both. Claire doesn’t want to bring him into that world; she doesn’t want to bring herself into that world. Can’t they keep drifting, way out here?
“I wish we had someplace to hang out.” He drives past the Albuquerque Academy, site of those long ago summer camps with Meredith and Evie, who started wearing a bra when she was nine. Claire lifts the sunglasses from his face and puts them on.
The hard rock station plays on his radio; all the songs sound more like screaming than singing. “Got some Iron Maiden for you on this Wednesday,” the DJ says. “
Number of the Beast
.”
Claire looks at Ricky when they’re stopped at a light, her eyes now the ones hidden behind mirrors. The music floats angry in the car. “I heard you scammed with a lot of girls.”
“Who told you that?”
“So it’s not true?”
“People talk all kinds of shit. I’ve had girlfriends.”
“Did you write poems for them?”
“Poems? Why are you asking me that?”
She looks at him for a smile, any hint. “No reason.”
Inside her locker earlier that day was a folded paper exactly like the other two.
When you gaze upon me what do you see?
When I gaze upon you it’s all my fantasies
Without you my life is an empty charade
My whole heart is the price I am willing to pay.
They go through the Dairy Queen drive-thru for milkshakes, drive around long enough to finish them. He takes her home, dropping her off around the corner; it’s better if his car doesn’t even enter the cul-de-sac.
On the phone with Meredith that night:
“I waited for you at the arroyo today. You know I haven’t seen you in, like, a week?”
“Sorry,” Claire says, blowing on her rainbow-striped fingernails. “What are you doing?”
“Reading this book
Catcher in the Rye
for homework. Our teacher said it’s supposed to be all scandalous, but it’s just this dude complaining about his problems. I’m like, I’d trade places with you a second, buddy. So what’s happening? Is your senior boyfriend over?”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Whatever. Boy. Friend.”
“Dork.”
“You are. Do you wanna come see
The Nutcracker
with us? Please say yes and don’t make me sit through it alone.”
Afterwards, Claire goes upstairs and sorts through pictures on the floor of her bedroom. The final project for photo class is called My Life: twelve pictures, with captions. “The focus is on composition and storytelling,” Mr. Duran said. “Tell me a story about you.”
Too many of Claire’s pictures don’t say anything about her. The black widow living in the garage. The dead rabbit. Hot air balloons. A candy wrapper on the sidewalk. Dakota’s old bedroom, with a gash of sunlight coming in between the closed drapes.
Ah, here’s one of her parents watching TV, looking like prisoners serving out a sentence. She lays that down as her first.
Cameron sits at his desk, listening to Supertramp, ready to start one of the college essays he needs to submit. He may be the only one from school worrying about this at the moment. Some of his classmates won’t stress at all – the only way they’ll be on a college campus is if they’re hired as janitors.
What has been an intellectual experience that has given you great personal satisfaction?
Being a member of Junior Honors Society sounds like a good answer. He had the GPA and the teacher recommendations. His mom got to brag to all her friends about it. But if the essay reader asked him why he stopped going, would they want to hear the truth? That he was too embarrassed to keep attending meetings after Amy Dorfman turned him down.
Choose an issue of local, national or international concern and explain its significance to you personally.
Nuclear weapons. No, everyone will write that. He can imagine Daryl Jennings’s essay already.
Discuss a person who has had a strong influence on your life.
His dad. No, colleges probably want to hear about a
positive
influence.
The electric typewriter hums faintly beneath the music. He stares at the blank page. On the wall, a field of sun rows filters in through the blinds.
Every school he’ll be applying to is in California.
Paradise.
The family went to the west coast every year for summer vacation. When they arrived in Anaheim, on the way to Disneyland, Cameron would look eagerly out the window for the snowy Matterhorn peak, rising above the city. Besides Disneyland were the beach and Sea World and Universal Studios with the ginormous shark. The sidewalk with all the handprints. The store called Toys “R” Us, like walking into a cathedral. Or further north, San Francisco with its fog and lighthouses. California had everything. Cameron came home every year exhausted, weighed down by souvenirs, and already panting to go back.
He types for a while, then looks down to see he’s transcribed the lyrics to the song “It’s Raining Again.”
His mom knocks on the door. He says, “Enter” as he rips the offending paper out of the typewriter.
“Am I interrupting?”
“No, just brainstorming my college essay.”
“I don’t know how you can write with this music blasting.” She turns it down, then sits on the bed and lets out one of her sighs. “I went on the world’s worst date last night. We’re talking
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
.”
“Worse than the guy who didn’t believe in deodorant?”
“Reed was Prince Charming compared to this.” She had to pick this guy up because he lost his driver’s license, he announced he hadn’t been on a date in nine years, he pocketed rolls from the table after dinner. “I pulled up outside his house, I’m ready to do anything it takes to get him out of the car, when guess what he says. Guess!”
“‘Thanks for a nice evening?’”
“Ha! He says, ‘Let me see if my parents are asleep before I invite you in.’ His parents! It’s like I was on a date with one of your friends.”
The scary thing is, Cameron has several friends who would jump at that chance.
Molly goes on, “If a man gets to be forty years old and he’s never been married, that’s a signal there might be something wrong with him.”
But
Don’t marry before your thirtieth birthday
. Right, Dad?
“Anyway, I’m going with Jillian to this singles mixer tonight. She won’t let me give up and ek cetera.” She runs a finger along his windowsill, holds it toward him.
“Uh-huh.” The one room she’s banned from cleaning.
“In case I don’t meet anybody, will you be my date for New Year’s Eve, Cam?”
“Um…”
“Oh, what am I saying? You’ll have places to go and people to see. Don’t let me – ”
“No, no. I can be your date. Just, y’know, let me know if you want to.”
“You’re the best. Have I told you that lately?” She kisses the top of his head, walks out.
His dad still hasn’t told her the news about Louise. He’s getting married and his ex-wife is going to something called a singles mixer.
Cameron rolls a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter.
He could tell the college admissions office the truth, that while other kids are planning campus visits he’s always known where he’ll be heading; the quality of the campus is secondary to simply getting out there. He plans to get a degree, make a ton of money, and buy his mom a house in California so she never has to see her ex-husband again. So neither of them do. Maybe the essay readers would like to hear that instead of the drivel they get from the other applications.
He starts typing:
Does it even matter what I write in this essay?
After church, Pastor Mark and six new members of the congregation – a family of four Chinese and a chubby couple who look like married twins – come to Bryce’s house for baptism, which is held a few times a year at different members’ pools. Pastor Mark stands in the shallow end, wearing a white smock and a swimsuit; the newbies step into the warm water (heated just for this occasion) one by one. Bryce’s mom stands by with a stack of assorted beach towels from the linen closet.
Inside, Bryce sits at the kitchen table, college brochures fanned out in front of him like he’s Kenny Rogers as The Gambler. His dad pours a mug of coffee and sits down opposite for their strategy session. “I hope this isn’t the time your lack of extracurriculars comes back to bite you,” he says between slurps.
“I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” comes in through the window, followed by the
splush
of a dunk.
While Cam had been on student council for two years, Bryce has a lot less to brag about. The short-lived comic book club (total members: six) doesn’t count. No instrument. No sports. He would hate to bring up his time on the
Scroll
, the school newspaper, where the tyrannical upperclassmen editors ran the show. Leigh Worthington used about two whole pens worth of red ink on Bryce’s first story, then hung it on the wall of the journalism room as an example of what not to do (though at least she had the decency to scribble over his name). He thought he had a perfect solution when he suggested becoming the staff artist, but Leigh replied, “I don’t think anyone’s a very good artist when all they can draw are flat cartoons.”
“I baptize you in the name of the Father…”
“…the Son…”
“…and of the Holy Spirit.”
Splush, splush, splush
.
With his coffee breath, his dad adds, “The good thing about extracurriculars is, you get to meet folks outside your normal circle,” then slurps again for good measure.
He’s apparently trying to will a different reality into existence. If only that were possible, Bryce would have used the power in many areas not related to college applications. Bryce will have to rely on his essay writing skills and his robust 3.2 GPA.
“And let’s be realistic in our targets,” his dad says. “These applications aren’t free.”
Let’s be really realistic and not apply at all.
On the back porch, six smiling, wet faces wrapped in colorful beach towels.
On the flyers, smiling young faces reading in circles on the grass, walking along tree-lined paths, sweaters tied around necks.
The life that could’ve been awaiting Bryce, if only his left ball hadn’t gotten in the way.
After the baptism and the hot chocolate, Bryce follows Pastor Mark outside. His holy bathing suit drips a puddle on the porch.
“Pastor, what’s the best way to pray?” Bryce asks, closing the front door behind him. “I’ve been doing it but I don’t think God is listening.”
Mark smiles. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with college decision time, would it?”
“It’s not that. I have a… problem.”
“God hears you. He hears you always. People think the only time He listens is when they pray, but prayer is for
you
to focus, not Him.”
“How do I know if it’s working? I’m all mixed up right now.”
“You’ll find you’re in good hands, Bryce. Come to my office after service next week and we can talk some more. Right now, I promised I’d check in on your neighbors.”
Mark switches his Bible to his left hand so they can shake. He walks over to the Vanzants’ house, leaving Bryce alone on the porch in fall’s mix of cold and warmth.
In bed that night, Bryce stops kidding himself. Stops with the might be’s and maybes.
It’s cancer.
It is cancer.
“I, Bryce Rollins, have…” Say it. “Cancer.” The word tastes sour on his lips.
He tries not to go to his Dakota memory, the one place he can retreat from all this. Tries, then gives in.