Cameron sits across from his dad, Hal, at Red Lobster. “Get anything you want, son. This is a monumental occasion?” His dad’s voice goes up at the end of certain sentences, creating random questions throughout a conversation. He’s already informed both the hostess and the waitress of his boy’s eighteenth birthday. Cameron hopes this isn’t one of those places where everyone comes out and sings. He used to have his birthdays at Farrell’s ice cream parlor, where they rang a bell and made a big deal; that stopped being appealing long ago.
The real celebration would come when Bryce hit eighteen in a few months.
His dad butters a biscuit. “I heard about the gal next door. Deborah.”
“Dakota,” Cameron snaps back.
“Really too bad, she was a cutie.” He starts reminiscing about Dakota and Cameron’s younger years on the cul-de-sac, throwing out random moments – like the kids tying their sleds to the back of Mr. Ingalls’ pickup truck – as if to justify getting her name wrong.
His dad’s scalp shines through his peninsula of hair. He wears glasses, too, the only other one on either side of the family besides Cameron. Thanks, Dad. As long as the hair stays, all is forgiven.
The day the Iranian hostages were released in January, 1981, Cameron’s parents sat him down in the living room after school. The TV was on the whole time, pictures of President Reagan, men filing off an airplane, hugs, crying. This followed a period when his dad had been gone on several business trips, where he’d disappear for days with no warning and no explanation (to his son, at least).
A thought hit Cameron there on the couch: What if these mysterious trips had something to do with the hostages? What if his dad…? That would be
awesome
. But then his mom was dabbing her eyes with a ball of Kleenex. She and his dad kept looking at each other, like they were daring the other person to talk first.
Finally, his dad said the word.
Separation
.
We’re not talking about divorce, one of them would say, and the other would nod.
On TV, a woman waved a little American flag.
Cameron sat in his room afterwards wondering how to feel. He wouldn’t tell anyone besides Bryce; if people at school found out, he’d be looked at like, what’s wrong with you that your parents split up? His dad knocked on the door and came in without waiting for a reply.
“I wanted to see how you’re processing everything?”
“It’s fine,” Cameron said.
“You know the Iran situation?” His dad sat in the middle of the bed. “Well, I’m kind of like one of those hostages. A hostage in a marriage that isn’t working. Now, I’m not saying your mom is the Ayatollah or anything. It’s more like… You’ll understand when you get older.” He stood up, patted Cameron on the knee, and with an “All righty,” walked out of the room.
After his dad moved out, Cameron saw him once every weekend, during which they rode around in the big flatbed truck Dad hauled porta-potties on during the week. They watched a lot of TV at the apartment, or worked on model airplanes, or went to movies where Cameron often caught his dad sleeping. Back at the house, the old power tools sat untouched, the garage an abandoned laboratory. His mom stayed in her pajamas a lot.
Eventually the
S
word became the
D
word. Father’s parting gift to son was the car.
Now, after the obligatory college talk come the five hundred questions about how the car’s running, and then whether or not Molly is seeing anyone. Sucking the meat out of a shrimp tail, his dad says, “You may be wondering about my personal life.” Cameron isn’t. “Remember Louise?” Louise. They’ve been together, broken up, back together, etc. If Cameron saw his dad during a breakup phase, he heard non-stop what a mistake she had been; once, he even asked Cameron to punch him if he ever mentioned getting back together with her.
“I’ve asked her to marry me?”
Cameron holds a piece of fried fish midway between his plate and his mouth, unsure if he’s heard this correctly. Louise is going to be his stepmother? Louise, who calls him “Cam-Man”?
“I see you’re surprised,” his dad says. “To be honest, I never thought I’d latch on the old ball and chain again?” He chuckles, attacks another shrimp.
“When?”
“Oh, sometime this year I guess. She was on me about the proposal, so that’ll shut her up for a while. Maybe we’ll have a holiday wedding. Whaddaya think?”
Cameron thinks he doesn’t want to be the one to tell his mom this news. “Sounds good, I guess.”
His dad says he hopes Cameron can accept Louise as part of the family, and that Louise has made noise about wanting a baby but that he thinks he can talk her out of it (or secretly get a vasectomy). This monologue unfolds for the rest of the meal, stopping only when the waitress brings out a piece of chocolate cake with a candle in it. At least there’s no song.
When Cameron gets dropped back at home afterwards, his dad hands him an envelope. “A little something, now that you’re a man?”
Cameron opens it up in his room. Inside, a birthday card with a $50 bill, and a typed piece of paper:
A father’s advice to his son on turning eighteen
1) Always treat a ¼ full gas tank as empty. That way you’ll never run out.
2) If someone can’t explain something to you in a way that makes sense, it means they don’t know what they’re talking about.
3) Expectations are premeditated disappointments.
4) Never pass up an opportunity to pee. You don’t know when you’ll have another.
5) Two aspirin before bed after a night of drinking.
6) Never tell a woman your secrets & never tell her secrets to anyone else!!!
7) When grilling hamburgers, don’t press down on the meat with your spatula. That will squeeze out all the juiciness.
8) Don’t marry before your 30th birthday (your mother and I made this mistake).
9) The world runs on bullshit. You can either figure out how to work with that or suffer trying to fight it.
10) Wear a rubber.
“Goddamn Arabs,” Mr. Swanson keeps repeating to the TV, his face and hair almost a matching shade of red.
“Joe, the kids,” Mrs. Swanson says as she straightens his tie.
They stand in the living room, watching a news report about Beirut. Images of smoke and fire and people running. Claire sits on the couch with the twins, Gabe and Donna; she pictures Beirut on a map, squeezed between Syria and Israel.
“We should get the hell out of the Middle East,” he goes on, angling his head so he can see the TV around his wife’s disapproving face. “Then bomb those people back to the Stone Age.”
“We’re going to be late.” Mrs. Swanson pulls on his arm. He keeps cursing under his breath as they leave for their fancy party at the fancy hotel. The grinding shut of the automatic garage door marks the start of Claire being in charge.
Gabe and Donna immediately want to change into their Halloween costumes: Luke Skywalker and Tinkerbell. Claire gets the camera from her backpack and has them pose throughout the living room. They have matching blue eyes that make them look vaguely alien.
“What are these?” Gabe asks as he pulls the Tarot cards from Claire’s open backpack.
She takes the pouch from him. “They’re, like, special cards.”
“Ooh, ooh, can we play?” Donna bounces up and down, her wings flapping. Gabe joins in on the begging.
They sit in a circle on the living room floor. Their game is something akin to Go Fish: pentacles are traded for wands are traded for swords. Characters like The Hermit mean you get to take another person’s cards. No one gets upset; they simply adjust the parameters of the game as needed.
When it’s story time, Gabe says, “Tell us about one of the pictures.”
“Which one?” Claire asks from the chair next to Donna’s bed.
Donna pulls out the three of swords: a giant red heart pierced in triplicate. Claire unfolds the tale of the princess who offered her love to three different suitors, only to be betrayed and hurt by each of them. After the third one, the princess locked herself in a tower for the rest of her life, never to be harmed by the outside world again.
* * *
“The United Nations Resolution quote ‘deeply deplores the armed intervention in Grenada, which constitutes a flagrant violation of…” Claire knows she should look up at the audience, but she keeps her eyes locked on her notes. “‘…international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that state.’”
Mr. Hagen has divided the class in half, to debate the U.S. invasion of the island of Grenada. This is a country Claire would not have been able to place; it barely seems like a country at all. Everyone on both sides has already spoken, so it falls on guess who to wrap it all up at the podium.
“So, in conclusion… um…” Orion, who closed out the affirmative side, never looked down. Claire looks up. “We have shown that America was not threatened by the military takeover of the government.”
Claire makes the mistake of trying to put her eyes on everyone in the room, like they learned in public speaking class last year, and sees stupid Isabel sitting closest to the podium.
“So in conclusion…”
“You already said that,” Isabel whispers.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Claire answers back.
Gasps and ooh’s run through the room, everyone suddenly awake and alert. Mr. Hagen restores order, but not before the girls exchange raised middle fingers. Claire mumbles a few more sentences and sits down.
At lunch, she goes the long way around the building so she won’t run into Isabel’s gang. She buys a Hostess cherry pie from the vending machine and is on her way to the bathroom when there they are, moving in unison like a pastel-colored amoeba. The big girl with the hoop earrings points first.
“Seriously?” Claire says to herself and to the universe. She reverses course. She can hear them calling after her but can’t make out the words. Maybe they’re threatening to use their huge hair to smother her to death.
The choice now is the gym to the left, where groups of boys play lunchtime basketball with the P.E. teachers, or…
Claire sits down on one of the worn benches under the Tree, as far away from the current smokers as possible, so maybe they won’t notice her. Isabel’s group rounds the corner and stops like there’s some magic force field around this area.
A red and white pack of Marlboros appears in front of Claire’s face. She traces it down to a hand, an arm, a body. It’s that guy Bryce and Cameron don’t like: mirrored sunglasses, a faint mustache under his nose.
“Want one?” he asks.
“No thanks,” Claire says, then throws another glance at the girls, still frozen in place.
“You know those skanks?”
She laughs, covers it right up. “Only one of them.”
“What grade are you?”
Once he hears this, he’ll ignore her for sure. She says it anyway. “Freshman.”
He doesn’t ignore her. His name is Ricky. He identifies the other guys there in the haze, but Claire mentally gives them nicknames: Stringy Hair, Buzzed Head, CAT (because of his baseball cap), Two Chins. Along with them are a can of Pringles, and some kind of crispy burritos.
Somewhere during the meet-and-greet, Isabel and Co. get tired of standing there and move on. There’s always tomorrow. And the next day. Etc. Etc. It’s depressing to think how long a school year really is.
Claire stays under the tree for the rest of lunch, eating her pie, trying not to look like she’s not breathing the smoke, hoping Bryce sees her here and does his frog eye-bugging thing. When the bell rings, Ricky says, “Hey, you maybe want to go out to lunch with us tomorrow?”
What Claire almost says: “For reals?”
What Claire does say: “You guys can go to a restaurant in thirty minutes?”
“As long as certain grannies aren’t driving,” he says toward one of the others; none of them acknowledge it. “Anyway, if you want to, meet at the parking lot right after fourth.”
In sixth period, Mr. Duran talks while the slide projector throws pictures up onto the wall.
Click-clack
goes the spinning tray as it changes images. “What do we notice about the depth of field in this shot? Anyone?” he asks, but it’s post-lunch coma time there in the dark. On the stool to Claire’s left is one of the boys from P.E., digging his finger in his nose up to the knuckle. On the stool to the right, a curly-haired girl jerks awake every time her chin hits her chest.
Click-clack.
* * *
Claire and the guys get into a wood-paneled station wagon the next day, Two Chins at the wheel, heading for the Original Hamburger Stand. Claire sits next to Ricky in the front. This close, she notices the black stains under his fingernails, the way his eyebrows almost collapse together to make one super-brow. Cigarette smoke trails out the open windows as if the car is ablaze.
“Hey, Flintstone, try pedaling that thing faster!” Two Chins yells when they’re behind a slow driver.
They order at the drive-thru and wolf down burgers on the way back to school. Claire sucks down a soda so huge she looks pregnant afterwards.
“Why do you only paint your nails on one hand?” Ricky asks her.
“Why do you wear your wallet on a chain?” she replies. Her face stares back in duplicate from his mirrored lenses.
They get back to school and finish eating in the parking lot. The boys discuss copying homework and getting tickets for the AC/DC concert. Finally CAT, his cap pulled down to his eyebrows, says, “Time to go.”
“We all have fifth period together,” Buzzed Head tells Claire. “Mrs. Anderson makes you do campus cleanup if you’re tardy.”
The boys start one direction, but Claire’s class is the other way. She wants to stop them. She wants to know if she can go out to lunch with them again, or was this a one time deal. Maybe she was part of an experiment, like a wet-mount slide in Bio class: find and study a pathetic ninth grader.
Bryce puts on his costume for the church Halloween party, held Sunday the 30th. He went as Han Solo three years ago, in winter gear and “riding” a cardboard Tauntaun, but apparently a lot of people didn’t see
The Empire Strikes Back
. Or were too dense to figure out the costume. Not wanting to answer a million questions again, this year is back to classic white shirt and black vest Solo (the badass from
Star Wars
, not the lovey-dovey Han from
Jedi
). He stands in front of the mirror in his room, fast-drawing his plastic laser pistol with its official sound effects.
Last year he and Cam had a great idea: dress as Hall and Oates. Bryce found a black curly wig and mustache at the costume store; Cam’s hair worked pretty well naturally. Their great idea lasted until lunchtime at school, when they’d been called every known variation of “fags” (and even some theretofore unknown variations). They un-costumed in the bathroom, Bryce stuffing the wig and mustache deep into the garbage can, and spent the rest of the day as themselves.
Hall and Oates were immortalized in the yearbook’s Halloween section, though at least real names weren’t printed below the photo.
Cam waits for Bryce in the driveway, dressed as Legolas in a white hooded tunic, a thin wooden bow on his shoulder. “Claire’s not coming?”
“Been in her room all day,” Bryce replies. “She’s either grounded or not speaking to anyone.”
“I can’t stay late – I have to study for the Econ test.”
“That’s on Tuesday,” Bryce says.
“Yeah, but I don’t wanna wait till the last minute.”
As with all holidays, the church is fully decked out for Halloween: carnival games, an elaborate haunted house that even features a fake graveyard. Bryce has heard stories of other churches that are anti-Halloween; he’s glad he doesn’t go to any of those.
Snow White and Red Riding Hood – Noel and Anna from youth group – arrive at the entrance to the haunted house the same time as Bryce and Cam. Screams echo from inside. “Hi, Bryce,” Noel says. “Can we go through with you guys?”
Mr. and Mrs. Coleman, dressed as pirates, are the ticket takers. As the group of four enters the tunnel, with its ghostly music playing, Mr. Coleman calls, “Watch out for Jabba the Hutt!” Ok, so one adult is up on his movies.
As they walk single file down the dim hallway, girls holding hands in front, both boys rate Red a six. Snow gets a seven from Bryce but a five from Cam. Bryce’s main criticisms about Noel have always been the too-thick glasses and the fact she never, ever wears shorts. Come to think of it, she shows a distressing lack of skin in general. On the plus side, she goes to an all-girls’ school, which, if the things Bryce has heard go on at those places are true, is
sexy
.
A sarcophagus swings open and a mummy lurches out at them. The girls shriek and keep shrieking, at the witch, the skeleton, Medusa. By the end, the two of them are flushed and gasping, looking like they just survived a near-death experience.
From there it’s on to the cafeteria with the massive dessert table. Brownies, cookies, cake, even “eyeballs” and “fingers.” Spiderweb cotton candy. A bubbling cauldron of punch. Tables full of colorfully clad eaters shove food into their mouths like death row prisoners.
With plates piled high, Bryce, Cam, and the girls sit on a patch of grass outside. Cam pulls his hood back, revealing his white painted face and pointy ears.
“You were here last year,” Anna says.
“Yeah, I was a robot.”
“Who are you now?” Noel asks.
“Legolas.” When he sees their blank looks, he adds, “
Lord of the Rings
?”
“That’s like
The Hobbit
, right?”
A little wizard chases a little princess in circles nearby. When he catches up, she whips him with a licorice rope.
“My mom made the Rice Krispie treats,” Noel says.
Anna asks, “What church do you go to, Legolas?”
“I don’t. My mom’s not an early getter-upper.”
“Lucky dog,” Bryce says, then bites into a brick-sized brownie.
“Even if she was, we’re not really religious,” Cam adds.
“Do you believe in God?” Anna asks it not as a challenge, but rather as if she wants to know his favorite food.
Uh-oh. There are times for serious talks, and times for hanging out with chicks; those two times don’t go together. Bryce says, “Hey, you guys wanna go back through the – ” before a hunk of brownie lodges in his throat. He holds a finger up, telling them to wait for the words
haunted house
. He tries to cough but no air comes.
The other three faces go diagonal and blurry. A fist of pain lodges in his chest.
Noel is saying something.
Bryce tries to speak again – to tell them what? – but the sound that emerges doesn’t resemble a word.
And like that, he knows he’s going to choke to death. At church. Because of a brownie. Dressed as Han Solo. This is it: the method and the date.
He waits for the tunnel of light he’s heard so much about.
When Cam slaps him hard on the back, a wad of chocolate and walnut flies free, landing in the center of their circle. Air floods Bryce’s lungs; he loses his balance even though he’s seated, tilts sideways to the grass. The others talk over each other, asking if he’s ok, leaning in.
So it wasn’t his time after all. Not yet.
On the ride home later, Cam says, “Anna gave me her number,” and holds up his palm.
“I knew it,” Bryce replies, looking from the road to the hand. “She was totally walking close to you the whole time.”
“When you were taking a wiz she said, ‘Hold out your hand’ and just wrote it down.”
“Dude, you are un-fricking-believable. Who comes to a church party and gets a phone number? Are you gonna call her?”
“Maybe. I wish I knew what she looks like out of the costume.”
Their street is dark, quiet. Tomorrow night, the real Halloween, will be different. Bryce pulls up in front of his house. “Remember when Dakota and her girlfriends – ”
“Hell yes,” Cam answers.
The high school girls, dressed as belly dancers, trick or treating barefoot. Cam and Bryce tracked the jingle-jangle of their costumes through the neighborhood all night, grateful for any glimpse of bare legs and stomachs.
The vision of them like some wish a genie granted.