Althea and Oliver (26 page)

“You sound like a bitter Mets fan.”

“There isn't any other kind.”

“I hate it when Mets fans complain about the Yankees,” she says. “You've got two teams in this city. You could have chosen the team that always wins. But you didn't. So sack up and quit whining. It's the price you pay, rooting for the underdog.”

“I'm from Queens; I didn't choose to be a Mets fan.”

“So if you could have chosen, you would have chosen the Yankees?”

“Of course not.”

“Then shush.”

A stale wind blows through the tunnel, ruffling the pages of the
News
. Matilda whoops.

“Now our train's coming,” says Ethan. “Let's go.”

• • •

After turning the cube at Astor Place and making a crayon rubbing of the plaque outside the Eleventh Street baths—“A bathhouse as a historical landmark?” Althea asked, prompting a brief treatise from Ethan on its significance—and completing a number of other tasks, all documented by a hell-bent Matilda, the exhausted crew returns to the Warrior house. They arrive as the sky is lightening, but before the sun has risen over Coney Island.

The other team—Kaleb, Leala, the drummer and the dropout—has not yet arrived. Only Mr. Business greets them, nibbling at the cuff of Gregory's jeans as Matilda dumps the contents of her messenger bag in the center of the living room.

“Fuck!” she shouts. “This means they're still out there scoring points while we're sitting around here waiting!”

“Actually,” Ethan says, “it probably just means they're stuck on the D train.”

“Is there anything else we can do before sunrise?” Dennis asks. “Isn't there something on the list we can do here?”

Matilda skims the remaining items. “What do you think constitutes a ‘radical change in appearance'?”

“A new tattoo?” Dennis says eagerly.

“We don't have time for that,” she says, looking at Althea. “Listen, Gemini. We're going to have to cut off all your hair.”

“Excuse me?” Althea says, clutching the black tangles with both hands.

“We'll get a lot of points,” Matilda says. “It'll put us over the top. It'll secure our victory.”

“You've got to take one for the team, dude,” Dennis tells Althea.

“It's my fucking hair!” she yells, backing away.

“Your roots are coming in anyway! You've got a hairdo like a skunk. Look, sometimes you have to cut off a finger to save the hand.” Matilda rummages in her sewing box for a pair of scissors.

“Or the hair, in this case. You've got to cut off your hair to save the hand!” shouts Gregory.

“Your roots do look pretty terrible,” Ethan admits.

“With your cheekbones and that long neck, a nice pixie cut will be a good look for you,” Matilda says, changing her tactics. “Now come upstairs! The sun will be up any minute. We don't have much time.”

“Skunk hair,” Dennis says.

The four of them circle around Althea, Matilda making snipping motions with the scissors, everyone hissing skunk noises—
“Psssssss”
—and shouting that winners have to pay the price, that champions have to be willing to make sacrifices. She's only known these people for a month, and now they're edging toward her, Matilda brandishing the scissors in a vaguely threatening manner, demanding to scalp her so they can win a scavenger hunt, and Althea asks herself if she should be afraid. She imagines the headline on the cover of the
Post
—
WAYWARD TEEN SLAIN BY BROOKLYN
SLACKERS
—and the accompanying sidebar, listing statistics about runaways and the trouble they find in New York City. Matilda reaches for a lock of Althea's hair.

“Get away from me with those goddamn scissors,” Althea shrieks, her clammy hands clenching into fists at her sides, that familiar racing feeling returning as they surround her, hemming her in.

“The whole scavenger hunt was your idea in the first place!” Gregory shouts. “You can't let us down when we're in the home stretch!”

Dennis, who looked so menacing at first with the three black birds tattooed around the base of his throat and the fat plastic plugs in his ears, is doubled over with laughter, and Gregory's skunk imitation is so ludicrous, and even Ethan is snickering with a hand over his mouth, and Matilda's determination isn't grim but joyful. In their secondhand clothes and their slipshod living room, presided over by Saint Cajetan, it's clear they're not a throng of would-be wrongdoers or a company of aspiring mavericks, but just another pack of kids looking to make their own fun. Still, Althea feels her nostrils flaring, gets a bitter, metallic mouthful of what she used to think was adrenaline, but knows now is the flavor of an impending bad decision. She grinds her teeth. A brief, unearned hatred flares in her for all of them, as bright and hot and soothing as a match against her skin.

“Don't fight us,” says Matilda. “It's easier if you don't fight us.”

“You're only making this harder,” Ethan says.

Imagine Minty Fresh, she thinks, imagine Valerie, imagine their jealousy if they could see her here, with the exact people they were trying so hard to be; and those people are begging Althea to help them win their game. Imagine even Oliver, inventor of the Non-Stop Party Wagon, urging her to stop fighting everyone and just say yes. And if he were here, she would ask him, the person who knows her best:
Do you think so, Ol? Do you really think it'll help?
But he isn't here, and never will be, so instead Althea takes her best guess.

“Fine!” she yells. “Fine! Cut off my fucking hair!”

Picturing Oliver, taking his imaginary advice, Althea realizes it's the first time she's thought about him for hours. At least since the start of the scavenger hunt. What about before that? She must have thought about him at some point today.

But then Matilda is dragging her upstairs, sitting her on the closed toilet, and wrapping a towel around her neck. Gregory stands in the tub snapping Polaroids while Matilda hacks away. Ethan brings a can of Natural Ice to anesthetize the patient. She accepts this act of kindness with what she hopes is grace.

“I'm sorry about what I said when I first moved in,” she says, chunks of hair falling into her lap. “That thing about your mother.”

“Just shotgun it,” he counsels, and she does.

OLIVER'S NOT INTERESTED.

“Your mom's on the phone,” Kentucky says from the doorway.

“Tell her I'm busy.”

“What could you possibly be doing?”

“I don't know, make something up,” Oliver says.

Kentucky returns a minute later. “She says if you don't take her call, she's going to get on a plane and come up here.”

“For Christ's sake.” He lurches into the hallway and picks up the pay phone's receiver, dangling from its serpentine silver cord. “What?”

“You've been ignoring my calls.”

“I haven't really been in a talking mood.” He's been awake for a day and he's spent most of that time rereading the same chapter of
Hyperspace
, staring at the ceiling of his room, and trying to remain curmudgeonly in the face of Kentucky's relentless overtures.

“Manuel says you've barely come out of your room since you woke up,” Nicky says.

“Did he tell you the rest of it? Did he tell you about the lithium?”

“He mentioned you two had a heated discussion. Oliver, this is exactly what I warned you about. I didn't want you to be disappointed. These people never promised they'd be able to help you right away.”

“Oh, they can help me, all right. They can dope me up until I'm a shuffling zombie who can't put together a sentence. I'm just not sure it sounds like a real improvement to me.”

“If you're that unhappy, you can come home, you know. He can write you a prescription and recommend a doctor in Wilmington to monitor you when you start to take it.”

“I haven't decided if I want to do it or not.” The receiver smells harshly of the all-natural cleanser the custodial staff uses on everything. Purportedly made from a top-secret blend of herbs, the concentrated liquid resembles Jägermeister in odor and appearance—only the cleanser's claim to be nontoxic sets the two apart. Oliver gags into the phone.

“You could just try it, you know,” Nicky says. “It might be fine. You might not have any side effects at all.”

“This was supposed to be it, right? Coming here was the last resort, the Hail Mary. And what do I get? Another shitty Would You Rather. I don't want to have to decide between the lesser of two evils. Haven't I lost enough already?”

When he hangs up the phone, he heads straight for Kentucky's room. He's sitting up in bed, reading Noam Chomsky.

“Let me ask you something else,” says Oliver.

Reluctantly, Kentucky closes
World Orders Old and New
. “Yeah?”

“What's your real name?”

“Will.”

“Will, what do you say we make a break for it and get the fuck out of here?”

• • •

It's snowing outside. Oliver is taken aback, although it is not the first time he has slept through a change in seasons and been caught unawares upon waking. The flimsy jacket he wore in early November is woefully inadequate for late December in New York, this deviously cheerful, almost-New-Year's weather that has filled the streets with hordes of tourists and tired children and forbiddingly beautiful women in knee-high boots with impossibly high heels and cheekbones that remind him of Althea's. It's full-on evening now, but weirdly bright, streetlights and brake lights and lights from the windows of bars and restaurants and department stores turning the soft patter of snow into a kaleidoscope of shimmering, metallic colors.

For two boys who have been locked up in an almost exclusively beige hospital for nearly two months, it's all a little much. Oliver leads Will down the street in an earnest imitation of someone who knows where he's going. Broadway is laid out before them like an exercise in perspective, terminating in a luminous explosion of colored light so intense that the sky above it looks like daytime. Oliver assumes this must be Times Square and says so to his traveling companion.

“I don't want to go there,” Will says. “That could melt our brains.”

“Fair enough,” Oliver says, taking them what he hopes is east. His knowledge of New York geography is extremely limited and almost entirely based on his mother's stories and the subway map shower curtain they'd had for a while before it had grown gray with mold and been replaced with a leopard print monstrosity he finds profoundly embarrassing.

“I'm starving,” Will says, pointing to a hot dog cart. “I want one of those. Do you have any money?”

“Could we have two hot dogs, please?” Oliver asks the vendor.

“You want mustard? Relish?”

“Make it however you would eat it,” says Will.

The vendor makes a face. “I don't eat these.”

“How do we walk to Alphabet City from here?” Oliver asks.

“That's a long walk.”

“We've got the time.”

A bus rumbles by, an ad for
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
across its side. Will points to the cartoon duo as he's wrapped in a hot blanket of exhaust. “So, which one do you want to be?”

• • •

The snow evaporates as it makes contact with the streets and sidewalks, but leaves a dusting on the plump black trash bags lined up on the curbs.

“I wonder if they've realized we're gone yet,” Will says. “I hope we didn't get Stella in trouble.”

“You know what's weird?” Oliver says. “I don't even care.”

“Think they'll call our parents?”

“Of course they'll call our parents.”

“You don't seem real worried,” Will observes.

“My mom's a shouter. It's annoying, but the consequences are minimal.”

“What about your dad?”

Oliver shakes his head. “It's just me and my mom.”

“Oh.”

“He died when I was little. He didn't walk out or anything.”

“You don't have to explain,” Will says, turning up the collar on his jacket.

The subway passes under their feet, sending a rush of air up through a grate in the sidewalk. “People usually assume he left us. My mom hates that. They were really happy. She doesn't want people to pity her. They do anyway, but I guess it's different.”

“I'm really sorry.”

“It's funny; Althea's mom split around the same time, but people always think she died.”

“No one likes to think that moms can leave. Too unnerving.”

“Al loves to make people uncomfortable, so she usually makes a joke like, ‘My mom's not dead, she's just defunct.'” Oliver reflects on this briefly, thinking of the many times Althea had used that line or one of its variants to alienate any new adult who showed interest in her, how he had repeatedly watched her reach for her trusty defense mechanism as automatically as Will's neighbors would grab the shotgun under the bed at the first sound of an intruder.

“I'm sure this friend of yours has a lot of good qualities, but she sounds fucked up.”

“She is at that,” Oliver admits.

“What about you?” Will asks.

“What about me?”

“Your dad. Did it fuck you up?”

Oliver laughs. “Something sure did.” He presses his temples with his fingertips. “Something's not working in there.”

As they get farther downtown and evening evolves into night, there are more and more bars and drunk people. If they were overwhelmed by Midtown, they are woefully unprepared for the insanity that is the East Village at night. Will stays close, and together they hug the inside of the sidewalk, trying not to get knocked down by foot traffic.

The snow is coming down harder now, and the weather has given the night just enough sense of occasion to send the city's revelers into overdrive. There is an electricity crackling among all the people, like when a famous musician dies or a new president is elected or a beloved underdog baseball team clinches the pennant, like some exciting piece of news is traveling down Avenue A toward Oliver and Will in a palpable ripple of energy, and overwhelming as it is, Oliver has the feeling that, at any moment, this urgent and unimagined revelation is going to reach them and tether him with some invisible thread to all of these strangers pulsing in the streets.

Of course, he knows that's wrong. There is no revelation circulating, only massive amounts of alcohol, consumed with gusto by the ten thousand people all hoping to get laid tonight in the same twelve-block radius. It's like Jason's party times a million, all the hooting and hollering and sweaty jostling, so much of it in the hope that at some point in the night you'll rub up against the right person and that'll be, as Nicky likes to say, the end of the story. But inflated or not he feels it anyway, that sense of possibility, the anticipation, like it's already New Year's Eve and the clock is poised at five minutes to midnight and everyone is waiting breathlessly for the moment that will elevate the ordinary into something singular and amazing.

Oliver doesn't even realize they have stopped walking until the door to a karaoke bar opens, unleashing five addled patrons onto the same small square of sidewalk where he and Will are now frozen, as well as the chorus of “Build Me Up Buttercup,” enthusiastically sung by a girl wearing a rhinestone tiara, clutching the microphone to her chest. The door is only open long enough to give Oliver this brief snapshot before it swings shut, the tiara girl and her terrible, terrible voice immediately silenced, safely contained on the other side.

“It's weird,” says Oliver. “Most of these people seem truly awful, but at the same time, I want to be just like them.”

“We could probably find you a tiara, if it means that much to you.”

“That's not what I mean.” He leads them down the street, past a particularly rowdy bar called Doc Holliday's, which appears to be filled with Hells Angels.

“I know what you mean,” Will says. “At least I think I do. But I was strange even before I got sick. Even if my brain worked right, I don't think I'd have much in common with this mass of humanity. And for what it's worth, you don't seem like you would, either.”

“I was never a freak—even after. Althea was the big spectacle. I resented it, then. Maybe she actually did me a favor. I never stopped being the normal one.”

“Sounds like a shitty deal for both of you. Look, I'm all up for this adventure, but can we go somewhere less—just less? All this action is making me a little swimmy in the head.” Will gestures to the chaos on the street around them.

“Sure. You're being a real champ, by the way.”

“What are we doing here, anyway?” asks Will.

“I really don't know.”

They head toward a park across the street, the one place the crowd seems to be avoiding, except of course for the homeless, bundled into shapelessness by their many layers of clothing.

“My mom used to live here,” Oliver offers.

“In the park?” Will asks.

“On the other side.” He nods toward Avenue B. “Somewhere over there.”

“With your dad?”

“First with friends, and then yeah, with my dad. She says it was different then. Dangerous. There was a saying my dad made her memorize: ‘Avenue A, you're all right, Avenue B, be careful, Avenue C, you're crazy, Avenue D, you're dead.' He used to sing it to me like a nursery rhyme.”

“And where exactly are we headed?”

“That was twenty years ago. I don't think you need to worry. It's probably safer than living in a town where everyone is armed.”

“We're not all a bunch of toothless hicks, you know. My mom's a dental hygienist. Pop works for the electric company. They read the newspaper. We don't raise our own chickens.”

This is exactly what Oliver had been picturing, but he's kind enough to lie. “I was pretty much just imagining the suburbs where I live.”

“I'd wager more of your neighbors have guns than you'd care to think about.”

This brings to mind an image of a housecoat-clad Mrs. Parker standing on the sidewalk with a loaded rifle, picking off squirrels. Thank Christ Garth collects historical artifacts instead of guns; Althea is one person who should never have access to firearms. In the movies, they always make it look like a girl can't bring herself to actually fire a gun once she's got her hands on it; she might level it at someone for a second, but inevitably she starts to shake and get all teary, and then she's easily disarmed and rendered harmless again. Althea, now; Althea wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger.

Although, come to think of it, wasn't that what had made her so handy to have around? Suddenly he can't recall why he had been so furious when she'd tackled Jason outside of Lucky's—the clown had keyed her car, after all, and called Oliver a freak, and it was that uninspired dig that finally made her commit to taking him down. No, he can't remember why he'd been angry at all; only the perfect pitch that launched the glinting arc of Jason's keys into the woods and the perverse exhilaration as they peeled out of the parking lot.

“So what does she look like?” Will asks.

“I told you, she's beautiful. Tall, blue eyes. She used to be blonde, and then she dyed her hair black. That I didn't care for so much.”

Will stops walking. “Wait. She has black hair? Long black hair, but the roots coming in blonde at the top, like a skunk?”

“Yeah.”

“She's tall, right? About your height, but still kind of scrappy-looking? Puffy vest and a real worn-out hoodie with thumbholes, like, chewed into the cuffs? That sound about right?”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“You were right, man, she is beautiful.”

Oliver freezes. “How do you know that?”

“I think she came looking for you. If she'd gotten here, I don't know, half an hour earlier, she would've caught you before you went down. I didn't know who she was—she just looked like some girl who'd gotten lost, wandered into the wrong part of the hospital. I can't believe no one told you.”