Freak City (2 page)

Tina was in our class, was part of a Buddhist meditation group, and Claudio went out with her for a while in middle school.

We laughed.

I laughed especially loud.

It was a miracle! After two weeks, three days, and five hours, I had finally not thought about Sandra for a few minutes.

“How was school?” My mother stood in the kitchen and shoveled about four tons of guacamole into plastic containers. The stuff looked poisonous green, and there was a tower of avocado peels in the sink.

“Yeah,” I said, as if that were a reasonable answer to her question.

She rolled her eyes. “Wow! No need to go into such detail! The short version would have been enough.”

I stared at her. She was standing next to the roulade now. Puff pastry with ground beef filling, her specialty.

“Well . . . ,” I started again, but then let it be. I had played hooky most of the day and then smoked some strange stuff with Claudio in the guys’ bathroom. A senior named Renee had sold it to us—and it smelled suspiciously like lavender. Then we roamed around downtown with Tobias and almost chased a girl we’d never seen before in front of a truck. Did my mother seriously want to know all that? She should be glad that my answer was so short.

I found a chocolate pudding on the buffet. “Don’t you dare!” My mother had turned her back to me. I had no idea how she did that. Everyone was always talking about the government spying on everyone. They’d never been in our kitchen!

“One spoonful? I’ll just try a little from around the edges.”

“Not one spoonful!” She turned around to face me. “It’s not enough as it is. The whipped cream was bad.”

My mother was a short woman who still looked quite young. She had had me when she was twenty and still in school. She had wanted to work in the hotel business, but that never happened. She married my father, whom she knew from when they were both in scouting. After I was born, my father kept going to college and got a degree in geography and physical education. At some point, they bought the house next door to my grandparents’ house. My grandma still lived next door; grandpa had died two years earlier.

After my little sister Iris was born, my mom started her catering business. Ever since then our kitchen has looked like a battlefield, and the refrigerator is always empty because with all the cooking for other people, she forgets to make food for her own family. Before that, she sold Tupperware for three or four years.

“Who is all this stuff for?” I stared at the dessert longingly. My mother stepped up to me and covered the big bowl with a sheet of aluminum foil.

“Today is Eric Hubert’s seventieth birthday. Sonya’s grandfather, you know, she used to be in the Ping-Pong club with you.”

I could only vaguely remember Sonya. But her grandfather—all year long he sat on a bench outside his house and stared off into space. “And he ordered guacamole?”

Mom shrugged her shoulders. “Sure. Why not? Apparently, he always wanted to go to Mexico when he was a younger man.”

Eric Hubert? I could hardly imagine that he had ever been young at all. It was even harder to imagine that he had wanted to leave his bench to get out of town. Most of the people who lived here did it all the time. A small town with a commuter train connection to the city. When I turned eighteen, I would be out of here. That very minute.

I thought about the Pop Academy. A while ago, I had searched the Internet for job openings in Mannheim, even though I wouldn’t graduate for another year. But better safe than sorry. I definitely wanted to go with Sandra. Maybe I’d learn how to be a sound technician or some other kind of training. I didn’t care. Anything as long as it was near her.

Any ideas about what I might do after graduation had died with the separation from Sandra. Spend a year abroad? Do volunteer work? Join the army? Look for on-the-job training? But what and where?

A sudden wave of panic washed over me. I turned on the water faucet, bent over the sink, and drank greedily.

“You’re a slob!” my mother scolded. “At least throw away the avocado peels first! You’re making a disgusting mess there!”

My little sister stormed into the kitchen. “Do I get some chocolate pudding?”

My mother looked tired. “No. What are you two doing in here, anyway? Why don’t you flop down in front of the television like normal kids and stop bugging me. Get addicted to TV. I can’t stand this hanging around in the kitchen.”

Iris giggled. “Is Sandra coming over today?” she asked, looking at me with puppy-dog eyes. Iris loved Sandra. Everyone loved Sandra. It was impossible not to love her.

“I already told you, Sandra . . .” I turned the faucet off. Mom had been right. Now the sink was filled with a gross brown soup of avocado peels. It looked revolting. “Sandra and I broke up. You get what that means, don’t you?”

Iris nodded. “So you’re not getting married!”

I looked at my sister, astonished. We had never talked about getting married. But Iris was in a romantic phase at the moment: she had a wedding Barbie in a stupid white lace dress. There was a wedding horse to go with it—white, wearing a pink crown. When you touched the side of the horse it played a wedding march. I seriously asked myself who thought up all this garbage for kids. Maybe Iris really thought life was like that. All fancy, with lace dresses and a fairy-tale castle. With a horse that didn’t shit but played a wedding waltz instead. It was time for Iris to grow up.

“People don’t get married so fast these days,” I said. “Unless you get pregnant by accident and have to.” My mother wrapped a meatloaf in tin foil with a stony expression on her face.

“My Barbie is single,” Iris said cheerfully. “You can marry her if you want. She doesn’t have a husband yet. For your engagement present you can buy her a necklace but one with pink diamonds.”

I was bewildered. “Your Barbie is a bride. She can’t be single,” I corrected her.

“Yes, she can!” Iris protested. “She’s a bride without a groom. Instead, she has a shiny ring and shoes with glitter. And Ricko. That’s her horse’s name. They’re best friends.”

“Is that supposed to mean Barbie only cares about the dress and the horse and the jewelry? Don’t you understand that getting married is really about love?”

Over Iris’s head, I saw my mother tap her head to indicate that Iris was crazy. “She’s just a kid,” she mouthed silently. But at that moment, I didn’t care. I had finally grasped how girls worked. They didn’t care about us guys at all. It was only important to look good, to be a princess. To wear shoes with glitter. Us guys were just the assholes who paid the bills. “So the men are just the assholes who pay the bills!” I said gruffly.

My mom slammed her fist on the table. “That’s enough! Watch how you talk with her! I won’t tolerate that in my house. What is
wrong
with you lately?”

Sandra. I thought of how she had told me she wanted to break up in the swimming pool. The water had suddenly seemed infinitely deep.

“Will Sandra come tomorrow?” Iris looked hopeful. I stared at her. There was glitter stuck to her forehead. No idea how it got on her face.

“Didn’t I just tell you . . . ?” I made a dismissive gesture with my hand. “Forget it. Just forget it. And don’t ever say the name Sandra again!”

I went to my room upstairs and turned on the CD player. Coldplay, extra loud. Mom hated it when I did that. But that was my revenge for the chocolate pudding I didn’t get. Some farmer’s family was having their fill of it right now, while there wasn’t even an expired yogurt in the fridge for us.

I threw myself on the bed and stared at the opposite wall. Sandra and I had sprayed it with graffiti sometime around Christmas. We were bored out of our minds, so we went out and got a couple cans of spray paint in a little store north of the city. Now the words
Sandra and Mika forever!
stood next to a jet plane. My parents had almost had a stroke. I hadn’t gotten any allowance for three months. But it was worth it.

Sometime, I’d have to paint over the glaring words.
Sandra and Mika forever!

The lettering disappeared from view as I remembered the swimming pool. I had swum three laps of freestyle, and Sandra had been on her back, exactly in the middle of the pool, paddling around in circles almost without moving. A few of the old people were upset with her. “Get out of the lane, young lady! If you’re not really swimming, go get in the kiddie pool!”

She just ignored them. Acted as if she couldn’t hear them, kept staring at the ceiling as if she were a drowned corpse.

At some point, my path crossed hers. “Are you dreaming?”

“No.” She stopped making endless circles. “I’m thinking. I think we need to call it quits.” She smiled at me. A smile she had learned from Pink, and her lashes were thick with mascara. I wondered how she managed not to smear it in the water.

“Quit? Quit what?” I splashed around Sandra in circles and didn’t understand a thing.

“Well, going out with each other.” She was still smiling like she wanted to pull my leg. And I immediately fell for it.

“Good idea. We can still be friends!” I said jokingly and touched her on the shoulder. I wanted to kiss her, but she pushed me away roughly.

“Stop that!” Suddenly, her smile was gone. “I’m serious. It’s over. Done. Finished.”

My gaze wandered slowly to the tiles on the opposite wall. They were dark blue. I started to count them: one, two, three, four. . . . There must have been hundreds, or even thousands, of blue tiles. The lifeguard walked through my view. Over there, next to the plastic palm, hung an advertising banner. A local swim shop was advertising special sale prices. I looked at Sandra again. She was wearing a zebra print bikini with little glittering stones on it. Even her swimsuit looked like it was ordered from a catalog for future superstars. Where did the real, genuine Pink go when she wanted to swim, anyway? Could she just drive to the next public swimming pool? Throw on any old stylish bikini and swim laps of freestyle in peace? Definitely not. Pink probably had her own swimming pool in the basement. Where she splashed around with Christina, Paris, and all the other rich girls while bad-mouthing the guys they wanted to break up with.

“What do you say?” Sandra’s voice catapulted me back into the here and now. The biting smell of chlorine filled my nose. Three old people who looked like hundred-year-old turtles swam past us in slow motion. Somewhere kids were screaming. Elevator music wafted through the speakers above us; I hadn’t even noticed it before. “Somewhere over the rainbow . . .” A shower was turned on.

“What should I say to that?” I stared at her, dumbfounded. “We wanted to spend the afternoon together. And now it occurs to you that you actually want to break up. Kinda out of nowhere, if you ask me. I mean . . .” I stopped my senseless paddling around and let myself sink until the water closed above my head.

Down here, everything was calm. No “Over the Rainbow” blaring from the sound system. No screaming kids. No Sandra throwing words at my head and me trying to dodge them.

My lungs started to burn, and I swam up to the surface again. “You’re trying to avoid our conversation!” Sandra said. Now the mascara had suffered some damage after all. A tiny black drop welled up at the corner of her left eye.

“I . . . I’m not avoiding anything!” I stammered. “I’m looking for the hidden camera. Since it’s not above us, it can’t be anywhere else but below us.”

“Come on, we had a good year!” she said. “It’s a great time to end it. That way we’ll only have good memories.”

I thought about the graffiti on the wall in my room. My desk all covered with red Sharpie. I thought about our sleeping bag near the rock in the park, and the string of lights we had bought at the Tollwood Festival. Our afternoons at the teen center. I thought about how a month ago, in a tent in her grandparents’ garden, we had slept together for the first time. A good year? For me it had been the beginning of a new era.

“I just think we should split up before it gets boring.” Sandra had started to swim toward the stairs. I followed her.

“But I’m not bored!” I protested behind her. “Not for a single second.” That wasn’t one hundred percent accurate. Sometimes I had been bored. When she dragged me along to stroll through the city or go shopping, and I had to wait for hours outside dressing rooms. When she gave a concert in some school cafeteria and discussed important things with the other musicians afterward without so much as acknowledging me with a glance. A few times she had stood me up, and I had sat around in some restaurant forever waiting for her.

Sandra got out of the water. She sat down on the heated stone bench and drew her legs up to her chest. She was shivering. “Somehow I just feel like this can’t be all there is,” she said.

I had no idea how I was supposed to reply to that. “We’re both still so young. Don’t you sometimes just want to meet someone else?” She nibbled at her purple fingernails.

I shook my head. Sandra looked at me with pity. “Is there someone else?” My voice sounded oddly strained.

Sandra smiled again. “Of course not.”

I exhaled, even though that didn’t change the fact that she wanted to get rid of me. She was dead serious, that much I had grasped somewhere along the way from the center of the pool to the bench.