Here I Go Again: A Novel (11 page)

In my dream future, which I guess is my actual future, this is the time of year when Brian and I had our little fling, only the circumstances were slightly different. Originally, last weekend was when Duke/Martin was sick in my car and he came over that Sunday and got kind of shouty and aggressive. Which made me like him all the more, according to my diary. (I’m really starting to question my teenage value system, FYI.)

Brian came out to calm everyone down and then he made Duke/Martin leave, politely but firmly. I was so impressed with Brian’s fearlessness and command of the situation that we ended up hanging out for a couple of weeks, until I realized being with him would send me to social no-man’s-land.

But I didn’t even
see
Duke/Martin over this last weekend, because I’m still kind of mad at him for his behavior in my dream future, which is actually my real future. Regardless, that means that he never
actually
threw up in my car.

Ergo . . . I didn’t saddle him with “Duke,” so he’s not going to resent my giving him a nickname for the next twenty-plus years.

Which means I’ve
already
made strides to fixing my future!

Yes!

Maybe this whole time-travel dealie really is a blessing and not some cruel joke perpetrated by a meddling hippie with large paws and an unhealthy amount of nudie art in her apartment. (I’m still probably going to call him Duke in my head, though, because every time someone says “Martin” I assume they’re talking about Martin Lawrence.)

We cross the street to Brian’s house. His place is decorated so differently from my house, even though they’re laid out pretty similarly . . . which I discovered the last time, when I’d routinely sneak up to his room in the dark to make out with him. (But that’s not happening this time because I’m all Team Duke.)

Whereas our central-stair Colonial is all about big vases of silk flowers and fussy couches and oil paintings, his central-stair Colonial looks like a Toys “R” Us on Black Friday. There are balls and army men and Barbie dolls on almost every surface. Crumbling LEGO kingdoms top each coffee table, and scattered bits of puzzles poke out beneath the tall pile of the living room shag rug. It’s not dirty, but it is total chaos.

We step into his cheerful kitchen and I spot Brian’s mom outside with a couple of the smaller kids. Their backyard is overrun with swing sets and sandboxes. I watch her shoo Snowball away from the sand, shouting, “No! That’s not for you! Bad kitty!”

Brian grabs a couple of Cokes out of a fridge that appears to be constructed entirely of shitty finger paintings.

Looking back, I recall him living in a houseful of siblings. And I recall being superannoyed by them, particularly when they’d run through the sprinklers and squeal. Like nails on a chalkboard, that sound.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have again?” I ask.

He’s puzzled for a second, but I play it off like Lissy Ryder can’t be bothered to know the comings and goings of this sleepy little burg, even though we’ve lived across the street from each other since third grade, rather than the truth that Lissy Ryder just got here from the future and struggles to remember anything that wasn’t explicitly posted in her diary, so please don’t call the authorities. Brian replies, “Four. I’m the oldest. The first set of twins—Diana and Holly—are nine, and the younger set—Paul and Greg—are six.”

I shudder inadvertently. “Your poor mother.”

Brian cocks his head and when he does, his eyes catch a swath of afternoon sun. I thought they were brown, but with the light on them, I see they’re more of a lake-water green with tiny speckles of gold. Did I ever notice this before? I suspect I may have. “How do you figure?”

“She’s got to deal with all those brats! My God, what a nightmare! I mean, they’re sticky and loud and they ask a million questions. Ugh. Who wants that?” My skin crawls at the notion of being saddled with so many progeny.

Brian grins again. “I’m pretty sure my parents like their kids. They’re a little worried about paying for five sets of college tuition, so they’re careful how they spend, but otherwise, we have no plans to sell ’em on the black market.”

“That’s a damn shame,” I reply. “Healthy Caucasian kids like that would fetch enough to fund an Ivy League education.”

Aw, crap, what’d I just say? I’m supposed to make small changes and be nice, and the first thing I do is suggest he sell his siblings into white slavery. Smooth, Lissy. Real smooth.

But Brian just laughs and the moment passes. While he fills a couple of glasses with ice, his two brothers run screeching through the kitchen to the family room like a thundering herd of asshole buffalos, LEGOs toppling in their wake. I clamp my hands over my ears but Brian is completely unaffected. “We call that ‘joyful noise’ around here. You learn to tune it out.” I smile and nod, hands still firmly in place over my ears. He peels a hand back. “But you’re clearly not into it, so let’s head upstairs.”

We gather up our drinks and a bowl of butter pretzels and exit the kitchen. We arrive at the landing in front of his door on the third floor and he opens it with a flourish. “Welcome to the jungle.”

Brian’s room is still exactly the way I’d described it in my diary—organized and meticulous without being sterile or lacking in personality. It’s kind of cozy in here, with slanted ceilings, and it’s refreshingly clean for a boy’s room. Unlike Duke’s room, which smells like sweat socks and is plastered with bikini sluts lounging on Lamborghinis, this place is populated by neatly aligned books and model airplanes and
Star Wars
memorabilia. (I’m glad he has a solid eight years of bliss before the whole enterprise is ruined by Jar Jar Binks in
The Phantom Menace
.)

There’s a hilariously boxy Macintosh computer on his desk and he seems very proud of it. Oh, honey. Wait until you see the iPad. For a moment I consider asking him how one might go about building a complex social networking site but I’m not sure how to describe it except that it involves “likes” and “dislikes” and something called Farmville.

His desk overlooks the street, and now that the leaves are falling off the (huge, pre–Dutch elm disease) elm tree, I notice he has a view right into my bedroom. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Half of Brian’s room is devoted to high fidelity—he’s got a turntable, a CD player, a dual cassette deck, and, what really impresses me, a reel-to-reel, all wired through a stereo receiver and cabled to a pricey pair of Bose speakers with a subwoofer. “That’s some setup you have here,” I tell him. Duke has only a Walkman, a boom box, and an unfortunate boy band fixation. (Color Me Sadd.)

“I’m really lucky,” he tells me. “I could never afford all of this on my allowance. My uncle gives me all his castoffs and the swag he gets from vendors. Even used, his equipment is better than most consumers could buy in a store right now.”

“Lemme check out your collection,” I say, brushing past him. The whole wall by the desk is filled with music on various mediums, too, including lots of genres outside of metal. “Elvis Presley? Lame!”

Brian arches his brow. “You are so wrong.”

Well,
that’s
refreshing. No one tells me I’m wrong. Ever.

He points to various albums, explaining. “You can thank Elvis for being the grandfather of rock and roll and for blurring the color lines in popular music. Without Elvis, you wouldn’t have had blues go mainstream, which led to R and B and eventually hip-hop. More important, without Elvis, there’d be no Beatles. Without the Beatles, no Rolling Stones; no Stones, no Zeppelin; no Zeppelin, no Aerosmith; no Aerosmith, no Van Halen; no Van Halen, no grunge. Shall I continue?”

“Only if you want to bore me to death.” But I say it kind of nicely and he seems amused. Brian launches into a whole genealogy of popular music, demonstrating which sounds spurred new music, and when he’s done, he’s mapped out an entire tree with most of the limbs stemming from Elvis. I grudgingly give the King of Rock and Roll some props.

(But not for the teddy bear song. Tell me that wasn’t beyond creepy.)

We listen to his uncle’s bootleg and it’s everything I remember, too. We spend the afternoon waxing poetic about music, with me sprawled in his beanbag chair and him at his desk so he can access his neatly categorized wall of sound. His deep and abiding love for Elvis/his pelvis aside, I’m surprised at how similar our tastes and opinions are, like how we both prefer the Scorpions to Ratt (despite Ratt’s glam-metal facade), and how Mutt Lange’s vision is why Def Leppard’s
Hysteria
sold as many copies as it has. We’re both passionately in love with the movie
Spinal Tap
, too, and in the middle of entirely different thoughts, we keep shouting, “No, we’re not going to fucking do Stonehenge!”

After Brian plays a retrospective of all my favorites, he starts sampling clips from the “second wave” phenomenon out of Norway that his uncle sent him. Scandinavia’s having a real hard-rock resurgence here in 1991. The music’s more thrash/speed punk, and way, way darker than the candy-coated, sexy hair metal that I prefer. While I’m not a huge fan of the beat, I’m charmed listening to Brian gush about the Viking-black-death rock ten feet away from where he sleeps on sheets patterned with Wookies and droids.

Our tastes truly diverge only when we broach the subject of Nirvana. And, trust? In 1991,
everyone’s
talking about Nirvana.

“How are you not enthralled by them?” he argues. “The lyrics, the raw emotion, the power behind the guitar licks, the way they’re so stripped down—they’re the very essence of rock and roll without having to rely on theatrics.”

I counter, “Pfft, I’m all about the theatrics. Plus, how are
you
able to get past that each one of them is in desperate need of a shower? Or if that’s not anarchy or punk rock enough for them, maybe they could jump in a fountain or something.”

Brian tsk-tsks me. “Lissy, hate to say it, but you’re way off on this. Nirvana’s going to be one of those bands everyone’s still talking about in twenty years. Cobain is the father of an entirely new genre and no one’s ever going to forget him. I’ll wager in fifty years, some other nerd will find himself with a pretty girl in his room and he’ll impress her by explaining the cultural significance of
Nevermind
.”

He is
so
not winning this argument . . . even if he did just imply that I’m pretty. I mean, I know I’m way cute, but it’s lovely to hear those words coming from him. So I say, “Ha! And then when the nerd ends up taking his cousin to prom, he’ll be all, ‘How’d I blow it with the hot chick?’”

The phone rings and thirty seconds later someone comes chugging up the stairs. His mom, Priscilla, bursts through the door wearing a dirty apron and carrying a drippy wooden spoon.

“Oh, thank God!”

Brian jumps out of his seat. “What the
heck
, Mom? The kids okay?”

She has to catch her breath for a second before blurting, “Lissy’s mother”—
gasp
—“called and said she saw her come over here a couple of hours ago.”
Gasp, gasp.
“She said to make sure you kids weren’t having sex because—and this is a quote—‘If your son makes me a grandma, I will kill each and every one of your no-necked monsters.’ She actually said ‘keel’ but, still, I understood what she meant.”
Gasp.

“Mrs. Ryder is pretty funny. I’m sure she was joking,” Brian declares, trying to make me feel less mortified. Which is not working.

His mother paces around his room, splattering bits of icing from the spoon as she gestures. A glob hits a scale model of the
Millennium Falcon
. “Are you? Because I’m not. That woman terrifies me, no offense, Lissy. Do you remember the block party where I made German potato salad instead of regular potato salad?” She flails and more frosting flies onto a Han Solo action figure. “I still have flashbacks from her reaction. Your father fought in ’Nam, yet
I’m
the one having flashbacks. Once in a while I wake up in the night screaming, ‘No hot vinegar!’
I thought we’d have to sell the house for a while. Do me a favor: Don’t have sex with Lissy.”

“Not really an issue, Mom,” Brian assures her calmly, even though his ears have flushed bright red.

She’s appeased, but barely. “Maybe leave your door propped open, too, while you’re up here. Oh, Lissy, dear, you feel like staying for dinner? It’s taco night and I’m making Bundt cake with lemon icing for dessert.”

“I should probably take off soon,” I tell her, not mentioning how I’d like to go home and properly die from shame in my own bedroom. I may be thirty-seven inside, but mortification knows no age limits.

“Okay,” she says, exiting the room. “If you change your mind, remember there’s cake! No sex! Just cake!”

“I’m so sorry about that,” I tell Brian.

“No need to apologize,” he says. “If anything,
I’m
sorry. Your mom didn’t come in here brandishing a loaded wooden spoon. But no-necked monsters? What’s that about?”

“Sometimes Mamma forgets she’s not Blanche DuBois.”

Brian frowns. “Okay . . . but you realize that line comes from Maggie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.”

“Really?”

He nods. “Unless my English teacher was lying about the collected work of Tennessee Williams.”

“Huh. Well, please don’t tell my mother. She swears it’s Blanche DuBois who was always bitching about them, and she’s, um . . . not a fan of being wrong. And my whole point was, she’s also not a fan of children, either. Like, at all.” Clearly, Brian is confused by this statement, so I’m compelled to elaborate. “She digs
me
, obviously—actually, she’s a little bit obsessive in that regard—but she equates the concept of kids with death.”

“Why’s that?”

Brian’s so sincere that I find myself sharing something I never mentioned to Duke. “She got pregnant in college and had to get married. Of course, this is a big, tragic family secret and no one will actually admit it, but I can do basic math. I was born five months after the wedding and I wasn’t premature or anything.”