Infandous (7 page)

They say junior year is the most important. A formative year, they say. It certainly was for me, but now I’m past it, and I’m not formed into anything I want to be. And now, with summer school, I’m pulled back into the past, repeating something I got wrong the first time.

My desire to
not be here
is so strong it’s like a fishing line pulling on my guts.

The only way I can even pretend to stand this is by disappearing.

I flip open my notebook and begin sketching what I see in front of me—the depressing chalky-green board, Coach Crandall himself in his oversized basketball shorts, his athletic socks and slip-on sandals, his collared Venice High Wrestling shirt, his thick fingers, his bristly cropped hair. I draw it as ugly as it is and disappear.

***

My brain is tired when Crandall finally lets us out, seven minutes after one. It’s no oversight, letting us out late. It’s his quiet little way of establishing dominance. A few of my fellow losers are going to Taco Bell for lunch. I tag along, more because I don’t want to go home yet than because I’m actually hungry.

I order two tacos and water. Then I proceed to transform said water into poor man’s lemonade. They have sugar and lemon wedges in the condiments section for the iced tea, next to the sporks and hot sauce. You do the math.

Mackenzie Winters flops into the plastic seat next to me with a sigh. “
Dude
,” she says.

I know exactly how she feels.

“How are we going to survive six weeks of that guy?”

I shrug. “The same way we’ve survived three years of a bunch of guys just like that guy.”

She laughs and takes a long drink of her root beer. Mackenzie Winters is a Mormon. She likes to pretend that she is tough, but she won’t drink caffeine. And she didn’t fail geometry because she skipped class. She failed because she is stupid. Probably she won’t fail again because even though she is stupid, she is also rich—at least, rich compared to me—and her dad has hired a student from Santa Monica Junior College to tutor her this time through. He made sure to hire a girl.

Mackenzie sucks at the straw of her actual, bought-and-paid-for fountain soda. I shake the ice cubes in my flimsy plastic water cup and down what’s left.

Darrin, the guy with the pizza hookup, is sitting with us too. Pizza delivery boy must not have a GPA prerequisite. He looks downright glum.

“What’s up, Darrin?” I ask.

“It’s stupid,” he says.

I don’t ask him to clarify. I get the gist.

After we’re done eating, Mackenzie texts her dad to come pick her up. When he gets there, he parks the car, comes inside, and shakes Darrin’s hand and mine too.

I can tell he’s sizing us up. It’s bad enough, probably, that his academically wayward daughter is in summer school; he wants to make sure that she’s not hanging out with complete losers. His parental concern is adorable.

Mackenzie and her dad drive off, and Darrin is about to ask if I want to hang out, I can tell.

I ball up the paper wrappers from my tacos and shove them inside the plastic cup. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.

Darrin gives me a halfhearted wave as I head out the door.

***

The problem is, I don’t know where I am going. Not home—our box of an apartment would be frying on a hot day like this. Not my studio—it would be even hotter. I think about dropping by Marissa’s place, but she doesn’t answer my text, so who knows what’s up with her.

Actually, my mom’s terrible idea about me getting a summer job is starting to sound slightly less terrible. At least if I find employment somewhere with AC, and if it’s a kick-back kind of a job, maybe I can muddle through my mounds of geometry homework in relative peace and quiet. And the idea of getting paid while I’m doing my homework sounds better than
not
getting paid while doing it. If I decide to do it at all.

The flaw in this plan, as I discover over the next few hours, is that not a lot of places want to pay you to sit there. Restaurants I rule out right away—anything in the food service industry is going to mean work and lots of it, the physical kind. Waitress is the kind of job my mom would probably approve of, and it’s the kind of job she could walk into any day of the week, if she wanted to. People love to be served by beautiful women—especially here. It makes them feel better. No one wants their burger brought to them by a big fatty or someone with a face full of zits. That’s way too real. It makes you think about the burger and where it’s going to go after you chew and swallow it, what it’s going to do to you next, how your body is going to process it and store some of it and eliminate the rest, through your pores and your asshole. If a beautiful woman hands you your burger, it’s like a promise: the burger won’t make you fat. How could it, if she’s the one to deliver it to your table? It’s, like, blessed.

Retail would pretty much suck too. You can’t just sit behind the counter and ring up the occasional sale; the owner wants you to wander around the store and offer to help and generally keep an eye on everyone to keep them from pocketing the merchandise. I’d be useless if the store had anything good to sell … Marissa would be stopping by in no time, and I don’t think she’d avoid helping herself just because I was on the clock.

And probably I’m unqualified for anything other than retail and food service, which gets me thinking again about what I will do next summer, after high school is over, when a job isn’t going to be an
option
anymore.

Even if I did want to go to college, it isn’t like my mother has set up a savings account. Either I’d need to take Naomi up on her offer or I’d have to figure out a way to bring in money. Some of the allure of college tempts me, of course—all that potential, balled up into one campus … art supplies must be just floating around. But what would be the point? There isn’t a career out there that I want, and so far anything I’ve ever wanted to learn about I’ve managed fine on my own.

My mother didn’t go to college. For the last five years or so she’s been working at the dental office, and before that she was a personal assistant for this banker who divided his time between LA and New York. He liked to call her his “West Coast Girl.” She organized his dinner parties and picked up his dry cleaning and paid his housekeeper. Before that I’m not real clear on what she did, in the years when I was really little. Service, I imagine.

She would have gone to college, like her sister did, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with me, or maybe she just would have gotten further along with modeling. Hell, we live close to Hollywood; maybe she would have been discovered.

She’s taking classes now, of course, working on her nursing career. All of my life, I guess, she’s been in the service industry in one way or another—cleaning people’s teeth or picking up their dry cleaning.

I wander up and down the boardwalk, asking for applications wherever the uniforms don’t look too degrading—a coffee shop, a souvenir store, a couple of pizza places. But I know even as I collect them that I won’t be filling them out, and I wonder how my life could be different, what other set of applications I might be able to gather if I had a different life, if I lived somewhere else, if I were someone else’s daughter.

Last summer, when my mom first started pressuring me about getting a job, I ran into Eugene at the skate park. I was just getting there, and he was crowding into someone’s minivan, heading home.

I don’t know why, but my hand shot up in a wave and I called out, “See you next time.”

He seemed surprised that I was talking to him. I mean, we’d seen each other a few times after that first time, but I hadn’t been very encouraging.

“Probably not,” he said. “My dad’s making me do this shitty internship for the rest of the summer. Fucking law office bullshit.”

He looked genuinely crushed. Me, I couldn’t get past the word
internship
.

I’m not far from home, turned away from the beach and the tourists and the crowd, when I slide to sitting. I lean up against a lamppost and try my best to take a few deep breaths. It’s close to five o’clock, and the heat is crushing along with everything else. I pull the band from my hair and let my curls flop over into my eyes, offering me some relief from the sun.

I wonder where my mother is.

Have you ever had the feeling that you aren’t the main character in the story of your life? That you fill a more minor role—supporting cast, maybe, comic relief, or even antagonist? If that is true—if you aren’t the big deal in the story of your life, if your whole purpose is to act as a foil or a catalyst for someone else—then maybe it doesn’t matter what you do. Or what you don’t do.

Maybe all that matters is what others do to you.

Feet stop in front of me. They are a man’s. Worn-out Toms. Tanned, golden-hued calves. Gray board shorts. I look up. “Hey, Jordan.”

“Seph, what are you doing?”

“Taking a break.”

“From walking?”

“From life.”

There’s a loose spring on the sidewalk next to my foot. A little one, from a pen. I palm it.

Jordan doesn’t know what to say, I guess, because he doesn’t say anything, just stretches his hand down to me. I look at it for a minute before taking it. He pulls me to my feet.

“Girl,” he says, “you look like fried shit.”

He invites me into his apartment to cool down. The shades are drawn, and it’s dark. It’s kind of loud in there, full of this buzzing humming sound. His place is typical Venice Beach. Shittier than ours, with the window blinds that come standard. Mom is right … they are ugly. His place is a studio, and the futon he sleeps on is in the middle of the room, still in full bed mode. I wonder if he ever sits it up. The blanket’s wadded down toward the bottom, and there are no sheets. One ugly table lamp and an empty pizza box on the floor. But the air in here is way better than outside, and I sigh with relief.

“Swamp cooler,” he says, indicating an ugly metal box squatting in his window. “My folks picked it up for me at a yard sale. It only works sometimes, though. On dry days. If there’s too much moisture in the air, it can’t cool things down as well.”

His apartment reminds me of a cave—like a rock cave behind a waterfall, with the moisture and the noise.

I flop on one of the two cracked vinyl stools by the kitchen counter. The couch seems too intimate. I shouldn’t worry, though. As soon as Jordan tosses me a soda and cracks one for himself, he makes my role clear.

“Did your mom say anything about the concert the other night?”

I shake my head and try not to feel too smug when he looks crestfallen. And I don’t tell him what he would like to know—that my mother
always
answers any question I ask about her dates, rare as they are. Most things I don’t even have to ask about; she just tells me. Almost always, she is an open book. It’s only the big secrets she keeps. So for her to keep quiet about her date with Jordan is unsettling, actually. But I don’t give Jordan this information, even though it would cheer him up, make his eyebrows shoot up his forehead in that comical Jordan way. Instead, I crack open my soda and sip it.

The swamp cooler hums. Jordan empties his soda can, smashes it, and tosses it overhand into the recycling bin. Then he says, “I had a really good time.”

If I had to guess, I’d say she did too, not only because of her silence on the issue but also because she’s been going around humming Rainbow Funkadelic songs for the last forty-eight hours. Another piece of information I won’t be sharing with Jordan.

It isn’t that I think my mom shouldn’t have a sex life. Everyone has one, whether it involves fantasizing to sloppy romantic movies or hooking up with random strangers or dating the same person for years and years. But the thought of my mom with Jordan …

Not that minor players have much say in these matters.

But Jordan looks so pitiful sitting there that I can’t help but throw him a bone. “Reggae was a good choice. It really is her favorite kind of music.”

This cheers him up. “Yeah. She seemed to enjoy it. She danced a lot.”

My mother dancing is something to watch. Literally. Everyone stops and watches when she starts to dance. It’s that underwater thing again—she moves like a wave, so fluid, her arms and back and hips and legs undulating like she’s made not of sinew and bone but of water.

Seemingly satisfied, Jordan changes the subject. “So what are you doing all summer?”

I shrug. “Summer school. Hanging out.”

“Doesn’t your mom want you to get a job?”

Back to Rebecca Golding. I shrug noncommittally.

“Maybe I can get something for you down at the shop,” he suggests. “Like sweeping up and helping with inventory.”

Jordan works for Riley Wilson Boards, a local surfboard shaper. A few of the bigger-name surfers ride his boards, including one guy that has a line of board shorts at Target, so the shop is making a name for itself. I’ve been in there a few times, but really, what’s the point? I can’t afford one of their boards, and anyway, if I ever have any money, I end up spending it on random stuff for my art.

“What do you do there?” I ask. “Sell boards?”

Jordan kind of laughs. “I’m not much of a salesman,” he says. “Naw, I’m a shaper.”

“Really? How come I didn’t know that?”

He shrugs. “I guess your mom didn’t tell you.”

Seven

So of course my mom is thrilled that Jordan is going to try to get me a job at the board shop. She comes home looking a little worn out, but as soon as I tell her the news, it’s like an extra light gets flipped on. Maybe it’s the job prospect that makes her happy. But I don’t think it’s just that … the way she pulls her hair over her shoulder, braiding it loosely and then shaking it out, the way she arches her back to stretch and seems to grow taller, brighter, more alive … .No, it’s not just the idea of me getting a job. It’s that Jordan is getting me one. Because she wants it.

“We should celebrate,” she says. When she calls Jordan to invite him along with us, she doesn’t have to thumb very far down her recent call list to find his number.

We decide to go out for Chinese, and my mom disappears into the bedroom to get ready. She skips a shower to give me time to take one, and feeling sullied by the hot day, my job hunt, and summer school, I do the whole thing—shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and shaving—all of it.