Songs for a Teenage Nomad (3 page)

Circle

…in the thick tar night of Sacramento sky, with bats slipping like arrows across the stars, with Big Head Todd and the Monsters on so low I can barely hear them, I see Mom’s car pull in, no Dan in the passenger seat, and I know he is gone like the others…I watch her open the car door, step outside, her face bathed in street lamp. Another one gone. She loves them so instantly, and with such hot light, and then it’s like she just burns out—like the star we learned about in science that uses up all its fuel and just stops shining…

Something slams into the other side of the gym lockers, the impact intense enough to rearrange the contents of my locker. One of my Doc Martens lands on my bare foot.

“Ow,” I mutter, even though it doesn’t really hurt. I hear footsteps run away at the sound of my voice. The locker room door bangs shut.

Still barefoot, I peer around the lockers. A girl is huddled on the floor, her brown hair draping her face. She wears only a white tank top, panties, and one green sock. Her hand gingerly pats her head.

I rush to kneel by her. “Are you okay?”

“Spanking,” she says in a deep voice. She sits up, massaging the back of her head. “Damn, that hurts. Those bitches ambushed me.”

I’ve never been one to swear. Not that I’m a prude or anything; it doesn’t offend me. Sometimes, I swear in my head. It’s just that when I try it out loud, I sound like an idiot. My mother laughs when I do it.

“You don’t have the mouth for it,” she’s always told me. “You’re no sailor, for sure.”

This girl’s a sailor. “Goddamn it,” she says, looking around. “They took my goddamn clothes.”

My face flushes at the next string of words (some of which I don’t even recognize). Then she tucks her hair behind her ears, and I get the first good view of her face. Cass Gordon. Andreas Bay’s loner girl. Notorious, she has no friends and spends more time cutting classes than going to them.

I can’t believe anyone slammed Cass Gordon into a locker. She looks like she chews glass for breakfast. The first week of school, she beat up a senior. A senior
boy
.

“I have extra sweatpants in my locker. They kinda smell, but you can wear them.” I look around for Ms. Davis. PE teachers have a strange way of disappearing just in time for us to be humiliated in the locker room.

Cass stares. “You’re new.”

“Yes.” I stare back. “Do you want my sweatpants or not?” Brave. This girl could waste me.

Suddenly, like a July rainstorm, she smiles. It messes up her face, making it vaguely sweet. “Sure, new girl. I’ll take the loaner.”

I return to my open locker.

I hear her stand up. My navy-blue sweats are wadded into a ball and jammed into the back corner of my locker. When I pull them free; they feel cold and sort of damp. Gross.

“Never mind, new girl,” I hear her say. Her arm appears around the corner, holding up a wad of clothing. “Dumped them in the garbage. Creative.”

I wad the pants back up and return them to their dark corner. Shutting my locker, I slip on the new Docs my mom swears cost half her paycheck even though they were on sale. When I go around the corner to see Cass, she’s gone.

***

I slip on my headphones to the strains of Counting Crows and walk the short path to the Little Theatre. An October mist curls around the few trees in the empty quad. The school is tired in the Friday air, hauled out and worked over a long week, only to be abandoned to the weekend.

I look forward to the theater on Fridays. We only have rehearsal officially on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, but Alexa goes every day, so I do too. On Fridays, we paint flats in the square black room and talk about movies and music and teachers and Alexa’s drawings. She outlines things, and I paint them in.

We sing along to Alexa’s favorite singers, Kate Nash and Regina Spektor. And to one of my favorites, Jack Johnson. She doesn’t laugh when I tell her that his music Band-Aids my soul. When I sing “No Good With Faces” for her, she tells me she loves my voice and that I should learn to play guitar.

Alone in the theater, we even talk about politics. She thinks the current president is ahead of his time compared to the former President who Alexa calls an anti-Aristotelian thinker because she’s taking a philosophy elective now and knows something about Aristotle. We talk about movies. We both love director Cameron Crowe, and our favorite scene of all time is the “Tiny Dancer” scene in
Almost Famous
when they all sing on the bus. Because music always makes things better.

I sing loudly around Alexa.

As I head toward the royal-blue pod of buildings, I spot a lone figure walking, head down against the wind. Sam. Of English class and ladder tragedies. I cut across the circle of lawn toward him. He looks up. I smile, glad the bruises from our last encounter have long faded.

“Hi.” I slide my headphones back.

“Your nose is all better.”

“I’m a quick healer.” Lame. It’s been over a month.

He doesn’t seem to notice. “What are you listening to?”

“Counting Crows.” I bite my lip, not wanting him to think I listen to stupid music.

“I love their first disc.”

“Oh, me too,” I say. “’Omaha’s one of my favorite songs of all times.”

“That’s a great one. It’s on my iPod. So, where are you off to?”

I curl my hand tighter around my battered Walkman. “Little Theatre.”

“Are you in the play?”

I shake my head. “Actually, I’m the assistant set designer.” The title sounds unnecessarily important.

“Wow. That’s really cool.”

It isn’t cool. Looking around, I notice that we’re standing right in the center of the circle of grass. Gum and chip wrappers choke the edges of the lawn where it meets the cement.

He wears a letterman’s jacket that looks different from the ones other guys wear.

“That’s a nice jacket.” I want to say important things to make him want to talk to me. But I also don’t want to talk too much.

He glances down at it. “It was my grandpa’s. He was a great football player.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“A great football player.”

He looks momentarily uncomfortable. “I’m okay.” He pauses. “Our team’s not so hot.”

“So I gather.” I wonder if I’m being coy or just obnoxious. I’m hoping for coy.

“You’re a strange girl, Calle. I mean, you’re not strange-weird, just strange-different, you know. I mean, no one I know talks like you.” Has he even heard me talk that much? “You always say interesting things in English.” I make a note to stop talking so much in English class. Interesting means weird.

“Hmm.” I don’t know what else to say. His hair curls in all different directions but manages to look ordered. He has sports-star-on-a-cereal-box hair. And wide boy shoulders.

“So, are you coming to the game?” He stuffs his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.

“What game?” I know what game he means and don’t have the slightest idea why I just asked that. Coy again? I should stop. Coy doesn’t work for me.

“The football game. The last one is tonight. JV starts at 5:30. I’m playing in it.” He exchanges back pockets for jacket pockets. “You should come.”

“Sure.” Attempting to be casual, I give him what I hope is a charming, noncommittal smile. “I’ll try.”

The white of his smile shames toothpaste commercials. “Great. I’m number 21. My grandpa was 12, but he was a quarterback. I’m a running back. So I flipped his numbers.”

I think this is supposed to be cool. He’s waiting for me to say something about it, so I say, “That’s so cool that you did that.”

He nods, smiling. “Yeah, it’s like a tribute to him. So you’re coming? Look for me,” he says with the confidence only popularity allows. “I’ll see you there.”

I frown, watching him stride across the quad. I don’t know about this boy. This football-playing, perfect-smile, wide-shouldered boy. These are the kind of boys who shove smaller boys into trash cans. Last year, Henry—a kid in my art elective who drew amazing pictures of dragons—ended up in a PE locker for three hours after this kind of boy stuffed him in there. Why is this boy asking me to a football game?

Underneath It All

…Mom throws a last-minute Fourth of July barbecue, stringing Christmas lights behind the house all around the small patch of grass she calls our yard. People cram together, sipping beer or mineral water, talking over the No Doubt playing from the stereo in the window. Mom crouches by the tiny Weber, flipping hot dogs, and taking drags from the cigarette of the man in the Eagles shirt who has managed to attach himself to her. When he’s not looking, she catches my eye and makes a hideous face until I dissolve into giggles in the corner…

“Can you put a new CD on?” Alexa asks, blowing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. She is perched at the top of the ladder, painting a magenta trim across the top of the downstage flats.

I hop down from the stage, crossing to the chair where Alexa has propped Ms. Hecca’s portable stereo. “Where’s your rehearsal mix?” I ask, searching the ground nearby.

“It’s not there?” she asks, brush poised. I shake my head. “Well, damn.” She shrugs. “Must have left it at home. Ask Hecca if she has any music that doesn’t suck.”

I have Ben Harper and John Mayer in my bag, but Ms. Hecca offers me a Death Cab for Cutie disc, which I love. Hopefully, it doesn’t fall into the “suck” category.

I start the disc going and reposition myself on the stage where I’m painting a piece of railing for a scene with Drew and Sara. “Cool,” Alexa says, singing along. “My mom and I love this one,” she says.

“My mom and I love it too,” I tell her.

“What’s she like?” She climbs down off the ladder to refill her paint tray.

“My mom?” I shrug. “She’s pretty cool, I guess. Really pretty. Kinda flaky. Bothers me about my clothes.”

Alexa laughs. “So she’s a mom. What’s your dad like?”

I hesitate, then say, “He left eight months after I was born. I’ve never met him.”

Alexa pauses, her eyes evaluating me. Casually returning to the painting, she asks, “Have you ever tried to contact him?”

I shake my head. “I’ve asked my mom about him before, but she doesn’t talk about him.”

“Really? Not at all?”

I pull the wrapping off a new, thin paintbrush and rub the soft bristles across my palm. “She gets really weird when I bring him up, defensive. I guess he broke her heart.”

Alexa sighs and surveys her work, maybe so she doesn’t have to look at me. “That’s so sad.”

“He’s a musician. I know that much. He left to try to make it with his band. I don’t think my mom ever got over it.”

Alexa frowns. “What about you?”

The picture is tucked away in my song journal. I almost tell her about finding it, but I stop. Shrugging, I say, “I have my mom.”

“Stepdad?” Alexa climbs down from the ladder, eyebrows raised.

“A few.” I dunk the paintbrush in the shiny black paint and watch it stream off back into the can.

“A few?” she repeats, moving the ladder to the next section of flat she has to paint.

“Four so far. My mom’s been married four times, and we’ve lived with seven others. My mom says ‘six’ because Mark didn’t count, but he ate all our food and left wet towels on the floor so I say he counts.” Even though I’m not looking at her, I can feel her turn and stare.

“Seriously?” she asks.

I nod, my eyes fixed on painting a fake staircase. I know we’re not normal. All the men. The moving. But that’s just my mom.

“They’re always Ted or Dan or Rob. See, my mom meets someone, and it’s really great. And then we usually move and start a new life. And it’s great for awhile. And then it’s not. And then they leave. That’s been pretty much it since kindergarten for me. At least that’s when I really remember it clearly. I’m sure it’s probably been that way my whole life.”

“How many schools have you been in?” She starts to paint again, and I’m glad she’s not still staring at me.

“Thirteen so far,” I tell her. “No, fourteen counting this one.”

“No way.” She shakes her head, catching a drip with a wet cloth. “So you’ve had, like, no stability in your life at all.”

I consider this. I don’t think I know what she means. Stability. I’ve always had my mom. I tell her this. “And,” I say, “they all drove Fords.”

“Fords?”

I look up at her small frame on the ladder, her lips pursed in concentration. “You want the long version?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I’m not going anywhere. I have a lot of flats left to trim.” She points down the row with her brush. “I mean, if you want to. I don’t want to pry or anything.”

“You’re not,” I tell her. And she’s not. I’ve never talked to anyone this much about my mother’s guys. Not even the counselor that the last school made me see because they thought I was suicidal when I wrote a poem about death for English class. We were reading Edgar Allan Poe—how could I
not
write about death? We moved the next week anyway, so it didn’t even matter.

“Okay.” I take a breath. Alexa watches me, waiting. “Four years after my dad split, she married Ted. Red Mustang. He’s the first one I really remember. He didn’t last long after we moved to L.A. He wanted to be a producer or director or something.”

“That’s original,” Alexa says.

I tick our cities off on my fingers. “She took that one pretty hard. Then it was Chuck in Bakersfield with the Explorer. Art in Gilroy with the Freelander. Freeloader is more like it. And then Steve in Manteca with the Excursion. That guy had a whole separate family in another city. Total loser. Then we went to Sedona, Arizona, for a brief new-age period my mom went through when I was nine.”

“Another Ford?”

I nod. “Yeah. Tom. Two-toned Maverick. He left us in the middle of the night, and a week later we moved to Santa Barbara where my mom knew a guy.”

“Santa Barbara’s nice,” Alexa offers, moving her ladder again.

“It was okay. I went to, like, three different schools there, depending on who Mom was with. But then Dan ‘Call me Dad—it’s just one letter away’ showed up and moved us to Sacramento. Gray Ford Taurus. He lasted the longest of any of them. They even had a real wedding with flowers and food and stuff. My mom wouldn’t get out of bed for three days after he left.”

“That sucks.”

“I ate a lot of cereal during those three days.” I stop, thinking about the week following Dan’s exit. Living in the U-Haul. Eating Burger King because a friend of Mom’s worked there. I don’t tell Alexa this part. “Then we met Ted Number 2. He had this battered, lemon-yellow Ford truck with a bench seat. He was blond, tan, a total surfer guy—younger than my mom.”

“Sounds cute,” Alexa says, taking a break from her painting to stretch her arms and back.

“Very cute,” I nod. “He was going to San Diego to design surfboards, so we went with him. We were three blocks from the beach in this tiny house. We ate pizza a lot and listened to the Stones, Cat Stevens—he had great taste in music. Drew would say it sucks, but it doesn’t. When Ted Number 2 moved to Hawaii without us, I told Mom she should never trust a guy in a Ford ever again.”

“At the least,” Alexa agrees, watching as I finish up the railing. “And now you’re here.”

“Rob. Silver-blue Ford Focus.”

Alexa snorts. “Your mom has a slow learning curve.”

“Yeah,” I sigh, placing the paint top back on the can. I think back to that night in the small kitchen in San Diego. Mom’s penny landing on Andreas Bay. She was so eager to leave, anxious and flighty. I wanted to stay in San Diego, but Rob thought it was important for us to get a clean start. I told him none of our starts had ever been clean.

***

I slip on my headphones and pay three dollars to get into the game. I am convinced that headphones give me an immediate excuse for not being with someone. If not, at least they make me look less lame for being alone. This is what I tell myself, though I don’t totally believe it. Ben Harper will have to be my date for the evening. His rendition of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” floods my ears, a strange musical backdrop to the rough, gritty game before me.

I have actually never been to a football game and am surprised by the energy around me. The air seems smoky in the translucent evening, lit by the field lights that look like transmitters for alien communication. Andreas Bay sweatshirts dot the metal stands to the right, splashes of bright blue and green. The other school’s colors are red and white, and their fan-filled bleachers to the left look bloodstained.

A rail-thin girl sneaks in under a curl in the chain-link fence to the side of the visitors’ stand. Cass Gordon. She doesn’t show up to school, but she comes to a football game? She climbs to the top of the bleachers and parks herself in the middle, a dot of black among the red shirts.

I look back at Cass, who has no awkwardness with being alone. With my life, you’d think I’d be a pro, but I’m not. I don’t know whether to sit down in the bleachers or hang out on the dirt track that circles the field like a drained moat. I don’t see any students watching the game; most just seem to be milling about in clumps, like they would at a dance or a party. None of the clumps are familiar, so I opt for the snack shack. I’m hungry anyway, and it will give me something to do.

A girl from my Spanish class is working behind the counter. She’s the nice, student council type, so full of school spirit that I imagine she has to be drained once a week or she’ll pop. I slip off my headphones.

“Hi, Calle!”

And she knows
everyone’s
name.

“Hey…” I, however, do not.

“I’m Kayla. From Spanish.” It seems like half the girls in the freshman class are named Kayla.

“Hi.” On the chalkboard behind the counter, someone has drawn pictures of hot dogs and sodas and candy bars in a crooked border. “Can I get nachos and a Pepsi?”

“Absolutely!” Kayla will end up as a cruise director. She rushes to the back counter and dips a paper tray into a glass container of chips. Standing on her tiptoes, she leans onto the pump that oozes the orange cheese onto the chips.

“Do you want peppers?” she asks over her shoulder.

“No, thanks.” My mother is on such a health kick lately that she’d have a heart attack if she saw me eat this fluorescent goo. I hand Kayla three dollars. The can of Pepsi is cold and wet from the cooler. A piece of ice rolls around the rim.

I sit near the bottom of the home bleachers and eat half the nachos before they congeal. An announcer’s voice fills the air.

“Stevens is down on the thirty yard line. Second and seven.”

Whatever that means. I search for Sam’s jersey. He’s on the field, Number 21. He looks like an upside-down triangle with his huge shoulder pads and narrow waist.

He breaks from a pack of jerseys and runs toward the end of the field. People around me jump to their feet, cheering.

“Touchdown. Sam Atkins!” The announcer’s voice says his name as one looping cry.

The people around me high-five and yell through cupped hands. Their energy warms me. I smile and watch Sam. His teammates surround him, smacking him on the helmet and shoulders, which looks like it hurts, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“They haven’t won a game all year.”

I’m not totally sure the woman next to me is talking to me, but she doesn’t seem to be sitting with anyone. She is old, maybe seventy, and her skin is ashes and coal. But I mostly notice how tiny she is. If it weren’t for her thick gray hair, I would take her for a small child at first glance.

“Hmm?”

She looks at me from under thin gray lashes. Her eyes are the color of blue Kool-Aid, and they stand out against her dark face, deep and liquid. They are too young in her mass of gray-black wrinkles.

“They haven’t won a game all year,” she repeats. “Can I have a nacho?” She points at my half-eaten nachos tray sitting between us.

“Sure. You can have them all.”

She picks up the tray and balances it on her small, blanketed lap. Pulling a soggy chip from the coagulated mass of cheese, she pops it in her mouth and licks her fingers.

“Yummy.”

“Not bad for toxic waste.”

She lets out a deep laugh that shakes her whole body. The nachos nearly slide right off her lap. The laugh passes as quickly as it escaped.

“I’m Emily Martin,” she extends her small hand.

I shake it. “Calle.”

She looks back out over the field. “Who are you here for?” She extracts another goopy nacho and points it vaguely at the field.

I flush. “No one really. I mean, Sam Atkins invited me.”

She raises her eyebrows. Or at least I think she raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t actually have any eyebrows, just brow bones. The skin there seems to rise, and her forehead skin wrinkles.

“He’s a good ballplayer, that Sam. His grandfather…whew,” she lets out a puff of air and downs another nacho. “Now there was a great football player.” She licks some cheese from her fingers.

“You knew Sam’s grandpa?”

She nods. “Tom Atkins, Senior. But he didn’t take his scholarship. Stayed on at the grocery.” When I shrug, she adds, “The Atkins family owns Bay View Foods.”

“I’m new to Andreas Bay.” Bay View Foods is the main supermarket in Andreas Bay, except for the Safeway. But most of the locals shop at Bay View. Safeway’s for traitors who don’t buy local.

“Ah. I thought you were.” She sets the empty nachos tray between us and pats my leg. “The Atkinses have been in Andreas Bay since it was founded in 1892. Sad story, that family.” She frowns and looks out over the field. “Listen to me. Gossiping about things nobody really knows. Still, if it hadn’t been for that Gordon girl…”

“You mean Cass?”

Before she can answer, another cry goes up from our section, and I realize the game is over. We’ve won for the first time this year. People pour out of the stands, and I am swept away by their movement, finding myself suddenly standing on the dirt track near the field, my nachos plate, my soda, and strange, tiny Emily somewhere behind me.

I look for her, but the crowd has condensed at the bottom of the stands and on the track, a sudden pack of sardines marinating in this rare victory. I study the visitor stands. Cass is no longer clumped in the middle.

Scanning the crowd, my eyes lock with Sam’s. His hair is messy from his helmet, and he has two thick black streaks under his eyes. He sees me, smiles, and mouths, “Thanks for coming.”