The French Revolution (27 page)

“HEY!” Esmerelda shouted. “This may be San Francisco, but you’re still my kid! No smoking, and definitely no drugs, capiche? Especially not in the goddamn living room!”

He cringed and curled up, a dog busted for chewing a shoe. “Sorry, Ma,” he croaked.

“Clean it up!” Esmerelda shrieked back. “Last thing I want is to roll around in your spittle.”

“I got it,” Robespierre said, and soundlessly began picking marijuana off the carpet. He was her brother, her partner, with all the right tools, the wiring, the irreplaceable genetics, but something wasn’t processing. How to read people, how to break through, to identify weaknesses and wedge them into opportunities, when to keep your mouth shut and when to charge ahead to the end zone like a turbocharged ICBM. Bad judgment calls and inattentive errors, tactless miscalibrations and a general naïveté, the kind of second-tier mediocrity that ruins premier organizations. The anchor to her accelerating rocket ship.

And the drugs, all day long. Black smoke on the rooftop, making him aloof, stupid and sluggish, addled and weird. Building a rap sheet, liability, incriminations and attacks. Unreliable from sunup to Taps, a minefield of mistakes.

“You’ve got to go,” she said, instantly regretting it, an extraordinarily rare slipup of verbal control. His crap rubbing off on her.

“Go where?” he asked, flashing black evil eyes.

“Upstairs,” she recovered, “so I can clean up the chair.”

He sloshed out of the chair and trudged up to his room, taking with him a funk, a miasma, an ecosystem of decay. Filthy and fucked up, he should be so much better. She would make him that way.

But it would hurt.

A February morning, the sky studded with rain. Marat walked through the hall to English class, the only class he attended regularly, because he liked the stories and how he only had to pick a side and sell it to be right. He kept a novel in his front pocket and read on the bus, over beers at Joel’s Ale House, on his back in his redecorated bedroom while girls got dressed and left, cross-legged on the beach while he waited to do deals with the dope acquired by Joel’s library of forged prescription cards. He skipped slow sections and quit whenever he wanted to, reread riveting passages over and over, savored the scenes on his schedule. Even as a time-agnostic pothead, he recognized this small freedom for the wonder that it was.

“Marat Van Twinkle?”

Principal Quince was next to him, flanked by Max and Darrell from security. The guards were grade-A guys, scrawny police force rejects thrilled to have summers off, both soca lovers who sometimes burned him mix CDs; two of Marat’s best customers.

“Huh?” he responded, detached and dim as always, not about to deliver incriminating behavior until he saw some proof.

“Come with me, please.”

“Why?” Marat looked around, other kids drifting along like they didn’t see him, zoning and spacing and bored.

“I’ll explain in a moment.”

The security guards reluctantly took his backpack and escorted him in a floating triangle to Quince’s office in the front of the school. A police officer stood by the door, thumbs hooked on his pockets and chatting up barbecue recipes with the school secretary.

Max unzipped his backpack. “What’s going on?” Marat asked.

“Where’s your locker?” asked Principal Quince.

“I don’t use a locker.” He watched Max gingerly excavate his scant collection of notebooks and folders. “Careful. I got homework in there.”

“You’re assigned locker 1-8-0-8,” Quince said. “We found a quarter pound of marijuana inside this morning.”

“Shit!” Marat laughed. Keeping pot in a locker was bush-league stupid, something any serious runner knew not to do from the earliest afterschool special. “Got any leads?”

“Clean,” Max reported.

“Have a seat,” Quince said icily. He walked behind his desk and gestured to a squat wooden chair. Marat kept an eye on the door, the cop leaning against the frame, wondering if an all-out sprint might do it.

“Have a seat,” Quince repeated, and Marat obeyed.

The cop closed the door. “Dope’s tagged from the Green Mountain Dispensary on Haight Street,” he said. “They’ve confirmed selling it to a kid who matches your description. We also know you work with a guy who drives a very nice Mercedes that changes license plates every few days, and that you’ve supplied most of the football team. And the marching band. And the cheerleaders.”

Marat’s insides collapsed into green soup. He held his mind on staying in character, something his sister would do so well. Faces flew by him, crazy customers and prank-playing punks, the crazy girls, the quiet girls, the dumb girls, the meatheads. Every one of his customers a suspect, not to mention his boss.

Quince sat down and looked the kid over, in sweatpants and burned-out sneakers, his duct-taped backpack held shut with safety pins. Radiating anger, impossible to tell if he was lying or not. Sure didn’t look like a drug dealer, or else the bling was in storage. “Robespierre’s your sister?”

“Yep.”

“Didn’t she get into Stanford early?”

“Yep.”

“Huh.’ Quince scanned Marat’s file, reports of suspensions and fighting, straight As in English, associations with known felons, tremendous truancy. “What are your plans for next year?”

“Finding the guy who planted drugs in my locker and turning him in.” Marat smiled white slabs, and Quince couldn’t help but like him a little.

“Besides that,” Quince said.

“Haven’t figured that out.”

“I see.” Quince made his back rigid and folded his hands, projecting sternness with a glimmer of sensibility. “I’m supposed to turn you over to the police. I can’t say exactly what they’ll do with you, but my guess is they’ll take you down to the station and interrogate you. They might put you in jail for a few days, or even longer. I honestly don’t know.”

“All depends on you,” the cop chimed in.

Marat shrugged and raised his voice, as expected of a cool customer done wrong. “I told you, I don’t use my locker. Was there anything else in there that belonged to me? Fingerprints?” Marat eyed the security guards, who were rolling their tongues through their cheeks and looking away sheepishly, as if nabbed mooching apples from a neighbor’s tree. “No. Because I don’t even know where it is.”

Quince waited. Few of the kids brought to his office knew when to shut up. Marat kept quiet and threw back a half-lidded stare, wary and coyote cool. “I could suspend you for five days and ask Officer Greeley not to take you in,” Quince said finally. “No police record. He doesn’t have to listen to me. But he might.”

“For what?” Marat asked.

Greeley stood in front of him, an overweight man made normal-sized in his police uniform, the beneficiary of excessive pockets and flaps and badges. The double chin gave away his heft, the lower half of his face overflowing his collar like a calving glacier, left unbalanced by his pewter eyes and thumb nose. “Who do you work for?”

Marat dangled his head over the back of his chair. The four adults ringed him like moons, their gravitational fields shielding the snitches buried among the student body. “Nobody at the moment,” he said, calibrating his response. “Your mom fired me for a cheaper fucktoy last week.”

“That’s it,” the cop said, reaching for his handcuffs. “Let’s go.” He lunged for Marat’s hand, but Marat was moving, spidering across the office, shoving the officer over the chair, ripping open the door.

“I came as soon as I heard!” Robespierre’s eyes were pink and puffed, and she froze him just enough. “It’s gotta be a setup. You don’t even use your locker!”

Then the security guards had him, his chin hit the floor, arms and legs locked behind his back. “What the hell is going on?” Robespierre screamed. “That’s my brother!”

“Get my shoes,” he told her through the black in his mouth. “Under my bed.”

“Shut up!” Greeley barked.

Marat woke up diagonal in the back of a squad car, his shirt torn at the neck. At the police station they put him in a room with a table and two men for three hours. He said nothing. He nodded once. His sister was waiting for him outside, doing her homework under a streetlight.

“It was either jail time or the army,” he told her. He laughed quick skip-beats, nervous irritation. “So I enlisted.”

She hugged him. Her seditious, amazing brother, too smart for getting stuck like this, his precise tactical execution crushed by grand strategies he never saw coming. “Thank you,” she whispered, flush with shame. “For the shoes.”

“It’s for college. Don’t tell mom.”

“I won’t.” The police were behind him. “Be careful.”

Thirty-six hours later he was doing push-ups in Texas, sweating through his hat.

When college started up, Robespierre hired away Jamba Juice’s most colorful staff to uphold the smoothie stand’s quirky reputation, then stocked her schedule with drama, psychology, accounting, and English, plus jazz history as an elective so she could
better relate to intelligentsia theatergoers. She tried out for five plays in her first two weeks of school, nailing leading tragedians and acerbic sidekicks alike, drawing buckets of laughter and misty-eyed gulps, culminating in a Taser-like full-body shock at the depth and breadth of her abilities. Her unrivaled talent outweighed her middling looks; all the plays wanted her, piling on compliments and bumps up to bigger roles and even offering a cut of the gate. It came down to Lady Macbeth or a lesbian rodeo champ in a student-written comedy, classic vs. upstart, laughs or tears, the two faces of drama spinning toplike in her head. She headed out for a jog to clear her head and nearly collided with a wall of chirpy students milling about the Quad.

“What’s going on?” she asked a heavily tanned surfer-type scratching his back with a guitar.

“Barack Obama, man!” He gave her an unfiltered smile and put out a gangly hand. “Join us!”

She hadn’t ever paid much attention to politics, aside from Fanny’s lusty jeremiads comparing San Francisco mayors to Soviet premiers and the politicians at the gay pride parade her mother liked to put on TV and snicker at. She had enough sense to know that most people were trained to hate politicians’ guts no matter what, and considered elected office your classic no-win career with bad money. But here were the people, apparently in good spirits, wearing—she started to look around now—T-shirts and caps with Obama’s picture on them, teaming up to wave huge banners. Outside together on a chilly school night, the feel of autumnal shifts and cycles and change. It was exciting, intoxicating, this power to shape behavior. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a Meetup.”

“What for?”

“For Obama, man!” With a chin-twist at the end, happy fresh-faced certainty.

“And are you doing anything special? Is he coming to talk?”

“Obama? I wish. Dude’s got California sewed up like a . . . a
sweater. Nah, we’re just here, you know, to support the cause. See how we can help and everything.” Sounding hokey, back-of-the-cereal-box starry-eyed stupid, like a ranch hand describing investment strategy to Goldman Sachs’ board of directors.

“Why do you like him so much?” So eager to know she nearly shouted it.

“Well, he’s gonna be different, you know? Work with everybody across the aisle and stay positive and bring people together. Restore our national reputation. Because we really need some of that, you know? And he’ll end the wars too.” Something in his face ticking here, a valve releasing, his voice switching to heavy, sincere evaluation mode. “So much bad stuff. All those people dying for no reason. It has to stop.”

“My brother’s fighting in the Middle East,” she said, a creeper of guilt winding round her neck. “And my dad,” she lied.

“Really? Wow.” Sweeping the sidewalk with the sole of his shoe. “Wow.”

“They both hate it,” she continued, inventing a sturdy foundation for antiwar credentials.

“Well yeah, right? We all hate war.”