Chapter 2 Recap: Lyle the Hammer, a former wrestler-turned talk-show-host, has a rough morning when he discovers a slightly less than ravishing intern working in his studio. He and his wife Yukiko are Sam’s biological parents, and Frankie is their surrogate, who fled the scene before Sam was born. Yukiko has been led to believe (by Lyle) that their child died as an infant.
3. Sam and The Weed talk plans
I had just gotten back from my paper route, and there was Pill, drifting into the kitchen half-awake. She went to the fridge, opened it, gazed in.
“It’s too early,” I said. “Go back to bed.”
She sat on the floor in the glow of the fridge, and she yawned so hard she lost her balance, tipping to the side. I scooped her up and plunked her on the couch and covered her with a blanket, and she fell back asleep, which was good. Things could get hairy when Pill woke too early. She got an impressive number of bad ideas, and she started doing things that were bound to set off a pre-coffee Frankie. So I was glad she fell back asleep, but as I was leaving, she woke—her head popped up and she watched me go. I told myself she would probably fall back to sleep, but I spent the rest of the morning wondering if I should have stayed home, just to keep an eye on her until Frankie was awake. I was thinking about this in AP Gov, while I was pretending to take notes because there was no point in actually writing anything down—we’d get the PowerPoint later—but the teacher hated to see us just sitting there doing nothing. So I was faking it, covering my notebook with loop-de-loops, wondering what had happened at home after I left, if it had gone okay or if it had turned into a disaster. And then Mrs. Deery the guidance counselor walked into class and made the announcement that I had gotten into Princeton.
The fuck. How did she know? Did Princeton tell the school? Did Frankie? Mrs. Deery started clapping and the five other kids who were in my class joined lethargically. And the rest of the day was unbearable. Everyone wanted to talk about Princeton. In AP Psych, a girl named Kendra turned to me and said, “I bet you got in because you’re Asian.” She drew a circle around her face with her finger. “You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Aren’t you Asian? Or half-Asian?”
“I’m Russian.” She looked confused, and just to mess with her, I started speaking fake Russian, which blew a gasket in her tiny brain. She stared at me wide-eyed and then turned away, and she left me alone for the rest of the class.
But her question bothered me, and not just because it was rude. I found myself wondering again about the old problem, the one I had visited every day of my life it seemed, if not consciously, then in the back of my mind: Where was my father? Who was my father? I knew nothing about him because Frankie had refused to divulge the smallest detail. There was a time in my life—halfway through my freshman year— when I convinced myself that my father was a Japanese Sumo wrestler. I dreamed up a story about it: Frankie had gone on vacation in Hawaii, and she had met a famous Sumo wrestler who was there for a tournament, and they got drunk and hooked up. Into the picture popped me, Sam. Zygote extraordinaire. I figured she never contacted my father to let him know, and she never told anyone about him because she was embarrassed about getting freaky with a Sumo wrestler. Someone like that was beneath her station in life, in her eyes. She was educated, an academic, and a Sumo wrestler was, when you looked beneath the exotic exterior, just a dumb jock.
For a while, I clung to that story as an explanation for everything in my life that didn’t make sense about me or my relationship with Frankie, which was deteriorating quickly. The truth is I couldn’t stand her most days. She only cared for me if I was the son that she wanted me to be, smart and promising. She couldn’t accept my Sumo self, that part of me that wasn’t her, that was my father’s. Of course maybe my father wasn’t a Sumo wrestler—maybe he was an accountant or something. But the point is I didn’t know, and that was all because of Frankie. I started to hate her for that.
After school, on my way through the parking lot, I spotted a guy they call Weed leaning back against his car, which was near mine. We weren’t friends. I didn’t have anything against him, we just never hung out. But when he saw me approaching, he waved me over.
“Heard you got into Princeton,” he said.
He lit a joint and after taking a pull, offered it to me, his black eyebrows lifting above his shocking blue eyes. He was a good-looking guy, I realized. He could have dated anyone he wanted, but I never saw him with anyone other than stoners, people he sold his product to.
“I’d better not,” I said.
“Sure?”
I wasn’t sure. Of anything really. Princeton, the question of my father—it was swirling around in my brain and making me uneasy. I took the joint and put it to my lips and drew it into my lungs. I tried to hold the smoke in the way I’d seen people do, but it burned like hell and I sputtered and coughed.
“You all right?”
I couldn’t talk, I was still coughing. He handed me a can of Coke and I drank some, and that helped.
“So are you gonna go?” he asked.
I took another drag and this one sat better—the smoke settled amicably into my lungs. I held it there for a moment and let it out, feeling something else escape with it, like the ability to care.
“I dunno,” I said.
“I thought you were going to, like, discover a cure for leukemia or something. Fucking invent your own white blood cells.”
I took another pull and let it out slowly, and I felt an even greater release. My head started to empty, but my thinking cleared. “I’m not sure what I want.”
He nudged a rock with his foot. “Me either.”
“What are you doing next year?” I said.
He smiled. “Maybe going to Princeton.”
“You should.” We laughed at the idea—Weed, at Princeton. “You could join one of the dinner clubs,” I said.
“What the fuck is a dinner club?”
“I’m not sure. I think you have to be rich.”
“Do you have to wear a sports coat?”
“Probably.”
“That would be cool.” He stood tall and tugged on his denim jacket and lifted his chin, imagining himself in a sports coat. Which wasn’t that funny, but we laughed so hard there were puffs of smoke coming out of him. Then the euphoria died and we both became quiet, shy almost.
“Do you like that name—Weed?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why do you use it?”
“I don’t. It’s what other people call me. Even teachers, sometimes.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Charles.”
“Liar.”
“Fuck you, that’s my name.”
“I’m going to call you Charles from now on.”
“Charlie.”
“Okay, Charlie,” I said.
But the energy shifted then, and there was an awkwardness between us, one that wouldn’t go away. He looked over at the tennis courts, though there was nothing to see but some dead leaves swirling around in the wind, flying up against the fence and tumbling down. I handed him back the Coke and thanked him, and then I got in my car and drove away.
Pill was standing alone under a tree, thumbs hooked under her backpack. She was wearing her winter parka and beneath that, her nightie, a shimmery pink thing with horses on it. When she saw me she bolted to the car, jumped in and slammed the door.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s with the PJ’s?” She stared out the window. “You wanna talk about it?”
She didn’t answer. I started driving, and she was quiet the whole way, which wasn’t like her—usually she chattered pretty hard when I picked her up. When we got home I pulled the car in front of our house and killed the engine, but neither one of us got out.
“This morning I tried to make scrambled eggs,” she said. “To practice being a Sumo chef. But then Frankie woke up and she freaked out because of the fire.”
“Wait. Fire?”
“On the stove, the thingies where the fire comes out. She said I was too young to cook and she grounded me for a week and so I went outside and then she came out and started yelling at me, and she grounded me for a month, and I said I wanted a new mom, and she said ‘I don’t care.’” Pill’s lips started trembling, and her voice got shaky. “Then she threw my stuff at me and told me to walk myself to school or just stay outside and get eaten by wolves.”
Ahh, Pill.
Whatever lightness I had felt from the weed was now gone, and everything was impossibly heavy. Frankie had never known how to deal with Pill, even when she first came to us as a foster kid. I was in sixth grade when that happened. I arrived home from school one day, and there was this toddler I’d never seen before, standing on the couch in her diaper, hanging into the back cushions and looking out the window and bouncing. She saw me and froze, then she shot her arm out in a salute, like, Hail Cesar, so I did the same thing, Hail, Weird Baby, and she laughed and bounced harder, almost falling off the couch.
Her name was Princess. Her earlobes were infected, the skin swelling up around tiny green gems. I knew nothing about earrings, and of course Frankie did, but she couldn’t stand to deal with them, they were ‘too gross,’ so it fell on me to get them out, which I managed to do. Pill was patient about it. She sat motionless on a stool in the bathroom, mesmerized as I worked the little earrings free. But then the holes started oozing pus, so I tried to clean them with rubbing alcohol. It must have stung pretty bad because she screamed and hit me fast and surprisingly hard—I remember being impressed by that, how hard she could hit. I searched for her for a while before finding her under my bed, way back in the shadows. I got down on my stomach and scooted under.
“Hey,” I whispered. There was no response, just the sound of her raspy breathing. “Wanna see something funny?” I grabbed my throat and fake-strangled myself, sticking my tongue out, gasping and sputtering. A low, machine-gun laugh came at me from the dark, and I loved that laugh. Right away I decided she was my sister. Not officially, because she was still a ward of the state at that point, but in terms of how it felt. She was my sister.
Pill was gazing out her window toward the backyard, her lower lip trembling. “I don’t get to play outside today,” she said. She pulled her coat over her head and folded down over her knees.
“You sure you’d want to play outside, a day like today?”
The coat nodded.
It started to drizzle, a layer of gray slime accumulating on the windshield, obscuring the street, blurring the neighbor’s house and yard, where there was a lamppost surrounded by a big tire. In between the tire and the post was a bed full of plastic flowers, permanently blooming. Why? I wondered. Why plant plastic flowers in your yard and keep them there all winter? Did they think we would be duped? Amazing! Flowers that bloom in snowstorms! Or was it some kind of stubbornness, a refusal to acknowledge the shitty reality of winter? Either way, I hated it. I hated the plastic flowers, hated this town, this life.
That’s when the second clue appeared. I saw a long, shimmering string stretching from the front of my car up to the sky, disappearing into the clouds. It vibrated and went still. I had the sense that it was leading me off somewhere, away from Lost Nation, for my own sake and Pill’s, but also for something higher, we’ll call it destiny. It felt real to me now. My destiny was somewhere else—not in Iowa, not at Princeton. It was a place I hadn’t considered yet, a life I hadn’t imagined.
Maybe I was bullshitting myself, trying to attach a larger significance to what was really just a desperate attempt to escape. Maybe I was delusional. But at that time I believed the giant thread disappearing into the clouds was real, that it was a sign, and I started to believe there were forces at work beyond chemistry and physics, things that couldn’t be explained by science alone but were real, things that had the ability to affect the course of our lives if we clued into them. In that moment, I clued in. My senses fired and an electric current thrummed in my body.
I pulled into the drive. Pill popped out of her coat.
“Mom said you can’t park here.”
“I need you to pack some stuff. Clothes, toothbrush, a few toys.”
“Where are we going?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. But we’re not staying.”
“We’re leaving?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get my stuff!”
She opened the door and jumped out, and she ran toward the house, windmilling her arms. She tripped hard on the steps, but she pulled herself up like it was nothing, and she flew inside, the door banging shut behind her.
At the time, I believed I was doing the right thing. And I thought I was in control, creating the future I had envisioned. I didn’t know that I was about to start a journey that would, like Oedipus, involve killing my father and moving in with my mother. I didn’t know. How could I?
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