Blues for Zoey

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Blues for Zoey
© 2015 by Robert Paul Weston.

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First e-book edition © 2015

E-book ISBN: 9780738745046

Originally published by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., Toronto, 2014.

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For Anyone Who Plays—Anything

In the brightness of life
In the dimness of dreams
In Heaven, on Earth

It ain'
t what it seems

—Shain Cope

“Freudian Slap, Part 1”

1

This Story Is No
t a Mystery

This story is not a mystery. It's a puzzle. A bunch of oddly cut slices of cardboard, jumbled together in an unmarked box. How do you solve a puzzle? You dump the pieces on a table, spread them around in a way that makes sense (or seems to), and then, one by one, you start putting it all together. That's when the trouble starts.

The
re are a lot of pieces and nothing is what it seems, not when you're holding just one. Ho
w do you know which way is up? Is
that the blue of the
sea
or the blue of
the
sky
? To see the connections, you have to
put them in order. Piece by piece. M
oment by moment. It's true for puzzles
and—that summer—it was true for me, too.

If you're still following this lame puzzle metaphor, you may be wondering, What sort of pieces am I talking about? In this particular puzzle-slash-story, they would go something like this:

1. Fathers
   
2. Illness
   
3. Lies
   
4. Love
   
5. Money*
   
6. Murder
   
7. Music
   
8. Secrets
   
9. Sex
   
10. Sleep
    

That's the top ten
in alphabetical order (which is not to say the alphabet is going to help; it's me
rely convenient). Why the asterisk beside
Money
? Because even
though I might be tempted to say number nine is the most important piece of all, it's not. The most important
thing in this story is life's
other
major trip-up. Money. That summer, it ruled my life (and ruined it).

Which brings me to the worst problem of all. U
nlike a puzzle, life doesn't come in a neat little b
ox. There's no picture you can look at to tell you where
you're headed. Sometimes, you don't even know you
're doing a puzzle at all. Not until it's too late.

2

Th
e
F
i
r
s
t
T
im
e
I
Sa
w
He
r
,
Pa
r
t
1

It was the end of July, the
deadest time of summer, when Mr. Rodolfo saved money
by skimping on air-con at the Sit 'n' Spin. That would
be the laundromat where I worked pa
rt-time during the school year and full-time over the summer. If you've never had the pleasu
re of folding two hundred ratty towels for the semi-homeless men of the Emerson Center, here's a tip: don't. It sucks.

That da
y, the only do-it-yourselfer was an old lady at the back. She moved so slow, I worried she was on the verge of a stroke. She
kept dabbing her head with a handkerchief while leaning heavily on Ol
' Betty, the store's perpetually broken washer. (It was Sit 'n'
Spin policy to dump the floor swill down Ol
' Betty's gaping gullet whenever the floor was mopped.)

It was just after one i
n the afternoon. I know this because the Brothers had just
left with the Premium Service dry cleaning.
Premium Service meant your undies
were
scrubbed with chemicals in a factory space Mr. Rodolfo r
ented down by the lake. I'm not
sure if the Brothers were
genuine twins, but in their baggy workman overalls
, they were indistinguishable. Every afternoon, they
stalked in like a pair of thugs,
rarely saying a word to me, and
collected the Premium Service. We
so seldom interacted, I'd forgotten their actual names. Joe
and George, I think, but they could just
as well have been JJ and
Gonzo.

I was folding towel two-hundred-fifty-three-million-and-six (give or take) when guess who showed up?

Becky
.

She was wearing a baby-blue mini-tee and yoga pants, and I'll admit I got a momentary flashback, a semi-dirty one of us making out on her bedroom carpet. I hadn't seen her in over a month, not since school ended. We had been basically avoiding each other since March—the
elev
enth
of March, to be precise—which was when she dumped me.

“Kaz!”

She flapped her arm like crazy, as if I wouldn't notice her without a ferocious wave. “You know you forgot your jacket? Digby's been sleeping on it for, like,
months
!” (Digby was Becky's big, butter-colored Labradoodle.)

The jacke
t was a woolen, navy-blue peacoat, a hand-me-down I'd inherited when
Dad died. I had wanted it back, but I was too lazy-slash-chicke
n to go reclaim it. I wasn't all that fond of B
ecky's dad. He always seemed creepily proud
of me for dating his daughter. I expected
that sort of thing from Mr. Rodolfo,
but from Becky's own father? Creepy. I
had a strong suspicion he would have made fun o
f me for getting dumped.

“Thanks,” I said. “I was wondering where that was.”

“Now you know.”

Instead of handing me the jacket, she laid
it on the counter, possibly to avoid touching me.
I saw that what Becky had said was true. The coat
was indeed covered with the leftovers
of Digby's dog-balding.

“It must have been under there since, like, um …since … ”

“March,” I said. “The eleventh.”

“Thanks, Kaz. Way to hold a grudge.”

“O
nly a little one.”

The return of my coat got me thinking about Digby. Once upon a time,
I
was the one covered with the dog's unwanted hair. Not so much anymore, though.

Obviously.

3

A Side-Note
about Becky Leighton

She was the first girl I had sex with.

I was
her
first time too, incidentally. Call it a mutually beneficial exchange of virginity-loss. Unfortunately, that was all it was. Just the one time.
O
nce
.

After that, she dumped me and hooked up with my former—and obscenely wealthier—schoolmate Topher Briggs. Knowing Topher
(which I do), it's safe to say that
by the time summer started, Becky had garnered
a lot
more below-the-belt experience than I had.

Let's say, hypothetically, there was a
Becky versus Kaz leader board
. It would have looked something like this:

Kaz Barrett:
1
.

Becky Leighton:
10,000,002—with Topher Fuckin
g Briggs, who once-upon-a-time had been my friend,
back when Dad was alive and yo
u defined friend as somebody who farte
d into a pillow and smothered you with it a
t sleepovers; back when we could afford to live
in oh-so-rosy Rosemount, instead of oh-so-shitty Evandale.

If there's one thing I learned from Becky
Leighton, it's that what Mr. Dearborn
taught us in his doomed-from-the-start
health class is true: you
do
always remember your first time.

In my case, I remember not having a clue what I was doing. I remember being so ne
rvous my teeth were
actually chattering
. And I remember the worst
part, which was stabbing around in the dark.
Literally. Actually jabbing my hips around, hoping Little Mr. Kaz would instinctiv
ely know where he was supposed to go.

In my head, it all made
sense. Wouldn't a hundred thousand years of evolution make things wor
k all smooth-like? I figured two people could just get naked, press themselv
es together, and things would, you know,
slide into place
.

Yeah, well, not so much.

It was
humiliating. Becky suddenly went, “Wait! Stop! Not
there!
Here!
” At which point, she
reached down and took hold of Little Mr. Kaz
so she could demonstrate. This might have been a wise
course of action except for the fact that tugging gently-slash-helpfully on my unit was almost exactly like getting a hand job, something which, at that point, I was
way
more familiar with. Which of course meant it
was all over before it truly began. If you see what I mean.

But that
was okay. I was optimistic.
Don't worr
y
, I thought,
maybe the first time was a sort-of-halfway-in mega-fail, but me and Becky are pretty
solid. There'll be plenty more chances to
get it right.

Wrong.

Becky dropped me the next day, which does very little for a young man's burgeoning self-esteem.

If you ask Calen, he'll tell you Becky was just using me. He thought all she wanted was to figure out how the plumbing worked. Anybody would do, he told me. And I said, if that's true, then how come she didn't pick someone who
actually knew what he was doing
?!

“You're lucky,
” Calen informed me. “At least you went and did it already. Alana's making me wait until we go away to college
. That's, like, a year and a half from now!”

So why am I going on about Becky so much?

I don't know, to be honest. I guess maybe I want to lay down a little background and besides, she was there when it happened: when I first saw the Girl with the Dreads.