Blues for Zoey (13 page)

38

Val Mer Residences

We made out in the back of the cab. Zoey's skin felt smoother and thinner than anything I'd
ever touched. Or maybe it was just my imagination, an illusion of contrast, the way the roughness of her
dreads brushed the backs of my hands when I slid my fingers behind her ears. I expected to taste the lime-and-mango fr
uitiness of lip gloss (something like what Becky had worn), but Zoey smelled of something simpler, like hot bathwater or a glass of milk.

We were nearing the east
end of the city, where the buildings we
re more derelict and the streets emptier.

“Where are we?”

She sh
rugged, a little embarrassed. “This is my neighborhood.”

Vacant buildings stood like forgotten monuments. “Seems like a weird place to live.”

“Not e
verybody has a grand piano in the living room, you know.”

“That's not
what I meant. I mean, why so far east? Falcone
r's on the other side of the city. It doesn't seem very convenient, like for your dad.”

“
Oh, yeah, well, we started out with this pretty nice place, an apartment on campus, but … ” Zoey bowed her head and rifled thr
ough her giant denim purse. I thought she would come up with some memento, but she just kept rifling. “Turned out there was a problem with vermin. Bugs or rats or something. The whole
building was fumigated, so they were like, ‘come out here and take your pick
.' I think Falconer owns the land. They're planning to
build another college or something.”

“
Out here?
”

“I guess.”
Zoey stopped rifling and closed her purse. “How come y
ou're so interested in the landscape?”

“Just seems weird is all.”

When I turned away from the window,
Zoey's face was right there. Her big eyes were electric in the flash and flow of the street lights.

Then w
e were making out again—in the back of a taxi, in the gloomy shadows of warehouses and metalworks, rushing past the shipping ports of an endless black lake. It all seemed appropriate and (this may sound strange) kind of r
omantic.

After a couple turnoffs, we arrived at Val
Mer Residences, a two-story apartment block that nearly had a view of the lake if it weren't for the massive sugar refine
ry standing in the way. The apartments were two buildings connected in an L-shape. They sprouted from one corner of a fenced-in sandlot that might have once
been the bud of a residential development that had failed to blossom.

Half the
L
wasn't finished yet. It was just a naked shell, surrounded by scaffolds, wheelbarrows, and piles of gravel. I could see that the construction had been left unfinished for a long time. The wood was beginning to buckle, leaving everything slumped and crooked. Zoey led me toward the completed side of the building (thankfully).

“I think it's kind of charming,” she said.

“You do?”

“Sometimes you gotta
look
for what'
s beautiful; it's not right there on the surface.” She shrugged. “Beautiful means different things to different people
.”

I thought of how Becky and my boss
had thought Zoey was a freak when they first saw her, but how I thought something entirely different.

“Don't worry,” Zoey told me. “It's nicer on the inside.”

39

Water from a Fisherman

What do you think was in my head as Z
oey tugged me down the corridor toward her apartment? Making out some more? Her eyes?
Her hair? A blow job? Sex? What she was
wearing? What she was wearing
underneath
what she was wearing? Nope. None of that. I was thinking about Mr. Dearborn, my ex-health-class teache
r.

Let me explain.

From the moment I started at Ev
andale, Mr. Dearborn was my favorite teacher. He could do anything: math, English, chemistry
, social studies. Basically, he was just good at putting stuff in your head—and making it stick the
re. He believed people who were too into one subject cared more about information. True
teachers, he said—people who could teach anything—they were more interested in knowledge.
A
ll knowledge
.

Dearborn had this saying: “Information gets y
ou through a test, but it's knowledge that
gets you through life.” You might think this sounds sensible. It might ev
en sound like common sense. Ironically, however, this was precisely the idea that got Dearborn fired.

E
vandale High had a “Three Strikes and Yo
u're Out” policy. I'm not sure what baseball has to do with good behavior, but people think it sounds good, so they use it. I never expected them to use it on a teacher
.

Mr. Dearborn's three strikes went like this:

1. The Amy Handler Bad
Word Incident

This happened when Mr. Dearborn
judged the school's annual short story contest.
He awarded the grand prize to Amy for
this story about two sisters driving up to a cottage
and then fighting over a boy. The p
roblem was the thing was full—
brimming
—with novel examples of the worst profanities y
ou can think of.

There was some debate over whether or not Amy was deliberately trying to piss Mr. Dearborn off, but most people thought no, it was an honest story. All the details wer
e there. The way the older sister walked as if she was in heels, even when in Birkenstocks; how it felt to do a face-plant on the surface of a lake; how it felt to have your hear
t broken. (Plus, everybody knew that over the previous summer, Amy'
s sister had stolen her boyfriend.)

After the contest, Amy was supposed to read the story in front of the school, but she only got through two paragraphs before they switched off the mic. Afterward, Mr. Dearborn made his famous speech. “To a writer, there's no such thing as a bad word. Each one has a time, a place, a feeling. Taking words away from a writer is like taking wood from a carpenter, taking water from a fisherman. To a writer, the only
bad
words are the ones that aren't true.”

(Strike number one.)

2. The 17.3 Incident

Thi
s happened in a social studies class calle
d World Issues. Dearborn informed us that
the average age at which a
human being loses his or her virginity is 17.3. It wasn
't like he was encouraging us to go out and star
t screwing; he was merely quoting the result
s of an extensive and reliable stud
y. You can just imagine the volcanoes going off a
t the next PTA meeting. As for me,
I had no problem with the statistic
. I was proud to know that if you counte
d Becky—dubious, yes, but
if
you counted her—I was
months ahead of the curve.

(Strike number two.)

3. B
oys' Eleventh Grade Sex Ed Incident

With all this in mind, you have to wonder what they were thinking when they assigned Dearborn an eleventh grade boys' health class.

“Boys,” he said when our two-week sex-ed unit was almost up, “I'm beginning to fear I'm not doing you justice. S
ome of these are the same videos they showed me when I was your age. So I know from experience that when it came to some of the really crucial stuff,
very little of this helped.” He opened his briefcase. “Yes,
of course
it's important to know which di
rection an egg travels down a fallopian tube, but let'
s face it, unless you've got your heart set on becoming a gynecologist, a good deal of what you
really need to know happens …
on the
outside
. Which is why I brought this in.”

He held up a DVD. It was porn.

Well, it was
and it wasn't. Technically, yes, it was pornography
in that it was a film of two people having
sex, but there were no beefy, glowing-orange men, and the woman didn't have fake tits-ass-eyes-nails et cetera.

What
Dearborn brought in was different. The film had been p
roduced in Montreal by a group of regular people who were honestly trying to make what they called “educational e
rotica.” They were
definitely not
porn stars.
(The guy looked a bit like a shaved rat and the woman's breasts were floppily genuine.)

“Let's try to be mature about this,” Mr. Dearborn told us before he popped in the DVD. “There's a lot more to sex than rolling a condom on a banana.”

I know he was trying to do us some sort of weird favor, but think about it: watching porn with
your chemistry-slash-English teacher while he makes it
even more
squirm-inducing by standing beside the screen, offering helpful commentary.

Like:

“See what he's doing there?
Foreplay!
Highly recommended.”

Or:

“
Lube
. It's not just for after school when you lock y
ourself in the bathroom.”

Or:

“Notice how he holds the base of his penis to slide it in. It's like a lot of things in life: without a bit of guidance, you can end up anywhere.”

Yeah
, I thought,
already learned that one the hard way.

So yes, it was—without a doubt—the most awkward thing that had ever happened, but somewhere behind all the wincing and squirming, I was thinking what I'm sure a lot of us were thinking.

Best.

Class.

Ever.

(Also: strike number three.)

40

Bottom Drawer

Zoey unlocked the door to her apartment while I tried to remember everything Dearborn had taught me.

Inside, I expected shelves full of her father's books, hefty bricks about philosophy and
music theory. There weren't any
. There weren't even any bookshelv
es. The only furniture was a TV on a nightstand,
two caved-in recliners, and a kitchen table with mismatched wooden
chairs. The nearest thing to literature was a stack of
Sports Illust
rated
s on the floor beside the TV.

Zoey went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard. I saw that inside, there were only bottles, one each of vodka, rum, and Irish whiskey.

“What are you staring at?”

“It's not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don't know. Something different.”

She led me
over to the fridge, where she took out
a bottle of Coke, followed by a fifth of Captain Morgan spiced rum from the cupboar
d beside it. When the fridge door thunked shut, I spotted
a magnet printed with a familiar symbol. A cartoon daisy with the ex
clamatory words
Get Wellness!

“Beauhaven,” I said, tapping the magnet. “My mom goes ther
e.”

“Really? My dad, too. He's deep into the whole health-food, working-out thing. The
diet's okay, but I'm not into getting stabbed with needles.”

“Stabbed?”

“Acupuncture. My dad says it ‘keeps him sharp,' which is his idea of a joke.” She poured us rum-and-Cokes in huge
red tumblers. “If you're gonna stab me with a needle, I better be getting a vaccination or a tattoo.”

“Do you have any?”

“Tattoos? Just one.”

“Where?”

“Maybe I'll let you have a peek and maybe I wo
n't. First, tell me what you expected to see when you came in here.”

“More books, I guess.”

She laughed. “Why would you think—
oh!
I get it. You mean, like, because of my dad. The professor. He keeps all that stuff at his office at the college. Here, hold these.” She handed me the two cups and then picked up the bottles. “Lemme give you the grand tour.”

There was a hall off the entrance that led to a couple bedrooms and a bathroom.

“That's my dad's,” Zoey told me as we passed a murky room, the door open only a crack.

Zoey's bedroom was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the apartment, but it seemed more ali
ve, more lived-in, than the other rooms. The bed was unmade;
clothes were all over the floor; newspaper clippings and pictures from magazines
were pinned over a small desk. A torn poster
for Wild Blue Bounce covered one of the
walls, Veronica Heller standing front and center.

I was about to sit on the stool b
y the desk when Zoey stopped me.

“That'll wreck your back. Just sit on the bed.”

I wanted her to join me, but instead, she reclined on some pillows
on the floor. The big red cup sat in
the valley of her stomach.

We talked. I told her about my dad, what he was like and how he died. She told me about her mom leaving because she didn't dig her dad's lifestyle.
Moving all the time, college to college to university, trying to nail
down a decent teaching gig. Her mom couldn't take it.

I wanted to
tell Zoey about Mom's illness, but I
didn't. I had vowed I wouldn't tell
people, and I stuck to it. (Well, sort of.
Apart from the people I'd already told.) All I said was that my mom had once been a musician, but that she lost her job and now she worked in a library. It was what I told most people. “S
he'll go back to the orchestra eventually,” I added.

“That why you work all the time? For the mobster?”

“No, we get money from my dad's life insurance. My mom's pretty practical when she wants to be. She didn't take the lump sum, so we get regular checks. Oh, and I already told you. He's not a mobster. He's just a guy with a dry-cleaning business.”

“That's what they all say.”

“I work there because I'm saving up.”

“For what?”

“For school.”

Zoey rolled her eyes. “
Boring
.”

“What? Why?”

“Eve
rybody and their pet llama saves for school. I
t's like a cult. Why doesn't anybody save up for something
interesting
?”

“Like a lawn full of Venus flytraps?”

“At least it's interesting.”

“How're you supposed to get a good job if y
ou don't—”

“Look up
boring
in the dictionary, yo
u'll find a picture of a good job.” Something about the way she said this made her sound olde
r. To top it off, she drained her glass
(while I was only halfway to the bottom of mine). I felt insulted, partly because she'd just told me I was boring, partly because she had this older voice she could call up whenever she wanted, and partly because she was a better drinker than me.

“How much?” she asked me suddenly.

“What?”

“How much have you saved?”

I wanted to impress
her. “A little over ten thousand dollars.
”

She lowered the glass from her lips. “Not bad.”

“My last girlfriend dumped me because she said I was cheap. Maybe, but c'mon, that's a lot of cash, right?”

“I can't believe you saved
all that working at a laundromat.”

I had
achieved my goal; I'd impressed her.
I took a big, bold gulp of my drink, stupidly forgetting
it wasn't just Coke. Halfway down, the burn
of rum made me gag. I spat it out in
a foamy gush—all over the bed, all over
the floor, all over me.

“
Kaz! What the hell?!
”

“Sorry! I
'll clean it up!” I jumped to my feet, but
I had no idea where to go.

Zoey grabbed a ratty s
weater off the floor and started mopping. She did
the floor, the bed, and finally me. She dabbed at my chest.
My stomach. My belt …

“Is that cola-puke on your crotch or are you just glad to see me?”

It was painfully
obvious what was happening. I say
painfully
because it
's true. (Getting a boner in a pair
of skinny jeans isn't the easiest thing in the
world.) Zoey's dabbing morphed into—well, let's call it more of a
rub. Her hands were gentler than Becky's. Something I appreciated.

“
Wait,” she said, once my jeans were around my knees. “I've got something for you.”

My head was spinning. “Like
a gift
? Right now?”

She pushed me toward the closet. “In there.”

I stumbled out of my pants and opened the doors. Inside was an old armoire.

“Bottom draw
er,” Zoey said.

As I reached down, I thought:
condoms. This
girl thinks of everything!
But when I
pulled open the drawer, I saw something else.

A gun.

A big black revolver, lying on top of folded clothes.

“
Fuck
,” I whispered.

“Yep,
” said Zoey, her older voice returning. “That's one way to put it.”

A million ideas flooded my head (like a fizzy spew of rum and
Coke). A gun? For what? Why did she want to
give it to me? I remembered how her dad had sounded on the phone. Angry, maybe e
ven violent. Wasn't there a movie
like this? Some dumb kid gets a blow job in return for killing a guy? Is that what Zoey wanted me to do? Kill her father?

(Needless to say
, propositions of murder make for a
serious
boner-kill.)

I
cradled the gun on the flat of my palm like
a dead budgie. “I have no idea what this means,” I said, turning around, “but I think you've made a mistake here, becau—”

I stopped mid-sentence because Z
oey was practically naked. She was lying on the bed in her unde
rwear (the famous pink leopard-print bra, with panties to match). It would have been the sexiest thing
that had ever happened to me if only the univ
erse hadn't introduced
a big fucking gun
into
the equation.

Zoey sat up. “What the hell?! Put that down!”

I did. It
made a deep, echoing
THUNK
on the wood of
the armoire, then rocked back and forth.

“You're not wearing any clothes,” I said stupidly.

“Yeah, I sorta noticed. I didn't think you'd turn around with a
fucking gun
.”

“I didn'
t think you wanted to show me one!”

“
I didn't!
” She blushed all over and scrambled into a T-shirt.

“Then why was it just sitting in—”

“It's not even mine!” She stomped over and stuffed the gun back into the drawer. “It's my dad's.”

“He carries a gun?”

“No, of course not. He's not here. If he
carried a gun
, he'
d have it with him now, wherever he is. He just keeps it in the house.”

“What does he need a gun for?”

Zoey pointed out the window. “Maybe you haven't noticed, but it's not like we live in the best neighborhood.”

Even worse than mine
, I thought.

“
He
puts it in my dresser sometimes,” she explained.
“Like when he leaves me alone for a night. B
ut then he doesn't tell me where, or which drawer.
He's an idiot.”

“Wait—so why did you want to give it to me? If it's your da
d's?”

“Not the
gun
, stupid. I meant
those
.” She pointed to the back of the drawer, where a box of condoms peeked out from under a folded s
weater.

I'd been right; I just hadn't seen them.
Stupid!
But maybe there was still a chance …

“So, um … you think … ?”

Zoey shook her head. “I'd say the moment passed. But don't worry, I'm more pissed at my dad than at you.”

The gun seemed to bother Z
oey in a deeper, more complicated way than it bothered me. I
was freaked out, but as
long as it stayed out of sight from then on, I was fine. For
Zoey, though, I sensed there was a bigger picture she didn't want to tell me about.

She went
back to the bed, her body slumped like the empty skeleton that made up the building
's other half. “You should go home.”

I tried to accept this. “Yeah, well, I gotta open up the laundromat tomorrow, so … ”

“So you better get going.”

I told her to text me if she was in the neighborhood. Maybe we could hang out again. She said she would, but I wasn't sure if she meant it.

Out on the street, waiting for the streetcar to take me back in the opposite direction, I thought,
I bet tha
t gun will be the craziest thing I
see all week
.

I was wrong.
The next morning, when I went into wo
rk, something even crazier was waiting
for me.