Californium (20 page)

O
n Saturday night, me and Keith tell my mom we're going to the library. I put on my Yankees jacket, stuff the periodic table cards in my back pocket, and grab my backpack, only there isn't a single book in there, just my Packy jacket and our new flyers. We actually go to the library and quiz each other for about half an hour; then we go to Keith's to drop off our backpacks and get ready for the party. About nine, we sneak down my cul-de-sac on the opposite side of the street to get to Astrid's. Her driveway is filled with cars, three wide and three deep, spilling out into the street, where even more cars are curled around the bend. It really is Ted Three.

Me and Keith knock at the front door and stand there for five minutes before Keith just opens it. Music blares from the living room stereo, but the room is totally empty. We walk through to the kitchen and it's senior city around the kitchen table: Sergio Ortiz (still with his clothes on), Ted, a couple guys from Filibuster, and Kylie Smith sitting on Petrakis's lap. They're playing
quarters and drinking beer from plastic cups, except for Kylie, who has a wine cooler.

“Hey, little dudes,” Petrakis says. “What'cha got there?”

Keith holds out the stack of flyers and Petrakis grabs half of them. Kylie leans into his chest and they read one together. The new flyer is a big picture of Treat's head and it looks like he's got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, only it's not a cigarette. If you look close, it's actually a picture of a white United Airlines jet with the wings missing and the plane smoked down to ashes so it only reads
ted.
That's the
fuck you
part of the flyer.

Kylie points the plane out to Petrakis and he says, “Oooooh”; then she hands flyers around the table.

“There's still going to be free beer,” I say.

Ted's looking at the plane. “Why does it say that, Ted Airlines?”

Sergio hands a couple flyers to the guys from Filibuster. “Check it out,” he says, excited. “Ted's got his own airline.”

“That kicks ass,” one of the other guys says.

Ted looks around and sees everyone looking at the flyers and nodding. “Totally,” Ted says. “This will be epic.”

Petrakis points at the glass sliding door to the backyard. “The keg's out there, little dudes.”

.

The patio's swarming with people, but it's easy to spot Astrid by the keg. Her hair's up on one side, tight with pink flower pins that match her lacy socks. She's got a giant hoop earring on that side and just a little diamond on the other. She's huddled with two
other girls, one I don't think I've ever seen before at school and the other is Lori, the girl who changed our first flyer and made all the copies.

Lori is going on and on about a girl named Theresa and how she's upstairs right now and “thinking about actually calling him. Can you believe that?”

“I can't,” Keith says, and all three girls look at him.

The girl we don't know grins. Lori rolls her eyes and turns back to Astrid. “What should we do?”

“You know how she gets,” Astrid says.

Lori's hands fly out. “I know. He's probably coming anyway, so why—”

The third girl holds her hand up, stopping Lori. “Who are these little boys, Astrid?”

Astrid turns around. “This is my neighbor, Reece, and his friend.”

“Keith,” Keith says.

Lori looks like she couldn't care less, like she might say,
Yes, it's terribly boring to meet you.
“Anyway,” she says.

Astrid gives Lori a
Be nice
glare. “Guys, this is Lori—”

We've always known who Lori is because she's a cheerleader, but Keith says, “The Xerox girl,” and holds a new flyer out for her.

Lori takes the flyer and kind of bulges her eyes at Astrid for a second, like,
Did you really tell them it was me?

Astrid doesn't react. She just keeps on going with the introductions. “And this is—”

“Sascha,” the girl next to Lori says. And now that I have an excuse to really look at her, I know I've never seen her before. If there's a cute, brown-haired, green-eyed girl at your school who
is only as tall as a freshman but has the body of a senior, and her name is weird, you remember her.

“Sascha?” Keith says.

She looks at Astrid. “Is my name not Sascha?”

Astrid waits a second, then nods along with a “Yes.”

Sascha puts her hand out flat, palm down, to Keith. “Sascha.”

I think she wants Keith to kiss it or something but he sticks out two fingers spread real wide and grabs Sascha's hand. “Scissors cuts paper.”

She pulls her hand back and laughs and it makes the giant hoop in her left ear swing around a little. Then I see the little diamond in her right ear.
That's
who found Astrid's other earring. I nudge Keith but he's staring so hard at Sascha he just absorbs it like rain in the ocean.

Astrid says they need to get upstairs and Lori agrees. “Reece,” she says, “can you do me a favor? If you see anyone coming out here to pee, can you tell me who?”

“Check,” I say and can't believe
that
is what came out of my mouth.

“You're sweet,” Astrid says and heads inside with Lori right behind her.

Sascha steps behind them, sticking out her left hand and letting a couple fingers glide across Keith's chest as she walks by, “See you later, Scissors.” She looks at me and lightly tugs a flyer out of my hand. “Thank you, neighbor.”

The door is barely shut before Keith's in my face. “Did you see that? Oh my God. What do I do?”

“How should I know? Did you hear me? ‘Check.' I could have said, ‘No problema,' or ‘You got it.' But ‘Check'? I'm such a nerd.”

Keith gets a cup, fills it with beer, and gulps it halfway down. He fills a cup for me, fills his up again, and we hand out flyers to everyone on the porch before going back inside.

.

The kitchen is packed now, chairs pulled all around the table as people play quarters and other people stand behind them, cheering or awwww-ing every shot. Ted's digging through the refrigerator, getting ready to make his famous bacon quesadillas, and Sergio has his shirt all the way unbuttoned.

Behind me, some guy snaps his fingers. “Hey, Mr. President. A flyer.”

It's van Doren. He's sitting on the kitchen counter, legs crisscrossed and a bottle of Gatorade between them. I give him one and then anyone in the kitchen who doesn't have one suddenly says, “Me too.”

We get through the kitchen and back to the empty living room. We could leave now, but Keith says maybe we should get another beer. His is empty, but mine's still full. “Well, we should give away all the flyers before we leave,” Keith says. He looks at the staircase. “Are you sure Sascha got one? Maybe I should go up there and check.”

“If you want to,” I say, but he doesn't. Instead, we sit down on the floor by the stereo and start going through the albums spread across the carpet. There's Adam and the Ants, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the Go-Go's, the bands cool girls like. And even though there's an Air Supply album, there's also some punk tapes: Adolescents, Agent Orange, and Black Flag.

Keith can't stop staring at the cover of the Cars album
Candy-O
because the cartoon girl lying on the car is pretty much naked.

“She's not real,” I say.

Keith says, “I know. But if I was Fred from
Scooby-Doo . . .”
He taps the cartoon picture right in the crotch and his eyes get real big. “Forget Daphne.”

The album that's been playing ends and there's a bunch of shouts from the kitchen for more music. It scares me, like I've been caught with a
Playboy
or something, so I play it off like I was just about to put on the Cars album anyway. As soon as the
hiss, click, click,
disappears into “Let's Go,” we hear cheers in the kitchen and me and Keith become the unofficial deejays of the party. And even though Keith's spending most of the time looking for albums with more half-naked girls on the covers or on the sleeves, we're doing a good job of changing albums after every song and handing flyers to anyone who comes through the front door. We've got the next three songs picked out and are studying a new stack of albums when a pair of legs wrapped in tight pegged jeans appears right behind Keith. Sascha leans down and says, “Hey, Scissors, want to help me win a bet?”

Keith doesn't ask what the bet is. He just stands up, says, “Sure,” and lets her lead him up the stairs without looking back.

I'm not sure if I should be happy or scared for Keith, but then Sergio sort of staggers into the living room, naked except for the shirt tied around his head. “She got any Buzzcocks? I need to dance, man. And piss.”

He staggers off into the hallway. I start digging through the
tapes, so afraid he'll come back that as soon as I see the Dickies, I throw that on and figure it's close enough.

There's a couple guys playing pool in the family room, and over in the corner is the bar me and my dad built. It looks really good with a little studio light shining down. The shelves are filled with all these blue and brown bottles that have ships and maps and swirls on their labels.

I squat down behind the bar to check out the mini-fridge Mr. Thompson put in. “I already checked,” someone says. “No wine coolers.” I stand up and there's a guy about my height right across the bar. He's got white-blond hair, pretty flat and plain, not at all punk, and an English Beat T-shirt. “Can you make drinks?”

“Sure,” I say, because Uncle Ryan taught me how to make him rum and Cokes one Thanksgiving. “We got any ice?”

The guy's gone and back in a flash. He slides a bowl full of ice across the bar and hops onto a stool. “Set me up, barkeep.”

Carey, who tells me it is a guy's name too, like Cary Grant, knows even fewer people at the party than me. I slide the rum and Coke over to him and he says he needs a coaster so he doesn't stain the bar. You'd think there'd be a few coasters but there aren't, so I pull a flash card out of my back pocket and toss it onto the bar.

Carey slides it under his drink. “What's this?”

It's Na. “Sodium,” I say.

Carey takes a drink and nods. “I get it, because there's soda in the drink and it's kind of sweet.” He finishes it off. “Sodi-mmmmm. What else you got?”

I toss out another card: Ne. “Neon.”

He scans the bottles over the bar. “You'll need a tall, skinny glass, orange juice, annnnnnd, there, that, the lime vodka.”

I mix the drink and set it on the card. “This one's on the house.”

He laughs like it's the best joke ever, then drinks the whole thing in a gulp and tells me to toss another card out. We invent a bunch of drinks, putting vodka and ruby-red cranberry juice together for rubidium and Captain Morgan with a lot of different things, trying to make neptunium.

He asks why I'm not having any and I make up a story about my parents busting me last week and having to lay low awhile.

“I've been there. But I'm staying at Marc's tonight, so it's no biggy.”

It takes me a second. “Marc van Doren?”

“Yeah,” Carey says. “He's my cousin.”

I make Carey a Krypton, which we figure should have just about everything in it, and he tells me more about van Doren than anyone at school must know, how recruiters really are calling him about track scholarships and how the one he wants most is UCLA.

You might think it's not punk rock to run track. Treat didn't think so until we saw van Doren at his locker one day right before practice. His shorts went down to his knees, his socks were black, and he had on a band T-shirt with the sleeves cut off: the Cramps. Carey says that van Doren always wears a band T-shirt under his uniform too. “Always the Misfits.”

“That's the ‘Misfit Mile'?”

“Yep,” Carey says. He tells me van Doren took seventh at states last year, which is why schools have been recruiting him. “Seventh in California is like first in forty-nine other states.”

When Ted and Sergio come over to the bar and ask me to make them a drink, Carey says, “Get a Krypton. Nobody makes them as good as this guy.”

“Super,” Sergio says and laughs.

Carey laughs too and gets up. “Must . . . get to . . . bathroom. Need to . . . release . . . Kryp-ton . . . from system.”

Ted and Sergio hang out and ask me a bunch of questions about DikNixon. They promise to show up for the party. Ted says he'll make bacon quesadillas for everyone and other than Sergio being totally naked, they're pretty normal guys. I'm having so much fun I don't realize Carey's been gone awhile until I head to the kitchen for more ice.

In the living room, van Doren has Carey around the waist and leaning on his shoulder as they walk real slow toward the front door. “You do this?”

“He was fine a few minutes ago.”

“Get the door.”

I sprint past them and open the front door. As they step through, Carey loses his balance a little and lets go of van Doren, stumbling in slow motion until he crash-lands on the front lawn and splays out like it's a king-size bed.

Van Doren pushes me out the door. “I'll get his arms. You get his feet.”

Carey's so limp and oozy he's hard to control, but we finally get him over to van Doren's Squareback Volkswagen and stuff him into the backseat. Van Doren says to wait by the car while he runs in the house. A minute later, he tosses kitchen towels to me and says, “If he yaks in my car, you're cleaning it up. Now, get in.”

We take off, out of the cul-de-sac and onto Yorba Linda Boulevard. Van Doren is silent and the radio is off. We wind down Imperial Highway, through some hills, then onto a freeway. We go
west on the 91 for a few minutes, past the 55, then the 57. The numbers don't mean anything to me until we merge onto the 5 north and I see
Los
Angeles
on the sign. “Where are we going?”