Good Kids: A Novel (3 page)

When I came back, my lungs full of silver air, my skin red and warm, I looked at my father with wonder, reading in his chair. How could he look the way he always had, even though he had kissed a person not his wife? I wanted to scoop up a snowball and throw it at his head, if only to catch him off guard, dent his shell. I needed to know: Were he and Nancy Dunn screwing?

No matter what he had done, he had a talent for secrecy. He sat with a bowl of ice cream, his first glass of wine for the evening, his eighth or ninth military history of the year—he never tired of wars, though he hadn’t been in one and professed hatred of them. He saw me staring. “If I keep eating like this, and you keep working out, I won’t be able to murder you, once I start to feel threatened by you,” he said. He smiled, warmly. “You’ll just outrun me.” He returned to
Scourge of Dunkirk
.

I climbed the two stories to my renovated room in the attic, showered with conditioner, cranked out four push-ups, and took my clothes off in front of the mirror. I felt I could see myself become less revolting as I became more and more interested in being devoted to someone. And now that there was something unrevolting to give, I wanted to give it. I stretched my arms out in either direction and lolled my head to one side, imagining myself on a cross.

I wanted to give what I had to Khadijah, of course. Part of it was the way she looked and the way she carried herself. But it was also that a small piece of me was close to a small piece of her
in a way I had never been close to someone, because of what we had seen.

Satisfied my father was stationary for the evening, I slunk to his study, in my pajamas, and rifled through his desk. It was the nicest piece of furniture we had. We didn’t have a lot of money; we’d been to Europe once, to Paris, and my father had cursed every time the bill came for lunch. The desk was a gift from an entertainment lawyer he knew from the Harvard Lampoon. Made of black wood, it worked like a drawbridge; you turned a little brass key and eased the work surface down on brass hinges, revealing six black drawers, each brass-knobbed and coated on the inside with mauve felt.

There was nothing of significance in any of them. A magnifying glass, an unopened letter from the Democratic Socialists of America, a roll of tape with no tape left on it, little mauve strands clinging to the translucent circle. In one drawer that was otherwise empty, there was an unused postcard. I flipped it over; the picture side was a photograph of Emily Dickinson’s house, in nearby Amherst, taken from the street. I thought about this a little while, and slipped the postcard in my pocket.

On Monday, during study hall, I wrote Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn a note on the postcard. “My dad HATES the Emily Dickinson house. He says it’s an ahistorical tourist fetish. Does your MOM like it?” The capitalization of
hates
might have been hyperbole, but he
had
called it a tourist fetish once, and though he hadn’t really called it ahistorical,
ahistorical
was a word he applied with derision to many things other people liked, like
Schindler’s List
and Mel Gibson’s version of
Hamlet
. I slipped the postcard through the gills of Khadijah’s locker.

It materialized in my own locker the next day. A message was written on it in a large, loopy script that must have been Khadijah’s: “Found in my mom’s office @ work.” A twice-folded sheet of graph paper was attached with an apple green paper clip.

I’d deduced that Nancy Dunn was an art historian of some talent from the fact that my father deigned to kiss her, but I was still awed by what I saw. On the graph paper was a time line,
untitled, drawn with a fine, black pen, ferociously graceful, the cursive you’d think would flow from one of Nancy’s dark hands, with their skeletal fingers. It might as well have traced the development of pottery in Mesopotamia, or perspective in European painting. But its subject was a series of local outings.

At the beginning, on the left edge of the black horizontal line, there was a perfect miniature architectural drawing of a greenhouse. Beneath it, a caption: “Botanic Garden of Smith College.” The next item, two inches to the right, was a little millstone, filled in with black and perfectly round. Beneath the millstone, in the same indestructible, filament-thin block letters of the caption previous: “Book Mill Used Books, Montague, MA.” Next was the Sunderland Pet Shelter, illustrated with a litter of lithe kittens, who bared claws at each other in Darwinian conflict as they tumbled across the bottom of the page; then, a movie screen that emitted thick, black rays of light and displayed a title I didn’t understand:
La règle du jeu
. It was at the terminus of the line that Nancy had drawn a picture of the Emily Dickinson Homestead, its balcony framed by identical trees.

Outside the social studies classroom, I caught Khadijah’s shoulder. For a moment, our eyes met and we passed something back and forth, a mix of elation and panic. Then we remembered we were surrounded by our peers and assumed postures of ironic detachment and bemusement.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I’m still not persuaded. But thank you.”

“Neither am I,” said Khadijah. “So.” We turned in opposite directions and walked away, backpacks bouncing, stupidly fast.

The time line became the keystone of our investigation. It turned otherwise innocuous objects into proof; it was what allowed us to settle the matter in our minds.

“Dad,” Rachel called from the kitchen that evening, “are we getting a sweet-natured, mixed-breed sheepdog whose behavior shows very mild signs of puppyhood trauma, but who will blossom under the care of a firm but gentle master?”

“Who wouldn’t blossom under one of those, honey?” My
father swiped the Sunderland Pet Shelter flyer from her hands. “Daddy was using that as a bookmark. Why did you take it from Daddy’s book? You should try to keep a respectful distance from your daddy’s things. My own daddy, good Irishman, would have gone somewhat apoplectic if you had appropriated a bookmark like that.”

“I just wanted to see if the book had Holocaust pictures.” She was at the peak of a one-sided carnage phase.

“Your old dad went to Sunderland for a bike ride and stopped to look at the dogs. You know how much I’d love to get you one, but we have to consider your mother’s allergies.”

At school the next morning, I ran to Khadijah as she hopped off the bus. “My dad took home a picture of a dog from the shelter,” I said. “You were right. It’s a definite thing.”

What we’d been doing had come to resemble a game so closely that I was surprised when Khadijah’s face collapsed and she covered her eyes with her hands. When she withdrew them, she was twitching. Her brow wrinkled. Her mouth puckered. Her cheeks assumed an alien roundness. She was trying to hold it together, like she had a broken wrist.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say it like it was good news.” But it was too late. She signaled forgiveness with a wave and spun into the crowd marching through the green double doors.

We were in almost the same location that afternoon, just after the final bell, when she appeared at my side. Her eyes were red, her face was calm.

“Come with me,” she said. “We’re going to the Thing in the Woods.”

The Thing in the Woods was a rusted wheel that must have once belonged to a landscaping vehicle. It sat in a fairy ring of mashed cigarettes and glittering bottle glass. Residual snow lay in patches on the brown grass, like mold on bread.

Khadijah drew two sheets of paper, the same graph paper her mother had used for the illustrated time line, from a pocket of her three-ring binder. I considered for a second whether the chart could have been a forgery of Khadijah’s, but I knew that
her draftsmanship was not as delicate as Nancy’s; the person who could make those inky kittens dart and swipe would not have drawn as geologic a pineapple as Khadijah’s. Khadijah’s handwriting, too, was different from the handwriting on her mother’s time line, larger, loopier, more arabesque.

She’d written: “I, Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn, will never cheat on anyone. If I’m in a relationship and I want to be with someone else, I will either wait and see if it changes or I will break up with the person I’m with before I do anything. I will not be an asshole and just cheat on them. If I think about doing it, I will remember this moment, now.” The other sheet of graph paper had the same vow written on it, only with my name at the beginning instead of hers.

She took the sheet with her name, knelt in the grass, and held it to the side of the rusted wheel. She took a blue ballpoint pen from her pocket and signed. Watching me closely, she offered the pen.

I knelt beside her in the grass. I pressed the paper against the rough surface of the wheel and put down my name in stilted, overly slanted cursive, the first time I signed my name rather than wrote it. Facing each other on our knees, we shook hands.

“Here’s my question,” I said, dusting off my shins as we walked away. “If they’re into each other, if they make each other so happy, why don’t they get divorced and be with each other? People don’t hold it against you if you get divorced in Wattsbury.”

She folded the sheets of graph paper, creased the fold, and handed me mine. “Because we exist.”

I
n the days after the vow at the Thing in the Woods, I thought of the darkness under the table at Gaia, with the light that snuck under the kente cloths. I wanted more of Khadijah. I especially wanted more of Khadijah in hiding places. But I thought it might be better to wait to initiate further contact until after I had made myself less ugly. I ran every night, and lifted my father’s boxed, multivolume Churchill biography over my head, watching my insect forearms in the mirror, waiting for them to change.

I monitored Khadijah in class. We had other star students, but Khadijah was a person conditioned exclusively for school, for this activity and no other. When she raised herself from her desk and took the floor to deliver a presentation, she came into an intellectual inheritance. She became a person who was not who she usually was. She became, I now understood, her mother.

She must have given her speech about ancient writing to Nancy several times, rehearsed it to excess, before she gave it to our class.

“Before the development of the alphabet,” she almost shouted, in Nancy’s clear, high voice, “a particular logogram had to depict a particular object, a particular object always signified the same concept. Alphabets enabled the meaning of characters to shift, depending on context.” She seemed to have memorized every sentence, every syntactical gambit.

It was unusual for a tenth grader at Wattsbury Regional to speak like this. Most academic parents nodded to the idea of meritocracy by concealing their handiwork, helping their children translate the ideas they’d given them for their schoolwork into plebeian English. The baldness of the parental involvement here was notable. But the truly remarkable thing was Khadijah’s composure. It was as if Nancy had not only dictated the content of her presentation but inhabited her the moment she rose to speak.

“. . . and therefore the creation of new words, an entirely new means of communication. Characters that had once been static in their meaning gained the ability to shift, taking on different meanings depending on their location among other characters.”

The visual aids she’d constructed were larger, I suspected, than cuneiform tablets. With the madness of an artist, she had created an exhibit that reached beyond the demands of the assignment. She’d decided that Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek lettering each deserved a monolith made from four conjoined sheets of extra-large black poster board. When she was done speaking like her mother, she shouldered the massive charts and returned to her seat, her arms full, her head obscured. She leaned the time lines against her desk, and I studied them from across the room. At each notch, there was an empire’s outline, or a glyph, or the sketched face of an ancient despot. They were dark and chunky with effort. They were imitations of Nancy’s art, drawn by a hand that couldn’t move like Nancy’s hand.

• • •

The following Thursday, we had the day off from school to participate in the ABC Walk, which benefited the ABC House.
ABC
stood for A Better Chance. The ABC House was an old Victorian in downtown Wattsbury where poor black and Latino boys from New York City came and lived for four years, so that they could attend Wattsbury Regional. The method of collecting donations was to go door to door pledging to walk ten kilometers through the woods if your neighbor would give you ten dollars. Sophomores wound through the Robert Frost Conservation Center as a cold rain sprinkled the birches. Khadijah walked with two
other girls fifty feet ahead of me and my friends—I could see her scrunchie, apricot today, through white branches.

I was walking with my father’s backpack held in front of me, bouncing against my knees. I’d left my own backpack at school the day before, so my father had told me to take his from the floor of the bedroom closet. Halfway through the hike, the social studies teacher placed in charge of us cupped his hands around his mouth and announced lunch. Rooting for a bottle of water, my hand closed around a minibar bottle of Sutter Home wine.

Burbling, abundant love for my father flooded my heart. I unscrewed the top as we sat on stones.

“You can have some of the wine my father gave me,” I whispered to my two friends, the straight-backed, dark-haired son of a Spanish literature professor in immaculate corduroys and the slightly obese son of an acupuncturist. “Just be cool about it, or people will freak out and tell on us.”

They each took a substantial gulp. We had a conversation about whose father was chiller about wine. After I’d wolfed my meatball marinara from Subway, I searched all the pockets and compartments in the backpack clinging to the hope my father had included a Subway cookie. In a pocket within a pocket, my hand closed around an unfamiliar form.

I drew out what looked like a hard candy imported from Europe. It was a round object in thick golden wrapping, with tiny writings on the side and the gleam of an elite continental sweet. I was even prouder of my father now; here was further evidence of his good taste.