Me, My Elf & I (10 page)

“What’s Googling?” I ask, imagining some kind of fancy, high-powered binoculars.

“Jeez, and you wonder why I think you grew up in a hole in the ground. Come here, I’ll show you.” He picks up his laptop and flops down on his bed, where we can sit side by side on top of his messy covers. After typing in some words, a screen comes up with the word “GOOGLE” in colorful letters across the top of the page. He keys my dad’s name into a little box, then a huge list appears with “Drake Addler” highlighted in bright blue over and over. “You can click on any of these Web pages and read about your dad,” he tells me.

“Whoa,” I say. “That’s so weird. How does the computer know so much about my dad?”

“Because he’s kind of famous,” says Ari.

I bump him with my elbow. “No, he’s not. You’re teasing me again.”

“Yeah, Zeph, he is.” Ari turns toward me and flaps his arms around as he talks superfast about my dad. “I mean not like totally famous. I wouldn’t like him if he were. But he’s got a huge underground following. I’m talking humungous, which is so much cooler than being popular because your record label paid a zillion dollars for your CD to be on an iTunes download list.”

“Why do you have to go underground to follow him?” I ask.

“I mean secret.”

“But it’s all over the computer.” I point to the screen.

Ari drags his fingers through his hair. “Okay, not secret, but not mainstream. You know, he’s on an indie label and he still tours by van and plays small clubs but he has a lot of fans.”

“Really?” I ask.

“Yes, really.” Ari drops back against the wall behind the bed as if explaining all of that exhausted him. “And I want to be just like him. My career, I mean.” He repositions the computer on his lap. “Here, check out some of these sites, you’ll see what I mean.”

I move closer to Ari’s side and roll my finger over the little black ball at the bottom of the keyboard (which Ari calls a mouse for some strange reason). I click on a Web site. Up pops my dad on a stage with his guitar strapped across his body. “Wow,” I say as I study the picture. He’s wearing a short ochre-colored tunic with bright red embroidery that my mom made and soft buckskin pants and boots. His hair has come loose from his normally tidy ponytail and whips across his open mouth as he sings. I look more closely at the picture, trying to find a glimpse of my older brother, Grove. I think I see one of his arms and his foot off to the right side.

“I miss them,” I say to Ari and lay my head against his shoulder. “My mom and Willow are great, but I’m really close to my dad.”

“God, seriously? I wish my dad would skip town every once in a while. He’s always here. The man’s never heard of a business trip.”

“Mine’s gone too much.” I realize then that I haven’t hugged my dad in over a week. “Every time he calls, he can talk for only a minute. He has no idea what’s going on in my life. And he’s the only one in my family who gets why I want to be here and go to school and try new things. He would be so excited about the audition.”

“But aren’t you used to it by now? I mean, isn’t he gone all the time?”

“He used to go on the road before we moved, but that was different. Everything was familiar at home and we were with all our family and friends, so having him gone was no big deal. Here, though, when Grove and Dad are gone, it feels like there’s a big empty hole in our house.”

“Don’t fall in!” Ari says with a snicker.

“What?”

“The big hole in your house.”

I jab Ari in the side. “You’re as funny as a snakebite,” I tell him, but I’m laughing.

“Want to hear him sing?” Ari clicks onto another page and my dad’s mellifluous, deep voice fills up the room.

“Ugh, I hate this song. It’s so dramatic.” I stand up on my knees beside Ari and I sing along to “Raven Call,” exaggerating my dad’s voice. “And the RAVEN, watching SILENTLY, wings beating HUM and THRUM!” I stop singing. “What’s ‘hum’ and ‘thrum’ anyway? That’s so annoying.”

“Some people think the hum and thrum means a beating heart,” Ari tells me. “That maybe your dad is referencing Poe.”

“What’s a poe?” I ask, flopping back down beside him.

“As in Edgar Allan. The poet? The guy who wrote ‘The Raven’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’? Tell me you know Edgar Allan Poe!”

“I’ve heard of him,” I say. “But I’m sure my dad hasn’t.”

“Of course he has!” Ari nearly yells, but he’s laughing, too.

“It’s not like my dad sits around reading poetry, Ari. He’s more into, like hunting, and fishing, and telling stories when he’s not playing his guitar.”

“I don’t care what you say, Zeph, your dad definitely knows Poe because your dad is a poet.”

“No, he’s not.” I push Ari. “He’s a singer.”

Ari buries both hands in his hair, as if I’m driving him crazy. “Have you even listened to his words?”

“Of course,” I say. “I’ve been listening to him all my life.”

“No, his songs, Zephyr. His songs! He has such amazing things to say. There are entire Web sites where people discuss the meaning of his lyrics.”

“What people?”

“Like this site, DrakeAddict.com.” He pulls up a Web site and more pictures of my dad, some old and some new, fill the screen. The soft guitar part from the beginning of his song “West Wind Blowing” plays.

I grab Ari’s shoulder and yell, “I love this one! ” My dad’s voice comes in quietly, humming for a few bars.

“So you do like your dad’s music?”

“This is his best song, don’t you think?” I ask with a sly smile.

Ari shrugs. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“Ari!” I slap his arm. “Listen to the words.” I sing along. “‘The west wind carried you in, tiny flower, you floated on the breeze, growing up tall and sturdy, among the alder trees . . . ’” Ari looks at me blankly. I grab one of his pillows and swing at him. “It’s about me, you loser!” I yell, but I’m laughing so hard that I keep missing him with the pillow.

“Oh my God, I get it now!” Ari grabs the pillow from me and I collapse back on the bed, as if exhausted. “Zephyr means west wind! It
is
about you. I’m totally going to post that.” He starts typing furiously.

“Wait! Stop!” I grab his hand. “I don’t want everybody to know that.”

“Why not? It’s so cool. Your dad wrote a song about you.”

“No.” I squeeze his hand. “Seriously, please don’t. My family is very private.”

Ari sighs but he stops typing. He pushes the cancel button and the Web page disappears. Then he leans back against the wall. “Tell me about where you’re from. What’s it like? Do you miss it?”

I lean back, too. Our shoulders touch. “In some ways it’s amazing. So beautiful and quiet. There’s hardly anything there, no stores, no cars.”

“Whoa,” says Ari. “You didn’t have a car? How’d you get anywhere? ”

“There’s a town next to ours called Ironweed where our clan, er, I mean family, keeps a car that we use when we need to bring in supplies. Plus, my dad has his own van that he drives to gigs. But mostly, we walk.”

“Do you go to that town a lot?”

“No.” I smooth the soft linen of my tunic over my knees, then yank out a tiny brown thread that’s come loose from the hem. “The people in Ironweed don’t like us.”

“Holy crap. I’d shoot myself if I had to stay in the same place all the time. Didn’t you get bored?”

“Sort of, I guess, but really there’s plenty to do. We study during the day and then we do chores and then we can go do whatever we want. All my brothers and sisters and cousins on my mom’s side are there. My dad’s whole family is just an hour’s walk away, so it’s not like we ever get lonely. Plus, we have lots of celebrations. There’s always some kind of party or special holiday to plan for or go to. And lots of people from different clans, um, families I mean, get together for those.”

As I say this, I think of the fun I’m missing in Alverland—birthdays, full moons, planting festivals, berry picking, bird-call competitions, overnights on hidden uninhabited islands with my cousins and friends from other clans where we practice magic all night, zapping one another with silly spells like uncontrollable laughter or farting hexes. I sigh.

“But you like it here, right?” asks Ari.

“I do. That’s the thing, I love it here!” I tell him. “I’m a lot like my dad and my brother Grove. We’re a little bit different from everyone else in Alverland because we have dreams that could take us away from that life. That’s why we came to New York. So my dad could record a new album and tour with a full band, not just my brother. Plus in New York he can meet record-label people. Maybe get on TV. All the things he wouldn’t get to do in Michigan.”

“And so you could go to BAPAHS,” Ari says.

“Yeah! When he and my mom decided we’d all come to New York for the year, I begged them to let me go to school. My dad is the one who found BAPAHS for me. Even though my mom was really worried and didn’t want me to do it, my dad knew I’d love it so he supported me.”

“You know, BAPAHS saved my life,” Ari says. “Middle school was really rough for me. There were only two other kids in my whole class who liked music. Everybody else was into sports. All I wanted to do was play my piano and write songs and perform. Now I get to do that and it’s cool. But it was all right being unhappy, you know? It made me understand the dark side of things. How to be a cynic and find humor in what hurts. That’s what a lot of my songs with my band, GGJB, are about.”

“I’d like to hear your music sometime.” I put my hand in his and I squeeze.

Ari turns his head toward me. “Zephyr,” he says slowly. I look up at him and I smile. “Listen, I hope you aren’t expecting something . . .”

“Expecting what?”

“You know . . .” He drops my hand. “Something between us.”

“You mean like boyfriend and girlfriend?” A flush crawls up my body.

He nods. “Because I don’t think . . . you know, you and me, and well . . .”

I curl my knees up tightly to my chest. “Why would you think that, Ari?”

“Well, you’ve been touching me a lot. You put your head on my shoulder. And then you were holding my hand.”

“Sorry! ” I’m laughing but I cover my face with a pillow so he can’t see how red I’ve become. I peek over the top of the pillow and try to explain. “We’re very affectionate with one another where I come from.” I realize that up until now I’ve spent every day of my life with the people who love me and know me. We thought nothing of holding hands, or giving each other piggyback rides, or curling up together like puppies or kittens for a nap. And although I’ll admit that sometimes that got old and I just wanted something new and different in my life, now I kind of miss it.

“Good,” says Ari. “Because I should tell you something. I think that I might be, you know, gay.”

I look at him, puzzled. I know I’ve heard that word before.

“You do know what ‘gay’ means, don’t you?” Ari asks.

I scratch my eyebrow and bite the corner of my mouth. “I think I do, but I’m not really sure.”

“Gay is when a guy likes a guy or a girl likes a girl,” he says slowly, as if I’m slightly stupid. “Instead of, you know, being straight, when a guy and girl get together.”

“Oh right!” I say. “Now I remember.”

“Let me guess, you don’t have gay people where you’re from?” He sounds angry.

“Oh no,” I tell him. “We do, we just don’t call them something different. People just love each other, it doesn’t matter who. Most people get married and have big families, but then there are some people who spend their lives together, two men or two women, and we call them a word that means something like Always Uncles or Always Aunts because they don’t have their own kids.”

“God,” Ari lays back against his pillows as if he’s woozy. “That sounds like the coolest place in the whole world. I bet even a goth, gay, Jew boy like me could get along.”

“Now you’re a goth,
gay
, Jew boy?” I tease.

“That’s what my band’s name means. GGJB, goth, gay, Jew boy.”

“I like it!”

Just then a little screen pops up on Ari’s computer. “Hey, cool. It’s Mercy. She’s IMing me.”

I read over his shoulder, but as usual, parts of the message seem like they’re in code:

“You see that? ” Ari asks then he types back to Mercedes:

“We told you, Zephyr, they’re mean, mean, mean.” He jumps over to the latest entry on Bella’s secret blog:

“What’s WTE mean?” I ask Ari.

“We think it means ‘worth the effort,’ but they change their slang all the time,” Ari says. “I don’t know what ‘cactus’ means, though. Hang on.” He opens the I-Hate-Bella blog where there are new nasty comments about Bella and her friends.

“Goodness, I feel bad for them!” I say as I skim the horrible things other people are saying. “Who do you think does it?” I ask.

“Some people say it’s Timber’s ex-girlfriend Tessa. She moved to Jersey last year and lots of people think she does it from there. But I doubt it,” says Ari. “She doesn’t strike me as the vindictive type. Plus, how would she know what happens at BAPAHS, unless she has a spy?”

“Who then?” I ask.

“Beats me, but I’d like to shake the hand of whoever’s behind it.”

“That’s mean, Ari. Nobody deserves to be hated that much by other people.”

“God, Zephyr, you just don’t get it, do you? You shouldn’t feel sorry for them.”

“I know what it feels like to be picked on and hated for no reason, Ari! Every time my cousins and I walked into Ironweed, the people who lived there yelled hateful, stupid things at us. Sometimes the kids would throw rocks and sticks and we’d have to run away into the woods like scared little chipmunks because our parents wouldn’t let us fight back. It was awful.”