The Freak Observer (8 page)

So I just swam through the crowds in the halls to my classes. I did my homework. I got good enough grades. When I wasn't thinking about an experiment or a test question, I was thinking about what I had to do when I got home. I planned what to make for dinner, and I worried if I remembered to start the load of laundry for Mom before I left that morning.

I have a tendency to frown and chew on my lower lip when I plan and worry. I didn't know that then. It turns out that I was making major decisions about my social life without really trying. I found my personal way-to-be: I was a scowling–anti-social–geek–girl. As it turns out, this was not a good place to start on my journey to normal.

. . .

Even scowling anti-social geeks aren't immune to the power of friendship. Friendship is for everybody.

That sounds uplifting, like a “very special” episode of a stupid sitcom. Friendship! Friendship is for everybody! But exposure to friendship is pretty much an accident of time and place. And the power involved is high-voltage— lightning-bolt scale. When friendship moves through you, it leaves a mark.

All friendships are unequal. If they weren't, power couldn't get swapped back and forth. We would just hover in our self-contained envelopes producing everything we need and eating our own shit. “Mmmmm!” we would say, “That's good shit.” And we would all be perfectly happy and immortal, like yeast.

Imagining a friendship between equals is sort of like imagining angels dancing on a pin. Does it matter if they are raving or pirouetting? What's the point, really, other than the one on the other end of the pin?

I am not a happy little yeast or floaty little angel. I am a bad friend.

When it comes to the power of friendship, I am a black hole. Fun, money, creativity—whatever—I'll just swallow it up. Eventually, I will collapse, and when I do, I'm going to take you with me. Consider yourself warned.

I had a friend, once.

I probably shouldn't be so dramatic. That sort of thing can be irritating. Still, there is some truth to the drama.

I've known a lot of people, grown up with people, and done stuff with people. I know what color their bedrooms are and if they like to eat a dill pickle before they go to sleep. I watched people outgrow sweatshirts. I've played No Bears Are Out Tonight in the mountains at night, while I was drunk, and there probably really were bears, but there were certainly warm bodies and excitement and hiding in the dark.

But friendship is something more than breathing the same air or touching the same basketball. Not much more, maybe, but something. I speak from experience here. Like I said: I had a friend for a while.

It was after Asta died. I'm not sure why it happened. Maybe Mrs. Bishop sicced him on me and told him to fetch me in like a bummer lamb. Or maybe grief is like magnetism—some it repels and others it attracts. Whatever the reason, it didn't last forever. I am a bad friend. That's part of the explanation. But I think maybe my friend was even worse. Like I said, friendship leaves a mark.

. . .

Teriyaki chicken, rice pilaf, stir-fry vegetables, mandarin oranges, and cinnamon roll. I like to eat school lunch. Seriously. I like to eat what I don't have to cook. Yay! for canned mandarin oranges. Yippy! for vegetables that look different but taste, oddly, the same. I even enjoy eating with a fork I don't have to wash. I was sitting there enjoying the finer things in life when someone actually made a point of sitting down across the table from me.

I recognized him from French class: Some guy called
Guy
.

Then he stuck his finger into the goo on my cinnamon roll. Then he smiled.

“Hi, Loa,” he said, “Want to be my debate partner?”

“Want to keep your hands out of my food?”

“Now that, right there, is one of the reasons why you and I should be debate partners. You ask the tough questions. I set you up to ask them, and you ask them.” Then he stuck his finger in his mouth and sucked off the frosting. He made that frosting look better than it was. That frosting looked great.

“Really. I've watched you,” he said. “You're smart and you're mean. We can start practicing after school today. You'd enjoy it. I know you would, eviscerating some poor guy from Two Dot, Outer-East-Montanagolia, who couldn't find Africa with both hands if it was tattooed on his ass. Think about it. A world of wonder awaits.”

“I ride the bus. My mom. . .”

“Call your mom. Moms like this kind of shit.”

“I don't have a phone.”

“I have a phone. Call her.” He slid a pretty piece of machinery across the table.

“Tell her you can spend the night with Corey. Tell her she doesn't have to drive into town or anything. You'll bring home the permission slips tomorrow.”

So I did. And it worked.

I handed the phone back.

“Who is Corey?” I asked. “And do you have permission to invite people to spend the night at her house?”

“Way to insult your new best friend,” he said. “Let me introduce myself, I'm Corey.” He raised his hands, palms up and arms wide, ready to be adored. He only held the pose for a moment, just long enough to make sure I, his audience of one, was with him. This is Corey. His hair is the color of a red-haired bear, a cinnamon bear, and nobody's hair looks that good and that messed up unless it's a plan. He wears a plain white T-shirt because he doesn't need to send any messages to anyone about anything. His mouth is sort of small, and he doesn't grin, but the corners are always turned up the way a dolphin always seems to be smiling. But it's a bad idea to assume that dolphins are happy—that's just the shape of a dolphin mouth. And this is just the shape of Corey's.

“AKA
Guy
.”

“Et votre nom est Lulu?”
He shook his head like it was amusing somehow that I was still tugging on the leash.

“I get your point.”

. . .

I saw deep scratches in the side of the little car. Not the kind left behind by a steering miscalculation, the kind that happen when someone drags a key or a screwdriver across the paint.

“I am not universally loved,” he said as he unlocked the door to his Mini Cooper. He fidgeted with his phone, “Manu Chao? Wimme? Drive-By Truckers? What random delights shall we hear?”

There were some big-ass speakers in that itty-bitty car. Where? I do not know—under the drift of Chinese food cartons and crumpled-up sweaters and the abandoned pages of homework with muddy footprints on them, maybe. Wherever they were, they were good enough not to buzz even though the sound getting pushed through them was dramatic. Visceral even, as in I could feel it pushing the molecules around in my kidneys and lungs.

The song was unfamiliar: There is a girl jumping off the stairs and somebody promises to catch her, but they don't. Later, she feels guilty.

In a few weeks, I would know all the words.

But that day, I just listened. I just watched Corey and wondered how he could stay on the road while he threw his head back, shut his eyes, beat the rhythm on the steering wheel, and howled out the lyrics.

. . .

Their garage was bigger than our barn. We don't have a garage, so there isn't anything but the barn to compare with this place.

A garage door slides open before the Mini stops in front of it.

“Welcomed home with open arms, right house?” says Corey.

“Mom enjoys convenience, so the garage door is programmed to recognize our cars and ‘Open,
mes amis
.'”

Inside the garage, there are two other rigs, a Ram Club Cab truck and a Prius. The garage is like a scene in a cartoon about cars who are very different but learn that they are not so different after all. Then they have a happy ending.

But, really, these cars
are
so different—and they hate each other. Secretly, the Prius is waiting for the day when gas runs out and she gets to laugh manically while the Ram truck suffers. The Ram likes to crowd into the Mini's space and scare him so much he leaks oil.

Corey interrupts my scowling examination of the cars.

“It depends on who Mom needs to impress. Some of her clients are Ram truck people. Some are Prius people. Today she must not be working because she is driving her Volvo. It's her midlife crisis car. Volvo, vulva, whatever. It makes her happy.”

I follow Corey like a stray dog through the house, which is all beautifully lit and new and enormous. Basically, it is all just not-like home.

I'm staring at the little stream—no shit, a babbling brook—that runs through a corner of the dining room. There are big white and red goldfish swimming around in there.

“Mom thinks aquariums and fountains are not very imaginative,” says Corey, and he hands me a glass of water.

But it isn't water. It smells like ripe pears and shines more purely than mountain spring water. This I know for a fact, because we have a mountain spring at home. Spring water does not smell like pears. We have a stream at home too, but it's behind the house, not in it. There are little rainbow trout in our water, not goldfish.

“Wodka,” says Corey.

“Thanks.” The vodka is delicious.

A little round robot vacuum cleaner peeks into the dining room, thinks better of it, and backs away.

“Mom has it programmed to start as soon as I come home. She thinks I leave a trail of crumbs behind me so I can find my way back to the bathroom.” Then he points at the shy little robot pacing in nervous rows in the other room.

“The first one fell in the creek. It turns out they are not intended for vacuuming koi. Koi don't do so good when they have a run-in with a robot either.”

Then we went downstairs through the home gym and into the game room.

. . .

Corey and I spent a lot of time stretched out on the pool table in his basement in the dark. It is a surprisingly comfortable place to be. There are no windows. When he switches the lights off, it is totally dark. It's so dark, my eyes start to make up moving splotches of blue light and I get a little dizzy.

If I paid attention, I could feel the warmth of his body even though we weren't touching. We were stretched out head to foot on a pool table in the dark. We were not touching. I could hear his breathing, and I could almost feel the beating of his heart. Or was that some echo of my own heart? I didn't care. I was warm and safe and full of vodka. Maybe it wasn't the dark that was making me dizzy.

This is what we did for the five months we were partners. We showed up 3:30 to 5:00, Monday and Wednesday, for scheduled debate practice. We kept our heads in the game when the game was on. The rest of the time, including “special prep sessions” on Tuesday and Thursday, we laid on a pool table in the dark.

Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we fell asleep.

Sometimes we had sex.

When we did, it was just because.

The first time was a little awkward.
I
was a little awkward. It wasn't entirely pleasant. It certainly wasn't like the soft-core porn on afternoon soaps. When it was over, Corey said, “Now, you've got that off your conscience. Do you want to take a shower?”

A shower seemed like a great idea. I actually enjoyed it more than the sex.

There were no public displays of affection, because we both have our dignity. Let's call it dignity, what we had. It wasn't our dazzling social reputations; that's for sure.

. . .

On nights when his mom was home, we left the lights on, not that she ever came downstairs. Sometimes we watched TV, but that was harder than it should have been because we disagreed about what to watch. That was mostly my fault. I don't like much. I avoid feeding my brain anything that it can turn into nightmares—so the news, horror movies, and the weather channel are all out.

Corey was a little picky too. He was not amused by the CGI-enhanced-“documentaries” on the History Channel and made gagging noises when I got sucked into anything with subtitles. He said it proved I was a reading addict, especially when I would try to read the little white-print warnings and legal-weasel words that flashed across the screen during commercials. We shouldn't jump out of a plane to test the strength of magic glue? No shit, Sherlock, no shit.

We compromised on reality shows.

Corey enjoyed mocking the contestants. I was astonished at all the ways they could ruin their chances, whatever their chances were. Were they on drugs that scrubbed away their impulse control? Did they really think that peeing in someone else's shoes was a reasonable step in their plan for world domination of the dancing world? What made that woman think she could move a stack of several three-hundred-pound pumpkins filled with water and dry ice to the judging table? Could it really be legal to ask the contestants to swim around in a kiddie pool full of sewage sludge while looking for coins? Corey said I was naïve. Wasn't I paying attention when they said they weren't there to make friends? There was money and fame on the line. They were acting, mostly, playing a role.