Breakfast with Neruda (17 page)

I flip the book over to the back cover and study the author's picture. A handsome young guy wearing a leather bomber jacket. He died when he was only forty, in 1916. I wonder why he died so young. My mother's age. I make a note to check on it in the library at school tomorrow.

By the time I'm beginning chapter five, it grows too dark to read, so I drive around to find a place to sleep tonight. Since Earl is suspicious now, I park in front of my mom's again. I set my alarm for 6:15 so I can run. Training season for cross-country begins in a couple weeks and I want to be ready. I'm hoping Coach Baker takes me back on the team, even with my criminal record.

I try to sleep, but my mind buzzes with too much information. I almost wish my life were like that guy's in
Memento
, where every day he wakes up and doesn't recall yesterday. But my life is not a movie.

“Hey, you,” Shelly says. She climbs into my car next to me and we kiss.

“Hey you yourself.” She is wearing a pink top and blue shorts and barely resembles the Goth creature I first met. She still has the black hair, but there is something else different about her, and I can't figure it out. Maybe it's the sandals.

“God, you smell good,” she says. After a morning run, I showered and dabbed another cologne sample all over myself. “What is that you're wearing?”

“Montblanc Legend.”

“That's like seventy dollars a bottle,” she says. “How can a homeless guy afford it?”

“Maybe I'm only pretending to be homeless,” I say. “Maybe I'm just an actor researching a role for a film.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Seriously?”

I sigh. “Unfortunately, no. I am truly a resident of anywhere I can find a safe parking spot.”

“How do you always manage to smell good? Even before I gave you that bottle of Blue, you never smelled like a vagabond.”

I laugh. “
Esquire
,
Sports Illustrated
,
People
,” I say.

“Reading makes you smell good?”

“Every time I find magazines or check one out of the library, I steal the cologne sample pages.”

“Very resourceful,” she says. “You should write a book called
How to Be Homeless, Yet Live Like a Rich Guy
.”

I laugh. “It helps to have friends whose fathers bleed money.” It must be her earrings. That's what's different. They're small, gold buds, not the dangly ones she usually wears.

“Have you asked your mom any more about your dad?” she asks.

“No. She gets mad every time I bring it up.” I glance at Shelly again, trying to figure out what's new. Her eyes seem bigger, but it's not her makeup.

“Well, we know you're not Asian or black since you have Caucasian features and hair,” she says. She squints at me. “You could be Greek or Middle Eastern. You do have that beaky nose.”

“Thanks a lot.” I study her face. “Bangs! You got bangs.”

“Took you long enough to notice, Neruda.”

“I noticed. I mean, I knew something was different, but I couldn't figure it out.”

She feigns a British accent. “So what do you think? Do you like my fringe?”

“It's hot,” I say. “Very hot.” I'd like to blow off our day at school and go make out with her somewhere. I wrap an arm around her, and she rests against me. I like the feel of a soft, warm girl against my chest. For a second I remember what it was like to have Ashley in my arms. She was affectionate, yet I don't pine for her anymore. Shelly is so not Ashley. Ash would never have dared to use a fake ID to get booze in Kroger or have taken me on a fake birthday adventure.

Maybe Rick is right; maybe I never loved Ashley. Casting me aside for Rick was no doubt hard for her. She never liked hurting anyone's feelings. Once at her house last fall, early in our relationship, while watching a movie in her basement, Ashley noticed a huge wood spider crawling across the floor. Kind of a mean-looking creature, big, black, and hairy. I stood up, ready to flatten it with my boot, and Ashley said, “Oh, don't kill it.”

“Huh?”

“Let's scoop it up and set it free. Let it take its chances outside.” She handed me a
People
magazine. My instinct was to roll up the magazine and whack the ugly creature, but I let the eight-legged thing crawl onboard and rushed it to the family room door before it had a chance to crawl up my arm. I flung the magazine and the spider into her backyard in the pouring rain.

“Now wasn't it better to save it rather than squish it?”

I shrugged. “I guess. But I killed your magazine.”

“That's okay.”

As gentle and lovely as Ashley was, I never told her about my mother's hoarding obsession. I told her I wasn't allowed to bring friends home because my mother worked a lot of nights and needed rest. Not a total lie. Sometimes Mom does work swing shifts, but she sleeps with a box fan on high that drowns out most of the noise. My sister and I just agree not to let anyone in on our living conditions. Children's Services would have a field day.

Ashley didn't know I started living in my car, so in a way, besides my immediate family, Shelly is the person who knows the most about me. But even Shelly doesn't know all of it.

My memories of Ashley are blurry now. To think I almost landed in jail over a girl who can't measure up. I kiss the top of Shelly's head and hug her tighter. Whatever the truth about her is, I like her a lot.

“I'm glad I met you,” I tell her.

She nods. “Yeah. I am pretty amazing.” She pulls out a fresh twenty. “Let's go eat.”

We make it back to school in time, but Shelly wants to smoke a quick cigarette before we go in the building. “It's too nice to be indoors today.”

“Too bad we can't blow off this place and go for a drive,” I say. “Crash another family reunion.”

Earl and Hess are laughing in the staff lounge where a plate of snickerdoodles sits. Earl looks up. “Enjoy your smoke?” he asks.

Shelly plops down and grabs a cookie. “We did. It's way too nice outside to make us work. We should get a good weather day today.”

Earl laughs. “Nice try, kid.”

“We could have them pull weeds out front if they want to be outside,” Hess says. “It's supposed to rain the next couple days, so today might be the only day to do it.”

Earl raises an eyebrow and looks us over. “Yeah. You could be right.”

Shelly and I wheel a trash tub out to the school's entrance. Each of us carries gardening gloves and these tiny shovels. “Do you know how to pull weeds?” I ask.

She laughs. “It's not that hard.”

“But how do I know which are weeds and which are supposed to be plants?”

She shakes her head. “You really are . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Just follow my lead.”

“You were going to call me an idiot, weren't you?”

“No.”

“Listen, I can't help it that I wasn't born with platinum or silver dangling out of my butt. There's a lot of shit I don't know.” I toss my gloves and shovel to the ground.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “You're right. I can sometimes be a condescending bitch.”

“You think?”

She kneels in front of the flowerbeds and waves me down next to her. “We'll start here,” she says. “See these spiny-looking things?” I nod. “Those are thistles. They're weeds. So we need to take our spades and loosen the soil, then grab them and pull them up by their roots and toss them in the can. Also, we need to pull up dandelions. You do know what dandelions look like, don't you?”

“Yes.” I grab for a thistle and draw my hand back. “Ow! That stings.”

“That's why we have gloves.” She waves mine at me, and I glower at her before I slide them on.

She and I sit side by side, pulling thistles and dandelions. This side of the building is hotter because we are in the sun, but it still feels good to be outside. Shelly tells me not to move too fast. “We don't want Earl and Hess to find more work for us to do.”

That's kind of the way she and I have worked this summer anyway. In fact, Earl and Hess never seem to hurry. Earl told me once summertime was his favorite season to work. “I don't have all you kids and teachers messing up my work right after I'm done fixing or scrubbing something,” he said.

“I feel bad about the other day,” Shelly says.

“What do you mean?” I ask, knowing exactly what she means.

“You know, when we were kissing and I . . .”

“It's okay,” I say. I wave a gloved hand at her. “We don't have to rush into anything. What do I have to offer you, anyway? A thirty-year-old station wagon and lots of laundry.”

She stops and looks at me. “I like you a lot, Michael Flynn Neruda, no matter where you live. And I think it's time you heard my story, the real story, and not the fiction that's being spread around town about me.”

Shelly stabs at the soil. “It was last summer,” she says. “The first thing I did was dye my hair black.”

“Why?”

“I had suddenly become a new person, and I needed to look different.”

“Why black?”

“I don't know. At a slumber party in middle school I once colored it dark, and I liked it. Besides, it made me look older.”

“Why did you need to look older,” I ask.

She studies me for a second, and says, “Because of Theo.”

“Who is Theo?”

“He's part of why I left. But we're getting ahead of the story.” I raise my hands in an apologetic gesture, and she continues. “So I dyed my hair.”

“What did your parents say about it?”

She glares at me, and says evenly. “They didn't know.”

“Okay. I won't interrupt anymore.”

She grins at me. “Yes you will.
Anyway
, nobody was home that day. My parents were golfing at the country club and my brother and his girlfriend had driven to Kings Island. They all knew I wouldn't be home when they got back because I lied and said I was spending the night at Amelia Preston's house.”

“But you had already left. Where did you go?”

“I'll get to that,” she says. “I had to pack light, so I crammed a couple pairs of jeans and some shorts and tops and underwear in a tote bag, along with a carton of unfiltered Camels.”

“But you smoke Marlboros,” I say.

She tosses a weed in the trash bin. “I was changing everything about myself, erasing the ditzy blonde cheerleader, including what I smoked.”

“Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you about that,” I say. “How did you get away with smoking as a cheerleader? Most athletes don't smoke.”

She laughs. “First of all, most people don't consider cheerleaders athletes, even though it requires strength and agility. Second, cheerleaders get away with a lot. Parents and teachers would be shocked to learn several of Rooster High's varsity cheerleading squad smoke things a lot stronger than cigarettes on a regular basis.” She scoops up a bunch of weeds and dumps them in the canister.

“So what else did you pack?”

She sits back down, and starts digging again. “Well, I couldn't take my phone or Kindle because Big Brother knows who you're talking to and what you're reading. But I had planned ahead and bought a TracFone with tons of minutes and took about three thousand bucks out of my savings.”

“You had
three thousand dollars
in savings?”

“Actually, I had more, but I didn't want the bank to alert my dad if I took it all out.” She glances at me, detecting my envy. “I'm not going to apologize for having rich parents,” she says. “It's the card I was dealt.”

I yank a large thistle out of the ground and slam it into the trashcan. “I know. Sorry. I just wonder how with everything you have you'd want to run away.”

She is quiet for a couple minutes, and I wonder if I've pissed her off. Then she says, “I've always felt I was playacting the role of Michelle Miller, the prep princess cheerleader who got decent grades and never caused trouble. But deep inside I knew this was a myth, and if you flayed me open, the feral beast would emerge. But how do you break out of your fictional shell and become who you want to be in Rooster, Ohio? Especially if you don't know who that is?” She smooths the soil over the hole I left in the ground where the thistle had been. “I blame it all on Mrs. Silver.”

“The English teacher?”

“Yeah. Before Sophomore CP English I wasn't much of a reader. But the first book she assigned was
The Catcher in the Rye
. Most of my friends hated it, but I related to Holden Caulfield.

I nod. “He's kind of a raggedy guy.” I had read the book and thought Holden was kind of a jerk, but I don't want to spoil her memory of it.

“You know what my favorite scene is?” she asks. “When Holden wanted to erase all the ‘fuck yous' scrawled on walls so his sister and all little children wouldn't have to wonder what the expression means.”

I liked that scene too. I dread every day when Annie finds out more ugly truths about the world, when kids call her racist names or refuse to make eye contact. Maybe
The Catcher in the Rye
is a better book than I remember.

“Anyway, I didn't know I could disappear for a while, even if it's inside someone else's head. So in a lot of ways Mrs. Silver ruined my life.”

I laugh. “How?”

“By feeding us stories that make you question everything, where you wake up and find you've been turned into a cockroach, or you choose to kill your own child rather than allow her to get taken onto slavery.”

I nod, knowing exactly what she means. “Literature doesn't ruin your life; it expands it.”

“God, you sound like Mrs. Silver.”

I shrug. “I'm a book nerd.”

“Well, I never was until she got her mitts on me.”