Better Nate Than Ever (11 page)

I remember the day Libby gave it to me: we’d arrived at sixth-grade drama class to find it had been replaced by a study hall. That another arts program was axed, deemed “frivolous” by the school board. We were supposed to be doing
Peter Pan
for the winter musical, and I was basically dying to play the title role, but
it
was canceled too. And when I got home from school that day, crying into my pillow, Libby’s shoe careened into my window (our secret hello). She was in the yard below, holding this old rabbit foot. Given to me toward some future fortune.

“. . . number ninety, number ninety-three, number ninety-nine, and number one hundred. Please stay.”

“Wait,” I say, turning to Aunt Heidi, “did they say ninety-one? Did they keep number ninety-one?”

Her face falls, and she just shakes her head. “No, Natey, they didn’t. I’m so sorry.”

But I can barely make out her words on account of the jubilation around me, children jumping up and down, into and out of their adoring parents’ arms. One girl—the tumbler, number eighty-eight from before—actually crawls
up
her father like he’s a tree, and ends up atop his shoulders, cock-a-doodle-dooing from on high, to celebrate being kept for the next round of auditions.

This girl would make a heck of a Peter Pan.

“Keep in mind,” Rex Rollins says, clapping us
quiet, “this is only the first round. And all of the children who were cut today will be totally right for another show.”

But I see a boy with one leg very clearly longer than the other, limping past me, with a giant hunchback taking up the rear, and I wonder: What show is this boy right for? Rex Rollins is just lying to us.

“Nate,” Aunt Heidi says, “I think we ought to get going. Honestly. We’ve
got
to get you on the next bus to Pittsburgh.”

And when we turn the corner into the elevator bank, there’s Jordan Rylance, coming back to the studio with his mom in her awful faux-leopard coat. Her mouth lifts and she says, way too loud, “Did you get a callback to sing later, too?” and I just shake my head no, that they didn’t see anything worth liking about me.

“Sorry,” Jordan says, shoveling a Subway sandwich down his throat.

“Are you,” Mrs. Rylance says to my aunt, “Nathan’s mom?”

And Heidi, who is holding the elevator door open, says, “No, God no,” and then looks at me. “I just mean I’d be a terrible mother.”

The door starts to close on her, and she motions for me to board the elevator.
So much for my lucky rabbit foot, still gripped in my palm like a handgun. So much for it watching over me and bringing a future fortune.

Through the shutting steel doors, Mrs. Rylance pops in her beaming face and looks right at me: “Well, better luck back in Jankburg, Nathan.”

“It’s N-n-nate.”

“I have to get him to the bus!” Heidi says, about to swat Mrs. Rylance’s head away.

And Mrs. Rylance turns back to Jordan, I see in the sliver of light closing before me, and puts her arm around him and says, “The
bus
?”

And they laugh and laugh, I can hear, laughing at me and my stutter and my family that takes buses. Laughing clear through my sixteen-floor ride to the lobby, out onto the wet streets, back to Port Authority.

To return home a sopping soldier in tight new clothes.

“D
o I have time to stop at Applebee’s?”

But I already know her answer.

“No chance. First of all, you’re twenty minutes from the bus taking off”—I think Aunt Heidi’s saying these words, but she’s five feet ahead of me again, jumping over tourists and around strollers, and these are only the approximate consonants and vowels I’m making out above the rain and wind—“and second of all, Applebee’s is inedible.”

Walking the reverse path to Port Authority, everything that seemed exciting on the way into town now seems frenetic, dangerous, wound up too tight. Maybe because, I dunno, to stop moving so fast might make you realize what an impractical home New York actually is.

Where are the trees in which to hide from your parents?

And when we push past the Montego’s sandwich-board advertising man, and I say hi—he did, after all, alert me to the worst outfit I’ve ever purchased, and that at the very least makes him a unique friend—he doesn’t even recognize me, just grunts and shoves another pamphlet into my hand.

“That’s a real paper waste,” I say to him, “because you already gave me one of these.” He probably doesn’t recognize me in these tight clothes, and I don’t blame him.

“Well, pal,” Aunt Heidi says, now standing with me just inside the ancient swinging doors of the bus station. “We should find your gate, and then I have to run. I’m already late.”

“For what?” I say, ringing water from my bangs onto the floor.

“Aw Shucks,” she says. “Downtown. I’m a hostess at a kitschy oyster place, called Aw Shucks. Which probably sounds gross to a kid.”

“It sounds delicious,” I say. “I’ve never had an oyster, and it sounds delicious.” The chance to win a pearl; the chance to taste something different than kielbasa or chipped-ham cafeteria sandwiches.

“Well, that’s very brave of you. Maybe if you ever make it back to New York, I can make sure you try an oyster. It’s kind of a kitschy place”—she already called it that; this must be her routine—“but the food is fresh
and we’ve got great weekend drink specials. There’s even a Sunday-night cocktail called The Heidi.”

“What does it taste like?” I say.

“Regret and a dusty womb and a
little
splash of orange juice,” she says. Heidi’s said this to all her friends. Or on first dates, I bet. Bragging about a drink named after her, to somehow justify working at an oyster place instead of following her acting dreams. I just know it.

A group of businesspeople pushes past us, and Heidi says, “Come on, let’s move,” and after she buys me my ticket home we zoom through the Greyhound bus terminal, passing a Hudson News and an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, a T-shirt shack and a sports-jersey store.

A boy could spend a whole year having fun in a place like this.

“I feel weird putting you on this bus,” Aunt Heidi says, likely soaking up the same characters I am.

Exhibit A: Wearing a fur coat and flip-flops and dragging a cat carrying case, a woman next to us is holding a hymnal and will likely want nothing more than to sit next to me and convert me to Christianity by the time we reach Philadelphia.

Who needs an Exhibit B with this kind of Exhibit A?

“Don’t worry about it, Aunt Heidi,” I say, “I made it here by myself, and I can make it home, too.”

Wait! Back up, Nate. A T-shirt stand!

“Can you hold my place in line,” I say to Aunt Heidi, “so I can run and get an ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirt for Libby?” It was all she asked for.

Aunt Heidi looks at her cell phone and sighs. “I’m already late for Aw Shucks, Nate, so run. And be here in two minutes. I’m serious: two minutes. If you don’t get on this bus, there’s no way you’re making it home at a reasonable hour, and I just—this isn’t how I want my reunion with your mom to start.”

Good. She’s considering any kind of reunion at all. This is good.

“Do you have a men’s extra-extra-small?” I say to the guy at the shack. Libby buys all of her clothes in men’s sizes so she can get the absolutely tiniest version and feel positively skeletal.

“No, boss,” the guy says, twiddling a mustache, “only men’s medium and men’s extra-extra-large.” He holds out a T-shirt, black with that signature red heart, and I say, “How much?” and he says, “Thirty dollars.”

I gasp. “Thirty
American
dollars?”

And knowing I won’t buy it, that I’m just another offended tourist, he goes right back to his cell phone, texting away.

His cell phone. His
Nokia
cell phone. Plugged into a kiosk outlet.

“Sir, sir!” I say, shouting perhaps, from a half
foot away. “If I give you, um, ten dollars”—shut up, Nate—“can I, like, throw my phone on your charger for a minute?”

He twists his face at me and says “ ’Kay, Boss,” unplugging his phone and holding out his hand. I burrow into my bag and pull out my ancient Nokia, my bag of money, too, and by the time he’s got it plugged in—the familiar Asian chime of a charging phone comforting me—it’s been a full five minutes since I left Aunt Heidi.

“Nate!” And here she is. “They are
boarding
your bus and you need to get on,
now
.”

“Ten dollars,” the man says, holding out his hand, but Heidi yells, “Now!” again, and I unplug my phone and shove it into my pocket (barely; God these jeans are tight). Forget ten bucks. I’m down to single dollars at this point, and I apologize and shuffle back to the line.

I’m the worst friend Libby ever had, though I have the advantage of being the only one she’s got, too.

“Sorry about that back there, Aunt Heidi,” I say. “I suck.”

“You don’t suck, you just . . . you are really stubborn, for a kid who’s never been outside Pittsburgh.”

“How do you know I’ve never been outside Pittsburgh?” I say.

“Because I know your parents. You’ve probably—what—only
been to Disney, am I right?”

“Yes,” I say. Yes, that’s exactly right. The woman in the fur and flip-flops clip-clops by, and I look at her and frown at Aunt Heidi and say, “Well, that was the most exciting and depressing two hours of my life. So: Thank you, for the good parts.”

She smiles. “It was really nice to meet you again, Nate. I—I really wish I could see you more often, but you know.”

“Yeah,” I say. “You wouldn’t want to skip town and visit Pennsylvania and miss any shifts at Aw Shucks.” She rolls her eyes and holds back a grin. “In case they name a brunch special after you, or something.”

“We’re shutting these doors, kid,” a man calls out from behind us. “Are you on this bus or not?”

“We don’t serve brunch,” Heidi says, quietly, and gives me a hug, a real one. And just a second later, when she pulls away, her eyes are fully wet, like two of the three rivers that converge at one point in downtown Pittsburgh. And I’d better get on that bus if I want to make it back to Jankburg by nightfall.

Though I’ve forgotten a single reason to
want
to make it back to Jankburg by nightfall. Or anyfall.

“Bye, Aunt Heidi,” I say, tugging my bookbag across the linoleum, waving. “Thanks for the ticket back. And the clothes.”

The door shuts, and I’m the very last person on,
which always quickens my pulse. When I’m last on the bus back home, nobody offers to let me sit next to him. I always have to walk with my head down, as quiet as possible, until I find the one kid who’s asleep, or a reject himself, and even then I sit with as little of my butt as possible on the very smallest sliver of the very edge of the bus seat, so as not to wake my bus-seat partner.

Here at the Port Authority, I’ve got the advantage of being the smallest person here
and
the least crazy. A new reason to like New York, all over again—the people may be faster and taller and jugglier and more successful than back home, but it’s clear that they’re also crazier.

That to immerse myself in their groupings is to emerge the most normal, as well.

I finally decide between the two remaining seats: one next to a regular-enough-looking guy doing a crossword puzzle, but with a giant, Nate-size suitcase placed square atop the seat next to him; or another, next to a grown woman with braids and a doll in her lap, certifiably nuts.

“Would you mind if I sat next to you, sir?”

The crossword guy moves the suitcase to the floor, and I slump into my seat and hug my bookbag. I pull out a mini-donut, and then two more, and then I eat four in all and take a final sip from my water bottle,
and then, at last, the bus driver hits reverse and we’re off.

And just when I think that the best thing I could do is take a nap, to try my hardest not to cry, to pretend I’m not as wound up as a dreidel (I researched dreidels for the homemade
Fiddler on the Roof
Playbill I created for Libby’s mom), my phone flashes a
blink-blink
sound, barely alive from its two minutes of juicing back at the Port Authority kiosk.

I pull it open and, amid the five-thousand logged text messages from Libby and one from Anthony (“You’re dead, homo”), an unknown 212 area code has left me a voice mail.

Me
.

We break from Port Authority, and the sunlight argues its way through the tinted bus glass, and when I press go on my phone, to listen to the voice mail, this is exactly the message I hear, with _____ signifying the parts that cut out.

“Hi, Anthony, this is _____ from Rex Rollins and Company Casting.”

Possibly I pee a little in my pants, here.

“We believe you were just mistakenly _______ but would like _____ at two p.m., today, back at the Ripley-Grier Studios on _____ sixteen. There will be sides ________ and you will need to _______ should expect _______ no later than four or five but please
call us _______ hope _____. And be prepared to show us the knee crawl you talked about at the audition.”

“Driver!” I yell, practically elbowing the poor crossword guy
(Four-letter word for second chance: N A T E)
next to me. “Stop this vehicle!”

I
f I had a pair of scissors, I would use them right now.

Oh, God, not like that. This isn’t a suicide book. God.

I would cut these jeans off at the knee (after ducking into a private phone booth or an alley; nobody in New York needs to know what kind of underwear I wear). (Hanes Boys, by the way, ’cause whaddo I care if you do.) I’d turn these jeans into shorts and pick up my sprint, en route back to the audition.

I know it doesn’t make sense. I know my mom is going to slay me. That Aunt Heidi is heading south (downtown) to Aw Shucks, feeling good about herself, that she finally did
something
resembling conscientious when it came to her nephew or to any child at all.

But there was a mistake made in New York Manhattan City today.