Dread Locks (9 page)

As soon as I sat down, Garrett got up. “Well, I’d better get back to work,” he said. “See you tonight, Tara.” Then he left.

I turned to Tara for an explanation. “What about tonight?”

“Garrett’s taking me for a ride in his Lexus,” she said. “Then we’re going to the rodeo—it’s in town this weekend.”

I was speechless for three seconds that felt like twenty.
“I
was going to ask you to the rodeo!”

But instead of answering, she looked at me thoughtfully. All I could see was my own frustration reflected back at me in her lenses. Then she reached out and caught a lock of my hair just next to my left temple. She wrapped it tightly around her finger.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see,” she said. She took her hand away and smiled, satisfied. I had no idea what that was all about until I went to the bathroom a few minutes later and caught sight of myself in the mirror. There, just in front of my left ear, a clump of my normally straight hair seemed like it had fused together. It now hung in a tightly wound auburn curl.

I left the mall and rode Tara home without saying another word to her. Then I rode my bike up and around the hills outside of town until I didn’t know what time it was. Had Tara been using me to get to Garrett, or was she plotting something against him? Was I a conspirator, a stooge, or a victim? The curl she had weirdly, miraculously given me was like a worm squirming its way through my head. I wanted to stop thinking about everything, but I couldn’t.

My aimless riding took me past Danté’s house, and I saw him and Freddy playing basketball on his driveway. It’s funny, but ever since that night with Freddy and Dante in the coffee shop, I hadn’t been that interested in hanging out with them—and just because I
didn’t
feel like playing ball with them, I forced myself to go over and do just that.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Freddy answered. Then he passed me the basketball. It was the usual greeting, but it didn’t feel usual anymore.

I dribbled slowly up the court toward the basket. Dante trie to block me, but with a burst of speed I blew past him and hit perfect layup, feeling the ball roll off my fingertips and into tl hoop. I don’t think I had ever jumped so high.

“Hey, it’s no fun if you’re not even gonna try,” I said Dante, mocking his effort.

“Two on one,” Dante said to Freddy. Freddy nodded.

“Fine,” I said. “You’re on.”

Freddy and Dante had both been on the team with me la year. In fact, they had stayed on the team after I had lost intei est. They were pretty good, but the way I was feeling at the mc ment—with energy to burn and the need to burn it—they migl as well have been playing hopscotch.

I stole the ball from Freddy, leaped up to the basket, an practically dunked it.

“Hey!” Freddy said. “Foul!” But it wasn’t a foul, and he kne it—I had stolen the ball with such speed and skill, he hadn’t eve noticed where the ball had gone until he saw it in my hands.

I soon lost count of the score. It didn’t matter. I just kne that no matter how well they were playing, I was hitting thre baskets for every one of theirs.

We burned out in less than half an hour, and when we wei done, the three of us lay on our backs on the driveway, knee bent to the darkening sky. The cement was still warm long afte the sun had hidden itself behind the trees.

“If you keep playing like that,” Freddy said to me, “they’ draft you right into college ball. Never mind that you’re not o the team anymore.”

“Coach woulda flipped to see you play like that,” Dante said.

We caught our breaths for a few more moments, then Danté sat up and looked at me. “So what’s with the hair?” he asked. “A new look?”

I touched the tightly spun lock dangling just out of my vision. I could feel it tugging on me, as if Tara’s finger were still wound up in it, pulling it tight. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Ask me again tomorrow.”

But I knew they wouldn’t ask me tomorrow. Just like I knew I wouldn’t be hanging out with them much anymore. It was like I could sense a door closing behind me as a new one opened in front of me. Dante and Freddy ... well ... they were just on the wrong side of that closing door.

I went home and just sat in my room in the dark. So a door had closed behind me, but I wasn’t sure I liked the one opening in front of me ... because Tara was out with Garrett. Garrett was gone by the time I got home, and I knew where he was. I could just imagine them sitting together at the rodeo, sharing popcorn and cotton candy. It should have been
my
cotton candy she was sharing. At that moment I hated my brother so much, I could feel it like a fever burning behind my eyes.

I didn’t know what time it was when I heard his car pull into the driveway, but it must have been late. I waited for the front door to open. When it didn’t, my curiosity got the best of me and I moved to my window and peered out.

I could see Garrett’s Lexus in the driveway. No one got out. Our yard lights were bright enough for me to make out a single figure in the car, behind the driver’s seat. Garrett was alone, and he was sitting as still as a statue. It wasn’t like him; Garrett was usually out of his car before it stopped rolling.

Finally, as though pulling himself from a trance, Garrett opened the car door. The interior light flicked on, and I could see him better as he climbed stiffly out of the car and rose unsteadily to his feet.

I met him at the front door.

“How was the rodeo?” I asked as he walked in the house. I had been practicing my delivery of that line for hours. Bitter. Nasty. An accusation more than a question. My tone of voice was lost on Garrett, however, who seemed a million miles away.

“Huh?” he asked, blinking his eyes several times, as though he couldn’t see me in the dim light of the entryway.

“The rodeo? With Tara?”

“Fine. It was fine.” He stumbled past me. “Man, I’m thirsty.”

I followed him into the kitchen. “How about Tara? Did she think it was ‘fine’?”

Garrett poked his head into the refrigerator. In the colorless, cold light, his face looked a sickly shade of pale. He found a can of soda and popped it.

“Are you listening to me? I asked you about Tara.”

He took a few swallows from the can, then gagged and spat it out into the sink. “That’s rank.”

I took the can away from him. “What’s wrong with you? Are you deaf? I asked you a question.”

He spotted a half-gallon carton of milk in the fridge, grabbed it, and chugged it all the way down. Little rivers of milk spilled from the corners of his mouth. Garrett has always made a habit of ignoring me, so that wasn’t all that unusual—but you first have to notice someone before you can ignore them.

I grabbed his arm and forced him to face me. The milk carton dropped to the ground, but he had already emptied it.

“What happened tonight?” I asked, speaking each word slowly and clearly.

Garrett looked at me. It seemed like he was trying to remember who I was. Finally, he shook his head and for a moment seemed to come back from whatever mental vacation he was on.

“To tell you the truth, Parker, I don’t remember. Isn’t that a hoot?”

And I believed him. It didn’t make any sense at all, but I believed him. I turned, troubled, and started to walk away, but then he suddenly spoke up.

“I do remember one thing, though. I do remember one thing.”

I turned back to face him. He was staring off into the distance, like an old man trying to remember things that had happened to him a long time ago.

“I do remember one thing,” he said again.

“What?” I asked, afraid to hear the answer.

Then he looked straight at me.

“She took off her glasses.”

10

BECOMING IGOR

L
ethargy. It’s a word I know, because it’s in one of my father’s favorite expressions.
Lethargy breeds lethargy.
It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you
want
to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf.

When you’ve got money and time, lethargy becomes like a disease. You’ve got so many choices of things to do that nothing seems worthwhile anymore. That’s the way it had been with me and basketball. That’s the way it had been with me and so many other things. I remember how my friends and I used to hang around on weekends, saying to one another, “So what do you want to do?” only to get shrugs and the same question back. After a while on those long, boring weekends, it would feel like your body was turning to stone and your mind was turning to mush. I never really thought about it much, but seeing Garrett acting so strangely started me thinking about a lot of things.

Laziness and attitude ran rampant at my school, so maybe that’s why it took so long for people to notice the hardening of the social arteries. It began with Ernest, then spread with the tireless growth of a creeping vine. I knew the symptoms. The dull, pasty skin. The glazing of the eyes, and a weariness that went bone deep. I could spot them in the lunchroom. The girl who would lift her spoon to her mouth as if her arm were moving through dense Jell-O instead of air. There was the guy in English class who, when everyone else rushed out with the bell, would take a deep, shuddering breath and rise from his seat like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. And then there was the thing about food. That was perhaps the strangest of all.

It was on the last day Dante, Freddy, and I hung out together. We sat at lunch, chowing down on what we liked to call Roadkill Roast—an oversalted, semi-edible pot-roast substance that the cafeteria served. It was nice out that day, so most kids sat at the outdoor lunch tables. Then, a few tables over from us, Celeste Kroeger, of Banshee fame, dropped her tray on the ground, flipping her Roadkill Roast into the dirt.

“Best thing that could happen to the stuff,” Dante commented. “Now all she has to do is kick some dirt over it and give it a decent burial.”

But that’s not what she did. Instead, Celeste knelt down and picked up the strips of pot roast one by one ... and pushed each one into her mouth.

“Oh, gross!” Freddy said. Dante and I were beyond even those words. We just stared. You know the “three-second rule”? That brainless notion that if food hits the ground, it’s not dirty if you get it off the ground in three seconds? Well, when something falls into mud, that doesn’t really apply. There was more mud on those strips than there was beef.

“I think I’m gonna hurl,” said Dante.

“Don’t,” I told him. “She might eat that, too.”

We just watched, stupefied, as Celeste pulled every last piece of pot roast, every carrot fragment, every little shriveled pea out of the mud and ate it, licking her fingers when she was done. Then she washed it down with a container of milk. It made me shiver, because I thought of the way Ernest had guzzled those leftover milks from empty tables. The way my brother downed a half gallon the other night.

“She didn’t even wipe the mud off the meat,” Dante said.

“She liked it,” I told them, and the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that it was true. “She liked the dirt more than the meat.”

Dante stuck out his tongue. “Well, that’s just sick.”

And although I had to agree, it brought to mind something I had heard about cravings. People think pregnant women crave pickles, but the truth is, each pregnant woman craves something different. It has to do with what your body needs at the time. My mom craved lemons every day that she was pregnant with Katrina. I always used to say that’s why she turned out so sour. It’s not only pregnant women who have cravings, however. Celeste was having a strange craving for some other reason. I have heard of people craving mud. That was supposed to mean your body needed certain minerals. But craving and eating are two different things.

“She’s gone nuts,” Freddy said, and left it at that. They thought this was an isolated incident, just one freakish girl with a weird taste for muddy meat—but I wasn’t so sure. Over the next few days, I kept an eye out for things like it, and I found that there was a whole earthen feast going on.

... Like the girl in ceramics class who, while throwing a pot on the spinning wheel, didn’t just use her fingers; she leaned over and began shaping the pot with her tongue.

... Like the girl who dipped her hand into her boyfriend’s trail mix, only to find there were actual parts of the
trail
mixed in with the nuts and raisins.

... Like the kid who kept biting his fingernails just to get at the black nail jam underneath.

... And like Celeste Kroeger, who kept knocking her plate “accidentally” into the mud, day after day, then scooping it back up from the ground and eating it, mud and all.

I asked Tara about it as we sat one afternoon having a picnic among the bobbing insect heads of our secret oil field. She just shrugged.

“People are weird,” she said. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Yeah—but eating dirt and rocks and stuff? I mean, what could make a normal person do something like that?”