The Elephant of Surprise (The Russel Middlebrook Series Book 4) (7 page)

Kevin caught me looking at him. The laughter froze on his face even as I immediately turned away.

It was funny how I'd been watching Kevin all these months out of the corner of my eye, but there were all these things I'd missed, obvious things that I should have seen. I'd been sneaking peeks at him, checking out the hang of his sweatshirt (or the bulge of his ass), but I guess I'd never really looked at
him
, not until just this week.

Gunnar had a dentist's appointment after school, so I headed for my bike alone, but I couldn't stop thinking about Kevin.

None of this made sense. Kevin had been a total jerk to me in the park that night. And yet now here he was going around the school looking all real and serious, even as he laughed in the library with Brian Bund. This wasn't the Elephant of Surprise—it was the Elephant of Fuck With Your Mind.

As I passed by the Dumpster, a head poked up.

"Wade?" I said.

"Russel!" he said with a smile. "I was hoping I'd run into you."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wade was hoping he'd run into me?

"Really?" I said. "Me?" It was a little like one of those moments in movies where the loser main character is glancing around to make sure he's really the person being spoken to. I stopped thinking about Kevin, that's for sure.

"Really," he said. He climbed out of the Dumpster (the muscles in his arms bulged). "I got a good vibe from you the other day. You seem like a decent person."

I blushed. I mean, he was flirting with me, right?

I nodded to his backpack, which didn't look particularly full. "So how was the haul?"

"Not so good. I should've known. Wednesdays always suck. Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays are the best days, at least at schools and hospitals." When I stared at him for an explanation, he added, "Cafeteria food deliveries are usually Mondays and Thursdays, so that's when kitchens need to make room in their cupboards and refrigerators. And Fridays are the days they throw out all the stuff they think will spoil over the weekend."

"Ah," I said. "So why come today?"

He fiddled with the straps on his backpack. "Well, like I said, I was hoping I'd run into you."

Wade had been looking for me exactly the same way I'd been looking for him? This did nothing to stop my blushing. There was no possible way I was misinterpreting all this, was there? Validate my reality here.

"So nothing for the homeless camp?" I said.

"Not today. But they'll get by." Especially if Kevin was running fast food over their way, I thought. Who knows? Maybe the whole city was secretly feeding that homeless camp, like the stray cat who goes from house to house and ends up the best fed animal in the whole neighborhood. But I didn't mention that to Wade, because I suspected he wouldn't appreciate the analogy.

"Can I ask you a question?" I said.

"Sure," he said.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

I nodded. That looked about right.

"So…" I said.

He laughed. "How did I end up like this? A freegan?"

"Well, kinda."

He thought for a second. "That's not something I can tell you. It's something I can only
show
you."

I rolled my eyes. "I totally should've seen that coming, shouldn't I?"

He beamed. "Yup! So? You got some time?"

"You mean like right now? Without Min and Gunnar?"

"They can come too. If you really want."

If you really want.
That's what he'd said. But what he'd meant was that he wanted to spend time with me. Alone. He was totally hitting on me! Right? I mean, this wasn't all in my mind.
Please
validate my reality here!

"Sure," I said. "I guess. But, I mean, I still have my bike."

"I came on a bike too. I borrowed it from the freegan house. Which is good because where we're going to is too far to walk."

*   *   *

Wade's freegan bike was surprisingly pathetic—a bent and squeaky thing with brake levers that were attached to the handlebars with actual twist-ties. It was a nice reminder that as romantic as freeganism seemed in theory, the reality of it was pretty different.

Wade led me to a nearby residential neighborhood. The houses were all small and old—mostly one-story with chain-link fences and lawns where the dandelions were the only things still alive. I could smell the exhaust and burnt rubber from the freeway a couple of streets over.

Wade stopped his bike in front of one particular house. It looked pretty much like all the others, except it had a weathered white picket fence, not a chain-link one. And off to one side was a mangled trike that looked like it had been run over by a car.

"This is where I grew up," he said, simply enough.

I glanced back the way we'd come. "Wait. Did you go to Goodkind?" This was my high school, only a couple of miles away.

He nodded. Somewhere in the distance, some asshole wouldn't stop revving his motorbike. 

I thought back. "You were a senior when I was a freshman!"

"Yup."

Why hadn't I recognized him before? Because I hadn't expected to find a graduate from our school rummaging around in the Dumpster? But it was also that he looked so different: he'd been bookish and quiet and lanky then, and didn't have a shaved head. Now he was a lot more filled out (how he'd gained weight as a freegan, I didn’t know).

But it wasn't just that. I remembered him looking sort of shell-shocked, which isn't something a freshman usually thinks about a senior. Now he wasn't like that at all: he seemed bold, confident, a natural born leader—a different person completely.

"You're probably thinking I had this terrible childhood," Wade said. "That my parents divorced, that I grew up miserable, and now I've rejected the whole middle class lifestyle."

"No!" I said, except that's pretty much exactly what I'd been thinking.

"Well, it's sort of true. I mean, my early childhood was great. My parents were great. I was an only kid, but I was a good student, so they had big plans for me—my whole family did, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. I was going to be the first member of my family to go to college. I was going to be the one to change the world. It was all going according to plan, but then when I was about twelve, my dad got sick. A year later, he died."

"Wow, that sucks," I said.

"My mom took it hard. But it didn't change anything. She was determined to keep the house, even if it meant her working two jobs. Which it did. But everything was different. Before, the future—my future—had been this happy, joyful thing, like we were all on this road trip to California. Now it was the exact opposite of joy. Now it was something I absolutely
had
to do, the only thing that would make my mom and my dead dad's whole lives worthwhile. It started to feel like I was heading somewhere completely out of my control, like I was marching off to some kind of prison camp. But of course, I couldn't tell my mom any of this."

I nodded. My childhood had been totally different than Wade's, but I understood where he was coming from. Especially the part about not being able to tell your parents what you really feel.

Without another word, he started forward on the bike again. I guess that meant we weren't going inside. For all I knew, his mother didn't even live there anymore. Even if she did, how likely was it that she'd accepted her freegan son? From a parent's point of view, that had to be even worse than being gay. (And what if he was freegan
and
gay, which is what I desperately hoped?)

As we headed down the street, we passed a woman in an orange waitress' uniform scraping dog shit off her shoe in the gravel next to her driveway. At first, she just scowled at us, but Wade waved, and she recognized him and smiled, rolling her eyes at her messy shoe. I wondered if she knew he was a freegan now.

He led me down a couple more streets, then into a vacant lot and up a trail to a grassy hill where we could look out over the city on the other side, and I couldn't help but think of that Charles Dickens story
A Christmas Carol,
where the ghosts take Ebenezer Scrooge on a tour of his life, except that rather than show me my life, Wade was showing me his.

Wade pointed to the building right below—it was white and boxy like a hospital. "That's where my mom worked the night shift. It's a nursing home. It's also where she lost it one night."

"Lost it?"

"She cut the cords to all the call-buttons. Basically, she snapped. So she got 'sent away' for a while."

"Sent away?"

"A mental hospital."

"Ah," I said. "How old were you?"

"Seventeen. It was halfway through my senior year."

Talk about shell-shocked, I thought.

"Some relatives pitched in, and the plan was for me to stay in the house by myself until my mom got better, or until it was time for me to go away for college."

"Yeah? So?"

He pointed again, to a building down the road beyond the hospital—a supermarket. "I had a job—I'd had a job all through school. First, I was a bag boy, but I worked my way up to checker. That's where I met my first freegan. For a long time, I'd been surprised by how much food we threw out—even after the food banks came and took all the expired food they could. Then I noticed these people who would gather around the Dumpsters. It wasn't easy to get inside—supermarkets have Dumpsters that lock for a reason. But I got to know them. Eventually I started 'accidentally' leaving it unlocked. And I got to talking to them. I liked them. It wasn't too long after that we lost the house."

"So you were homeless?"

"Not really. I mean, I could've stayed with relatives. Or I could've left for college three months early and stayed on the campus. But something just hit me: I didn't need a job if I didn't have a place to stay. If I joined the freegans, I could take the summer off, and then go to college in the fall."

"And so you did."

"And so I did."

"What did you think?"

It was like his eyes reached out and grabbed me by the shoulders. "It was amazing! Living with the freegans was the exact opposite of the last five years of my life. I didn't have to be anywhere I didn't want to be or do anything I didn't want to do. For the first time since I could remember, my life wasn't just about doing what other people wanted me to do, what other people
expected
of me. I was free!"

That's just what Venus had said: freeganism meant being free. But then I thought: free to eat out of Dumpsters and drive a bike held together with twist-ties?

He must've seen what I was thinking on my face, because he said, "I know how it sounds. It's so hard to explain. Remember, I used to live like everyone else, like you do. I know what it's like to live in both worlds. But most people don't know what it's like to live like a freegan, not wanting things, not worrying about the future."

"Not worrying about the future?" How could this be? Wouldn’t you
always
be worrying about the future—about your next meal, or what happens when your one pair of shoes wears out?

"That's just it," Wade said. "The world provides. It always does. You don't always get what you want, but you always get what you need. It takes an attitude adjustment. But once you make it, you don't have to spend all your time thinking about the future, wanting and planning. You can just live in the moment. Can you imagine that? Being totally satisfied with your life exactly the way it is?"

"I guess," I said. "And suddenly it's not your responsibility to change the world."

"But that's just it! Before, everyone
expected
me to change the world, but I never knew what that meant. Now I do. It's not until you stop worrying about your own selfish wants and needs that you become aware—
really
aware—of what's going on around you. How do archeologists study a culture? They look at the trash, at the stuff that got left behind, right? Well, that's what we freegans do too! We see things the way they really are, the secrets people keep. When you live the way we do, when you don't spend your whole life looking at a television or a computer screen, you can't help but take a good long look at the world. And you see things, things that were hidden before, people that are forgotten or ignored. A lot of folks want you to go on ignoring these things and these people, but you can't. Once you really
see
them, once you see that they're people just like you, you can't not see them again. So when it comes to changing the world, I feel like now I know exactly what needs to change. And I
want
to change it—not because someone thinks I should, but because
I
want to. And I think I
am
changing the world. It's not like I dropped out of life by becoming a freegan. I still live in the world. I just see it with different eyes. It's this weird paradox. By giving up all the things I thought were so important, I care a lot more about life and about the world. I realized I didn't need to go to college to change it! And I
will
change it. I'll do what I have to do to change the world. Whatever it takes—anything at all."

Wade's enthusiasm was infectious. It was impossible not to smile. I was sure that the odds of my ever becoming a freegan were about the same as my dating girls again, but I had to admit it was an interesting point of view—definitely one I hadn't ever heard before.

"Some freegans think we should drop out," Wade went on. "That we
have
dropped out—that we should reject everyone and everything else. But that's not how I see it. We
are
a part of society—why should we be considered any less American than anyone else? We just see things differently. And I think we can see the future. There's a revolution coming, Russel. You can feel it in the trees—you can taste it in the dandelions. Like I said, you might not see it if you spend all day staring at a computer screen. But it's definitely coming!"

On one hand, this whole Passionate and Idealistic Young Man thing was totally working for me. On the other hand, even I'm not this wild-eyed.