The Absolute Value of -1, page 7
It was pretty cold that day, I guess, and me and Lily were sitting on the curb outside of the Gap. I wasn’t wearing a coat, though, so I got up and bounced a little, just to get warm.
Simon is always saying I act like a cokehead. But he knows I don’t do coke. I know everyone probably thinks I do. Everyone can eat it, though. I’m a little hyper. ADHD or some fucking thing. Who cares, right? So diagnose me.
Lily looked up at me. She has these big brown eyes. It sounds corny, but they totally get me. They make my stomach and heart flip five times a piece. So I looked away quickly, because I have a tendency to kind of stare at her if I don’t catch myself. It’s been like that forever. Well, since I met her, anyway. When she catches me staring I feel like a complete douche. She always calls me on it, too.
“Man, it’s cold,” Lily said.
“Yup,” I said, continuing to bounce for warmth. I kept my eyes on my sneakers. “You need to get up and move.”
“No way.” She huddled in tight, pulled up her knees. She looked really cute. “Noah, why did your family leave California? I’d kill someone to be in California right now.”
“Who? Who would you kill?”
“Anyone. Name him.... Or her.”
I thought about it for a second. I could have said my dad. His fat face popped into my head pretty quick. That seemed pretty depressing, though. I wasn’t looking for pity from Lily.
“My dad.” What the hell. Why not.
Lily just chuckled very politely, though.
“Come on, get up and bounce,” I said, trying to kind of change the subject, get her mind off my dad and that whole fucking can of worms I just didn’t want to start opening. “It’ll keep you warm, and I’ll get to see those beautiful boobies bounce up and down.”
“Noah!” She was probably really offended but I just sneered a little and laughed.
Lily really does have the biggest tits in our school, I’m pretty sure. She’s had glorious fucking tits forever, though, far as I know. Soon after I first moved out here from Cali, in the middle of seventh grade, someone told me she paid for them.
It’s obviously bullshit. Even in this town girls aren’t buying tits at age thirteen, right? But they really are that fucking glorious. Still, she hates when I talk about them. Dudes are endlessly telling her how great her tits are, and it drives her crazy. I don’t know why, honestly. If girls came up to me in the halls and shouted, “Hey, giant-cock man!” I’d be loving that shit, for real.
Tits, that’s what I was about to get into. The new girl at the Gap had very nice tits. Not huge like Lil’s or anything. But really nice. I had this thought that I’d like to get my hands on them.
I turned to the Gap window and looked in. “New girl working at the Gap,” I said to Lily. “I’d like to get my hands on her tits.”
Lily rolled her beautiful eyes and put her chin back on her knees. “Big shock.”
The truth is I don’t get any action from the ladies at all. None. I’m not going to try to hide this immutable fact from you. But you also have to understand that if I didn’t spend so much time with Lily and Simon, I’d probably have a better shot.
I’m not stupid. I know Simon and Lily are a couple of the biggest freaks in school. But they’re my best friends, and I’m in love with one of them. Besides, Simon is pretty much my best customer.
I should probably mention that I sell a little bit of weed. Now and then.
“Why do you have to constantly talk about boobs?” Lily asked.
I stepped off the curb and then back up. Repeat. “I don’t constantly talk about boobs.”
“You do,” she insisted.
I don’t. Not constantly. But I had a plan. It hadn’t worked, obviously, but the plan was, if I kept letting Lily know how much I’m a boob man, she’d pretty soon realize I was the man for her, right? Clearly I would fully appreciate her particular attributes.
“Where the fuck is Simon?” Lily said.
I should probably also mention that she was totally wet for Simon. Only Simon never seemed to realize this. The school at-large assumed they were married already with seven children or something.
“I’m cold. I’m going home.”
She got up and turned to face me a second. I looked away as she half bowed good-bye.
“Bye, Noah. Tell Simon I left.”
“Yeah, I think he’ll figure that out pretty quick when you’re not here.”
She gave me the finger and walked off. I watched her walk away and cursed her pea coat for covering her ass.
What? I’m not strictly a boob man. It’s not like I’m religious about it or something.
That afternoon, Lily wasn’t going for my boob strategy at all, as you can see. I glanced into the Gap, then pulled my cigarettes from my back pocket and lit one. (They’re menthols; I can smoke and have fresh breath all in one shot.) I figured I’d wait a minute to see if Simon was going to show up at all. It was after five, so I was pretty sure he’d come and gone already, before Lily and I even got there. This was back when Simon never hung out past five on weeknights.
But whatever. I was in no hurry at all to get home. At home there are exactly five things that interest me at all, and four of those are televisions. The other is dinner, when it happens, which is pretty rare.
Plus the one thing you can pretty much bet on, my dad will be home, sitting in his office at the back of the house. He’ll be puffing away at some nasty cigar, screaming into a goddamn phone, watching six finance networks. Once in a while he might stick his head out to shout at my mom, or to call me a goddamn faggot.
Wanna come over?
My dad moved us out here about three years ago now. We’d been living in Orange County out in California, which was fine with me. But it wasn’t fine with someone, because my dad left his medical practice, sold the house in about a week flat, and shipped me and Mom off to Long Island, New York.
Unfortunately for me and Mom, he followed a few weeks later. I don’t know what he was doing still in California for those few weeks, but I have a feeling it wasn’t dishing up holiday meals at a shelter for battered women, or anything charitable like that.
Soon after he got to Long Island, he put his hairy arm around my shoulders. He’d been at his new practice all day, and now he was home; his sport coat was off and lying on the back of our new black leather couch in the music room. His shirt sleeves were rolled up past his elbow, and I could smell a day’s worth of cigar smoke and BO. His silk tie was loose at the throat.
I had been looking at this hideous painting he’d had hung in the living room. (Yeah, had hung. As in, my dad doesn’t pick up a goddamn hammer and nail to hang his own painting. There are people whose fucking life calling is to hang shit up, move shit around, change lightbulbs, whatever.) It was one of five paintings in a collection he had shipped from some artist in Oregon. Who knows how much they cost him. Must have been hundreds of thousands, from the treatment they got. They showed up one morning with two armed guards. They’re still up in the house today.
Anyway, each one features a mermaid, playing a harp or peeking from behind a giant clam shell or just looking generally slutty-coy. You can’t see any tits at all, but my mom hates them, I’m pretty sure. I don’t blame her.
So I was standing in front of one of these new paintings. All the living room lights were off, except for the five spotlights he’d had installed to shine directly on each of the mermaid paintings. “Noah,” he said to me. “Noah, do you like this painting?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t even thirteen, not quite the smart ass I am today.
The douche bag pulled a fat cigar out of his shirt pocket and jammed it into his mouth. Then he went on, talking through his teeth like Spider-Man’s boss at the fucking newspaper.
He squeezed my shoulder. “You know what this painting is?” he asked. He pulled a lighter from his pants pocket and sparked it.
Careful, I thought. The booze on your breath might blow us all to Kingdom Come. Two years down the road, I was saying shit like that out loud. But for then, at twelve, I just looked at my feet and said, “A mermaid?”
He let go of my shoulder and slapped the back of my head in one smooth motion. Not too hard, but I must have jumped. I know I said, “Ow, Dad, what the hell?”
“Whoa, whoa, sorry, Nancy,” he replied with a smirk. “So sensitive. Take it easy.”
He took a deep breath and sighed, then muttered under his breath. He pulled his tie off and tossed it onto a nearby recliner.
“It only looks like a mermaid,” Dad went on. He took a short puff off his cigar. “In actuality, this is Glenn Lerman’s BMW.”
“It is?” Glenn Lerman was one of Dad’s partners back in California.
Dad nodded, then placed his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed for a second, then let go. He walked over to the darkest corner of the living room and I heard some glass and ice clinking. Must be a banner evening; his third scotch, and not even six yet.
Dad laughed and took a good swig from his tumbler, then moved over to a different mermaid painting. This one was a redhead mermaid, looking over her shoulder at you and smiling. She wasn’t smiling at me, though. She was smiling at Dad. Their smiles seemed right together.
“This painting here,” Dad said. He gestured at it with his drink. “This one is that asshole Jerome Preston’s condo in Laguna Beach.” Another partner.
I glanced at Dad, then chose another mermaid, pointed at it. “What about that one?” The minute I said it, I regretted it. My voice sounded shaky and off. He would think I was mocking him.
Dad swirled his glass. The ice clinked around a little and he drank the rest in a single gulp. Then he looked square at me. His face was suddenly hard and serious.
I stared back for an instant, but looked back at the painting.
“That one?” Dad said, looking into his glass, hoping an ounce was still there. “That’s Aaron Roth’s little girl, her goddamn college tuition. I don’t know. Where’s your mother?
“Cheryl!” he called out, much louder. “Cheryl, we’re out of scotch again!”
With that gem, he walked into his back office and closed the door. Mom’s reply, that a delivery would be coming in the morning, was quiet, timid, and unheard by the man in the house.
| chapter 2 |
November. I spotted Simon Fisher strolling down Cardinal Drive, like he does every morning. Pretty much every day since we met in science class when I first got out here, me and Simon have walked from Cardinal to school together. We’ve come a long goddamn way since then.
“’Sup, Fisher!” I called out from up the block. He could barely be bothered to look up, of course. I swear, sometimes that dude is the walking fucking dead.
Simon pulled the headphones off his ears and dropped them around his neck. “Hey.”
Know what’s fun? When your morose douche bag friends are insisting on shoegazery douchebagitude, really amp it up. Get loud, jump around a little more....
“High-five me, bitch!” I said. Excuse me: fucking exclaimed.
Simon managed to lift his hand, which must have weighed about seventy pounds.
“Dude, you are not a morning person, do you know that?” I pointed out.
“How can you be so awake at this hour, man?” he asked me. Then he looked at me. “Wow, dude. Nice shiner.”
I reached up and felt around my eye. It was a little sore. “Eh, it’s not that bad,” I said. And it wasn’t. I mean, I had pretty much forgotten it was there. But my dad and I had gotten into it pretty good the night before, so there it was.
“I don’t want to talk shit about your dad or anything,” Simon said. Which of course means he’s about to talk shit about my dad. “But I’d call the fucking cops if I were you. Your dad’s a class-A prick.”
I shrugged. I know what Simon thinks. He thinks my dad beats me, like it’s child abuse or whatever. But it’s really not like that. The thing is, we fight. You can believe that dude has to show up at his office sometimes and tell a bullshit story about taking an elbow to the face in a pickup basketball game over the weekend. But I did that. I gave him that black eye, or that bloodied lip.
For now, he’s still giving it back twice as good, though.
I just said to Simon, “If I was gonna turn the dude in it wouldn’t be for this black eye, dude, believe me.”
Look, I won’t sugarcoat it. I know my dad’s a fucking prick. He treats my mom like shit, he treats me like shit.... He even treats the partners at his medical practice like shit.
Still, he’s not exactly my favorite topic of conversation, so I changed the subject. “I’ve got some excellent trees for you in this bag of mine, Mr. Happy Pants.”
“Oh yeah?”
See, that’s what perks this dude up in the morning: my weed. He is never as happy to see me—or Lily, for that matter—as he is to see some weed. Not that I blame him. I mean, he sees me every fucking day, and this was some very good weed.
“Yeah. Do you need to make it to first period today?”
Simon cocked an eyebrow at me. “Define ‘need.’”
See what I mean? Mood shift, 180 degrees. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
The back of the high school came into view as we turned onto Hill Crest, and there was Lily, slumped against the maple tree behind the tennis courts.
“Lil-yyy!” I called out. My goddamn mating call.
Simon shushed me. “Come on, Noah. It’s seven thirty in the fucking morning. Can we respect the sanctity of me being fucking tired?”
I shit you not. He really says shit like “sanctity” all the time. He also writes poetry. Poetry. He doesn’t know I know, but I know. “Sorry, sorry.”
Lily got to her feet, but it wasn’t me she was happy to see. “Hey.” She gave a half wave, with her elbow bent, and her hand below her shoulder. Then she shoved it right back into her pea coat’s pocket. A second later she pulled it back out to push her hair behind her ear. It was a windy morning.
It wasn’t too windy for Simon, though, our resident bowl packing, wind guarding tour de force. Before I could even say good morning and get comfortable, he was passing me the bowl and coughing his lungs out.
I laughed. “You like that?” I asked him. “Cough to get off, my friend.”
Simon nodded and coughed his ass off.
“Are you going to Rohan’s class?” Lily asked him.
“Nope,” Simon said. She was sitting up against the tree, and he was leaning on her, like she was a goddamn easy chair or something. I stood up and took the bowl from him, then handed it to Lily without taking a hit.
“Ladies first.”
Lily leaned around Simon and took the bowl from me with one hand and pushed her hair out of her face with the other.
“It’s too windy,” she said. “I can’t . . . Simon, light it for me?”
Simon was on cloud nine though, and I’m quicker anyway. So I leaned over and lit the bowl for her while she held her hair and covered the carb. She took a pretty small hit and held it, then blew it across Simon’s face.
“What the fuck, Lily?” he said. She laughed and threw her arms around his neck.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it. I wanted to vomit. You’re probably thinking, Why the fuck does this guy hang around these two? Or step up and be a man, or whatever. I don’t know. This was every morning, practically. Three days a week, I bet: I sit down, stand up, sell some weed, smoke some cigarettes, and watch Simon and Lily flirt each other’s pants off.
That particular morning, Lily mentioned some open house party happening. She pretty much begged Simon to go with her, and he of course ignored her. Lily ignored me, though, when I expressed my bubbly goddamn enthusiasm. Then, since Simon had skipped Rohan’s class, when the haze started to lift it was almost second period. Lily and Simon have that class together. Which left me, lying on my back on the lawn. I lifted my head, strained my goddamn neck, and watched them walk off until they were out of view.
My head dropped with a quiet thud on the hard, cold dirt of the schoolyard. I rolled my head to one side and saw the tennis courts. They always remind me of back home in Cali, where everyone I knew had a court or three on their property. I took lessons for two years out there.
I rolled my head away from them and saw my cigarette butts, dirty and bent, all smoked right down to the filter. There were seven of them. I knew they were all mine, all clustered together, there; Simon smokes some shit without filters, fucking nut; Lil smokes whatever she can get, usually what she bums from Simon, but there’s always a load of blood-red lipstick on her butts, so they’re easy to identify.
Simon was the first friend of mine to come over to our new house. It was a weeknight, and after dinner, after seven, I think. The sun was down, and I was hiding in the basement. Not hiding like a kid in a closet, afraid of the boogeyman. Just kind of keeping out of the way, playing my Xbox or whatever. The basement had already been turned into my TV and game room. Dad had his own room, in addition to his office, which had two TVs and a sweet sound system; that was on the second floor. Mom had her own room, too, that she called the solarium. It didn’t have a TV, but it had speakers mounted all over the place that piped in music from Dad’s system in his room. In other words, the house was arranged so we could spend as little time as possible with each other. For that reason, it also had a goddamn intercom system. When we first moved in, I loved that. I was constantly slapping myself in the chest and going, “Mr. La Forge, why have we stopped?” and shit like that. I’m telling you, I was a total fucking moron.
Starting that evening, though, that goddamn intercom became my bane, my absolute arch nemesis. When Simon rang the front door buzzer, I took the steps two at a time to make sure I beat my mom to the door.
He was standing there with his big sister, Suzanne, who must have dropped him off. She looked a lot like him—reddish hair, freckles, all that—and was kind of hot, which was a combination that was a bit troubling, honestly. Simon was in baggy jeans, with safety pins in them here and there. His black T-shirt had a huge skull on it, and he was wearing it over a shirt with long sleeves. Now I’d seen everything.
