"You know what this means, right?" Mr. Basketball was looking straight ahead, serious about the road. "We"re too smart. Smart people can"t turn their brains off."
"If we were so smart, shouldn"t we find a way?"
"Why would we want to?" he asked. "We"re smart enough to know that, in the end, that"s not really what we want. Self-awareness is a gift, really. You"ll be happy for it one day."
"When I"m a better person, maybe."
"When you can control it, sweetheart," he said.
We laughed. I wasn"t sure why. I looked out at the road and watched all the familiar areas pa.s.s by me. In Mr. Basketball"s car, everything looked smaller and more manageable. I stuck my hand out the window, ready to press myself against the world.
The next day, I didn"t even have to ask. "If you don"t feel comfortable riding the bus, I don"t mind giving you a ride again," Mr. Basketball said. "We live so close."
I agreed.
"Last night," I said, while we were halfway to my house, driving through the town, "an orange giant picked me up by my overalls and threw me over a stone wall."
"Last night," Mr. Basketball said, "I had to play soccer with books for feet. And then all my teeth fell out."
"The stone wall, turns out, was bordering the edge of the universe. I fell into the sky, which wasn"t really the sky, since it was the s.p.a.ce outside of whatever is the universe."
"They call that hypers.p.a.ce," he said.
"Well," I said, "I was thrown into it."
"Your dreams are pathetically transparent."
"Should I be embarra.s.sed? I"m so embarra.s.sed."
He laughed. I stuck my hand out the window. The air was soft. Spring was coming.
"You should," he said. "You feel alone. Pushed out of the world, expelled by some G.o.dlike figure."
"And you. Chained to your academics, too stressed to function in real life. Aging."
I swallowed.
"The overalls," Mr. Basketball said, not skipping a beat. "That"s what doesn"t make sense to me. The overalls. Very unlike you."
Did he know me?
"Infantile state?" I asked. "Clothes worn by people who aren"t usually me?"
"Oh, yes yes," he said. "I can see that now."
I smiled.
"See, you are smart," he said.
The next day after school, Mr. Basketball had a cupcake waiting for me on his desk. He was leaning back in his chair, reading the Fairfield Times: TORN FLAG TOO HIGH TO REMOVE. He had on khakis and his plaid shirt was unb.u.t.toned to show off a T-shirt with a wagon and a warning: I HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY.
"It"s a little late," he said. "But happy birthday."
"Thank you," I said. Even though the cupcake was for me, I felt awkward touching it, as though it still shouldn"t belong to me. Because why would he get me a cupcake? Did he buy the cupcake for me? Did he leave school at some point to get me a cupcake, think about what flavor I might like best, and then pay money for it?
"How old are you, Emily?" he asked.
"Fifteen."
Ms. O"Malley popped her head in the door. "Johannes," she said. Her clothes always looked so soft and muted and British. Her long curly hair was like a yellow mane around her face. "Faculty meeting."
"Your name is Johannes?" I asked when she left.
"It is."
"Why would your parents name you Johannes?"
"Why wouldn"t they?"
"Did they not want you to have any sort of childhood?" I asked. "Who sees a baby and feels okay calling it Johannes?"
He laughed. "They wanted me to be a lawyer or something like that."
"Really?"
"Really. That and some hereditary s.h.i.t. Long-lost grandfather I never met, who died in the war. I"m supposed to carry on his qualities. Be virtuous. Heroic. Johannes."
"I could never be a Johannes," I said.
He stood up from his desk, walked toward me.
"You can be anything you want to be," he said. "For example, I tell some of my friends to call me Jonathan and some to call me Jack."
We were quiet. He had friends. It was something I never considered before.
"You haven"t eaten the cupcake," he said.
"It looks cancerous," I said, poking the cupcake. "It"s very neon. You eat it and if you don"t die, I"ll try some."
He laughed. He b.u.t.toned his shirt back up to cover the wagon. "I have this faculty meeting. We"re getting a new vending machine. Shouldn"t take more than twenty minutes."
In his car, I threw an empty Sprite bottle in the backseat, pleased at my power to rearrange his life. His window was cracked where a rock had recently hit it. I picked up a twenty-dollar check from "Grandma."
"I thought you were rich," I said.
"My parents are," he said. "A lot of it doesn"t trickle down. Like I said, they really really wanted me to be a lawyer. They"re still waiting for me to go to law school. I told them not to hold their breath. The day I go to law school, Emily, that"s the day I"ve surely sold my soul. But for now, they say they won"t fund this life of Shakespearean gooblygok. A direct quote. And I look them in the eye and say, "Gooblygok? I"m no lawyer, but I know that"s not a word." That"s why they don"t give me money, because I say annoying s.h.i.t like that."
I didn"t know if it was seeing his grandmother"s curly handwriting or Natalie Merchant that came blasting on the radio, but something made me feel outside myself. I looked down at my legs and they barely looked like mine.
"Do you remember me?" I asked. We had never talked about what happened on my stoop and I was starting to fear I was the only one who remembered that moment.
"Remember you?" he asked. "From two seconds ago when you spoke?"
"No," I said, laughing. "From October. My porch."
He sighed. He turned left.
"Yes," he finally said. "Of course. You had gla.s.s in your foot."
"I did," I said.
He pulled into my driveway.
"And you didn"t even flinch."
"Not once," I said.
"Right there," he said, pointing to my stoop. "You looked like the saddest, bravest, most alive girl I had ever seen. You were so alive. I can"t explain it. Your face."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He sighed. "When you get to be my age, Emily, that"s the kind of stuff you start noticing. People have two deaths really, their physical death and their emotional death. People just start to emotionally die at some point. Some earlier than others. Take Mr. h.e.l.ler, for instance, barely alive. But you, you are definitely alive, my dear."
Mr. Basketball leaned over and opened the pa.s.senger door for me. He hovered over my lap for a moment. He was so close, his face was suddenly terrifying. There was a tiny wrinkle in the corner of his eye, a coffee stain on his collar, a patch of dead skin on his temple where he must have forgotten to wash. He slid his hand down to my foot.
"Has it healed properly?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "It has."
I got out of the car and walked slowly into my house so he would know I wasn"t afraid.
"Who was that?" my mother asked when I threw my backpack on the tiles of our kitchen floor.
"Who was who?" I asked. I poured myself some lemonade.
"Who was that man dropping you off?"
"That man?"
"Emily, who was that man?" she said.
I took a long cool sip of my drink.
"That man was the man who dropped me off."
I put my gla.s.s down. The liquid settled in my stomach. I was alive. How exciting. My mother put her hands on her hips. "Fine. Fine. Be that way."
"Oh relax, Gloria. It was my friend"s dad Maximus."
I pulled my homework out of my bag. My mother took an orange out of the refrigerator and began to peel it using her hands.
"Listen, Emily," my mother said, throwing the peel into the garbage. "I just have one thing to say. If a man tries to have s.e.x with you and you don"t want it, do you know what you say?"
I put my hands over my ears.
"Don"t scream," she said, removing my hands. "That will only make him violent. Just confuse him. That"s what your Nana always told me. She said you start singing something crazy, real crazy, like, "Somewhere over the Rainbow.""
My mother was so beautiful. She was biting into an orange and the juice ran down her chin.
"I know that sounds crazy," she said, wiping her mouth. "But that"s the point. You have to scare him more than he scares you, get it?"
17.
I was pleased with your haikus," Mr. Basketball said in cla.s.s the next week, handing them back to us. When he stopped by my desk, he said, "See me after cla.s.s." "You all seem to understand the beauty behind a haiku and that"s a good thing."
When the bell rang, I nearly skipped up to his desk.
He explained to me that while the poems I wrote were interesting, they were not haikus.
Emily Vidal"s Haikus: Mother is always the next morning,
A painted river of Maine
Framed and frozen body of water
Father said he had affiliations with.