20. Berlin
BERLIN
Before anyone else in the family was up, Jack showered, put Clearasil on his nose and chin, and brushed his teeth. By the time he came out of the bathroom, fully dressed, his sisters were waiting in the hall to use the only toilet.
“You took too long,” Alice said.
“At least you get to sleep in a real bed,” he said.
Zoe dashed in and shut the door.
“But we’re sharing a bed,” Alice said. “And Zoe kicks me in her sleep.”
“Sorry,” Zoe said from inside the bathroom. “I can’t help it.”
Their mom came out of her room in her pajamas, blinking her puffy eyes, looking absolutely wrecked.
She barely slept anymore, between her days with them and her long nights at work.
He knew she was worried about him, and she didn’t even have their dad to help out.
“Morning,” she said, her voice cracking. “Where are you off to?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I’m just going to walk around. I may end up at a climbing gym.”
“Great,” she said. “Have fun.” And then she put her palms together. “Leave your ringer on though? So I don’t worry?”
He had given his mom enough reason to stress out recently; he wouldn’t add to it.
With a raincoat, his climbing shoes, a Nalgene bottle, and a granola bar in his backpack, he closed the door to the apartment and got his earbuds from his pocket. As he headed downstairs, he ran into Adam on the next landing just outside his door.
“Busted,” Adam said, holding his hands up. “I missed my curfew.”
Jack was impressed. He’d pulled all-nighters before to study, but he’d never in his life partied until the next morning. And this guy was middle-aged. “Was it fun?”
“Not really,” Adam said, “but I think I finally found them.”
“Found who?”
“The band that’s going to get me some respect around here.”
“Yeah? What kind of music?” Jack said.
“Indie rock revival,” Adam said. “Think, like, the Strokes meets the Pixies.”
Jack was relieved to know who Adam was talking about.
“And they’re the whole package; they’ve got stage presence, a kind of cool, unique sound. Their songs need some work, but at least they’re trying to write their own shit. They’ve got potential.” He nodded a chin at Jack’s phone. “Who are you listening to?”
Jack showed him his phone.
“Peggy Gou? Very cool.”
It may have been pathetic, but after receiving such scorn and wrath from his classmates, it felt nice to get approval.
“So are you in high school or college…?”
Jack looked down at his shoes. “Neither really,” he said. What a terrible question to have to answer. “I’m supposed to start college in the fall, but it’s kind of up in the air for me.”
“Don’t do it,” Adam said flatly. “You know what I got out of college? A boatload of debt, an unpaid internship in Jersey City, and a wife who wants nothing to do with me. College is a waste of time and money.”
Jack smiled. His parents would for sure disagree, but he loved the idea of alternatives.
“But don’t listen to me,” Adam said. “What’s your… thing?”
“Math,” said Jack. “Science. But I’m not so sure anymore.”
“Whoa. In that case,” said Adam, “I stand corrected.”
“Not necessarily,” said Jack, and he shrugged, as though MIT meant nothing to him, as though he hadn’t killed himself for six years to get accepted, as though there were paths out there that did not include a bachelor of science.
“I’ll see you around, yeah?” Adam said, opening his door. “Maybe you want to go hear a band some night?”
“Sure,” said Jack, “that would be awesome.”
Adam had no reason to be nice to him. Adam had no reason to be nice to his family, letting his mom work in his apartment, dropping off stuff from the bakery every once in a while.
It felt good to know that some people on this planet really were kind and caring; not everyone faked it, not everyone turned on you.
Jack had always considered himself a pretty good guy at heart, so to have been tagged as one of the world’s absolute worst ones felt unbelievably shitty.
There was a point to this outing. In Dallas Jack had a car, which meant he could go where he wanted, when he wanted—within the bounds of reason, of course—all by himself.
But here in Berlin he felt like a child again.
He hadn’t done a single thing on his own since they’d arrived.
And spending every single day with his mom and his sisters was causing him to regress.
He was cranky all the time, and his mother fussed over him.
The couch in the office had a high back and arms, so it felt like he was sleeping in a crib.
Last night, he’d had growing pains, a misery he thought was in the past, and had to get a Tylenol from his mom.
When he’d finally fallen back asleep, he’d had a nightmare, not a teen nightmare of forgetting to study for an exam, but a kid nightmare involving a cartoonish monster.
He needed to start acting his age again, so he’d made a plan to spend the day on his own like a normal person.
It rained in Berlin all the fucking time.
He stopped to put on his raincoat, wishing he felt better, more like himself.
Ever since the day he got in trouble, Jack had felt this hard little knot of agony that had taken root in his stomach, and there was no making it go away.
He was going to have to live with it, possibly forever.
Sometimes eating helped. He stopped at a bakery and waited in line, watching the woman in front of him to see what and how she ordered.
And when it was his turn, he paused his music and pointed, saying a few words in German because—he would never tell his mom—he’d been doing Duolingo when no one was watching.
He got a salted pretzel and a coffee. When he handed over the money, the woman behind the counter made an angry face.
“ Haben Sie ’was kleiner? ”
“Sorry?”
She sighed. “Smaller bills, please.”
“Sorry,” Jack said again, looking through his wallet and feeling his face turn red as the man behind him grumbled with impatience.
The woman was shaking her head, holding the bill up to the light as if he were paying with counterfeit cash.
Jack reached in his pocket and found six euros in coins.
He handed them to her, and she handed him back the hundred bill and gave him his change.
This one interaction—his confusion and her hostility—wore him out.
He took his pretzel and coffee and walked out, trying to shake off the feeling of not belonging.
The night before, he’d studied the map and found a trek that would take him through the big park in the middle of Berlin all the way to the Brandenburger Tor.
From there, he would head to Checkpoint Charlie and to a climbing gym he’d found online called Urban Apes.
It would be the first time he’d gone bouldering since the whole fiasco, and he looked forward to it, to starting fresh with a new chalk bag, judging difficulty levels, and following the colored holds.
He’d never had a bad interaction with a fellow climber at a gym.
He turned off the playlist he was listening to because Billie Eilish was bumming him out, reminding him of his friends; for as long as he’d known them, he’d never gone this long without talking to Drew, Rosie, or Sam, and he missed them even more than he missed his dogs, which was really saying something.
But he’d shut them out, too angry and ashamed and miserable to talk.
He felt a kind of homesickness for them. He felt it for his dad too.
The only good thing about his dad being completely off the grid was not having to see the disappointment on his face.
His dad wouldn’t even be mad, would never lose his temper like Sam’s dad did all the time, or give him the silent treatment like Rosie’s mom, or make him feel any worse than he already did.
Jack could not remember his life before his dad was in it.
And he never would have guessed that the football-size robot Jack had helped develop would break up their family, especially since his dad built it for them , had invented the thing to clean dirt off the solar panels of their very own roof.
NASA wanted the drone’s technology, but what they ended up taking was the inventor himself, the systems engineer who built the hardware and wrote the software, who knew how to troubleshoot and make repairs, and who could adapt the thing to work under pretty much any conditions.
Jack’s dad was a genius, everyone knew that.
What Jack hadn’t known was that he would be willing to ditch them all for six months.
And now his dad had started doing these workouts in the biosphere that were being livestreamed, and some fitness buff was posting clips of them on TikTok, and they were getting a weird amount of attention.
It would have been super cringey if they weren’t popular, but the comments about his dad were all heart-eye, muscle-arm, and fire emojis, which was embarrassing in its own way.
He was passing a pond in the middle of the Tiergarten that made him think of Turtle Creek, where Sam lived.
He threw his empty coffee cup in a trash can, retied his shoelaces, and switched to a more upbeat playlist, but the first song, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers,” reminded him too much of Cynthia.
Only Rosie knew how much time he’d spent with her, and the only reason he’d told Rosie was because he’d needed her for an alibi.
“SAT tutoring?” Rosie had asked. “Dude, is she at least paying you?”
“Gross, no,” said Jack. “She just needs a little help. It’s not a big deal.”
“Do her parents know?”
“No,” he said.
“So… why’s it a secret?”
Jack had shrugged like it was perfectly reasonable, although he didn’t really get it either. “I guess it’s because Cynthia’s scores went down after they hired that lady who costs, like, twenty thousand dollars. She doesn’t want them or anyone to know she’s getting even more help and—”
“Yeah, but…”