Chapter Three
CHAPTER
THREE
Derek
Soccer practice ends. The team heads to the locker room, I go to the bike racks. Miguel Montero’s eyes are watching me, I can feel it. I throw on my backpack, jump on my bike, and pedal out of the parking lot toward the gravel road.
Miguel’s not all bad all the time, but he loves to have fun at other people’s expense. So if I don’t stick around, they can’t give me a hard time about Jae, the girl in the bathroom.
Are you okay?
How is it a perfect stranger seems to care the most?
The sound of crunching rocks beneath my tires is numbing. My mind wanders to—Jesus Christ—the look on Tillman’s face when I got home last night.
I rode up to the front yard. He was walking back to his car with the pizza delivery sign on the roof.
Mom was following him, and I heard everything she said.
I recognized him right away, even in the dim light: his wire-framed glasses, his narrow eyes, his copper-colored hair.
I’d known Tillman my whole life, and he’d never looked at me with pity.
He was the outsider, the one with his nose always in a book, the one always scribbling his mysterious notes.
Now he knows my secrets, and he can look at me the same way I look at him.
I ride until mansions become bungalows. Some of them you could say, I bet a sweet old granny lives there. But not the other ones. You ride faster past those ones. You wonder what really goes on in those ones.
I roll up to our pink house, where a dark blue pickup truck is parked. My hands form a death grip around the handlebars. It’s Peter Manganelli, Mom’s boyfriend and all-around douchebag. He doesn’t come around much these days because his wife is starting to ask questions.
The gate to the front yard screeches and scrapes the sidewalk.
The path is overgrown with grass. I lock my bike to the paint-chipped porch, and when I reach for the front door, it swings open with ease.
How many times do I have to tell them to keep it locked?
Just a few doors down, sweet old Mr. Jefferson was robbed at gunpoint.
He was eating meat pies in his tighty-whities.
Inside, the kitchen linoleum is stained with yellow and brown splotches. A lonely stick of incense on the counter fights to overpower the smell of smoke and booze.
“That you, kid?” an ogre-ish voice calls from the living room over the blaring TV. I don’t respond. He’d know it was me if he’d locked the door.
My stomach growls. I open the cereal cupboard and find an industrial-sized canister of garam masala sitting right in front of my box of Coco Rocks.
I’m annoyed that Mom would buy any spice at all when she barely cooks anymore—she barely does anything—and I’m annoyed that it’s not in the spice cupboard where it belongs.
I push it aside and grab my Coco Rocks, and the box feels unbearably light.
When I shake it, I’m greeted with the hollow rattle of two or three chocolaty pieces. Peter.
Jerk.
I reach into the fridge for some ginger ale and ease my hunger with large gulps before grabbing my backpack, heading to my room, and slamming the door.
Let there be light. I flick on the switch, and white orbs of light float like ghosts over glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling.
A Milky Way mural spans each wall, dark blues and blacks and purples, and stars twinkling in every hue.
A giant solar system lamp with round globes arches over my bed.
And a spaceship lamp on my desk illuminates the posters behind it: Star Wars, Interstellar, Koi … Mil Gaya.
It’s a shrine to the cosmos, the closest I might ever get to religion. Maybe it’s my attempt at harnessing all the creative energy of the universe.
On my desk sits a box of my half-baked movie scripts and loglines. Screenplays I might write one day. I haven’t had any fresh ideas in weeks, and I’m hoping something will come to me.
But what if it doesn’t? Maybe I should be like Mom and try different mediums, except not with colors. With words. A short story, maybe?
I toss my bag somewhere and push my chair up beneath the door handle, forming a barricade.
“Derek?” Mom calls from down the hall. She sounds good. Happy. But why can’t she be happy when it’s just the two of us?
I see her now, all spindly, stumbling a few steps before finding a windy path to my room.
Three tentative knocks sound on the door. “Derek?”
Maybe if I’m quiet she’ll forget I’m here.
“Derek?”
“Yeah.” My bed frame moans as I sink into it.
“Where were you?”
“Guam.”
I could remind her every day for the next year I have practice after school. It wouldn’t make a difference. Mom doesn’t really care where I am or what I do anymore.
There’s silence on the other side. And then she shuffles back to the living room. Hey, at least she put in her best effort, right?
With an hour to kill before my shift at the diner, I reach for my bag and pull out my history book, the only reading assignment for today.
I flip it open and try to focus my eyes on the chapter headings, the dates, the pictures that should be telling a story but mean nothing.
I can’t focus on history when shit is going to hit the fan today.
Because in this house, happiness never lasts.
Mom used to date this doctor. She wasn’t so bad then.
She still looked like Mom. Her hair was a long bright auburn.
Her face was sharp and stunning. And her eyes weren’t sunken and dark-rimmed like they are now.
When I was younger, I thought she looked like a princess, but I’d rather kiss a horse’s ass than tell her that.
I don’t know why she broke up with Dr. Rai, but after him, she brought home Peter the Degenerate. He has the temperament of a constipated gorilla. Me angry! No poop to sling!
“What do you see in him, anyway?” I asked in one of our Peter-related tiffs. “Dr. Rai was great. He was normal. He smelled good. He brought you flowers. Remember him?”
“Well, it sounds like you have a crush on Dr. Rai.”
“Gross. But see? Peter? You got nothing.”
Maybe Mom got rid of Dr. Rai because he made her feel guilty about my lack of Indian culture. “He’s lost,” he’d said once. “Completely confused. Doesn’t know Hindi.”
“He’s Gujarati,” she’d snapped back.
If it was anyone’s duty to teach me Gujarati, or Hindi even, it was my dad’s.
He was, after all, the Indian one. But when it came to his culture, Dad was always too practical to be proud.
This is America, was his answer to everything.
He’d been that way since he and Mom met at Georgetown University, where frat boy Dad downplayed his Indian heritage.
To him, India was like a distant relative, one he loved but didn’t miss very much.
He preferred the version of it that didn’t require a plane ticket: frozen samosas popped into the oven, the occasional festival (if Mom dragged us there), or any movie with an A.
R. Rahman soundtrack. So without Dad’s insistance that I was Indian, I never felt like I was, and he’s Gujarati never really sunk deep for me.
A hard knock on the door interrupts my thoughts. “I’m out of cigarettes. Run and get me a pack, will ya,” Peter says from behind the closed door.
“That’s illegal,” I say. “I’m not eighteen yet. Plus, homework. You know, kid stuff.”
There’s a THWONK so hard I expect a hairy hand to break through the wall. I jump up to open the door.
The first thing I see is Peter’s gorilla chest, the hair smothering a gold chain hanging from his neck.
His graying black beard is oiled and man-scaped within an inch of its life.
His nose is so delightfully freckled and his eyes so dreamy gray, there must have been a glitch at the hell factory that spawned him.
He’s the kind of guy people talk about on the news: He was such a nice man, I never thought he’d do such a thing.
Peter drops a bill into my hand and I head outside to Mr. Brown’s store a couple of blocks down. On the sign, DISCOUNT CORNR SHOP has no e. Everyone complains about it, says the sign makes the whole neighborhood look bad. Have they seen the neighborhood?
I walk in and Mr. Brown says, “Derek, Derek, Derek,” with a cigar dangling out of the corner of this mouth. Guy always says my name three times, and he always has a cigar in his mouth like it’s been surgically attached.
“Hey, Mr. Brown.” I wave and head down the aisles. I grab a pack of ginger ale, some Coco Rocks, and a couple of TV dinners and diet sodas for Mom.
I drop the items on the counter, scoot my fake ID toward him, and point to Peter’s favorite brand. “Two,” I say.
Mr. Brown gives me a look.
“For my mom’s boyfriend,” I explain.
“No can do, Derek.”
“Hey, Mr. Brown. This guy has, like, giant hands. And he’s just looking for a reason. You know what I mean?”
His brown eyes stare at me unblinking, and then he snatches his cigar and shakes it at me like a thick finger. “Now, don’t you come asking me again,” he says, before popping the cigar back in his mouth and turning to unlock the glass case. “Make me lose my damn store.”
As soon as I step outside, I crumple the receipt and shoot a three-pointer into a trash can. I glance down the street to the house and figure I have five minutes before Peter loses his shit.
Somewhere a dog is barking and a woman’s shrill voice yells, “Minnie! Quiet!” A car drives past, blaring country music from behind tinted windows.
The houses on this street are almost identical.
They might be different colors, but they’re all really the same.
Dusty lawns scattered with toys or broken furniture, screen doors that couldn’t keep an insect out, let alone a human.
There is one exception, though: Miss Carol’s baby-blue house.
She spends most of her time outside, planting flowers, trimming bushes, and cleaning windows.
It’s not enough to make the street look better, but I appreciate the effort.