Dear zoe, p.9
Dear Zoe, page 9
Jimmy Freeze disappeared for a few days after Dad made me kick him off the porch. Or at least if he was around he didn’t show himself to me, and I looked for him plenty. I don’t think I’m one of those girls who’s attracted to “bad boys.” Most of the boys like that at my school are sort of poseurs who aren’t bad because they’re really bad but because they can’t figure out how to be what they actually are. I think what I liked about Jimmy Freeze was that he felt like the opposite of that—like he was really a good guy who couldn’t help himself from screwing up a lot. Sort of like my Dad, not to get all Freudian or anything.
Anyway, the night I found out about his little “business” with the truck, my Dad and I made a huge dinner and sat in front of the TV eating until almost nine o’clock. Then I did homework while he drank beer and fell asleep in front of the Pirates, who were on the West Coast. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not but no one called, no one came to the front door, nothing. By the time Frank and I threw a blanket over him and headed upstairs, it was close to midnight.
I heard the music as soon as I went in my room, not because it was as loud as last time, but because I guess I’d been listening hard for sounds from his house for days. It was the same song again, soft and low, but my window was open and I guessed his was too.
Goodnight you moonlight ladies,
Rockabye sweet baby James.
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose.
Won’t you let me go down in my dreams,
And rockabye sweet baby James.
God, what sappy stuff. But for some reason it made me feel really good to think about lying in bed and listening to it with him. Not with him, I guess, but that’s what it felt like. I switched off the light and Frank and I settled in. I think I would have been asleep in about five minutes if I hadn’t heard what sounded like a scratching at the screen. I wasn’t sure I’d heard anything until I looked at Frank and saw that his little ears were two perfect triangles pointing straight up, along with the hair at the base of his neck. I told him “Shhh,” and we listened together. It came again, louder this time. We both jumped out of bed and ran to the window and when I pulled back the shade I could see what looked like the white blade of a street-hockey stick against the screen. My heart just about ricocheted off the walls of my chest because I’ve seen all those Halloween movies and my imagination put Jason and his white hockey mask at the other end of that stick. Who it was of course was Jimmy Freeze leaning out his window below me.
“Hey, Tess DeNunzio,” he said.
I automatically put my finger to my lips but I don’t know why. His parents let him play music that shook the house and my Dad was downstairs in a Coors Light coma.
“Wanna come over?” he whispered. He was motioning for me to come out my window.
God, I wanted to more than anything.
“I can’t,” I whispered back.
“Why not?”
I gestured to my windowsill and then to his like a game show hostess, telling him there was no way I could make it. His window wasn’t that far below mine but it was far enough to the right to make it too big a stretch for me.
“Then I’ll come up,” he said. He crawled out and stood on the sill. From there he could lean out and prop himself against my Dad’s house. He stretched over, grabbed my sill, and before I could tell him not to he had let his feet fall away from his house and was hanging below me.
“Hey, Tess,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“How about opening the screen?”
“Oh yeah. Right.”
All the windows in my Dad’s house were new and the screen slid up easily and Jimmy Freeze scrambled up and in.
“Nice work, Spidey.” I tried to sound like boys scaled buildings to see me all the time.
“Thanks.”
Frank was over the initial shock of a body coming through the window and was working himself up to bark until Jimmy put his hand out. Quick as that, Frank settled and started licking Jimmy’s hand like a salt stick. We both watched him and Frank’s tongue was all you could hear for maybe a whole minute.
“Okay,” I said. “Now what?”
Jimmy looked at me and smiled a little bit, but let Frank keep licking his hand.
“You ever get high?”
“Not really.”
“Not really?”
“No.”
“Wanna try?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, it’s just weed. No big deal. We could sit on the windowsill.”
“I said okay.”
“Oh.”
It was as simple as that, really. I think parents have this view that their kids are being pressured all the time to do drugs and maybe some kids are, but I guess I was just waiting for someone to ask. Someone other than Travis. Or at least someone like Jimmy Freeze. I mean if my own Dad was selling the stuff how bad could it be?
We sat facing each other on the windowsill and listened to the music rising up from his room. He had really nice eyes, dark and set deep, and I could tell he was taking this seriously, that he wouldn’t make fun of me if I coughed up half a lung or something. He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a lighter and a little cigarette case that had four freshly rolled joints in it. He took one out, lit it, took a longer drag than I’d ever seen any of my friends take and held the smoke for what seemed like a minute.
“This how you know my Dad?” I asked.
He turned and exhaled, filling the space between our houses with swirling smoke. “Yep. This and being neighbors.”
“Is that why he made me kick you off the porch?”
“I don’t know. I guess. Or maybe he knows some of the other stuff. Here.” Jimmy handed me the joint. “For the first couple, don’t even put your lips around it. Just bring it real close and whistle in.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah. You won’t get as much smoke and it’ll be cooler.”
“Okay.”
I coughed a little but it wasn’t as bad as I thought. We passed it back and forth a few times, Jimmy taking huge drags, me barely making the tip turn red. Frank watched us from the bed.
“What other stuff?” I asked him.
“About the school I go to and why I’m there and everything. My Dad sent me there but he holds it against me.”
“What kind of school?”
“One of those places for ‘troubled youths.’ Way up in Maine. Costs my Dad more money than he’s got and it’s mostly rich kids who never had any idea how lucky they were. Anyway, my Dad’s not stupid. He knows I still smoke pot. But I was doing a lot of other stuff before. He can’t understand that smoking pot and doing nothing else practically makes me a geek up there. He thinks just because it’s basically a correctional facility everyone who goes there gets ‘corrected.’ Most of the kids are just happy to be away from their parents so they can do their drugs in peace.”
I told him about Kasey, about her getting arrested on our porch and being sent to a school like that and then getting kicked out.
“Yeah. Half of my class has been kicked out. You feelin’ anything?”
“I’m not sure.”
He smiled. “You’ll be sure. Put your lips around it this time and take in a little more. It’s gonna be hotter.”
I could feel the smoke singe the back of my throat on the way in but I held it.
“You’re a natural.”
I shrugged, still holding it in. That’s when I started to feel every pore in my body open up at once. Jimmy must have seen it happening.
“There you go,” he said. “No worries.”
From there the whole night slowed down. And for a while got real funny. Nothing that had ever happened to me in my life was as funny as Jimmy Freeze putting his face real close to mine to check out my pupils. Until he lost his balance and almost fell out the window into the alley and that turned out to be even funnier. Then after a while I was able to relax into the high and Jimmy Freeze and I started solving all of the world’s problems: poverty, hunger, killing in the name of religion. It all seemed so simple. Just a matter of a little human kindness and understanding. Nothing JT and us couldn’t handle. Like Jimmy said, No worries. Then he started talking about New York, the Towers. I nodded, got quiet, didn’t tell him about you. He told me about his real Mom and how she died when he was ten and he showed me the picture of her he carries everywhere. In the picture she’s dark and beautiful. She’s starting to look away and two surprisingly thin fingers are covering one side of her face, like someone had snuck up on her with the camera and she was embarrassed. Jimmy said she hated having her picture taken that last six months. He asked if my Mom was still around, did I have brothers or sisters, did I have pictures. I told him about Mom and Em and David, said I hadn’t brought any pictures with me.
“You okay, Tess?”
I said I was just real tired all of a sudden.
“You’ll sleep like a baby. And no hangover. That’s the beauty.”
“Great.”
“Hey.” I must have been looking down because all of a sudden his finger was under my chin, pulling my eyes up to his face. “Thanks for letting me be your first. You sure you’re okay?”
“Perfect.”
“Wanna do this again sometime?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Can I kiss you good night?”
“Yeah. You can.”
And he kissed me just like I hoped. Real soft. Just lips. And real long. At least I think it was real long. It was still hard to tell. Then he swung his legs out the window, braced his hands on the sill, his feet flat against his own house, and shimmied his way down until he could reach his right foot over and step down. After he’d slipped inside he poked his head back out and put up a finger for me to wait. Then he disappeared for a minute and came back with a spray can. He mimed a throw then threw for real, and somehow I caught it. Lysol.
“Keep it,” he said. “For next time.”
“Thanks.”
“Night, Tess DeNunzio.”
“Night.”
I slid the screen down, pulled the blind and sat down heavy next to Frank. He looked up at me like he was jealous. Or suspicious. Like he knew I was stoned. Or maybe he just looked like that because I was stoned. Because all of a sudden, alone, without another stoned human being in the room to balance me out, I was the most stoned human being that had ever lived. And the hungriest.
I made my way down the stairs and into the kitchen in a time warp. Inside the frig was pizza from God knows when but I started eating, standing right there with the refrigerator door wide open because the thought of taking the time to close it was too much. Frank sat in the triangle of light at my feet, his tail twitching, his eyes following every bite of pizza to my mouth until I started sharing.
“Don’t tell Dad,” I whispered. “Don’t tell him anything.”
Leaving Em Again
On the last day of school kids ran out of the front of Em’s building like it was burning. Backpacks were half on one shoulder or dragging on the ground and papers they’d been saving all year were falling out of notebooks and being left behind. They shouted and turned and waved to their teachers and then their buses sucked them in like high-speed vacuums. I wished I could still feel that way about the end of school, forgetting as soon as I got off the bus at home that there was even such a thing as next year. But now every year feels less and less like an ending and closer and closer to the beginning of something I’m not ready for. That’s how Em looked, like she was seventeen instead of seven. She walked real slow and didn’t look up even though she knew I was there.
“Hey Em, happy summer,” I said.
“Mm.” She nodded and walked past me toward where my Dad’s truck was parked. I followed and climbed in behind her, pulled her into my lap and buckled us in. I guess my Dad could see there was something going on so he stayed quiet.
We pulled out and followed the buses to the exit. Through the back windows of the one in front of us we could see kids bouncing up and down in their seats and balls of paper flying across the aisle. A boy pressed his face and hands to the window, crossed his eyes and pushed his tongue between his flattened lips.
I said, “That a friend of yours, Em?”
She shook her head.
“Aren’t you glad you don’t have to ride the bus with those morons?”
She shrugged.
“You okay?”
Another shrug.
“I mean if you’re going to give me the silent treatment I think I at least have a right to know why, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Well?”
We drove for a while without saying anything. I could tell she wasn’t just trying to annoy me so I didn’t push her. After a while she sat back against me and I felt her relax.
“So when am I going to see you now?” she said.
“What do you mean?” I knew what she meant but I was stalling for time to think up an answer.
“I see you at school every day. School’s over now, so when am I going to see you?”
I still didn’t know what to say and it made me feel like a parent. Whenever they have to think about their answers and they give you one of those long, well-reasoned explanations, you know they’re lying. I decided not to do that to Em.
“I’m not sure,” I told her.
“Why not?”
“I need some time to think about some things.”
“Like what?”
“Lots of things, I guess. Will you be okay on your own for a while?”
“I’ve been on my own.”
“I know. I mean even a little bit more.”
She moved her small shoulders. It wasn’t much more than a twitch. “I don’t know. I guess.”
She was quiet but pretty soon it seemed like she was breathing a little faster and I could tell she was trying not to cry.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
“What?”
“I have to miss both of you at the same time. It’s not ffair.”
“Em?”
“You and Zoe. No one thinks I miss her.”
She started to cry.
“Of course we do.”
“No!” She yelled really loud, which she never does, so it scared me. “Then why don’t I get to do anything about it? Mom gets to lay on the couch and sleep all the time. Daddy gets to stay at work all night. You get to leave like you’re not even in our family anymore. What am I supposed to do?” She was crying hard now. “I do everything just like before, Tess! I do everything the same! I’m the littlest one left and no one’s telling me what to do!”
I held her real tight. “Shh. Hey.”
“It’s not fair!”
“No.”
“I can’t stop missing her.”
“No. No one can. No one should.”
“But how much longer?”
“I don’t know. Maybe forever.”
“Don’t say that, Tess. Don’t say that.”
“Do you really want to stop missing her?”
“No. I just want it to stop hurting so much.”
“It will.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has it for you?”
“No.”
Then as fast as it had come on, she got quiet again and curled in my lap under the seat belt. My Dad reached a hand across and put it on her leg and she let him keep it there. We rode like that the rest of the way.
When we turned onto our block I could see someone standing at the corner stop by our house watching kids get off the bus. By the time it pulled away I could see that it was David. He was still in his suit from work and he was looking after the bus with his hands in his pockets, seeming a little confused. I don’t think he’d ever seen this particular truck of my Dad’s either, so turning and seeing us coming didn’t help any until he saw my Dad waving at him.
My Dad patted Em’s leg. “Hey Em, look who’s here.”
Em looked up. “Daddy!”
When David waved back, I couldn’t help it. I turned away.
“Keep going, Dad.”
“What?”
“Keep going. I don’t want to see him right now.”
“Tess, honey, I can’t just go driving by with his daughter.”
“Just go, Daddy! Please!”
“Stop! Stop!” Em shouted.
“Tess, I can’t.” My Dad pulled over and opened the door and Em wiggled out of the belt, jumped down the stairs and up into David’s arms.
“You’re home! How come you’re home?”
“Hey, sweetie. Happy summer.” He turned his body left and right as he hugged her, like rocking a baby. Over Em’s shoulder he said, “Nick,” and my Dad nodded.
Then David said, “Hey, Tess.”
“Hey.”
I was studying one of the holes in the floor of the truck. The rust around the edges looked like dried blood, a scab.
