I’m in the concession hut and David Drucker is standing outside. The whole thing is so weird. Surely he knows that when I sat at his lunch table this afternoon I was just looking for a place to be alone. I don’t want anything from him. Or for us to suddenly be besties or something. I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I’m not usually like this. I don’t abandon my friends in the cafeteria or walk out of class in the middle of the teacher’s lecture or have any trouble lying and saying “Your ass looks awesome in those high-waisted jeans.”
My dad’s shirt is filthy.
This place reeks of rotting hot dogs and old gym sneakers.
Everything is wrong.
It’s been one month.
I am still all wrong.
“I wasn’t following you,” David says, his eyes darting off the walls and then, finally, landing on mine. “I mean, I was. But just because someone needed to follow you. Does that make sense?”
“It’s okay,” I say, because he looks nervous and he makes me want to make things easier for him. “Here, help me up. I don’t want to touch the floor.”
David comes around to the side door. He puts out his hand, and I grab it and hike myself up to standing. “This place is gross,” I say.
“The bleachers would have been the better choice.”
“You know what? That’s a great idea.” I sprint toward the field and then up the stairs, taking two at a time, and the momentum feels good, air pumped directly to my cold, dead heart. When I get to the top, I take a seat.
I forgot how much I love being up here. I rarely miss a game, not because I care that much about football, but because I love being part of the crowd. Like there is nowhere else any of us is supposed to be except right here cheering on our team, perfect teenager clichés reporting for duty. I see David craning his neck to look up, probably deciding whether he should join me.
“Come on!” I call to him.
He takes the stairs more slowly than I did. Stares at the ground so as not to fall. David is one of those random people at school you don’t think about at all, but now that I’ve invited him to sit next to me here, I scramble to remember everything I know about him. That will hopefully make things slightly less uncomfortable, because honestly I’d totally pick the stomach flu over awkward.
But the problem is, that’s the first word I think of when I think of David: awkward. I don’t know much else about him. I remember I used to go to his birthday parties, and when he turned five he had one that was space-themed. We all got these cool NASA badges (I still have mine, actually), and his parents rented a bouncy castle that looked like the moon. We were jumping and then bumping into each other, and out of nowhere he fell to the floor and started crying with his hands over his ears. We all went home early.
What else? I’ve seen him trip about a million times, and he has this bad habit of bumping into people. Maybe it’s because he walks around with those huge headphones on and can’t hear anything, or maybe it’s because his mind is busy solving, like, global warming or something. And he’s right. He’s a terrible dresser. He looks like a missionary. Or like he has an after-school job at an electronics store at the mall.
Now that he’s sitting up here, I quickly study his face and I realize he’s not bad-looking. Actually a step up from Justin and Gabriel, who think they are hot shit despite their matching chin acne. If David got his hair cut and let people see his bottomless dark brown eyes, he’d be seriously cute. Probably the reason I invited him to sit next to me, if I’m honest with myself, is that my dad mentioned him out of the blue just a few months ago. At the dinner table one night, my dad announced that he thought I should get to know David Drucker.
“David Drucker was in my chair today, and I gotta tell you, that boy is interesting. He talked to me about quantum mechanics,” my father said. And I’m sure I replied with something sarcastic, like “Sounds fascinating, Dad. I’ll get right on that.”
Do I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face? Yes, yes I do.
“The Arthur B. Pendlock Stadium can hold up to eight hundred and four people,” David says, sitting next to me now but looking out at the field. You can make out the post office from here. The cupcake bakery. Sam’s Bagels.
“That’s what this place is called?” I ask. “The Arthur B. Pendlock Stadium?” David nods. “I never knew that. I think I would have guessed more than eight hundred and four people. It gets pretty packed at the games.”
“I’ve never been,” he says.
“To a game? Really? They’re fun,” I say, though I wonder if our definitions of the word fun are the same. He shrugs. I consider asking him about quantum mechanics, but I don’t even know what quantum mechanics is. Or are? Is quantum mechanics plural?
“Not a sports fan, I take it?” I ask somewhat inanely. I’m not sure why I’ve always assumed that the responsibility of a conversation falls on me. Half the time, I’m better off just shutting up.
“Nope. I don’t really understand the appeal. The suspense is inherently limited. Your team is either going to win or lose through some variation of throwing and catching balls. That said, I’d rather watch than play. Why would you let yourself be tackled to the ground and risk a potential head injury? It’s confusing to me.”
“I can see how that would be confusing,” I say, and find myself smiling.
“I’ve considered whether some of the guys find it homoerotic, but most of them have girlfriends, so probably not.”
I laugh.
“I’m only half joking,” he says. He looks at me and then his eyes dart away again. “We can stop talking if you want. I assume you left class to get away from all that noise, though my assumptions usually have only a thirty percent accuracy rate.”
“I did, actually,” I say. I can see the grocery store parking lot from up here, where my dad taught me to drive not so long ago. We went there at odd hours on weekends and even some weeknights for the three months leading up to my birthday. He was patient with me, a good teacher, only getting annoyed in the beginning, when I got confused between the gas and the brake. I passed my test on the first try, and my parents and I celebrated with sparkling apple cider in fancy champagne glasses. My dad toasted to “all the roads Kit has yet to travel.” He took a picture of me holding up my license, and then he teared up a little, because he said he was already starting to imagine what it was going to be like when I left for college, how his life would have a Kit-shaped hole.
My dad was supposed to miss me, not the other way around. That’s how things were supposed to go.
I don’t want to think about that.
After a while, quiet settles between David and me, and surprisingly it’s not awkward at all. It’s actually kind of nice to sit up here, away from school and the shitstorm that awaits at home, away from the terrifying concept of one whole month. It’s nice to sit with someone and not have to think about what to say next.
I don’t go back to class. Instead I go home and spend my time lying on the couch and watching Netflix. Though I’ve been here for hours, I did not study for tomorrow’s physics quiz. I did not read fifty pages of Heart of Darkness and think about its thematic relevance to my own life (though that should have been an easy one) or start that essay for world history on migration. I also didn’t write that article about the debate team for the school newspaper even though the deadline is tomorrow by three. We’ll probably have to run a picture in its place. Clearly this is not the way to make editor in chief, which has been my goal for the past three years, but I can’t seem to motivate.
“Egg rolls, scallion pancakes, General Tso’s. All the bad stuff,” my mom says, dropping a bulging bag of Chinese food onto the counter. She kicks off her shoes. “Does grief make your feet swell? Because these things are freaking killing me.”
“I don’t know.” I get up and set the table for two, not the usual three. I need to stop noticing details like this.
“How was your day? As bad as you expected?” My mom kisses me on my head and then decides I need a hug too.
“Not really. I mean, it wasn’t good.” I don’t tell her I skipped class. No need to freak her out. “But you were right. I needed to go. Yours?”
“I kicked ass, took names, even landed a new account. Not bad for a Monday.”
“That’s cool,” I say, and we toast with our glasses.
“I need to up my game on the financial front.” Wrinkles I haven’t noticed before bracket her mouth. She shouldn’t have to up her game. She already works too hard as it is. Bangs on her laptop after dinner and dashes off emails late into the night. When I was younger and brattier, I used to complain that she loved her work more than she loved me. Now that I’m older, I realize that’s not true. My mother is just one of those people you miss, even when she’s sitting right in front of you.
“I didn’t think about the money thing,” I say, and my stomach cramps with guilt. Soon there will be my college tuition, and what about when I leave? My mom will come home every day to this big empty house. A team of three knocked down to two, and then, finally, just one. Will she sell this place? I hope not.
“Don’t worry. No one’s going to starve. But you know what’s really stressing me out? How do I know when to change the oil in the car? Or what the name of our home insurance company is? And all our online passwords. I don’t have any of them,” my mom says. “Your name? Birthday? I feel completely in over my head. Work I can handle. It’s the rest—it’s real life—that’s the problem.”
I think about how my mom doesn’t really have lots of people around to help other than me. My grandparents retired and moved back to Delhi like a million years ago. She and her parents have this complicated relationship anyway. When my mom was a kid, her parents did everything they could to make sure she assimilated into American culture—paid for her to go to a fancy-pants, mostly white private school they could barely afford, even packed PB&J in her lunch box because the other kids used to tease her that her Indian food was too stinky. The way she tells it, they raised her as an American and then were surprised and resentful when she didn’t turn out to share their old-school values. I’m pretty sure “old-school values” in this case actually means “not cool with the fact she fell in love and married a white dude,” because otherwise, she’s totally on board with the rest of their beliefs—well, except for the fact that she’s a straight-up, unapologetic carnivore and gets her hair cut and colored every six weeks. Still, we go to gurdwara in Glen Rock one Sunday a month, and my dad used to come with us sometimes, though less for a religious awakening and more for the homemade Indian food, which admittedly, now that I’m old enough to have a choice in the matter, is why I go too. At my grandmother’s request, my mom keeps in touch with all the relatives, even though they are in Delhi and Vancouver and London and distantly related and kind of a pain in the ass. And though I’m not quite fluent, my mom has taught me enough Punjabi that I can get by. My mother may be American-born, but she’s never forgotten we’re Indian too.
Everyone pretends things are okay with my impossible-to-please grandparents—we go to visit them in Delhi every other year, though my dad always stayed behind because “he had to work.” We pretended this was true and that it had nothing to do with the fact that my grandparents didn’t approve of him. Whenever my mom talks to Bibiji on the phone, she always puts on a voice I associate with her work, the advertising-executive voice. My mom’s conversations with her parents have mostly consisted of a recitation of our small accomplishments—my grades, my mom’s landing an account, my dad getting a local business award—as if these things are part of some campaign pitch that she made the right choices. And whenever I wear a lengha or a salwar kameez for some second cousin twice removed’s birthday party, which requires three hours in the car to the middle of Pennsylvania, my mother makes sure to take a picture and email it to Bibiji immediately. See, she seems to want to say, nothing’s been lost here. I’m passing it all along.
Here’s the sad and horrifying part: The second I put on my Indian clothes, an alert goes out to her parents, yet when my dad died my mom didn’t even call them until the day after the funeral. My mother explained to me that she knew they were traveling to a wedding that weekend and couldn’t get back to the United States in time, so there was no point messing up their plans. Honestly I think my mom didn’t want to know if they would come to pay their respects.
Of course I like to believe they would have. They may not have approved of my mom marrying my dad, but they’re not monsters. They’re just backwards. And, okay, a little bit racist. Oddly enough, though they may not like the fact that I’m half white, they always compliment me on the color of my skin. So fair, Bibiji always says, like that’s a wonderful, important thing, the fact that I’m a couple of shades lighter than my mother. And I can see you enjoy your food.
“I’ll help you figure it all out,” I say to my mother. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, honey, don’t say that. It’s going to be fine. You have nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
I make myself busy dishing out the food, spoon out huge piles onto our plates. There are people who don’t eat when they are sad, who lose their appetite and get crazy skinny. My mom and I are not those people.
“I love you, Mommy,” I say. As soon as the words are out, I feel bad again, because it makes her eyes fill. I want her to know that I realize just how lucky I got in the mother department. That if I had to pick anyone in the whole world to go through this with, to have as a mom, it would be her. Only her. This is partially grief talking. Before all this, my mom often annoyed the crap out of me. She’s master of the subtle criticism disguised as a suggestion: Why don’t you straighten your hair? Don’t you think your nails would look so much better if you didn’t bite them? That shirt is a little frumpy, no? Now, though, I feel stupid for caring about that sort of thing. She could die tomorrow. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“No. Good crying, I promise,” she says, blotting under her eyes with a paper towel. It doesn’t look like good crying. She looks on the verge of unraveling into a mess of tears and snot. Nothing like the woman she must have been at work today: fierce and tucked-in and totally under control. “I’m just so grateful that I have you, Kit.”
I know she doesn’t mean for her words to sting, but they do.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I promise, and hold up my finger for a pinky swear.
“A whole month without him,” she says, ignoring my outstretched finger. “How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“Kit?” I wait for her to finally say it, to just go ahead and mention the accident outright, and then maybe murmur a few empty words that are supposed to be comforting. I brace myself to talk about all the things she’s refused to talk about until now. “You have a little scallion in your teeth.”