Chapter
1 In which my English teacher completely loses it
I can’t believe he’s still obsessed.
I don’t know how long ago it was, but way back before
it was even a “thing,” my best friend—formerly known as Peter—started baking.
Well, perhaps that’s not exactly the right verb, because what comes out
of his oven bears about as much resemblance to bread as it does to, say,
reinforced concrete.
Now, why a teenage boy who’s built like a refrigerator
is baking bread in the first place is a whole other story. The short version is
that it’s my fault, because I was the one who gave him the book The Hunger
Games for his birthday. If you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of
decades or are reading this in some far distant future where no one knows who
Katnis Everdeen is, well, it kind of sucks to be you because it’s a really
great book.
The long version would probably require a panel of
psychologists, years of intensive therapy, and a whole lot of dark chocolate to
get through, but suffice it to say while the rest of the world was kind of
fixated on the whole kids-killing-kids part of the book, what does Peter take
from it? That boys can bake.
Yeah, go figure.
Oh, and of course, since the character in the book who
bakes bread is named Peeta, Peter decided that was his new name. The only
problem with this otherwise brilliant little plan is that we live here in
Boston, home of the silent “R”. You know, Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd and all
that. So insisting that he be called Peeta rather than, well, Petah, is kind of
insane in its own right.
Now, you’re probably asking yourself what a
sixteen-year-old girl is doing with a boy as her best friend, or you would
have, had I gotten around to telling you I was a sixteen year-old girl. Well,
surprise! I am, my name’s Gwen Pendergrass (and don’t get me started on the
baggage that last name comes with!), and he is, so you might as well just start
dealing with the concept.
Or you could move on to some other book entirely, one
which could perhaps be reasonably called “intelligible.” And I wouldn’t fault
you; I mean, my mom’s the writer anyway, as you might’ve guessed from all this
incoherent ranting. She can’t spell to save her life, but neither could
Shakespeare, so there you go. Me, well, I’m not quite sure what I am, but I’m
sixteen, so lay off, I’ll figure it out eventually.
Okay. Start at the beginning, Mom always tells me, so
here goes: I was born. At the usual age and in the usual manner. Or at least so
I’ve been told, as it’s not like I actually remember it at all. Which is
probably all for the best, what with all the squeezing, screaming and crying
that I’ve heard goes on. In any case, it’s always been just my mom and me, and
since I’m not much of a believer in virgin birth or parthenogenesis (see Mom, I
do pay attention in biology class! Well, at least sometimes...) I’ve always
assumed Dad was out there somewhere. I even have a small strip of pictures of
him and Mom in some photo booth at a casino in Vegas. They both look kind of
drunk but really happy, which I supposed explains a lot. Me in particular. Or
at least my aforementioned birth nine months later.
But as I was saying, Dad’s never been in the
picture—or outside of the Vegas ones, if you take my meaning—and while I’m not
thrilled with the idea, for the most part I don’t dwell on it. It’s just my
life, such as it is.
If you’ve happened to do the math—which I can assure
you I would never do in your place—you’ll have figured out I’m a high school
soph, which is just about as much fun as it sounds. In English class, we’ve
just finished reading Oedipus Rex—you know, that timeless story of a boy who
kills his father and marries his mother, something high school students
throughout history have always deeply related to.
“...so, using Oedipus’s failed relationship with his
father as an inspiration,” my English teacher, the inimitable Mrs. Beecham,
tells us as we’re scrambling to get all our stuff into our backpacks, “you’re
going to write about your earliest recollection of you and your father doing
something meaningful together. Something other than going to his parole
hearing, watching TV or playing video games.”
My fellow students let out the traditional collective
groan of dismay, which Mrs. Beecham, just as traditionally, ignores. “And make
it good, people,” she tells us. “Because if I get one more essay on my dad made
me toast while momma was away, we’re doing six weeks of James Joyce. Solid.”
James Joyce, in case you’re fortunate enough not to
know, is the Mount Everest of writers. You read him because it’s such grueling,
hard going that at the end you can plant a flag on the book and say I
prevailed; I reached the summit of Mt. Joyce without the aid of Sherpas or
oxygen tanks, and I lived to tell the tale.
However, as I bet there aren’t more than two other
people in the room who have any idea who the heck he is, the whole threat thing
is kind of pointless. But as I said, Mom’s a writer, so I know this stuff enough
to shudder at the thought.
The rest of my classmates start filing out, scrambling
to get to their next class before the bell rings.
“Three pages, typed,” she calls after them. “And rough
drafts by next Wednesday.”
And then it’s just me, standing in front of her desk.
I want to ask if I can approach the bench, but I have a feeling it won’t go
over all that well.
“Yes, what is it?” Mrs. Beecham asks with a sigh.
Actually, she adds a put-upon sigh as punctuation to every one-on-one
interaction I’ve ever seen her have. She once even got so exasperated with us
kids for “pestering her for clarifications” that she’d slammed a book down on
her desk. “I’m here to teach,” she’d told us in the resulting stunned silence.
“Not to answer questions.”
When the time comes, I’m going to push for getting
that inscribed on her gravestone like a family motto.
“Um, I never knew my father,” I tell her.
“Consider yourself lucky. Most of ’em are pigs
anyway.”
Not what I was expecting. But she’s on a roll, now.
“If I hadn’t met my kids’ father, I would have been a
whole lot better off, let me tell you. For one thing, I can guarantee I’d be
doing something worthwhile with my life instead of being stuck here teaching the
same junk year after year.”
Well, okay, then. This is going well. I start to ask
if I could write about my mom instead, but she’s gone, lost in her own world.
“But they’re classics...” she whines, presumably
mimicking some member of the school administration. “Classics my ass,” she
tells me. “If you listened to those spineless worms on the school board, you’d
think nothing worthwhile had been written since Mark Twain.”
“Uh, that sounds pretty frustrating,” I mumble. “But
what should I do about this assignment?”
“Frustrating? You don’t know the meaning of
frustrating. You kid all whine and moan about the assignments. Three whole
pages. Please. I’ve been doing this same curriculum twice a year for fifteen
years. Fifteen years! At sixty, three-page papers a year, do you know how much
I’ve read?”
I start doing the math in my head, but she’s plowing onwards,
saving me the effort.
“Twenty-seven hundred pages. Twenty-seven hundred
pages of mostly incoherent drivel from you people! So don’t you complain, Missy,
don’t you dare complain!”
“I wasn’t,” I protest. “I just need to know how to do the
assignment without a dad.”
“That’s not really my problem, now, is it?”
“Excuse me?”
She looks down at me over her glasses. “This is a
creative writing class. Be creative. Write about how the jerk broke your poor
mother’s heart, or about all the lies he told her.”
“I really don’t think it was like that, Mrs. Beecham.”
“Yeah, right. Is he dead?” she demands. I suddenly
remember there is no Mr. Beecham. Shocking, I know.
“I don’t think so,” I reply.
She smiles like she’s just checkmated with me. “Then
it was like that. Trust me.”
“Hey, Pita Piper,” I call, as I finally come out of
school.
He’s standing next to this massive oak tree in the
school’s front yard, and he doesn’t dignify my adornment of his name with even
the faintest of eye rolls. The tree doesn’t react either, but given that it’s a
tree and he’s Peter, neither of these events are particularly surprising.
By the way, have I mentioned how much I love this
tree? It’s just brilliant. It’s supposedly been here since long before there
was a here, here. And despite its size, it has somehow figured out how to offer
no shade at all no matter where the sun is in the sky. I’ve never been able to
work out how it manages this trick, but if I had to deal with people carving
their names into me and covering me with TP on an annual basis, I wouldn’t give
them any shade either.
Peter steps away from the tree and matches strides
with me as I pass.
“It’s just Peeta,” he tells me patiently. He’s always
patient with me, even when most people would want to throw me in front of a
bus. Which may explain why he’s my best friend, I suppose, because if your
friends are trying to throw you in front of buses, something is seriously wrong
with your life.
I’d met him when we moved into our current apartment
building filled with double-income families. Unfortunately, the two incomes
tend to both be earned by a single parent working two jobs that together pay in
the low to starvation range. Peter’s family is the exception in that he still
has both parents, though with all the weed they smoke, you could mash their
brains together and the resulting creature still wouldn’t be as sharp as my
mom. I wouldn’t particularly want to meet it in a dark alley either, but I
guess that’s pretty much a given for anything created from two brains.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re nice enough and do their
best to take care of Peter... it’s just that their best isn’t particularly
good.
So where was I? Oh yeah, I was telling you how I met
Peter. We’ve moved so many times that I can’t remember where we were coming
from, but my job is always to sit on the lawn of the new place and guard our
stuff as Mom makes trip after trip in our old station wagon, moving our junk...
sorry, our prized possessions... one carload at a time.
Of the two or three carloads, only two things are
really mine: a huge box of books, and a ratty suitcase filled with hand-me-down
clothes which are always somehow mostly smaller than I currently am, but which
are insufficiently worn out to be replaced.
Of these, I only really care about my books and my
clothes can go up in flames for all I care. Well, as long as I’m not wearing
them at the time.
But back to yet another move. Mom was off on her
second or third trip and there I was, bored out of my mind, so I decided to
break open my book box and see if Frankenstein was anywhere close to the top.
It is, without a doubt, one of my favorite books... and yes, I know, that makes
me officially weird. Most of my generation don’t want to have anything to do
with something more than twenty minutes old and my favorite book just had its
two-hundredth birthday.
If you’ve never read it, trust me, it’s nothing like
what you expect. In some ways, Dr Frankenstein is even more of a monster than
his creation, and I can totally relate with the monster’s perspective of having
the world all around you, but being outside of it, only able to look in. Sure,
being the poor kid on the free lunch program isn’t exactly the same as being a
reanimated creature too hideous to be gazed upon, but still, not being seen for
yourself, can be pretty exhausting either way.
I had settled down and was in the middle of chapter
four when the sun pretty much went away. I looked up and found myself in the
shadow cast by this really big guy looking down at me.
“Hey,” he said, then apparently realized he was
blocking my sun, because he took a large step to his left and it all came
streaming back in.
I blinked in the sudden light and tried to place him,
but the only thing I could think of was that he could be the monster itself.
Well, in size at least, because this guy was anything but hideous to look at.
“So, I was wondering,” he said, “if I could borrow
your copy of Frankenstein. When you’re done with it, of course.”
I had no idea who this kid was and considered the
obvious questions that brought up, but decided to go straight for an even more
basic one. “Why?” I asked, looking up at him, innocently.
At this point in the conversation, most people will
just stare at you blankly with a “that does not compute” glaze to their eyes.
Like when a waiter bounces up to you and says, “If you need any help, my name
is Candy” and you reply “What’s your name if I don’t need any?”
It kind of short-circuits their brain, and you can
almost hear the gears whirring as they try to go back and make sense of what
you said.
And of course, this is exactly what I expected to
happen to Peter. For yes, this is Peter, and this is the moment I’ve been talking
about when I first met him.
“Because the rats ate my copy,” he responded
patiently, without even a hint of grinding gears, smoke, or glazed look at all.
Impressive.
“Everyone’s a critic,” I told him, wondering if he’d
follow my logic.
“Actually, they were pretty indiscriminate. They also
ate one of my shoes.”
I’m beginning to like this kid, not that I’d ever let
him know.
“Right or left?” I asked, as if it somehow mattered.
“Left definitely. I remember Mitch–that’s my
dad–saying it was ironic they ate the left shoe because with that one gone, now
the right shoe is left.”
Ouch. I did mention that his parents’ brains are kind
of cross-wired right? This sort of stuff comes out of their mouths all the
time, and a lot of it is actually pretty funny. All the more so, as they have absolutely
no idea that it is.
“You know,” I mentioned casually, “lending a book to
someone who has rats which eat them is kind of like lending money to someone
with a gambling problem.”
“They’re not so much my rats, as rats who pretty much
sublet the entire building.”
Great, I’m just loving this new place already.
“If they bother you, though, you can always get coyote
urine from predatorpee.com. Works like a charm. The downside, of course, is
that your bedroom smells like a bunch of coyotes peed in it... or you could
just embrace the rats as another marvel of nature’s infinite adaptability, and
anyway, what’s a little black plague among friends?”
“One of these days,” I commented to the universe at
large, “I would really like to live in a place which didn’t involve choosing
among bookeating rats, coyote pee and the Black Death.”
“Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn’t it. So, can I
borrow your book?”
Since the whole pee thing grossed me out, and having
my precious books turned into rat turds was not something I wanted to risk,
after we were all moved in he took me to this vacant lot where everyone dumps
their junk and we found an old metal filing cabinet that he lugged up to our
apartment for me. Must’ve been from the twenties or thirties because this
sucker was made of real steel, nothing like that tin foil aluminum stuff they
sell nowadays.
Weighed a ton, but it’s been a life saver. Some people
have gun safes. Me, I have a book safe. In return, I let him come and read any
time he wants.
But back to me, Peter, and the shadeless oak tree that
I started talking about like half a chapter ago.
“Can I borrow a memory?” I ask him as we start walking
to the green line T-station to catch our train home. Sure, the orange line is
closer and takes about a billion fewer stops but what can I say, I like green.
And it’s not like we have anything particularly exciting to do once we get to
our luxury living accommodations anyway, so why hurry?
Life is the journey, not the destination. Therefore,
the longer we can make the journey last, the longer we’ll live. Or something
like that.
By the way, for those of you outside of Boston, the
“T” is the subway, short for the MTA, which stands for Mediocre Transport
Autocracy, or something like that. Some of the stations are actually pretty
cool with art and bronzed clothing and stuff.
Ours isn’t one of them.
“I mean it,” I tell him. “I need a memory I can borrow
for Mrs. Beecham’s insipid Oedipus-inspired, father/relationships assignment.”
He doesn’t respond, just slowly turns and gives me The Look. You know the one:
the look that says, “you didn’t really just say that did you?” Which of course
I just did, or he wouldn’t have given me The Look in the first place.
So of course I hit him.
Remind me not to do that; the guy’s made of concrete
or something because it’s like hitting a brick wall.
“Ow!”
As I shake my hand in the air to get some feeling back
into it–or at least some feeling other than pain–I glare at him as it were all
somehow his fault, but he shrugs, not buying it.
I rub my poor bruised hand as we descend into the open
maw of Boylston station. It’s cool and dim in there after the bright afternoon
sun, and I fish in my backpack and we flash our Charlie Cards and head out to
the platform. A train’s already sitting there so we run for it, taking the
stairs two at a time then dashing into the car, just as the doors... well, do
nothing.
And they keep on doing nothing for about another ten
minutes and we get to watch everyone else do exactly the same thing we just
did: see the car from the top of the stairs and risk a broken neck running down
to catch the train just before it doesn’t leave.
“It doesn’t have to be a good memory,” I say as we
continue to wait. “How about the one when Mitch thought he was the prophet
David, or when you went camping and the raccoons found his stash...?” The doors
finally slide shut and the car lurches forwards. I plead all the way to our
stop in Roxbury, the dissolved municipality we call home. Yep, some people get
burgs or boroughs or townships, or even just cool neighborhoods like Angleside,
Ravenswood or Pigeon Hill like they have over in Waltham.
Me, I get to live in a dissolved municipality. An
alka-seltzer of a former town, whose old buildings often look like they’ve been
sitting there dissolving away over the years ever since the proud city of
Roxbury was eaten by Boston and dissolved into the melting pot of greater
Bostburbia, relegated to a mere backwater of a neighborhood. But we will
never forget!
Well, that’s true, but mostly because nobody ever
learns that stuff anymore, because it all happened about a hundred and fifty
years ago.
And it’s kind of hard to forget what you never knew.
But the principle is sound. And there’s always Wikipedia.
Peter’s still shaking his head ‘no’ as we climb up the
four flights to our floor.
“Mitch is a bad enough influence in general,” Peter
tells me. “And you, in particular, don’t need another one. Why don’t you write
about when your own dad was your imaginary friend?”
“I was about three. And it wasn’t real.”
“It was real to you.”
“Yeah, so was the tooth fairy.”
He looks at me, concerned. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing, I’m sure there are millions of cute little
pixies out there who have nothing better to do than collect used teeth.
“They aren’t pixies, they’re fairies. And I’m pretty
sure they’re not all that cute. Probably more like Rosie the Riveter with
wings.”
I’m fairly sure he’s putting me on, but when you look
in the dictionary under deadpan it says: “see Peter.” Well, at least it does
since I whited out the old definition and penned that one in.
I know, me, the literary literalist, defacing a book.
In my defense, I put a picture of Peter next to the entry which means I
actually also face’d the book, so between that and the defacing, it should
cancel itself out karmically speaking.
Aaaah, I’m turning into Mitch with his right shoe left
thing...! Maybe Peter has a point about him being a bad influence after all.
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