Français, downtown. Do you know it?”
Last night, Zelda had told me that she didn’t go to school at all. So had she been lying then, or was she lying now?
“Of course! How fancy!” My mom put on a terrible French accent. “Parlez-vous?”
“Bien sûr! Et vous?”
“Oh, uh, no. Not really. A bit of Spanish is all.”
“Me gusta español tambien.”
My mom reached over and smacked me on the kneecap. “What an accomplished young woman you’ve got here, Parky!”
Don’t I know it, I signed.
“And where are you planning to go to college, Zelda?”
“Mostly the same places that Parker is applying, actually.”
Shit! My mom was never supposed to know about the bargain Zelda and I had struck, mostly because I had no intention of carrying out my side of it. I stared laser-beam death eyes at Zelda, but she went blithely on. “Yeah, things are going so well between us, I figure why not try to stay together at university.”
My mom had this look on her face like she’d just won the lottery. “This is news to me! Last I heard, he wasn’t applying at all.”
“He didn’t want you to make some big deal about it,” Zelda said. “With his grades and all, he might not be accepted. But I thought you should know.”
“Well—this—I—”
At first I thought my mom was just at a loss for words, then I realized she had started to cry. “I’m sorry, Parker,” she blubbered, “but this is such huge news. And I just wish . . . I just wish Marco was here. He’d—”
“No doom and gloom this morning, Ms. Santé,” Zelda said, managing to interrupt the sobfest before it could really get going. “We should be celebrating! Do you have any music in here?” She scanned the room until she found the stereo on the shelf below the television. “Perfect.”
She switched it on and turned the station to some fast, old-timey jazz.
“Come on,” she said, putting out a hand to me. “I spent all last night dancing to the music you like. Now it’s your turn.”
I stood up, and she immediately pulled me close. We danced cheek to cheek, with one arm held straight out as if we were pulling back the string of a bow together.
“I love this kind of music!” my mom said. She wiped at her eyes, then stood up and began bopping around the room in an adorable old-person sort of way. After thirty seconds or so, she collapsed back onto the couch. “I’m too old for dancing.”
“Nonsense!” Zelda said. “You’re not even the oldest person in the room!”
My mom laughed, mostly out of confusion, and before long started to dance again. The three of us kept on going like that for a good twenty minutes, and I realized this was maybe the purest, most uncomplicated joy there’d been inside the house for a long time.
IN THE JAPANESE TEA GARDEN
I KNOW THIS MIGHT BE hard to believe, but back in elementary school, before I became the famously speechless recluse I am today, I actually had a best friend. His name was John, and we spent every available minute playing together in Golden Gate Park. We would pretend to be wizards and warriors from our favorite video games, wielding dead branches as swords and lobbing pinecones as if they were fireballs. It didn’t take us long to colonize every area of the park, like some upstart imperial power planting its flag in an already inhabited land. I still have some of the maps we drew up, with all their tantalizing geographic inventions: Goblin’s Graveyard, the Terrortory, the Lake of Giant Piranha, Singed Mountain. Across these landscapes we waged an epic and unending war against a nameless evil, which is to say we ran around kicking and punching at the air for a few minutes at a time and then declaring victory. To everyone else in the park, it probably looked as if two kids were simultaneously having a twenty-minute epileptic seizure. But in our heads, we were nothing short of heroes.
John and I stopped hanging out once we got to middle school, but I kept playing make-believe on my own up to an age I’m not, at this moment, willing to put down in writing. So Zelda couldn’t believe it when I told her I’d never been inside the Japanese Tea Garden, which was located smack in the middle of Golden Gate Park, just behind a set of big red lacquered doors. The six-dollar entrance fee had always been enough to put me off, as