Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,48

Zelda and me. Pirez checked his watch. “Jesus,” he said. Time passed. He checked it again. “Jesus,” he said again. Time passed. He checked it again.

“Excuse me, sir,” Zelda said. “I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but perhaps there’s a mutually advantageous end to this story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve left a message for Parker’s mother, so she’ll certainly find out about what happened here today. Maybe it’s time you let us go.”

“I’m not sure I can do that. I’m a parent myself, you know.”

“Then perhaps you were a little bit conservative with your estimate of the damages to your property. Say by two hundred dollars or so?”

“Yeah,” Pirez said, smiling a little. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

A few minutes later we were released back onto the San Francisco streets. Zelda was $900 poorer, and apparently I was starting to develop a pretty serious black eye.

“It’s turning the same color as that sunset,” Zelda told me, pointing out where the blue sky was bruising with nightfall. And I started to laugh, because it was funny how good that black eye suddenly felt, in spite of how much it hurt. It felt like living.

We walked for a while, back in the general direction of my house, enjoying the squeaky San Francisco trolley-car symphony. Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang.

“Get home now,” my mom said, then immediately hung up.

DINNERTIME DEBACLE

ZELDA HADN’T WANTED TO COME with me. She told me she had enough experience with parents and kids to know that she’d be walking into a firefight. But I insisted. At this stage, I couldn’t afford to leave her alone with her phone; she must have been wondering why that call from the hospital hadn’t come in yet, and it wouldn’t take long for her to notice the little “Do Not Disturb” symbol in the corner of her home screen. I had to provide nonstop entertainment, even if that entertainment involved my getting torn a new one by my mom.

She was standing in the kitchen when we came in, holding a mostly empty glass of wine. Her eyes were already rimmed with red.

“Hello, Zelda,” she said.

“Hello, Ms. Santé.”

“Thank you for escorting my son home, but I’d like to speak to him alone.”

No, I signed. She’s staying.

“Excuse me?”

She’s staying.

My mom took a moment to absorb this, then laughed one of those little joyless laughs that are a parent’s way of saying, Oh, is that what you think is going to happen?

“Fine. What do I care?” She refilled her wineglass. “So you got in a fight today. At a movie theater. Care to explain?”

I was helping a friend, I signed.

Another fake laugh, only this time it meant, Oh, is that what you’re going to say happened?

“I don’t see how putting a boy’s head through a popcorn popper could possibly be helping anyone.”

“Actually, I was the one who put the boy’s head through the popcorn popper,” Zelda said.

My mom turned her death glare away from me for a moment. “Zelda, has Parker told you that this wasn’t his first fight? Did you know that he spent most of middle school doing this kind of shit?”

“That’s really neither here nor—”

“In eighth grade, some boy was making fun of him, so Parker shoved him into the street and a car ran over his leg. Broke it in three places. He could’ve been killed.”

Okay. So you may remember I mentioned this in passing a while back (page 52, if you wanna check up on me), and I said I’d eventually give you the details. Well, here we are.

Even though everything my mom said was technically true, it also wasn’t the whole story. I hadn’t tried to hurt anyone on purpose, and that kid—Trevor Jaffe was his name—had been tormenting me all year. And it wasn’t just “making fun of” me. He would push me too, and punch me, and trip me, and kick me—basically the whole bullying playbook. So yeah, I pushed him back one time, and I wasn’t paying attention to where we were (waiting for the bus), and this one car was driving way too close to the sidewalk, and so yeah, he ended up getting hit. Trevor’s parents pressed charges, and maybe because he was white and I wasn’t, I got this minor version of assault put on my record. I was suspended from school for a month after that, and it ended up setting me back in all my classes, and in some ways I never really found my feet again. So there