Stupid Fast - By Geoff Herbach Page 0,35

decided to lumber over to the Jenningses’ again? (“Give me some wine!”) I sincerely doubted my relationship with Jennings, both father and daughter, could withstand another dose of drunken Franken-Jerri. It was good judgment, sound judgment on my part not to tell Andrew anything, okay?

Crap.

So I biked toward my ridiculous paper route, not to deliver papers but to see a girl who plays piano and who lives in my best friend’s house. The sun was still pretty high because it was summer. I sweated in my tight jeans because it was summer. I smelled the pee-smell of my own athlete’s body. I biked to see a girl, it occurred to me, who may well not want to see me at all, who may well be under instructions from her father to bring me to her house for purposes not even remotely regarding the love I had in mind.

I haven’t yet reported on the sound of my anxiety fantasies. Sounds like this:

What if this is some kind of intervention? What if Mr. Jennings called a social worker, some harsh-looking old lady who tells me that I’m going to be pulled from my home and stuck in foster care or the care of the state because Jerri is obviously an unfit mother because we call her Jerri and she doesn’t really work (“What kind of work is being a crossing guard, Felton? That’s not real work.”), and she has hair under her arms, and she sleeps in her car when she’s drunk (“Jerri Berba is entirely unfit.”). This could be it, Felton. This could be the beginning of a nightmare without end. Andrew and I will send letters back and forth from shag-carpet country homes, rundown, stinky, dirty homes owned by dirty people who make money taking in defenseless foster kids. They’ll use the money to buy beer and cigarettes, and they’ll blow cigarette smoke in my face and burn Andrew’s forearms with their butts, and they’ll force him to drink beer too. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! The letters between me and Andrew will be filled with our love for each other and be filled with the severe abuse we’re enduring. But it won’t matter because the abuse will eventually break us down, kill our brotherly love, because we’re not strong enough, and we’ll grow apart and get hardened and do crimes and get no cards or calls from Jerri. Poor Jerri—screaming for wine, crying, stuck in a straitjacket in some rat-sack dirtbag asylum in some dirty city. This is crazy. Come on. Snap out of it, Felton. Come on. No! No! You’re not being crazy at all! This is not implausible and stupid at all! You found your dad hanging from a beam in your garage! Five years old! You know the whole wide world of horror isn’t something from a stupid movie. It’s reality. It’s true! The whole wide world of horror will open up. It’s ready to swallow you whole at any given moment, particularly this particular moment because this moment with Andrew saying he’s an animal that pees in the yard and Jerri buying ten bottles of wine is just the kind of moment when…

“Are you planning to park your bike?” Aleah was standing at the end of her driveway, her arms hanging at her sides, her mouth open, her eyes blinking. I realized I’d been circling her block for like ten minutes.

I can be a serious head case. Truly.

I stopped my bike and breathed (om shanti shanti shanti—dang it).

“Sorry. I was just thinking.”

“What about?”

“Bad stuff.”

“I figured that. Would you like some iced tea?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Come inside then.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

***

Aleah is an odd person. I found that out right away. She’s extremely intense all the time. This is not reserved for piano playing. Her piano playing is just a normal part of how she is second to second, minute to minute, day to day. On fire.

“I love human drama,” she told me.

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure I agreed.

“Your family’s weird.”

“Yes. That’s true.” She was certainly right.

“I’m weird. It’s okay to be weird.”

“I don’t know.”

“I embrace being weird.”

“Oh.” Huh?

We sat on opposite ends of Gus’s couch in the living room. She’d poured me some really sweet iced tea that tasted almost like blueberry juice. She sat cross-legged, facing me. She was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and jeans and a red bandanna tied over her hair. I couldn’t exactly turn toward her because my legs are long. They felt twenty feet long. I’m spaghetti man. So I had to keep them