Stupid Fast - By Geoff Herbach Page 0,67

didn’t seem that old.

“It’s not like she was in eighth grade,” Andrew said. “Nineteen is adult. Jerri has a good head on her shoulders too.” Andrew trailed off as he realized what a dumb statement he was making relative to the current situation.

“She was a kid when she had me,” I nodded. “Like I’m a kid right now.”

“How old was your dad?” Aleah asked.

“He was thirty-four when he died,” I said.

“You were five, right?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” Aleah said. “He was way too old for your mom. That’s a very bad power dynamic if you ask me. A thirty-year-old man with a teenager?”

“How is it a bad power dynamic?” Andrew asked, mouth full of chips.

“I’d like us to drop this conversation,” I said. “I don’t like it.”

“Felton isn’t interested in the truth,” Andrew said to Aleah.

“That’s not true,” I said. “I’m afraid of the truth.”

“Oh, that’s much better,” Aleah said.

The two of them moved on to another subject.

But I couldn’t stop thinking of it. Jerri was a teenager when I was born. I imagined Abby Sauter pregnant with some thirty-year-old’s baby. Messed up. Really, sincerely messed up.

Just then Ronald walked in from the garage.

“Looks like we got ourselves a house full of Reinstein!” he smiled.

“Andrew and Felton are going to stay with us,” Aleah said.

The smile dropped right off his face. But after he found out Jerri was a teenager when she had me and she was crazy and Grandma Berba was on her way, he helped Andrew dig Gus’s sleeping bags out of the crawl space above the hall (I couldn’t help, as I’d cooled from the bike ride and was near paralyzed from Ken’s assault).

It was a completely crazy hour with everything coming at me from every angle. Jerri, you understand, was a pregnant teenager with me in her belly. Meanwhile, the entire honky universe was buzzing, chattering, texting, calling. Jerri was almost the same age as these honkies when I was in her belly.

CHAPTER 47: BRAIN MASH: PART II

Because it was Friday, Aleah didn’t practice piano. She might as well have.

After dinner, Aleah, Andrew, and I sat in Gus’s basement watching movies. Or not really movies. We watched Aleah’s DVD recordings of the Metropolitan Opera, which I didn’t get. But Aleah and Andrew completely get opera. They whooped and laughed and talked about orchestration and about Mozart and about singing in Italian and singing in German, and I sat there thinking about Jerri and her baby, who was me. Then Aleah kissed my cheek, told me to get some rest, turned off the light, and disappeared upstairs. After, Andrew said, “Aleah’s really a wonderful person. You’re very lucky.” In like a minute, he began snoring. And I laid there, my eyeballs staring into the black night of the basement, thinking about Jerri and her baby, who was me.

Jerri wanted to be a civil rights lawyer when she was my age. That’s what she told me. Clearly, I was the reason she wasn’t a civil rights lawyer. Jerri was valedictorian of her high school class. I knew that from before. That’s part of history she kept. Jerri stayed in Bluffton for college because her dad would only pay for it if she did. I knew this because once, freshman year, after taking it on the chin from the honkies all day, I asked her why in the name of squirrel nut hell did she decide to stay in Bluffton for college when she was so dang smart in high school?

“My father trapped me,” she said. Now I knew this too: Jerri got pregnant with a professor’s kid (me!) by like November of her first year of college. How the holy hell did that happen? How the holy hell did she meet, fall in love with, and marry a professor in just a couple of months? Then it dawned on me: Jerri wasn’t married to Professor Reinstein at all. That’s why she still had the last name Berba!

Even though my back hurt like freaking terror, I rolled over and shook Andrew awake.

“What?” he asked, sleepy.

“Jerri and Dad were never married,” I whispered. “We’re bastards. Do you understand?”

“No,” Andrew said. “That’s not true. I saw the wedding album, remember?”

“The wedding album had to be from something else. Jerri’s last name is Berba.”

“Yes. She kept her last name. But they were married.”

“No, they weren’t, Andrew. Stop kidding yourself.”

“I saw the wedding announcement from the Bluffton Journal too. They had a spring wedding.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Same place as the album. Way up in”—Andrew yawned—“Jerri’s