I’m juggling them, baby! Three balls! Wooo! 6:12 a.m., and I’m juggling three balls! I can’t juggle four balls. I’m juggling three balls!
Whoops. Shit!
I’m juggling two balls!
Sock balls!
CHAPTER 53: FIRST THREE DAYS
You know, if I think about it, I was really upset. Why is it so hard to know why you’re behaving the way you are when it’s all going down? I don’t know.
The following three days were hazy. Grandma Berba washed my sheets for the first time all summer (every morning because I bled on them), and for like three days, almost all I did was sleep in my clean bed.
I got up to eat (huge doses—there was good food in the house). I got up to hang with Jerri. I did the paper route.
Andrew, Grandma, and I went together. Grandma Berba drove. Andrew and I dropped off papers. (I was slow because on top of a slightly achy back, I had a gravel burn the size of a small child on my leg and ass.) We’d go super early in the morning so nobody could see us. Andrew and Grandma delivered the nursing home so I wouldn’t have to see Dad’s old girlfriend, Kelly Mayer. Everything else was dark on the route. So early.
All the lights were out in every house, including Aleah’s. She changed her practice schedule, not so she could hang out with me but so she could help Andrew with piano. I guess that was nice of her. She biked over to our place each day, and they played and played and played. I didn’t even watch but listened from my clean sheets below. I couldn’t go upstairs.
Because.
I was so embarrassed and mortified. Aleah couldn’t possibly be interested in me. I’d freaked out. I’d told her about squirrel nut. She’d called me a simple boy and an innocent child, and that’s not good. You want a boyfriend who’s simple and innocent? Date a baby? No thanks. My chest hurt.
One time, while I was downstairs listening to them play, I did turn on my phone to see if she’d called or texted, but there was such a blizzard of texts from honkies (I’m sorry, but I have to call them honkies) and voicemails from Cody and Coach Johnson asking me to contact him that I shut the phone back off. I couldn’t deal.
Anyway, she didn’t need to call. I was downstairs. And Aleah knew I was there while she was with Andrew. How could she not? Where would I go? She didn’t ever come down to see me. That’s all the information I needed. Aleah didn’t come see me. And it made my chest so heavy, extremely heavy, because I didn’t mean to have childish thoughts that popped out of my mouth. I couldn’t take them back.
At least I had clean sheets.
***
I also got up to use my computer. I didn’t check email. Google searches. That’s all I did.
I had Googled “Steven W. Reinstein” before. I remembered the results, which I thought weren’t about my dad. I redid those searches and knew they were about my dad. I saw pictures I’d seen before and archived articles I’d glanced at before. Tennis pictures. Tennis articles.
STEVEN REINSTEIN LEADS NORTHWESTERN PAST PURDUE.
COURT COVERAGE KEY FOR REINSTEIN.
REINSTEIN IS FORCE OF NATURE.
REINSTEIN BRINGS NCAA SINGLES TITLE TO NORTHWESTERN.
All of it was on the Northwestern website (except one small picture and paragraph on the NCAA website). He wasn’t all over the Web or anything. (I suppose he played tennis before there was an Internet.)
I had for several years seen, over and over, a particular picture on the Northwestern website of a big Jew-fro dude in a purple T-shirt explosively hitting a tennis ball, a grimace on his face, sweat shooting up in the air everywhere. A dude who happened to have my dad’s name, who really happened to be my dad.
I stared at that picture. I downloaded it to my computer. I blew it way up. Dad. There. Probably rode to the courts on our dead Schwinn Varsity. Steven W. Reinstein, while he was in college, looked exactly like I would if I were four years older. He was enormous and obviously hugely powerful. He was a force of nature.
It made me miss him, and even though I’d decided not to be mad at poor Jerri, missing Dad made me so mad at her. I had nice feelings about Dad pent up in my muscles because of years of lies (he’s sweet and kind—wrong). But I should never be mad at Jerri.