proprietary look of accusation that adults love to brandish at anyone under the age of eighteen. As soon as he was gone, Ruthie said,
“We’d better go. Just in case.”
“In case what? He throws a phone at us?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. In case … ?”
“My mom gets back from pilates at four. I better drive you home.”
And so ended the first of Ruthie’s unfathomable soliloquies, veered into and away from with all the predictability of a rabid skunk trying to cross a highway (I saw it once: trust me, the ending ain’t pretty). Here’s another:
“I’m named for a character in a book. I tried to read it but it was boring. It was turned into a movie and I tried to watch that, but it was boring too. So I figure maybe I should change my name. What do you think of Desireh?”
And another:
“I’m not anorexic. Anorexics have a distorted body image. I know I’m too thin. You have to be too thin if you want to make it in L.A. Besides, I eat eight hundred calories a day, which is considered a lot for people in places like Malawi. What if I called myself something British, like Fenella, or Hermione?”
And:
“You know how when some people get a piece of bubble wrap in their hands they have to twist it till it pops? Yeah, I’m not one of those people. I have better things to do with my time. Ruby? But if I called myself Ruby I’d have to dye my hair red, and then, well, Ruby and Sprout, that’d be too much.”
But my favorite had to be this one:
“Why is it that the closest word in English that rhymes with anarchy is menarche?”
“Monarchy—”
“ Men arche.” When I just stared at her blankly, she said, “You walk around clutching a dictionary to your stomach like a cheerleader trying to cover up the gift the captain of the football team gave her, look it up. Oh hell. Why don’t I just give in and call myself Britney ?”
Meanwhile, school:
On Long Island, I’d been anonymous. Just one of 2,567 students, not at the top of the heap, not at the bottom. Just a brown-haired piece of the middle. Take me out and nothing would collapse. No one would notice.
But in Kansas, I was marked out. The new kid. The stranger. The boy with the weird accent. The boy with the weird dad, and no mom. From the moment Madison Pagels tripped me as I walked down the aisle of the school bus at 7:07 A.M. to the moment Madison’s best friend Chelsea Monroe tripped me as I walked up the aisle at 3:56 P.M., and all the spitballs, hair-pulling, snickers, catcalls, “Kick me” notes, and fistfights in between, the school day pretty much seemed to revolve around me. After one rock-solid week of this, I decided that if there had to be a target on my head, I’d paint it there myself.
When Ruthie honked in the driveway (“Daniel, your friend’s mom is here!”) I found my dad planting some vines to fill in a patchy spot in the back of the house, and asked him for some cash.
“How much do you need?”
“How about a hundred?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“How ’bout fifty?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“How ’bout twenty-five?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“Really, I just need ten.”
“Well, here’s twenty. If you go by Wal-Mart, buy a couple of plates. You seem to’ve broken them all.”
“Gosh, thanks, Dad. That’s more than I asked for. You’re the best .”
A few days earlier, my dad had shown up on the lawn of some house in Hutch in the middle of the night and interrogated it for six hours— Why did you kill my wife? Why did you destroy my life? Why are you the cause of so much strife? —which made more sense when Ruthie drove me by the house and I saw that it was a one-story ranch made out of pale brown bricks topped by asphalt shingles. Our house on Long Island had been made of pale brown bricks. Its asphalt-shingled single story had barely made an impression against the sky. As I looked at its Kansas doppelganger, I vowed that I would be more than a single story. I would sprout a second story, a third if I wanted, a
“We’d better go. Just in case.”
“In case what? He throws a phone at us?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. In case … ?”
“My mom gets back from pilates at four. I better drive you home.”
And so ended the first of Ruthie’s unfathomable soliloquies, veered into and away from with all the predictability of a rabid skunk trying to cross a highway (I saw it once: trust me, the ending ain’t pretty). Here’s another:
“I’m named for a character in a book. I tried to read it but it was boring. It was turned into a movie and I tried to watch that, but it was boring too. So I figure maybe I should change my name. What do you think of Desireh?”
And another:
“I’m not anorexic. Anorexics have a distorted body image. I know I’m too thin. You have to be too thin if you want to make it in L.A. Besides, I eat eight hundred calories a day, which is considered a lot for people in places like Malawi. What if I called myself something British, like Fenella, or Hermione?”
And:
“You know how when some people get a piece of bubble wrap in their hands they have to twist it till it pops? Yeah, I’m not one of those people. I have better things to do with my time. Ruby? But if I called myself Ruby I’d have to dye my hair red, and then, well, Ruby and Sprout, that’d be too much.”
But my favorite had to be this one:
“Why is it that the closest word in English that rhymes with anarchy is menarche?”
“Monarchy—”
“ Men arche.” When I just stared at her blankly, she said, “You walk around clutching a dictionary to your stomach like a cheerleader trying to cover up the gift the captain of the football team gave her, look it up. Oh hell. Why don’t I just give in and call myself Britney ?”
Meanwhile, school:
On Long Island, I’d been anonymous. Just one of 2,567 students, not at the top of the heap, not at the bottom. Just a brown-haired piece of the middle. Take me out and nothing would collapse. No one would notice.
But in Kansas, I was marked out. The new kid. The stranger. The boy with the weird accent. The boy with the weird dad, and no mom. From the moment Madison Pagels tripped me as I walked down the aisle of the school bus at 7:07 A.M. to the moment Madison’s best friend Chelsea Monroe tripped me as I walked up the aisle at 3:56 P.M., and all the spitballs, hair-pulling, snickers, catcalls, “Kick me” notes, and fistfights in between, the school day pretty much seemed to revolve around me. After one rock-solid week of this, I decided that if there had to be a target on my head, I’d paint it there myself.
When Ruthie honked in the driveway (“Daniel, your friend’s mom is here!”) I found my dad planting some vines to fill in a patchy spot in the back of the house, and asked him for some cash.
“How much do you need?”
“How about a hundred?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“How ’bout fifty?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“How ’bout twenty-five?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“Really, I just need ten.”
“Well, here’s twenty. If you go by Wal-Mart, buy a couple of plates. You seem to’ve broken them all.”
“Gosh, thanks, Dad. That’s more than I asked for. You’re the best .”
A few days earlier, my dad had shown up on the lawn of some house in Hutch in the middle of the night and interrogated it for six hours— Why did you kill my wife? Why did you destroy my life? Why are you the cause of so much strife? —which made more sense when Ruthie drove me by the house and I saw that it was a one-story ranch made out of pale brown bricks topped by asphalt shingles. Our house on Long Island had been made of pale brown bricks. Its asphalt-shingled single story had barely made an impression against the sky. As I looked at its Kansas doppelganger, I vowed that I would be more than a single story. I would sprout a second story, a third if I wanted, a
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