Tell Us Something True Read online

  “No. Natalie just wanted a chance to say good-bye to her.”

  “You’re shameless.”

  I would never use Natalie, but Penny cared about her. There was no way she’d dare be rude and cold to me in front of Natalie. And she always told me she admired what a good big brother I was, so, yes, I thought maybe when she saw me with my sister, she’d remember one of the things about me that made me worth loving. But I couldn’t admit any of this to Will.

  “Are you going to ask Penny if it’s okay to come by?”

  “No.”

  “But aren’t you going to see her next period in Spanish?”

  “Will, are you going to give me the ride or not?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What aren’t you sure about?”

  “If I want to aid and abet you in making an ass of yourself.”

  He finally agreed to do it, and we picked Natalie up right on time. She was wearing this pink velvet leotard, with her hair in pigtails. It was like she’d dressed for her starring role in the smash hit Win Back Penny’s Love.

  Natalie jumped on Will’s back and he rode her out to his car, galloping and zigzagging while she laughed and clutched his neck.

  “How are you guys going to get home?” he asked as we idled in front of Penny’s house.

  “We’ll walk.”

  “No way. I’m not walking home,” Natalie said. “No way.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “I can wait here if you want,” Will offered. “You should make it quick anyway.”

  We climbed out of the car and I leaned back into the passenger window. “It’s okay, Will. I hereby relieve you of your chauffeuring duties. Carry on.”

  He gave me a disapproving look. “Suit yourself.”

  Juana answered the door again, but this time I could read her face. She knew Penny and I were over, and she knew it probably wasn’t a good thing that I was standing on the doorstep with my pigtailed little sister.

  “Hello, River.” She leaned down a little bit and managed a smile at Natalie. “Hello, princess. You must be Natalie.”

  “I am.”

  She stuck out her hand and Natalie took it. “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s nice to put such a cute face together with the name.”

  Natalie looked at me. Not sure what to do or say next. Juana hadn’t invited us in.

  “Um,” Natalie said. “We’ve come to see Penny.”

  “Is she…expecting you?”

  “No,” Natalie said. “It’s a surprise.”

  Juana thought it over for a minute, but what were her options? She couldn’t just turn us away. Natalie was sweet and cute, yes, but also, Juana and I shared the role of almost-family to the Brockaways. We were like almost-cousins.

  “Penelope!” she called. “You have visitors!”

  She led us into the kitchen, put out a plate of cookies and poured us glasses of milk. She knew just what I liked, but I held back. I didn’t want Penny to find me with a milk mustache.

  Penny went right to Natalie and gave her a big hug, swinging her back and forth. She kissed the top of Natalie’s head.

  “Hiya, Natty.” Penny put her back down. “Look at you. You look ready for the Olympics!”

  “I wish you hadn’t broken up with River.”

  Penny shot me a look. I shrugged, like: I swear I didn’t put her up to this.

  “Listen, Nat,” Penny said. “You wanna come upstairs for a minute? I have a new perfume I think you’re gonna love.”

  Natalie put down her cookie and took Penny by the hand. I couldn’t decide if I should feel betrayed or in awe. I had no idea what the kid’s end game was.

  I wolfed down two cookies and chugged my glass of milk, wiping my mouth and waving off Juana’s offer of more.

  She cleared my plate and glass. “She’s sweet, your sister.”

  “Yeah, I know. She’s a good one.” I could tell Juana wanted to say something else. Probably she wanted to yell at me to run and take my dignity with me.

  “She’s lucky to have a brother like you. Nobody will ever know you in the same way you two know each other.”

  I’d heard something like this before. It was one of the things adults liked to say, along with telling me it wasn’t my fault that my father left me.

  “My brother and I, we grew up side by side working in my grandmother’s restaurant. To this day we can make a whole meal without ever speaking a word to each other.”

  “You should open your own restaurant, Juana. You’re an amazing cook.”

  She wiped the counter in front of me even though I’d been careful not to make a mess. “That would be something.”

  “Potatoes could be your signature dish.”

  “I can do so much more, River.” She leaned closer and dropped her voice. “But the Brockaways? They want simple food. Nothing interesting. No spice.”

  Natalie burst into the kitchen with a small round container in the palm of her hand. “Look, River! Penny had an extra silver eye shadow she gave me for keeps!”

  “I told her it’s only for dress-up. No wearing it out of the house, right?” Penny looked at Natalie.

  Natalie nodded. “Right.”

  Penny gave her another hug. “Thanks so much for coming by. It really meant a lot to me.”

  “Thanks for the eye shadow. And the perfume.” Natalie leaned into me and held out her forearm. “Smell me, River.”

  She smelled like Penny.

  I put my arm around Natalie’s shoulder and we stood facing Penny by the kitchen island while Juana washed dishes in the sink.

  “Well…good-bye.” Penny took her hair out of its bun and started to tie it up again. It was one of her nervous tics, redoing her already perfectly done hair.

  “We need a ride home,” Natalie said.

  I squeezed her shoulder. “No, no. It’s okay, we’ll walk.”

  Natalie took a step away from me and folded her arms across her chest. “I told you I’m not walking, and I’m not. I’m not walking home.”

  Penny watched us.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket. “I can call Maggie or one of those guys. Luke has practice, and Will already drove us here, so it’s probably too much to make him come back again, especially at this time of day, but maybe Maggie can—”

  “Juana,” Penny said, staring me down. “Can you please drive River and Natalie home?”

  Juana turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on a dish towel.

  “I have to make dinner, and your mother, she said—”

  “Just do it, Juana.” And then Penny added, “Please.”

  “Okay, if you really need—”

  “Thank you.”

  Penny turned and walked out of the room.

  We followed Juana down the driveway past Penny’s SUV and across the street to a dark green Toyota Camry, an old one, with a smashed-in front left bumper and a sticker on the rear fender for a radio station I’d never listened to.

  Juana lived with the Brockaways except for on the weekends. I’d had no idea she had a car, or where she went when she wasn’t here, but of course she had a car, because this was Los Angeles.

  “Thanks for doing this for us,” I said as Natalie hopped in the backseat. “Really, we appreciate it.”

  “It’s okay,” Juana said. “You’re a nice boy, River.”

  I told her where our house was and which streets I’d avoid considering it was rush hour.

  I turned to face Natalie. “So how’d it go upstairs?”

  “Fine. She told me she was sorry. And that she’d miss seeing a lot of me but that we could still be friends.”

  “Well, that’s nice of her.”

  “And I told her that she’s wrong about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I told her that she’s wrong when she says that you don’t think about stuff, because you do. You do think about stuff. I know you do.”

  We drove in silence with the radio turned down low. A Sp
anish-language station. Probably the one on the bumper sticker. I watched as the plastic religious figure that hung from the rearview mirror swung back and forth as we stopped and started through evening traffic.

  When we pulled up in front of our house I thanked Juana again. “I know driving me around really isn’t your job. I’m sorry Penny made you take me.”

  She put a hand on my cheek. “Like I said, you’re a nice boy, River. You have a kind heart. I know this about you.”

  As Natalie climbed out from the backseat, she spied the dangling plastic figure. She reached over and touched him.

  “Who’s this?” she asked Juana.

  “This is St. Jude.”

  “Who’s St. Jude?”

  “He’s a saint. The patron saint of lost causes.”

  By week three at A Second Chance it was no longer possible for me to be vague about my problem with weed.

  Time to get down and dirty.

  During Bree’s turn she put her face in her hands and wept, her body gently shaking. Nobody said anything; we just sat by and let her feel her sadness. Daphne rubbed her back. Usually when people cry in front of me it makes me super uncomfortable, or “uncunchterble,” like Natalie used to say, and I feel embarrassed for the person doing the crying and I just want to do something to make it stop and put us both out of our misery. I did feel pretty uncunchterble at first, but as it went on and on I was able to just feel for her.

  Daphne was up next.

  “So usually I shop at Ralphs or the Vallarta, or if I can get a ride or I got the car, we go to Costco. But we needed ziplock bags because we were out and I got four lunches to make each day not including my own, so I walked to the little grocery a few blocks away. The store’s got nothing you want, and the guy who runs the place is rude, so I don’t go there on principle, but it was night, and I had to make lunches for the next day, and so I go there and he’s only got some crap brand with like eighteen bags in the box and I’m all: that’s barely gonna get me through one day of lunches. And the box costs four ninety-nine. That’s like twenty-eight cents each bag. I got enough in my wallet to buy him outta his entire supply of crap ziplock bags. But I just think it’d be so much easier to slip the box into my purse and leave. It would feel good, even. To not have to talk to the dick who runs the shop. Not transact with him. But…I didn’t. I bought two boxes. They lasted me three days.”

  Everett broke the silence that followed. “Wonderful.”

  “Wonderful?” Christopher looked at Everett. “Wonderful? Really?”

  “Do you have something you want to say, Christopher?”

  “Yeah. She—”

  “Don’t say she. Look at Daphne and address her directly, please.”

  Christopher swiveled in his chair to face Daphne. “That story. It makes you out to be the hero. Like it was some noble act to pay for the overpriced bags. If you didn’t want to pay for them, you could have just gone someplace else. And maybe this guy has five kids of his own at home, and they need to eat lunch too, and that’s why he tacks a little extra onto the price of his plastic bags. Did you ever think of that?”

  She stared back at him.

  I must have had the wrong idea about them. Not that I was any relationship expert, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea to talk like that to the girl you’re into.

  She took a pink lip gloss out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and put it on. I wondered what Penny would have looked like in that lip gloss, because on Daphne it looked kind of amazing. “Yeah, actually, I think you make a good point, Christopher.”

  Or…maybe they did like each other.

  “My problem is my problem and I can’t go through life thinking I’m doing someone a favor by paying for things. And yeah, hard as it is for me to imagine that guy, like, procreating, he probably does have kids at home and he probably does have to fix them lunch.” Daphne screwed the top back on her lip gloss and rubbed her lips together. “The funny thing is, most of the other stuff I’ve ever stolen or thought about stealing was stupid. Like it was something I didn’t need, and something I didn’t even want. Once I stole a little porcelain horse. I stole a Zippo lighter and I don’t smoke. How I got arrested was I stole a scarf from Macy’s downtown. A wool scarf. This is Southern California. I don’t need a wool scarf.” She sighed. “I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time.”

  Hand gestures all around. We connect what you’re saying to something true inside ourselves.

  “So…why?” I asked.

  Daphne looked at me.

  “Why do you do it? That’s what’s important, right? The why of it?”

  “Because I’m sick and tired of having to work so hard all the time while other people just get stuff handed to them. I’m not saying I deserve more than anyone else, I’m just saying I’m smart, okay? And I’m, like, really competent. I’m good at stuff. And I can’t have what I want…or do what I want, and…” She sighed. “Forget it. I know how this sounds.”

  “It sounds complicated,” I said.

  She smiled at me. “Yeah. It’s complicated.”

  “So, River.” Everett turned to face me. “What’s your week been like? What are you doing to stay clean? What are the moments that are hardest for you? What do you miss about getting high, or do you even miss it at all? What’s your why?”

  I took this as Everett’s not-so-subtle invitation for me to step up my game. Most of the kids in the group weren’t especially articulate, and sometimes they didn’t say much at all, so I knew I didn’t have to go on at length, but I did have to say something about fighting my addiction.

  I thought about the two times I’d smoked weed. The first was at a party. Penny was out of town and I didn’t even want to go because parties weren’t nearly as much fun without her, half the fun was finding a place to be alone and get her out of as many layers of clothing as she’d let me, but anyway, I went. It was the beginning of junior year and the party was at this kid’s house whose dad was a big-time movie producer.

  I was with Maggie, Luke and Will. We were hanging out around a fire pit near the pool just talking and some other people came over and lit up a joint. They passed it around and I took it.

  It didn’t feel like a big deal. I didn’t think: I am about to do illegal drugs for the first time. I just took a hit, and coughed, and passed it to Maggie and when it came back around to me, I took another hit.

  The world didn’t go psychedelic or fish-eye-lensed. I just laughed a little more, because everything struck me as a little bit funnier. I did have a moment looking at Maggie, Luke and Will where I thought: I love these guys. I’m lucky to have them as friends. They bring joy into my life. They support me and stand by me and they’re always there for me when I need them. But of course I didn’t say that out loud because who says stuff like that?

  The second time wasn’t quite as rosy.

  We were at the beach. Again, Penny wasn’t there. When I’d told her I’d smoked pot at the party she’d been pretty disapproving. Penny was sort of a prude, and I don’t say that only because we never had sex; I say it because she was cautious. She made her decisions carefully—something I didn’t like thinking about considering her decision about me—and she hated being out of control.

  Luke’s sister Erica had come home for winter break from college with a significant stash, which Luke promptly pilfered along with some rolling papers. None of us knew how to roll a joint and it was windy so the scene was pretty comical, but we managed. The beach was empty and we climbed up a lifeguard tower and sat with our legs dangling down and passed the joint. I guess I thought if I smoked more I’d laugh a little more and maybe even get hit by another one of those waves of love and appreciation.

  Nope.

  The world kind of went off track, like a film where the sound doesn’t quite keep up, and time didn’t make sense anymore. I remember looking at my watch and thinking: How much time is going by, how much time is going by? Only, apparently I wasn’t thinking it, I was saying it, over and
over again until Maggie threw cold water in my face, which only made things worse because then I started thinking, Why is she throwing water at me—I thought we were friends.

  I didn’t tell Penny about that time at the beach, and I hadn’t smoked pot since.

  “I didn’t like what it was doing to me,” I heard myself say.

  “Mmmmmm.” Everett closed his eyes and nodded.

  “And…and…It was like I was operating outside myself, you know, out of sync with everything. So I stopped.”

  “That’s it?” Christopher asked. “You just quit? No problemo?”

  “Oh, there was a problemo.”

  Addicts don’t just walk away without a fight. If they did, they probably weren’t addicts in the first place. This much I knew from the Say No to Drugs assemblies. So I tried imagining needing something so badly I couldn’t quit it.

  I imagined Penny.

  “I couldn’t stop,” I went on. “It became the most important thing in my life. It was all I thought about first thing in the morning. All I thought about all day long. When can I get high? My whole life became about: When can I get high again? I stopped hanging out with my friends. And then…my girlfriend broke up with me.”

  I had to take a moment. The fake stuff came naturally, but the true statement, my girlfriend broke up with me, was hard to say out loud.

  “It does all come with a hefty price tag, don’t it?” Mason stared at me in a way that was less: I connect what you’re saying to something true inside myself, and more: I could harm you physically without breaking a sweat.

  “Honestly, without her…I feel pretty lost,” I said. “And I don’t know how to put her behind me.”

  “Is that how you like it, River? With the girl behind you?” Mason doubled over with laughter, slapping himself on the shoulder because there was no one with whom he could share a high five.

  “Mason,” Everett said.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re listening. Or taking River seriously.”

  “Oh, I’m listening. I’m listening real good. But it’s pretty hard to take River seriously. I mean—look at him.”

  So, of course, everyone did. My face burned Nordic red.