Tell Us Something True Read online

  Everett studied me. “He’s struggling, Mason. Just like you. Just like all of us.”

  “So…” Daphne caught my eye. “The weed was just filling a hole you already had. That’s your why. You let it be everything so you didn’t have to pay attention to what you’re missing.”

  “Maybe.” Why had I made Penny my everything? What was I missing? I had a good shot at a great college. A family who loved me. Friends who put up with me even when I disappeared. Sure, I had a father who’d abandoned me, but I tried not to dwell on that. I was a reasonably good-looking white male from the Westside of Los Angeles. I’d pretty much won the lottery.

  “Or maybe,” I said, “I wasn’t really missing anything. Maybe…I’m just weak.”

  —

  “Sorry I was such a dick,” Mason said to me outside afterward. “I can be that way sometimes, and I don’t even know why. It’s like I have two personalities or something. Good Mason and Bad Mason. I never know who’s out ahead.” He stuck out his hand. “Accept my apology?”

  “Sure.”

  “And I’m sorry your lady broke your heart.”

  “Yeah,” Daphne added. “That hurts.”

  “Dude,” Christopher said. “You should embrace your freedom. Girls are nothing but trouble.”

  “Wow,” Daphne said. “How do you not have a girlfriend? With all that sweet, romantic talk.”

  “So what you’re saying is: you wanna be my girlfriend?”

  “No thank you, Christopher. You got too many issues.”

  “Ha!”

  She waved her hand in his face. “And I don’t have time.”

  “You don’t have time for a boyfriend?” I asked. This struck me as a bullshit excuse. Something along the lines of It’s not you, it’s me or I just think we’re better as friends or You don’t think enough about things.

  “Look, I take care of my brothers and sisters all week long. Morning and night. And then I come here Saturdays, because, you know, I have to. So when do you figure I have time for a relationship?”

  Christopher finished his cigarette and reached into his pocket for his car keys. “Well, it’s been real, suckers, but I’m all shared out.”

  Mason checked his phone. “Aw…balls.”

  “What?” Christopher asked.

  “My friend was supposed to pick me up but he’s bailing. Can you give me a ride home?”

  “Depends. Where do you live?”

  “Culver City.”

  Culver City wasn’t all that far from my house. I quickly weighed the embarrassment of getting shot down against a five-mile walk alone in the dark.

  “I live in Rancho Park,” I added. “I could kinda use a ride too.”

  Christopher threw his arms out. “Anyone else? Apparently I am now a taxi service. Daphne? Do you need a ride?”

  “Nah,” she said. “I’m gonna take the bus.”

  “The bus?” I asked. “Really? But nobody takes the bus in LA.”

  “White people don’t,” she said. “Mexicans do.”

  I felt that Nordic curse rise in my cheeks. Why was I such a clueless asshole?

  “I mean…what I meant…I meant to say…”

  “You meant to say that you don’t ride the bus and neither do your friends because you all have cars.”

  “No…I meant…”

  “River. Untangle your panties, will you?”

  “C’mon.” Christopher motioned to Daphne. “I’ll drive you home too.”

  “Do you even know where I live?”

  “No.”

  “Boyle Heights.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know where that is?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It’s east of downtown. Like, the exact opposite direction from where you’re going.”

  “So?” He tossed his keys up and caught them in midair. “That’s why God invented freeways.”

  Right before we got to where the 10 hits the 110 we four very different people realized that we shared something in common: we were super hungry.

  They could say what they wanted about the snacks I’d brought the week before, but at least I’d done better than Bree. Flaxseed chips? Seaweed? Come on.

  In all my life, I’d only been to downtown Los Angeles maybe a dozen times, when I’d let Mom drag me to the theater to see Peter Pan or Mary Poppins, the kind of huge spectacle I couldn’t fully appreciate and we couldn’t really afford. Mom had groomed Natalie to be her next-generation theater date, and Natalie was doing a much better job in that role than I ever did.

  I had no idea where we should go, but the others decided that Philippe’s was the perfect spot.

  “Who doesn’t love a French dip?” Christopher asked as he zipped his Audi A5 through the quiet downtown streets.

  The place was packed. Old people. Young people. Big Chinese families. Guys in jumpsuits with Department of Water and Power patches above their hearts. Cowboy hats and beanies. T-shirts and ties.

  As we stood in line to place our orders, Mason must have picked up on my unease about bringing a bulimic into a restaurant that reeked of animal fat.

  “I can eat a sandwich,” he said slowly as if English wasn’t my first language. “I just can’t eat five of them.”

  “Got it.”

  We collected our order—four French dips, coleslaw, drinks—and we settled into a booth with an old wooden table into which people had carved their initials and some moron had drawn a dick and balls in black Sharpie.

  I had a strange flash sitting in that booth with Christopher, Mason and Daphne, imagining this as some upside-down alternate version of my other life, where I might be in a similar booth far west of here with Will, Luke and Maggie. I guessed Daphne would play Maggie in that version, though they looked so different. Maggie was tall and thin with shoulder-length light brown hair she usually tucked behind her ears, and braces at seventeen, her third round, because she was born with the world’s most crooked teeth. It was hard for me to see Maggie because she’d been my friend since I was two, but everything about Daphne was new to me. She had a small ring in her nose and a tattoo—roses on the vine that wound around her wrist—and her curly hair and eyes were the same shiny black. She had a round face and skin that looked soft. She was quick to smile, and when she did, she went for broke.

  Looking at Daphne carefully and imagining her as Maggie led to comparing her to Penny, because all roads led me back to Penny.

  Penny’s hair was curly too, but it was reddish. She was pale-skinned and covered in freckles that multiplied in summertime and diminished in winter. Her eyes were green. Her lips were thin, never glossed in pink like Daphne’s.

  “What are you looking at?” Daphne asked.

  “Nothing!” I said.

  “Really? ’Cause it kinda looked like you were checking me out.”

  “No, I was—”

  “You haven’t even touched your sandwich.”

  I glanced down at my tray. She was right.

  Mason and Christopher were staring at me like I was a total bonehead with no game at all. I wanted to explain that I wasn’t into Daphne because I was hopelessly in love with Penny, and anyway it was sort of obvious that Daphne and Christopher were into each other, but that would have just made everything even more awkward, so I just picked up my French dip and took a bite. It was delicious.

  Christopher had finished his and was itching to go outside for a cigarette. Mason offered to go with him.

  “To keep myself from ordering cheesecake,” he said. “An entire cheesecake.”

  Daphne and I sat facing each other, but I could hardly look at her now that I’d been busted for staring.

  “So you really weren’t checking me out?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “What?”

  “Usually I know when guys are looking at me that way. Because, not to brag or anything, but it sort of happens a lot.”

  She watched me try to hide my embarrassment by stuffi
ng my face with my sandwich.

  “So what kind of name is River, anyway?”

  I took a long drink from my Coke. “You mean, who names their kid River? I assume you aren’t asking about my country of origin.”

  “Right. How’d you wind up with a stupid name like River? That’s what I’m asking.”

  “My dad. He wanted something different. Unforgettable. Which is pretty ironic considering he went on to basically forget about me.”

  “He left?”

  “Yep.”

  “Like, went out for a pack of smokes and never came back kind of left?”

  “Close.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think there’s two kinds of men.” She fixed those black, shining eyes on me. “The stayers and the leavers. My dad? He’s a stayer. I got lucky like that. Five kids and two jobs he works sixty hours a week, mostly on overnight shifts, but he still comes home in the mornings. Your dad? He’s a leaver. That’s just who he is. And that’s about him. Not you.”

  I’d heard every single version there was of how I wasn’t the reason my dad left—from Mom, Leonard, my friends, a therapist I was forced to see briefly with permanently smudged glasses and an office that smelled like patchouli. Daphne wasn’t going to shed any new light on the shitty dad card I’d been dealt.

  “Is he a deadbeat?” she asked.

  “No, actually. His checks come on time. My mom never even had to fight about it because he offered more than any court would have ordered him to pay. He thinks he can buy a clean conscience.”

  Sometimes I thought it would have been better if he had gone out for a pack of smokes and never returned. Then I could have invented my own narrative about what happened to him—he was kidnapped, he was a secret agent for the government called on a special mission, he’d suffered amnesia and lived a new life with a new family, but every now and then found himself dreaming of a little blond boy with sad blue eyes, and when he woke he couldn’t shake the feeling that this boy was real.

  But thanks to the powers of modern technology, there was no mystery about Thaddeus Dean. I could Google him. I could look at pictures of him. I could watch videos of him giving speeches with a little microphone attached to his headset like he was the captain of the Millennium Falcon.

  Most of my sandwich sat untouched. I wasn’t all that hungry anymore.

  “Well, at least he sends money,” Daphne said. “I know plenty of people whose fathers don’t.”

  I nodded.

  I’d always tried to focus on how things could have been worse. We were able to stay in the house and Mom didn’t have to quit a job she loved to find a better paycheck. And then she met Leonard and they married and had Natalie, the greatest gift of all my life, and none of that would have happened if Thaddeus Dean hadn’t decided he was destined for a different life as the nation’s leading expert on interconnectedness in the digital age with a much younger, childless woman he’d met, no joke: online.

  I found myself sharing all of this with Daphne even though I’d pretty much stopped telling people the story of my father. I let those who didn’t know better assume Leonard was my biodad, though anyone with eyes should have seen through that. I hadn’t even talked about my father that much with Penny, though once, we Google-imaged him—he’d grown a beard and had started wearing wire-rimmed glasses.

  “He’s kind of handsome,” Penny said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Like you. But you’re way hotter.”

  “So when’s the last time you saw him?” Daphne asked me.

  “When I was about five. At first he used to see me once a month. Then twice a year. Then…”

  “Does he live far away?”

  “Nope.”

  He’d moved to San Francisco a few years ago to run some technology think tank. Before that, he lived in London and Sydney. I knew all this from checking his online trail now and then. Mom and I never talked about him anymore.

  “So…he’s an expert on how the Internet brings people closer together?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And yet…he never even emails you?”

  “Not once.”

  “So he’s your why.”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “I am.”

  I looked around. The restaurant had nearly emptied out without my noticing. Guys from the kitchen were sweeping floors and putting chairs up on tables, pouring the remains of ketchup bottles one into the other. It was time to go home.

  “I wonder what happened to Mason and Christopher?”

  “Maybe they went out for a pack of smokes,” she said. “And they’re never coming back.”

  —

  They were sitting on the hood of Christopher’s car, windows down, radio playing. The night was beautiful. Balmy with a violet sky.

  We dropped Daphne off first. She lived in a little box of a house surrounded by a waist-high chain link fence. A postage-stamp-sized front yard littered with plastic toddler toys. A palm tree that listed to the right. She unlocked a metal security gate and then a front door. We waited until she’d closed both behind her before hopping back on the 10. Despite feeling a world away, I was back at my house in twenty minutes.

  Mom was at the door when I arrived.

  “Who was that?” she asked, watching the taillights of Christopher’s Audi round the corner.

  “Friends.”

  “I figured they weren’t enemies. I mean, which friends? I don’t recognize that car.”

  “Just some guys I know.”

  I could tell Mom was trying to set the stage for one of our late-night talks. Leonard’s workday started before sunrise, so he went to bed early like Natalie. Mom and I were night owls. Sometimes we hung out in the kitchen talking way past midnight. Usually we’d eat an entire fourth meal.

  “Omelet?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’m going to bed.”

  She looked disappointed, but I was tired and missing Penny. It was only ten forty-five. We used to stay together until eleven-thirty on Saturday nights, her curfew.

  I lay down on my bed in my clothes. I couldn’t help but wonder what Penny had done tonight. And I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d wondered about me. Maybe she’d stayed home and watched a movie with Ben. Maybe her dad had grilled steaks in the backyard. It had been that kind of night. Whatever she’d imagined when she thought of me, or if she’d even thought of me, I knew she hadn’t pictured me walking nearly five miles to A Second Chance support group for teens. Yup. It was absurd. But Penny believed I didn’t think about things. That I didn’t reflect. So if she’d stretched out on her bed tonight and wondered about me, I doubted she’d imagined I’d spent the evening talking about my battle with drugs to a roomful of strangers and then talking about my father for so long that a restaurant had emptied. I’d done nothing tonight but think. Reflect. Now that I thought back on the past few hours, I regretted how much I’d talked to Daphne. I’d talked so much about myself that I’d never even asked what her father did at his two jobs. I hadn’t asked about her mom. Or her brothers and sisters.

  I pulled out my phone. I wanted to text Penny, but I didn’t. For one thing, Maggie had deleted her contact information, not that I didn’t know it by heart, but Maggie thought if I had to take the time to actually dial in Penny’s number, I might stop and realize what I was doing and think better of it.

  I texted Daphne. The four of us had exchanged numbers when we’d dropped her off. We’d talked about maybe working out some sort of car pool situation, though I didn’t mention I had no car. Or license.

  ME: What does UR dad do?

  HER: WTF?

  ME: What does UR dad do on his night shifts?

  HER: Warehouse worker/baker

  ME: Mom?

  HER: No, it’s Daphne

  ME: Duh. I mean, what does UR mom do?

  HER: Housekeeper

  ME: What R UR siblings names?

  HER: Maria, Miguel, Claudia, Roberto

/>   ME: Thx. G-night Daphne

  HER: G-night boy w/ the unforgettable name

  When I met Will at the beginning of freshman year, with his high voice and long hair and short-shorts, I’d never have imagined the senior-year version, the Will to whom girls, grades and great parking spaces came effortlessly.

  But back to the shorts. When I say short I mean really short. I mean an inch away from sharing your balls with the world short.

  We were getting ready for PE. I hadn’t noticed Will at the locker next to me, but once I saw those shorts, it was hard to look away.

  It wasn’t until a few weeks later, after we’d started hanging out, that I said, “Dude. Those shorts. They need to go.” We’d just run laps.

  He looked down. “These? Really?” And then he took off for one final lap, which we later called “the lap of shame.”

  I didn’t see those shorts again until my birthday months later. I was surprised he’d brought a wrapped gift to school. Even a card.

  Dear River—to mark the occasion of you turning 15, here: something that says how much you mean to me better than words.

  I unwrapped it. The shorts.

  Over the years we’d found ways to give them back and forth. I’d leave them in his car or his backpack. He’d sneak into my room and put them in my drawer. I sent them to his summer camp in a care package. But no one ever wore them.

  Until he walked into my kitchen that Thursday morning.

  “Hurry up, River. I’ll drive you to school.”

  Will had grown since freshman year so the shorts had reached a whole new level of…inappropriate. Mom stared, openmouthed.

  “What is it, Deb?” He spun around. “Is there something in my teeth?”

  “William Parker,” she said. “What on earth are you wearing?”

  He slung an arm around her shoulder. “Deb, River needs cheering up. And these shorts bring joy to the world.”

  “If it wouldn’t make us late,” I said, “I’d make you take a lap of shame.”

  I dragged him to my room and threw him a pair of my jeans. We laughed most of the way to school.

  —

  My good mood lasted until right before sixth-period study hall, when I practically tripped over the table where Penny’s best friend, Vanessa, sat with a box of cash and a pile of printed purple tickets.