“Do you remember the Viking article I gave you? The one about the woman Viking?”
I said I did.
“Do you know why I gave it to you?”
“So that I could become a hero,” I said.
“Everyone is a hero in their own lives,” he said. “That’s by default. But I wanted you to see that sometimes the world thinks something is not possible, but it turns out that they can be wrong. Even fancy scientists can be wrong.”
“Sometimes the most important things don’t fit on lists,” I said. “And sometimes those are things we don’t expect. Like this apartment.”
Dr. Laird smiled. “Sometimes the most important things don’t fit on lists. I like that.”
“Me too.”
We dabbed again.
* * *
I kept waiting for Gert to show up, but he didn’t. We had not seen each other very much since AK47 had left. She did not tell him in person that she was leaving, which I did not like but also understood. Gert could get very angry and I know she did not want to have to fight with him. At first I wanted them to fight so that Gert could convince her to stay. Now I was glad she did not get convinced.
People from the party started going home.
“If you talk to Annie, tell her we miss her,” Big Todd said, and we hugged and I said I would.
Dr. Laird said to call him to set up an appointment whenever I needed.
Once everyone left I started cleaning up and was almost finished at 10:12 p.m. when there was a knock at the door. Through the peephole I saw Gert standing in front of the door.
“You’re very late,” I said, opening the door.
“Too late?” He smiled and leaned in the doorway.
I shook my head. “You are welcome.”
He started walking into the house and I cleared my throat and pointed at the RULES FOR ZELDA’S APARTMENT. Gert saw the sheet of paper and stopped.
“Okay, okay,” he said, and took off his shoes. “I like the place.”
Gert put his hands in his pockets. He had not shaved in a long time and I knew that he had been drinking beer from how he smelled.
“Thank you.”
I made him not coffee but tea. One of the things that I learned is that I don’t like coffee, not as much as tea. I also do not like carpet, because dirt hides in it and it gets ugly and smells.
He sat on the couch and picked at a thread. I brought over the tea.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Fine. How are you holding up?”
He shrugged. “Not bad.” He cleared his throat. “Have you heard anything from her?”
I had heard from her and told Gert that she was doing well. He kept picking at the thread of the couch. He asked where she was now—if she was in Arizona.
AK47 had asked me not to tell Gert things like where she was. I could tell him she was okay and safe. “But don’t tell him anything else,” she wrote in her e-mail.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But she is okay and safe.”
Gert looked around and then rubbed his neck. “I’d really like to talk to her,” he said. “So if you know how to get in touch with her…” He trailed off and stopped rubbing his neck. “She’s not answering my e-mails.”
He had not touched his tea.
“She is on her own quest,” I said.
“Yeah.”
He took my phone from me. “Gert. Stop.”
“What’s your password?”
When I didn’t tell him, he threw it at the wall, where it bounced and fell onto the ground, making a chip in the wall.
I crossed my arms. “You need to leave now,” I said, pointing to the door. “That is the most important Rule of the House—no yelling and throwing things.”
Gert picked up his shoes and walked to the door. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
He went into the hallway and punched the wall before starting to walk, holding his shoes.
At the end of the hall he stopped and said, “Can you just come home?”
“This is my home now,” I said, and even though it was the hardest thing I have ever done, harder even than facing Toucan, I went back inside and closed the door.
I put the last dishes from the party into the sink and turned off the music and went to my room, where it was quiet and filled with shadows.
I knew, though, there were no monsters in the shadows, no Grendels in the walls. Just my breathing in the dark, and outside a bright moon hanging in the sky.
* * *
When I woke up the next morning and began getting ready for work, I saw that there was an envelope underneath the door. I bent down and picked it up and saw that the envelope had my name on it in Gert’s handwriting, which is big and with a Z that looks like the number three.
Inside was a paper that had been folded three times. It was Gert’s scholarship essay, the one he had written for college and did not want me to read.
I pressed it flat on the coffee table.
To the Rivergreen College Scholarship Committee:
My name is Gert MacLeish. I’m twenty-one years old, don’t have a high school diploma, and nobody I know has ever been to college, either.
I’m not very good at writng essays, so the only way this is going to work is if I write like I speak.
I frowned. Gert spelled writing wrong. He should have used spell-check. I took a pencil and corrected the word before I started reading again.
Some people are made to go to college, some people aren’t. I always thought I was the second kind. I played football. My grades weren’t great, but you can probably see that from my transcripts. Football was supposed to be my ticket. When my knee blew up, so did every dream I had of ever being someone.
My sister Zelda never really knew our Dad. She was young when he left. When Mom died of breast cancer, we ended up living with our Uncle Richard, a really bad dude. Zelda’s into Vikings and villains and heroes, and if there’s one villain, one dragon blowing fire on the world, it’s Uncle Richard.
She doesn’t really know how bad things got with him, how abusive. Men aren’t supposed to talk about this kind of stuff, and I don’t know why I’m mentioning it right now, except that the instructions say to talk about “mitigating circumstances.” Uncle Richard is the definition of a “mitigating circumstance.” Zelda is always talking about Grendels, these evil monsters who hide in the shadows and come for you in the dark. The longer we stayed with Uncle Richard, the more I realized that he was the one she was afraid of, the monster that came in the dark. And since Zelda couldn’t defend herself, it was up to me to defend her—to get us out of there. I’m not the type of person who asks for help, but that’s what I’m doing with this letter.
At the start of this I said there were two kinds of people, and how I was one kind—the kind that most people probably think doesn’t belong in a college classroom. Well, my sister, Zelda, she’s the other kind. Our mother was also a big drinker, and even though she got sober in the last few years before she died, she wasn’t sober when she had us. While I turned out okay, Mom’s drinking was poison for Zelda’s brain and she was born on the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum. They said she would probably never be able to read, and that she’d probably have other people taking care of her for her entire life.