At some point I was hungry and went into the kitchen and found him there standing at the counter, eating from a bag of almonds.
“How’s homework going?” he asked. I could tell he was preoccupied with something, worried.
“Fine,” I said, bracing.
“The thing is, Lis,” he said, in the slow voice that meant he was about to say something incisive and possibly devastating, “you have no marketable skills. Not one.” He popped another almond into his mouth. The subject seemed to come from nowhere—why were we talking about marketable skills midmorning on a Saturday?
“But I’m doing all these activities,” I said, “and I get A’s!” And yet even as I said it—the newspaper, mock trial, the fact that I’d worked at a lab over the summer, and took Japanese—I wilted. I got his point. The confection of extracurricular activities, the flurry of self-importance—it was just a fever dream. No one hires someone for being on a debate team. I had not impressed him or fooled him. He knew all this stuff wasn’t worth much, and he was worried for my future.
I assumed that activities led to other activities in a ladder ascending to adult responsibility. I wasn’t supposed to be prepared for an adult job. Others seemed to think that too. At the same time, because he spoke with authority, and because I had been hoping to impress him, and because he was famous and successful and knew about the world, the remark was devastating.
“I wouldn’t lose sleep over it,” Mona said. “He’s just being silly.” I wanted her to say he was totally insane—to make him recant—in part because I worried he was right, if not about now, then about later, that I’d never be a success, never be able to get a job.
We all made allowances for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful. Now I felt he’d crush me if I let him. He would tell me how little I meant over and over until I believed it. What use was his genius to me?
I was weary of going back and forth between my parents’ houses. I decided to split the remaining time before college in half, six months with each. I knew my father would not like the idea. The truth is, I would have moved back into my mother’s house, but I worried this would make him furious, and I didn’t want to leave Reed.
I’d figured out that to negotiate effectively, you must be willing to give up the thing you want, entirely, for something else; you need a fierce apathy. Since he’d said I had no marketable skills, something had shifted and loosened inside me. Things were not going to work out with him the way I’d hoped when I’d moved in.
I waited for him to walk into the hallway after lunch that weekend, sitting on the side of the door.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Yup,” he said, and sat beside me on the dark wooden bench.
“I’m sure you know how difficult it is for me to go back and forth,” I said. “The two houses are polar opposites. I’d like to split the year.” I was shaking. The trick was to make the request before revealing the underbelly, the girders and joists, the pylons.
“But you’re already at two months,” he said. “In fact, I’d like you to start coming more frequently. I don’t like the way you’ve been doing this. If you want to be part of this family, you’re going to have to be here more. You know what? Nope,” he said. “It’s not all right.” Other people sought resolution, but he could sustain a dissonant note.
He got up and started to walk away.
“If you won’t let me split it,” I said, as if in passing, “I’m going to go to my mom’s house for the whole year.”
I watched him from the corner of my eye. He seemed to deflate, all at once. I’d never negotiated with him and won.
“I—” he turned back. “Well, okay. Fine.” The winning felt uncomfortable, as though I’d wounded him.
I felt an obligation to be merciful. “Let me know which half you’d like,” I said.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, walking away.
I’d won. It wasn’t much; it was a step. I would get away. I would work toward freedom—one day, I would dangle my limbs from a car window beneath high arching branches.
Flight
In my senior year at Paly, I was elected to the position of editor in chief of the paper. Now it would be me and three others who would edit the pages and finally deliver the paper to the press late at night. The editors in chief from previous years had seemed to me impossibly mature and knowledgeable. Now we would be the ones to look that way to others.
That year, we published articles about how the school board, amid massive layoffs, had given credit cards to staff members who treated themselves to, among other things, an expensive lunch at MacArthur Park. After the series of articles came out, the head of the school board resigned.
In the middle of one week, there were technical problems.
The computer system crashed, the screens went dark, the printer became inaccessible. If the computers no longer operated and would not reboot, days of work would be lost—all of our carefully designed pages. Josh, his dirty-blond hair the color of a sand dune worn in a thick ponytail, lay down on the floor to inspect and arrange the wires. The rest of us mulled in a daze of terror and tragedy. He always managed to fix it—the computers would sputter back to life, and the printer would aspirate and spit paper again.
“Do you want to come?” he asked me, about a trip to his house to get a missing cord. I noticed Josh more closely: dimples when he smiled, wide shoulders beneath flannel shirts. He was shy, and friendly, and had loose, complicated handwriting, like the bouncing string of a kite.
“Sure,” I said, not knowing then that he lived in Portola Valley, twenty minutes away. His mother and stepfather were lawyers and had managed to get him permission to transfer to Palo Alto School District based on some provision about their commute to work.
He seemed, to me, sloppy. Too relaxed, shambolic. He could fix computers, but he was disorganized, forgetting to do his assignments for Mrs. Paugh’s English class, whereas I was meticulous, a gradegrubber. He never arrived anywhere on time, and he was hopeless with a calendar, wouldn’t have his homework and scrambled to do it in the minutes before class. (Later I would find out that he was taking applied mathematics and differential equations at Stanford, and he would be admitted to college at Stanford and MIT.)
He drove a used ‘83 Toyota Supra in incandescent teal with a pink sine wave painted along both sides. “Sorry about the paint job,” he said as we got in. He’d bought it used from a female physicist in Livermore. He had nice hands on the steering wheel.
His room had a mattress on the floor and a window looking out to a yard and the forest. There were papers and books strewn around, a stack of stereo equipment and headphones. It was large enough to seem empty and cluttered at the same time. He found the cord, and we left.
On the way back we turned onto Arastradero, a two-lane road, rough and patched, that wound beside a nature preserve.
“I’m going to show you a secret,” he said. “Hang on.”
The speed limit was twenty-five; he began to accelerate. We advanced toward a blind corner where the road rose up and then disappeared, a hill on one side, a drop on the other. The road curled back on itself, around the hill, out of sight. Another car might be advancing toward us and smash into us at the bend; a family of deer might be walking across.