And now I miss being a teenager, that salty conviction that you have found it, the thing that makes your mind make sense to you. You’d want me to be compassionate, so I tell her I get it, that I too love that book. She just looks at me. Suspicious Meerkat eyes. And no wonder. Adults lie all the time, but not this one!
“All right,” I say. “The part that really stuck with me was all the Eric stuff, fooling his probation officer, how easy it was for him to convince all these so-called smart adults that he was okay. That’s the problem with this country, the Injustice System is pretty ineffective.”
I want to talk about incompetent social workers but the Meerkat doesn’t care about stupid Eric and this is why she doesn’t have friends, because she doesn’t understand that people take turns. She’s back to ranting about Dylan’s poems and this is my chance to save her, to help her.
“I get it,” I say, because that’s the first rule of helping any kid. You have to validate their feelings. “But I think your mom’s upset cuz… well, this therapist I went to once, he told me that sometimes we all get a mouse in our house.”
“Are you a slob?”
I picture her going home and telling you I have mice. “No,” I say. “See, it’s a metaphor. The mouse is something you can’t stop thinking about or doing.”
“And the house is your head. Yawn.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s a little simple but the point is that when you get really into something, it feels good. But it’s not necessarily good for you. I’ve been there a buncha times.”
She is quiet. Kids are a relief, the way they just shut down and think when they feel like it. And then she looks at me. “What was your thing?”
Women. Terrible city women. “Well, when I was a kid it was this movie called Hannah and Her Sisters.”
She turns her nose up at me and oh fuck that’s right. Melanda. “Eew,” she says. “That’s Woody Allen and he’s on Melanda’s DNW list…”
“Do Not Watch?”
“Yep,” she says. “And he’s at the top. Like the tippity top.”
“Well, your teacher is sure on top of things.”
“She’s more like my aunt.”
Melanda is the mouse in your house. “Well, my point was… that movie was my Columbine, the thing that changed my life. See, I lived in New York but I didn’t live in that New York and I wanted to live in that movie. I stole that tape from Blockbuster, watched it every second I could.”
Nomi responds by repeating that Woody Allen is bad, just like his movie and I won’t fuck up like I did in the diner. “Okay, but does Melanda think it’s okay for you to read Dylan Klebold’s poems?”
She growls at the trees above. “There is literally no comparison. He was my age.”
“Okay… but you have to admit, he did some terrible things… Explain why you think that’s okay.”
No kid wants a pop quiz and she groans again. “It just is.”
“Look, Nomi.” I am channeling Dr. Nicky. “We got off track. I was just trying to tell you that it’s not always good to have a mouse in your house, no matter what the mouse is.”
“Did you really read Columbine? The whole book?”
I’m not RIP Benji and I never lie about books, especially with my potential stepdaughter. “Yep.”
“Did you also read all the stuff Dylan wrote that’s online?”
Kids do this. They bring it back to them, especially a kid like Nomi, younger than her age, going to school every day in those glasses—so wrong—and wishing that some maladjusted boy or girl is writing poems for her but knowing it’s not possible because she’s watching too closely. She picks at a hangnail. “You know how he writes a letter to the girl he loves and tells her that if she loves him, she has to leave a blank piece of paper in his locker?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But he never gave her the letter.”
“But he wrote it,” she says. “And that was sweet.” I hope some exchange student with buckteeth moves here this year and rocks her world and she crosses her arms. “Anyway, I’m still not gonna watch a Woody Allen movie.”
“Well, that’s fine. Do what you want.”
“So you don’t care?”
I laugh off the question and maybe I’ll go back to school and become a guidance counselor. “Look, Nomi. It’s like this. Who cares what Melanda thinks? Who cares what I think? You only need to decide what you think.”
She kicks a rock. “Well I can’t watch any movie tomorrow anyway cuz we have our stupid family bonding.”
I’m not a part of your family but I am a part of your family and I force my voice to be steady, as if I’m asking for directions. “What’s that mean for the Gilmore Girls?”
“Well, first we oversleep. So we wind up on the eleven o’clock even though we said we’d take the ten.”
“And then…”
“We take the ferry and walk around and look at tchotchkes.”
“Tchotchkes.”
“We also go to bookstores or whatever, but you know how it is. Mostly tchotchkes.”
Your desk is crowded with tchotchkes and I laugh. “Yep.”
“Then we go to a restaurant with a long line and my mom is too hungry to wait and I’m like ‘Just put our name in’ and she won’t do it and then the people who walked in after us get a table and I’m like ‘See, Mom?’…” You said that she was the problem and she says that you’re the problem and I can’t wait to be a part of your fucking family. “And then she wants pizza but then she wants dumplings and she’s like ‘Oh let’s go to this place I heard about from Melanda.’ ”
I laugh. “Been there.”
“And then we go and the place isn’t open yet cuz she can barely work Yelp and we just walk around starving and look at more tchotchkes and then she wants some tchotchke she saw in the morning and she gets paranoid that someone else got it and we run back to the shop and it’s gone and she’s all waaah.”
You’re afraid that you’re gonna lose your shot with me and I smile. “Then what?”
“She still can’t make up her mind about another stupid tchotchke because that would mean making a decision so we go to a coffee shop and she gets mad when I take my book out, like we’re supposed to talk all the freaking time. But it’s BS cuz she’s sick of me too and she takes her book out and then we come home. And that’s our family bonding. The end.”
I applaud and the Meerkat laughs, but then she turns into a young version of you, serious. “It’s really not as stupid as it sounds. I’m not mean.”
“You’re not mean. Family is… it’s a lot.”
“It’s just weird to like… try to bond, you know?”
I do know. I remember sitting with Love in prison and trying to feel in love with her and Nomi’s done with me. “I’m gonna get a coffee first. See ya.”
I wave. “Say hi to your mom.”
She heard my request but she’s already distracted because she ran into my fecal-eyed neighbors and I can’t rely on Nomi to tell you about our great conversation. She runs into people all the time because that’s life here and she’s mad that you took her Columbine away. I walk into the T & C and it’s bustling. I feel good. I bent the rules and the universe rewarded me, Mary Kay, because now I know about your plans for tomorrow and I am on board.