“At least the Nazis had that right,” Kevin Herman says from the back row.
The rest of the back row laughs. The film goes on. Mr. Williams either didn’t hear Kevin or has become really good at ignoring him.
The man explains the imprisonment and murder of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and how they were forced to wear purple armbands. The footage is black and white, but I can see armbands. I imagine they are purple. He explains that while we might know that Jews were forced to wear yellow stars, we may not know that homosexuals were forced to wear triangles. Pink triangles.
It occurs to me here that though I am no longer interested in triangles, I am interested in pink ones. I’m just still not so sure how interested I am.
“The gas chamber was too good for them,” Kevin says.
The back row sniggers again.
I read books about schools that have gay/straight alliance clubs. These are fictional books. And so I believe gay/straight alliance clubs must also be fictional. We certainly don’t have them here. We have a sign in the entrance hall that says THIS IS NO PLACE FOR HATE, but that doesn’t actually make it no place for hate.
If we have anything, we have Holocaust deniers. We have neo-Nazis. We have the Ku Klux Klan. They leave invitations in our mailbox every few years with mints—individually packaged melty mints with the KKK symbol on the wrapper. It’s 2012 and we still have them.
This whole town is frozen in time. Stuck in one place. Motionless. Except for me, because I just quit trig, which proves motion is totally possible, even if it means I now have to go home and tell my parents and listen to my mother talk about how quitters never win and winners never quit.
“Look at me!” she says. “I wanted to quit art school in my first semester, but did I? No. I carried on and went all the way through and got my master’s. And that master’s is feeding this family now!”
The only good thing about this conversation is that Friday is pizza night and I get to eat slices of white pizza with broccoli and garlic and drink a birch beer while I listen.
“Couldn’t you get a tutor or something? I don’t think it will look very good on your school records that you quit something, will it, Gerry?” She pours herself another glass of red from the bottle next to her glass.
Dad sighs. “You’re not heading for the sciences, are you, Astrid?”
“Nope,” I answer. I’ve told them my plan a hundred times: Move back to New York City and be an editor.
“It was only pissing you off, dropping your GPA and making your life harder. It’s senior year. You’re supposed to be having fun.”
“Oh, my God,” Mom says. “You sound like a hippie!”
“Pass me the wine,” Dad says. He rarely joins her, but it’s Friday and the stapler-stealing-and-breaking person at work hasn’t come out to apologize yet and it’s driving him crazy.
He pours himself a glass and looks her straight in the eye. “Just because you don’t know how to have fun doesn’t mean the kids can’t,” he says. “Astrid knows what she wants to do. Who gives a shit if she dropped trig? She was never going to use it!”
“It’s quitting,” she answers. “And quitters never win.”
“Oh, my God, you’re like a broken record, Claire. You know, some quitters do win. Plenty of them.” He adds, “Why can’t you just be nice to her for once?”
The question hangs in the air for a minute. Ellis gives me a jealous look. As if it’s my fault that this whole family doesn’t revolve around her. Sheesh.
Mom looks at Ellis and me. “Go upstairs.”
We sit there for a second because we don’t know what to do. We’re not done eating yet.
Ellis quietly says, “But I’m not done eat—”
“Go upstairs!” Mom yells.
We go upstairs. But the two-hundred-fifty-year-old walls and floors are thin, and we hear the fight from our bedrooms. All the usual stuff. She can’t have fun because Gerry is a loser. Gerry doesn’t understand her needs. Gerry can’t even hold a steady job. Gerry never listens. Gerry cares more about “your fucking stapler than your wife.” Gerry is the perfect example of “quitters never win” because he quit law school.
After ten minutes of this, we hear Dad’s chair move. He doesn’t say a word and starts running the water for the dishes as she clip-clops up to her office because, you know, “someone has to work around here.”
I don’t like how pot has taken my dad away from me, but I like how it’s given him the balls to stick up for me like that. I send love from my bedroom. Dad, I love you for saying what you said at dinner. I know it was hard because Mom has chopped off your balls and baked them in a testes casserole, but thank you for trying. It means a lot.
Ellis comes to my door. Sometimes she’s like a real sister—the way we were when we were little when we’d watch The Wizard of Oz and she’d curl into my side when the flying monkeys would come. Sometimes she needed me, I guess. Not very often anymore.
“I’m sneaking down. Want me to bring you back some pizza?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I say, even though I’m still kind of hungry. “Thanks anyway.”
5
I WORK WEEKENDS.
I COULD HAVE PICKED any job—the usual fast-food places or playground summer positions. I could have stayed with friends of the family and interned in New York at some publishing house, as Mom suggested. But in June of junior year when Mom pushed (if you don’t get a summer job now, I’ll get one for you) I chose Maldonado Catering. Juan and Jorge (neither of them a Maldonado, for what it’s worth) are both really nice. Jorge interviewed me and gave me the job in about twelve seconds.
“Want to know why?” he asked in a thick Puerto Rican accent.
I nodded.
“Because you didn’t bullshit me and tell me that you know what you’re doing. It means we can teach it to you our way, man.”
Now it’s October, and I know three things. I know how to devein shrimp really fast. I know how to open clams really fast. I know how to do inventory. (Okay, I know a lot more than that, but some days I feel like that’s all I do. Especially the shrimp-deveining part.)
I start my day at 5:35 AM with inventory for next weekend’s jobs, which are listed on a roster next to the inventory clipboard. The walk-in freezer is full of boxes, and I sit on the one in the back corner and relax. I wish I could live in here. I’d put the bed there. It’s the only place I feel comfortable anymore. And a bookshelf there. I’m not nervous about what Mom would think. A dresser with a few T-shirts and jeans in the corner.
There is nothing else like the sound of a walk-in freezer’s door opening. It’s a loud clunk of the huge handle followed by an air-suck sound. It’s a big sound. Like something circus equipment would make. Logger sounds. Or those science-fiction bay doors on spaceships with air locks.
I pretend to look for a box of frozen pastry shells in case it’s Juan. But I feel my stomach twist because I know it’s not Juan.
“Need help?” Dee says.
“Just checking the dates to make sure I get the right ones. Damn, there are a lot of shells here this month.” I say this in case anyone is outside, listening. In case anyone knows.