NOVEMBER 2, 2009
I am standing at pickup/dropoff, reading The Scarlet Letter for the essay that is due in English on nature imagery, and I am sweating because we’re having a weird late fall heat wave. Mostly, though, I am holding a book in front of my face so that I can act like I am not aware that I am the only senior at Parkhaven who does not own a car. Usually I take the bus, but Mom arranges her schedule so she can pick me up on Mondays and drop me off at Mrs. Cherniak’s. I babysit for Mrs. Cherniak when she goes to continuing-ed classes so that she can keep her nurse anesthetist license current for when her kids are in school and she goes back to work gassing plastic surgery patients. She doesn’t want to work, but they need the money. “College fund,” she explained to me. College, school, they control our whole, entire lives.
Since the Guinness Book of World Records is nowhere in sight, I know Mom won’t be on time, so I sit down on a bench next to a chubby freshman wearing a yellow T-shirt with a piñata on it and the words I’D HIT THAT. Then I dive back into Scarlet Letter. I actually like Scarlet Letter. A lot. Maybe because it is practically the only book I’ve ever read for school that has a female heroine who is just a plain-vanilla WASP and not hiding from the Nazis or dealing with getting her feet bound or some other ethnic dilemma that I honor and everything but is not exactly real pertinent to my own personal life. Mostly, though, I like the way love was back then. Important. Important enough to be cast out forever for. To die for. To risk your immortal soul for. Love, marriage, family, your kids, nowadays they’re all disposable. Just something you can walk away from the second a better idea comes along.
I block out the buses lined up like elephants at the water hole and the kids running for them with heavy packs pummeling their backs, and get deep into my Hester and Dimmesdale. They are meeting in the forest, sitting beside a brook, and I am imagining Dimmesdale with his shirt off pressing his flaming cheek to the scarlet letter heaving on Hester’s bosom. I have Hester unlacing her bodice a little when, in the outermost rim of my peripheral vision, I notice some jerk in a gargantuan truck with a bumper like he is going to be clearing cows off a railroad track cut to the head of the pickup line and start honking. Then yelling. Which makes the people behind him start honking for him to move. He ignores the honking.
I am tuning the jerk out and feeling really sorry for whoever his poor kid is when the chubby freshman nudges me and says, “I think Ty-Mo means you.”
I look up. Tyler has leaned over and is yelling out the passenger window of the truck, “A.J.! Yo! Hey, A.J., you wanna ride?!”
In the suavest of moves, I glance over both shoulders, then, seeing no one standing behind me, stab a finger into my chest where Hester would have had her big A and mouth, Me?
He waves me over as the honking from the minivan moms rises to an angry crescendo. Before the honking can get any louder or any more people start turning in my direction, I run over and hop into Tyler Moldenhauer’s truck. Once I slam the door shut, I say with my trademark flair for the obvious, “You’re not at practice.”
He points to his ankle, wrapped in an Ace bandage. A pair of crutches is jammed in the space behind the seat. “Sprained it.”
“How’d you sprain it?”
“Being an asshole.”
“Yeah, but what did you do that was different?”
Without taking his eyes from the road, he points a finger at me, says, “Good one,” and whips a U-turn that fishtails us into the traffic going the other way.
It is stupendous being up high with windows all around. I wonder what I’ve ever had against trucks, then remember that it is Mom who hates trucks. Or, at least, the people who drive trucks. As for me, I never want to ride in a teeny-tiny, claustrophobic car again.
As we head away from school, I spot Mom pulling into the end of the pickup line. The only thought that crosses my mind is, I hope she doesn’t see me.
“Where we going, Aubrey Josephine?”
I smile at the joke name, at him trying to guess what the J stands for. For a second I think about Mrs. Cherniak, all showered and dressed up, excited about seeing her nurse buddies, about getting the classes she needs to take out of the way. Kyle, six, and Jessica, four, waiting for me to come and play “Dance Dance Revolution” with them on their Wii. On the refrigerator, a twenty-dollar bill under a magnet with the Papa John’s delivery number on it.
Then I answer, “The quarry.”