Zen and Xander Undone (7 page)

The kid who just kicked my ass starts crying like a baby.

“H
IYA, SLUG.
”

“Hi, Mom.” I stare at the same crack in my ceiling that I've been staring at for two days. I imagine her hiding inside the tiny fissure in the plaster, watching me.

“How's the ol' spine feeling?”

“It hurts.”

“
How
does it hurt? Is it achy?”

“No.”

“Tingly? Like when your foot falls asleep?”

“No.”

“Sore? Like a bruise kind of?”

“Why does it matter? It just hurts!”

“I'm just wondering. I'd rub it for you if I could.”

“Thanks for the thought.”

“All I can
do
is think.” She's silent for a moment, pacing up and down the crack in the ceiling. Then she gets big and floats down to sit on my bed. “I know! It's throbbing. Is that it?”

“Yes!” I say just to shut her up.

“Yeah. I remember throbbing. Throbbing was not my favorite pain.”

“You had a favorite pain?”

“Soreness. That's the best one.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I had a lot of time to contemplate the different types of pain when you were at school and I was stuck in my room all day. I ranked them. Soreness, tingling, achiness, throbbing, burning, stinging, and agony.” She shudders.

“Stinging is worse than burning?”

“Yeah, I know. It's surprising. I wouldn't have taken this view before I got sick. But yes, I'd say that stinging has a deeper kind of oomph to it. It's more physical.”

“I couldn't disagree more. Burning is much worse.”

“Get back to me when you've had cancer.”

“Whatever.”

“You know why you're in pain, right?”

“I was thrown by a student.”

“That's not when you hurt your back and you know it.”

“I'm not going into it, Mom. The guy was trying to hurt Xander and I stopped him.”

She's quiet for a minute, but I know by the quality of her silence that this isn't over. Finally I feel her nestle into the cup of my ear. “When I was alive, I hurt myself the worst when I was doing something I shouldn't be doing.”

“We've already been through this.”

“Zen, you know you screwed up. It scares me that you won't admit it.”

I try to shut out Mom's words, but they've wormed their way into my brain, and now I doubt myself. Was I really just trying to protect Xander? Or was I looking for a head to kick? It did feel awfully good to kick that guy, even though I tore something in my back doing it. Should it feel good to hurt someone?

I hear sounds from the neighborhood through the haze of the Vicodin the doctor gave me. Slamming car doors, the hum of a lawn mower, one of our neighbors shouting at his kids. I wish I could go outside, but I'm stuck here. My eyes trail to the folder lying open on my desk, the one we stole from Mom's lawyer.

“You should just stop it,” Mom says bitterly. I almost forgot she was here.

“Stop what?”

“You know what. That folder is none of your business.”

“The whole thing was Xander's idea.”

“I may be dead, but I still have feelings.”

“I know!”

“Tell your sister I said to stop.”

“Like she'd believe me.”

She says nothing to this. Xander is too scientific to believe in ghosts. She'd probably recommend I see a psychiatrist if I told her I still talk to Mom.

“So who is John Phillips, Mom?” I ask her.

I feel a wistful sigh moving through the air in the room, and then she's gone.

I
T'S SUNNY OUT,
and I'm spraying all the weeds on our lawn with some supposedly organic, environmentally friendly poison. I've spent the last three days in bed, nursing a bad muscle sprain, and it feels great to be out of my bedroom. The doctor said that I'll get better faster if I can resume light activity, but no, absolutely no shotokan practice for at least three weeks.

It's killing me.

It's hot outside, and I can practically feel my shoulders crisping in the sun. I should do this later, but I don't want to go in the house because Xander is obsessing about John Phillips, and I don't want to get pulled into her psychodrama.

Spraying weeds is boring. Normally I would mix it up with a little shotokan practice. Spray. Side kick. Spray. Elbow strike. Spray. Middle block. But just standing long enough to aim and spray is already as much as my back can take. I still can't bend over, so my aim isn't so good.

“Hey! Zen!” I hear from across the street, and look up to see Adam coming over. He's wearing a straw gardener's hat, cargo shorts, and his old brown sandals, which are encrusted with mud. He must have been working out back in his mom's garden. “How's it going?”

“Okay,” I say, keeping my head down as I spray another dandelion. “You all ready for finals week?”

“More or less. I only have two tests. The rest are papers.” Adam is a very good student. He ranks tenth in the class, only because he got a C+ in home economics his freshman year. He isn't like Xander, though. He has to study. “You ready for your trig final?” he asks me.

“I think so.” I shrug. My grades aren't the greatest these days, but I don't really care. After Mom died, little stuff no longer seems to matter. I don't even think of school when I'm not there. “I'll eke by.”

“So.” He casts his dark blue eyes over the roof of our house. “Did that guy ever come back?”

I know exactly who he's talking about. Every time I remember, I get angry all over again. “Haven't seen him.”

“That's good.” He twists his face into an uncertain smile, crosses his arms over his chest, uncrosses them, and jams his toe into a hunk of crabgrass I just sprayed. “Get any interesting mail recently?”

By the fidgety look in his eyes, I can tell he's talking about the prom.

“Adam.” I take my rubber gloves off and lead him over to our porch to sit on the steps. Sitting next to him makes me wish I was lithe and sexy like Xander, but I'll have to settle for “athletic.” “You really don't have to do this.”

He seems a little disappointed. “But your mom said—”

“I know. It's just, the prom really isn't my style.”

“Mine neither.” He grabs hold of my wrist and pulls it so that I have to look at him. “I'm picking you up at six o'clock on Friday. You'll be wearing a nice dress, and I'll be in a tux. We'll have dinner at Il Maestro's, and then we're going to the prom. We'll get our pictures taken, and we'll dance to a few songs and have some terrible punch. Then we will heave huge sighs of relief as we leave. After that, we're going to get some ice cream, and then I'm bringing you home so you can practice cracking skulls, or whatever it is you do in your spare time. Okay?”

“
Why?
” is all I can say.

In that one word are lots of questions I can't ask.
Why
is Mom doing this?
Why
did she choose Adam?
Why
can't I just remember her fondly and escape all the meddling in my life like other motherless orphans get to do?

“Your mom wanted it.”

“What did she say to you?”

He pauses, seeming to gauge something about me before answering: “She told me you're too self-sufficient, and you cut yourself off from other people, and that she thought going to the prom would—”

“—get me out of my comfort zone?” I finish the thought for him. My mom was always saying this. She was probably the only mother in America who
liked
it when her kids were uncomfortable.

He doesn't answer. He just smiles.

Just then the front door slaps open, and Xander is standing on the porch wearing her thready cutoffs, holding three Popsicles. “Who wants root beer?” she asks, knowing Adam will take it.

Soon all three of us are eating our Popsicles on the porch steps just like in the old days before Xander and Adam started fighting so much.

“Remember that time we found the robin's egg?” Xander says.

Adam smiles. “Of course.”

“Didn't you want to kill it, Xander?” I point out helpfully.

“I just wanted to see what was inside!”

Even back then, when they were ten and I was eight, our personalities were fully formed. Xander was the scientist. She wanted to break the little blue egg open and look at the bird fetus inside. I thought we should leave it alone and let nature decide. But Adam wanted to save it. He did a whole lot of research on the Web, and he set up a light bulb over a shoebox full of grass clippings, and took hourly temperature readings, adjusting the distance of the bulb from the nest, gently turning the egg every few hours. We watched and waited. To pass the time we fought terrible battles about what to name it. Adam finally won, and we called it Beverly after his grandma. Xander told him it didn't matter what its name was because it wasn't possible the egg could have survived the fall from the nest, but he wouldn't listen to her.

A week after we found the egg, Adam called us in the middle of the night, his voice high-pitched and panicky. “Come over! It's hatching!”

We ran over in our slippers and nightgowns and watched as the little bird poked its way out of the egg, its tiny little beak cracking the shell a millimeter at a time. We were so still and watchful, I found it hard to breathe. When finally Beverly emerged, skinny and oily, we looked at one another like idiots. What now?

Xander searched out some worms from Mom's garden, and we minced them up with a razor blade. The baby ate them hungrily, but kept chirruping and squeaking. It didn't seem happy.

We tried everything. Eyedroppers full of water. Cut up grasshopper guts. Nothing seemed to work.

Beverly's chirping grew weaker and weaker, so the next morning Adam's mom called the veterinarian, who called the local conservation office. Later that morning, a nice lady came by and took Beverly away. We felt like failures.

We called every day for the rest of the summer, probably driving them crazy.

Beverly survived. We even got to witness the day they let her go that autumn. Xander and I wore our Easter dresses from the year before. Adam wore a sweater and a tie. When Beverly flew away, Adam and I clapped, jumping up and down. Xander cried. That's when she still had a sensitive bone in her body. I'm pretty sure it must have been her left ulna, which she broke later that year.

“I wonder if Beverly is still alive,” Adam says as he tosses his Popsicle stick under the porch stairs where we always toss them. He looks at the maple tree in front of our house as if he expects to see her there.

“That was pretty amazing, actually. The way you hatched her,” Xander says quietly. She can't bring herself to look at him, but this rare compliment from Xander is not lost on Adam. He turns to her, an emotion on his face that I'm not sure I understand. All I know is that he never looks at me that way.

After a long silence, Xander lifts her eyes to Adam's, and smiles, fidgeting. Then she bolts up from the porch steps. “You guys. It's almost noon. Let's go to the bridge!” She jogs off down Olivander Street, toward the rail yard, which we nicknamed Hades because it's got so many abandoned skeletons of trains, left to rust as the sumac and thistles grow up around them. Xander turns around and yells, “Come on!” at the top of her lungs. Adam and I creakily get up to follow her. He helps me stand and keeps his hand on my back as we walk. “You okay?”

“Ugh,” I explain.

“Where does she get the energy?” he mumbles.

“She sucks the blood of babies when their parents are asleep,” I tell him.

He gives me a cockeyed look. “You have a dark side.”

That makes me smile. Finally someone noticed.

Our town is cut in half by railroad tracks. Always at noon a big freight train rumbles through town, drowning out conversations with its whistle and bringing traffic to a complete standstill. Adam, Xander, and I like to go sit on the pedestrian overpass that runs over the tracks and watch as the train zooms underneath us.

We get there just in time. Xander sits dangling her legs while Adam and I stand next to her, watching for the train. Six sets of tracks snake underneath us, some of them littered with dormant boxcars. The trees in this part of town are thick, and the bridge we're on is so high that it looks like we're floating over a sea of leaves waving in the wind. It smells green, and you can see forever from up here.

We hear the whistle before we see the train. Adam squints at it.

“What's on it?” Xander asks.

I peer through the haze at the long line of cars approaching us. “Looks like coal?” I say, and turn to Adam.

“Lumber too,” he says. He has the sharpest eyes.

“Okay, get ready!” Xander screams.

The train roars toward us, its metal heart thrumming. Adam and I stand on either side of Xander. I grab hold of the railing and stare at the engine as it surges toward us, getting bigger and bigger so quickly! Just when it looks like it's about to crash into us, Xander lifts up her shirt, screaming at the engineer: “Honk if you're a pervert!”

He couldn't have heard her, but he responds with a few sharp notes of his horn as the train booms under the bridge, car after car blurring by, its thunder shaking our bones.

When the train is gone, I say to Xander, “You don't have to flash them. They toot their horn anyway.”

“It's a rush,” she says, no hint of apology or shame. “You should try it next time.”

I roll my eyes and look at Adam, whose thin face is alight with a smile.

He's staring at Xander like he's never seen a girl before.

W
E WALK BACK
home slowly, each of us in our own thoughts. Maybe they're thinking the same thing I am. That pretty soon we'll be spread out over the East Coast. Adam will be going to NYU to study biology; Xander will probably go to MIT in Boston. And I'll be stuck here, just me and Dad in a quiet house.