Firecracker Page 17

  “We’re all bad people, Astrid. Every one of us.”

  I disagreed, but Vivi shared my penchant for making ridiculous statements, so I let it go. “Why don’t we ever talk like this anymore?” she wanted to know. She started another one of her menthol cigarettes.

  “We never talked, period.”

  “No. We talked. Things used to be different.” I knew my mother well enough to know that sentence was close as she would ever come to telling me she cared or to talking about the bad things we were going through. I mean, if Fritz was actually named Things Used to Be Different Krieger, we would have talked about him all the time instead of, you know, never.

  “Your grandfather didn’t hire that boy to hurt you,” she said.

  I was glad we weren’t going to pretend for the rest of our lives that someone wasn’t paid to go with me to the homecoming dance. Because that’s not something that happened to everyone.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “It’s true. He’s been sick for a long time, you know. He wanted to have someone looking out for you.”

  “I can look out for myself.”

  “Don’t I know it. Monty said you would figure it out in the end.”

  “Not fast enough.”

  “Well, he bet me a thousand bucks that you would put it together. Now that you did, though, I don’t have to pay him. Because he’s dead. Good for me. I’m sorry. Gallows humor. I used to work in a hospital.”

  “I’m sure you were hilarious, Vivi.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. It gives you face lines.”

  “Why did he do it, then? Why did he hire Noah?”

  “Probably because you get away with everything. You make messes. We can’t trust you, Astrid. We never know what phone call we’re going to get next. We have to live our lives.”

  “You live your lives all the time. Everyone lives their lives. And that’s all I want. Let me live my life.”

  Vivi laughed. “When have I stopped you from living your life however you wanted? My head hurts from you living your life however you want. You’re almost eighteen. You’re almost your own problem. In a few months, you’re free to dig your own ditch and fall in it.”

  “It’s victory enough just to have you rooting for me, Vivi.”

  “This family can’t solve your problems forever,” she said.

  “When have you ever solved my problems? When has anyone in this family solved anything without throwing money at it?”

  “Money solves some problems. You’ve used that method yourself.”

  “You know,” I said, “Grandpa tried to pay Randy not to marry Lisbet.”

  Vivi smiled slightly. “Of course I know that. He tried to pay me not to marry your father. He makes the offer to everyone. If it works, good riddance.”

  I frowned, feeling a familiar tightness in my chest. It bothered me that Grandpa had tricks I didn’t know about.

  She sighed and rubbed her temples. “What do you want?”

  “I want to go back to Bristol,” I said.

  “I never wanted you out of Bristol. They asked you to leave.”

  “You and Dad made me go to public school.”

  “That wasn’t us,” she said. “That was your grandfather’s idea too. We would be perfectly fine sending you off to wherever you wanted. But Montgomery thought you could learn something from the experience.”

  I just stared. Was she lying? Why would she lie? What would her endgame be? She had to be telling the truth because the lie wasn’t going to get her anything.

  “I want to go back to Bristol,” I repeated.

  “I thought you liked it at the public school. I thought you had friends.”

  “I was wrong.” I felt myself tearing up again. It was really embarrassing.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “If that’s what you want.”

  I had been back at Bristol for a month. It was what I’d wanted, which I guessed was a good thing.

  When Vivi called Dean Rein shortly after my grandfather died and asked him to take me back, he reminded her that the decision didn’t belong to my family; it belonged to him. He was the one who had expelled me. They went back and forth for a few phone calls, but he suddenly relented, provided that I sit down with him again to show him my list.

  That list.

  I guess I couldn’t really expect to get my old life back without it, but at that point, even looking at that stupid piece of paper made me feel a little squeamish. Somehow my list still smelled like Cadorette Township High School. I mean, there I was at Bristol, which smelled like freshly cut grass and diamond earrings, but in my hand was this yellow piece of paper from another planet that smelled like . . . herpes medicine and body odor?

  Dean Rein put on his reading glasses because he really wanted me to know he was taking this seriously. He rocked back and forth in his chair. He was silent for a full five minutes. I don’t think he’d ever been silent for five minutes. In his sleep, he probably talked about his stupid skiing vacations.

  “Subtracting the ones I already discounted, we’re left with two,” he said.

  “There were five on the list. You crossed out two. That’s three.”

  “Telling me to shove it up my ass does not suit the purposes of this challenge.”

  “It was still fun to put down,” I said.

  “You helped that girl become homecoming queen. And saved your sister from heartbreak on her wedding day. These two are good.”

  “I know. Really good. Great, even.”

  “Too bad you didn’t have three.”

  “Too bad, indeed.”

  “But you did do three good things.” He had this stupid grin on his face, like he was telling me a secret. I wanted to punch him so hard. “I watch the news. You saved your grandfather’s life.”

  “My grandfather’s dead. So, your sources are inaccurate.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “The intent matters. You did it naturally. You did it in the moment. I’ll give you credit for it. If it’s what you want.”

  It felt weird to use that thing that happened in the pool as something to bargain with. I didn’t jump in the pool for any real reason. I just happened not to be a monster. If someone else saw that as a good deed, then that was fine. All I really had to do was nod, and I could get back into Bristol. And that’s what I wanted. I was pretty sure that’s what I wanted. So I said, “Fine. Then count it. Three good things.”

  He peered at the list in his hand once more. “In the end, the list . . . it was a pretty good idea.”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I was skeptical at first, of course, about being your therapist at all. However, you can’t really get hung up on what’s conventional. Not if you have a solution that might work.”

  I wasn’t following, which usually happened when I spoke with Dean Rein because I usually zoned out and lost track of the conversation.

  “Why are you acting like none of this was your idea?” I said. “It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want any of this.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, Astrid. I thought you knew?”

  “Knew what?”

  “It was your grandfather’s idea. I’m sorry. I hope this doesn’t upset you.”

  I didn’t even know if I could be upset anymore. First Noah, then public school, now Dean Rein and the list. It was all my grandfather. He’d wanted something more from me. I didn’t know what. I bit my lip hard. I wasn’t upset. I didn’t have the energy anymore.

  I guess that’s how I would describe what it was like to be back at Bristol. I just didn’t have the energy. Somehow Pierre understood that, which was weird because Pierre usually didn’t understand anything. I’d definitely seen him regard a zipper like it was a supercomputer.

  Pierre came b
ack to Bristol around the same time I did. I wasn’t surprised. It would have been strange if he hadn’t come back. He didn’t speak to me for three days. This was a conscious effort on his part, I’m sure. I wasn’t broken up about it. I didn’t really notice.

  The fourth day, I saw him sitting on a bench as I walked by. When I was almost all the way past him, he said, “So this is how we meet again.” This would have worked better if I’d been looking at him, but the point was made. He was waiting for me, and he’d forced me to notice.

  I turned around and shuffled back over to where he was sitting. I had this image in my mind that everywhere I walked for the rest of the year, he would be sitting, waiting for me. Waiting for me to look at him and talk to him. I couldn’t deal with it. He had something he wanted to say, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to continue putting it off. “Pierre, what? What can I help you with? Tell me what you want from me, already. Just tell me.”

  I don’t think he was expecting that sort of reaction. I don’t think he had any answer for me. He liked chasing me. He thought it was romantic that he was always behind me and I was always running away. I didn’t think it was romantic. It was a very unpleasant reminder of why it wasn’t always good to be liked.

  Pierre appeared to be thinking hard about what he was going to say. He was probably weighing whether or not to read me a poem or play me a song or write my name in clumps of grass. Wisely, he threw out all of those ideas. “Have dinner with me. We can go wherever you want. We can go into New York if you’d like. We can get on a plane if that is what you want. But have dinner with me.”

  “Okay,” I was shocked to hear myself say. I wasn’t sure where that word actually came from or why it was in my mouth. “But let’s go somewhere close.”

  Pierre suggested dinner at the restaurant that pretended it was the fifties. And even though I hated the very idea of that place, I also hated the very idea of having dinner with Pierre. Since I had already agreed to that, I figured (as my grandfather would have said), If you’re already served a shit sandwich, you might as well top it with more shit.

  During this dinner, Pierre asked me if I would be his girlfriend. He’d called me his girlfriend for a long time, but I’d never agreed. This time I said yes. Please do not throw this book across the room in anger. As soon as we got to the restaurant—or whatever it was, since restaurant is a word they use for places that serve excellent food, but this place had waitresses singing doo-wop music—the first thing I made Pierre do was tell the waitstaff to refrain from any more of their songs. And he convinced them. First, they were like, “It’s our job.” But Pierre mumbled something to them and pointed at me, and they all looked a little scared, and they didn’t sing again.

  Pierre might have a ponytail. He might have a completely ridiculous interest in porcelain statues of angel children. (Because, he said, “They are experiencing a perfect eternity every day.”) He might wear pants that look like bathroom wallpaper. But here’s the thing: he was always nice to me.

  By the time I got back to Bristol, I was completely out of people who were nice to me. Noah had turned out to be a spy. My grandfather had hired Noah. My parents knew about it.

  Pierre talked a lot about love while we were together. It was basically how he started the conversation that night at dinner. He said, “The thing is this: I know you hate me to say this. You said that you hate it. But I can’t help saying it again: I love you, Astrid. That is it. That is all. If I cannot be with you . . . I don’t know. I can’t do anything about it, but I can ask.”

  I didn’t want to argue with him. But I could accept that it was less about him and whether he could love me than about the idea of love itself. Perhaps he loved me as much as someone could. But the more I thought about love, I felt less and less that love itself was real. Human beings have been around for a long time, and we have all sorts of things that have changed over the years to make it better for us to survive. Like eyebrows. And thumbs. And love, if it is real, is the sort of thing that should have evolved away. Love leads to people jumping in front of moving trains. You know, like, If you don’t love me back, I will let this train run me over. Or, That person I am married to is about to get hit by that train. So, I will get hit by that train instead. SPLAT. That sort of thing happens.

  “I’m just going to say this,” I said to Pierre. “I don’t love you. I don’t think I will ever love you. I am not trying to be mean. I am just telling the truth. I don’t think I can love people.”

  Pierre thought about this. “Is this because of that other boy? That Noah?” I was pretty sure that it had nothing to do with Noah. With Noah, maybe I had become temporarily a little dumb because I liked him. But I didn’t turn into Lisbet or anything. I didn’t picture a big house for me and Noah filled with our babies dressed in little versions of his polyester shirts. I didn’t write my name in a notebook with his last name . . . if the last name he’d given me was even real. Astrid J. Krieger-Einstein. Ugh, that just sounded horrible. That name in itself was a train about to run me over. I just thought he was cute, and I liked how he smelled, and I didn’t think it through beyond that.

  “No,” I said. “It has nothing to do with him. It just has to do with who I am.”

  He looked down at his pancakes. That was what he was eating for dinner: pancakes. “I think I understand. I think it is very clear. But I don’t need you to be in love with me. That is okay. I just want you to be my girlfriend. I am sure it would be not too terrible for you to have somebody to eat dinner with. To have someone to sit with in class. To have someone to give you rides.” Pierre was pretty much offering what he did for me anyway. He just wanted to name the thing. For whatever reason, it was important to him to use the title. The word girlfriend meant something to him. And it meant nothing to me, so what was I doing fighting it? It was like someone asking you for your cake when you’d already dropped it on the floor. You weren’t going to eat it, so why not give it up?

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be your girlfriend. But not a lot of kissing or anything, please.”

  Pierre smiled. I didn’t particularly understand why he wanted it, but he got what he wanted.

  >>>>>>>>>>>>>

  I never felt super comfortable calling Pierre my boyfriend. I don’t know if I actually ever said the sentence That’s my boyfriend, Pierre, aloud. But what I called it wasn’t the point.

  I found out quickly that one of the main reasons Pierre wanted to formally be my boyfriend was because he wanted people to know. He wanted people to see the two of us walking together and for them to think they understood something about our relationship. He wanted people to know him as Pierre, Astrid Krieger’s boyfriend. Or, you know, whatever his actual name was, followed by “Astrid Krieger’s boyfriend.” To his surprise, about ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine percent of people couldn’t have cared less about whom he was dating or that I was his girlfriend. When it all came down to it, only one other person really cared. And she cared a lot.

  Talia Pasteur was angry.

  I didn’t know if I was going to have to wait a week, a month, a year. As it turned out, a mere day after I agreed to allow Pierre to use the word girlfriend, I walked into my room to find Talia sitting on the edge of my bed.

  Talia’s hair was now short in the back, parted, and combed up on one side. If it hadn’t been an unnatural white-blond color, it would have been the exact same haircut as my dad’s. She circled the room and took a glass off my dresser, then dropped it on the floor. “Whoops,” she said. It didn’t crash as elegantly as Talia had probably hoped it would. It bounced off the floor and chipped.

  “That isn’t mine,” I told her. Actually, almost nothing in the room was mine. I had sheets, clothes, and a small refrigerator for my juice boxes. Almost everything else of importance I’d left back on the rocket ship.

  “Why did you come back here?” Talia said.

  I shrugged. “I was never supposed
to leave.”

  “Of course you were.”

  “Just because you wanted me to leave doesn’t mean I was supposed to,” I said.

  “You were a terrible person. You did all sorts of terrible things. They should’ve kicked you out a long time ago.”

  “I’m not a terrible person,” I said, although I wasn’t sure how much I completely believed it anymore. “I was never terrible to you.”

  “Of course you were. Every single day. You kept telling me how much I looked like a tree.”

  “You did look like a tree.”

  “I’m not finished, Astrid. You made me hate myself. You took the one thing I wanted in the world.” She didn’t want to say Pierre’s name aloud and that was fine because I never liked to say his actual name either, given the phlegm that accompanied the act of pronouncing it. She was of course in love with him, and I was more than fine with that. They could move back to Bratislava or wherever he was from. I wasn’t stopping them.

  I never thought of myself as being mean to Talia, but maybe I had been. I didn’t like her. At that point, I probably hated her. Maybe I’d always been terrible to her.

  “You have the only thing I ever wanted in the world, and you didn’t even have to try. You don’t even really want it.” She was trying very hard to look at me with cold eyes, but they were getting red and watery.

  “He is the only thing you ever wanted in the world?”

  “Not just him. Everything. You’re so pretty, and you’re so rich, and people listen to you even if you’re mean to them, and everyone has always done everything you wanted them to do. You have all of that, and you’ve never, ever even cared.”

  “Don’t you have all that now? Isn’t everyone at school terrified of you?”

  “They’re terrified of me, but they don’t admire me. And still, it’s hard work. I have to try every day.”

  “So that’s why you set me up?” I said. “Because I don’t try hard enough?”

  “Set you up?” She asked it as if she didn’t understand any of the words. “You keep saying that. You cheated. You weren’t set up.”