Grendel's Guide to Love and War Read online

  And I thought, Shit.

  But then I heard someone from far away say, “Dude.”

  There was a pause in the kicking of my ass. “Dude,” the voice repeated. “You’re going to rupture something.”

  Someone said, “Shut it, Mr. Miyagi.”

  I glanced up at my savior, who looked possibly Asian, if only my eyes would focus.

  “Dude.” He drew a circle in the air in front of his face. “Korean. We’ve been through this. If you’re going to be a racist prick, at least be accurate about it.”

  Somebody shouted, “Watch out, Farnsworth. He’s gonna go all Kung Fu Panda on your ass!”

  There was a snort. “That would be an appropriately insulting epithet, were I from China. But again”—he pointed at himself—“KOREAN.”

  It was at just this moment that other students started to filter out the doors in large numbers, and my assassins decided they had too large an audience and dispersed. As they headed toward the parking lot. I sat up and attempted to gauge the damage.

  “Dude,” Ed said. “You’re in Masonberg. One does not insult Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee in Masonberg and expect good things to come of it.”

  I looked up at him blankly.

  “I’m in your class. With Rogers.”

  I finally managed to get to my feet. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Because I have the sense to sit in the back.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because Mr. Rogers is a pig.” He raised an eyebrow. “He definitely does not like me just the way I am.”

  I smoothed my shirt back down and wiped gravel off my palms. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” I said, and he laughed.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You needed that like a loch in kop.” He pointed toward his ear.

  I wondered what my face had done when they’d asked about my name that had prompted this guy to start speaking Yiddish. Or maybe he hadn’t actually been speaking Yiddish, and I really did have a loch in kop. I palpated my head for signs of trauma. “Like a hole in the head,” I agreed.

  “I have Jewish cousins,” he explained.

  “How did you know I was Jewish?”

  “Good guess.” He shrugged. One of his hands was in his pocket, and the other held a cell phone that was beeping with a new message. He took a quick glance at it before putting it away. “My brother’s giving me a ride this afternoon,” he said. “You can come with, if you want.”

  “Oh,” I said. I wasn’t especially eager to find out which of those guys might be on my bus. “Actually, that would be nice. I mean, if your brother doesn’t mind.”

  “He’ll be okay with it.” He started out toward the parking lot, and I followed behind him. “So,” he went on. “What are your thoughts on spicy food?”

  “Uh, I am in favor of it.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “There’s a barbecue place five minutes from here, and I’m starving.”

  That afternoon, Ed and I split a bucket of spicy beef ribs in the back of his brother’s car, and it was decided: we were friends.

  In the car, Ed was staring out the windshield, likely thinking about California, where he hoped to go to college at UC Davis with its viticulture program. “Okay,” I said, patting the seat in the vicinity of his shoulder. “In honor of your breakup, let’s go to Greenmont.”

  “You don’t want to go home and wait for Willow some more?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “You’re a good man,” he said, giving me a smile that was three-quarters real and one-quarter I-just-dumped-my-culturally-insensitive-girlfriend.

  “Nah,” I said.

  “A great man,” he insisted.

  “Great.” I thumped the steering wheel. “We are great men. Both of us.”

  “Great!” Ed clapped me on the back. “Awesome. Now let’s talk about that junk in your hair.”

  One of my most vivid memories is of my mother sitting at a tabletop easel in the kitchen of our house on Fort Meade, working on a painting of a pot of petunias, a shabby old teapot, and a loaf of bread. She worked on that painting for six weeks, every day, for an art class she was taking at the local college. I would come home from school and she’d be toiling away, always between four and five in the afternoon. I thought she was a genius, and someday she would end up in a museum, or at least in a calendar.

  The painting had been finished and turned in by the time she died a few weeks later, but the petunias were still sitting on the kitchen table that day. I thought we could keep them forever, but my dad explained that petunias are annuals. They last for a season, and that’s it. So first we lost Mom, and then the petunias, and then, when we moved not long after, the kitchen itself. And my memories of my mother in that kitchen, talking and joking and painting, started to wink out one by one.

  I’ve looked for that painting a few times over the years, up in the attic and in the back of the closets, but I never found it. I just want a piece of tangible proof that it existed—that my mother was real for a little while, that she was a brilliant painter, and that no matter how many of my other memories wink out, even though I can’t remember what my mother’s voice sounded like, I’ll always have a three-foot piece of canvas that can’t get lost in my underdeveloped frontal cortex.

  I think about that painting a lot because there are petunias all over the neighborhood. They bloom, they die, and then like clockwork, the old ladies are out planting them again every April. The circle of life, and all that.

  My mother’s petunias were purple.

  About a week went by while Minnie and Allison’s petunias started to wither in the heat. We barely saw the Rothgars. They came and went from the mailbox or from the grocery store, but I didn’t see Willow again. Ellen must have been on a leave of absence from work or something, because I could frequently hear her yelling, but it was hard to tell if she was yelling at people in person or on the phone. We kept the windows shut, and that took care of most of the problem; plus Dad was at work during the day, so he missed a lot of it. It wasn’t the same as living next door to Minnie and Allison, though, and I watched as the grass got way too long, since I didn’t particularly want to offer my lawn-care services to Ellen after I heard how she talked to her movers.

  I was in the kitchen on a Wednesday night eating a sandwich—I’d woken up starving, which happens sometimes in the summer because of all the extra mowing—when I realized tomorrow was trash day, so I went to take the can out to the curb. Once I was outside, I heard voices coming from next door. It didn’t sound like the Rothgars, or at least it wasn’t only the Rothgars. It was the sound of a big gathering—too many voices to pick out just one. It was one in the morning, though, which seemed kind of late for Ellen to be having a party. So after I pulled the trash can to the street, I went to my backyard to check it out.

  It wasn’t Ellen’s party, that much was clear right away. These were all kids. I made my way over to the fence for a better look.

  There were probably thirty or forty people there, from what I could see. There were a few I recognized, mostly people from the lacrosse team who also ran track with Ed, the super-serious athletes who competed at States every year.

  I wasn’t exactly friends with Ed’s track-team buddies, but I wasn’t exactly not friends with them, either. They were nice enough when they saw me, but it’s not like I ever hung out with them. Kieran Graham, who was famous for being nearly unmanned by a hurdle sophomore year, wandered by with his phone to his ear, telling whoever was on the other end that the party blew and they shouldn’t bother coming. I was just thinking about heading back inside when I heard Lauren Shaffer call my name; she was on the team with Ed, and I’d gone out with her sister, Adrienne, for half a minute last spring. Things had fizzled pretty quickly, but I didn’t get the sense that Lauren held it against me.

  I leaned over the fence, and Lauren approached from the other side. “Hey,” she said. “Do you live there?” She pointed toward my house.

  “Yeah,” I sa
id. “I do.”

  “Don’t you want to come over?”

  I observed the clusters of people smoking by the woods or making out under the deck. I didn’t think Rex would be especially keen on my hanging out at his party, and I wasn’t sure about Willow. I hadn’t seen either of them yet, which probably meant they were both upstairs.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She pulled on my sleeve over the fence. “Come on. It’s not like you have something else to do.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. So I hopped the fence and followed her back toward the house, where she offered me a cup of beer that I took but didn’t drink.

  The basement was startlingly empty with all of Minnie and Allison’s stuff gone. There was a huge flat-screen on one wall and a leather sofa in front of it, which was piled up with people who were drinking or making out or crying into their phones. Lauren sat down on an ottoman and scooted over so I could squeeze in next to her, not that I really wanted to.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me about what happened with you and Adrienne.”

  What happened was that things were going kind of okay until one day when we were hanging out in her room doing homework and she put her tongue in my ear and whispered, “I’m really into emo guys,” and I said, “What?” and she said, “You’re so, like, deep. You’re like Adam Driver. Or Neil Gaiman,” and I said, “Um,” and then she tried to lick my ear again so I left.

  I didn’t really want to tell Lauren this, though. “It just didn’t work,” I said. What I wanted was to tell Lauren that Adrienne really hadn’t been into me. She’d been into the idea of me, which was not remotely the same thing.

  “She’s upstairs,” Lauren said.

  “What? Like, now?”

  She nodded. “She wants to talk to you.”

  So this was an ambush.

  I looked down at my beer. If Ed had been there, he would have found a convenient place to pour it out, because Ed hates all beer in general and cheap beer in particular. I took a sip and grimaced, because it really was nasty. Lauren watched me expectantly.

  A couple of the people on the leather couch had fired up a game console and were playing some car-explosion thing with the sound turned off. At the bottom of the steps, a girl I didn’t know was crying into her friend’s shoulder. I wondered how many more people there were upstairs. I wondered if I knew any of them.

  I got the sudden sick sense that I wasn’t looking at people: I was looking at the silhouettes of people. And that’s all they saw of me, too. That was certainly all Adrienne had seen.

  Once in a while, I get this awful feeling that I’m encased in a coating of cement, like I’m inside a shell. I can’t get out and no one else can get in, and I feel like no one in the world is ever going to get through to me on the other side, and no one even knows because when they look at me all they see is a shadow puppet.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “You should go talk to Adrienne,” she insisted.

  “I can’t,” I said. I hunted for an excuse and came up with: “My dad will wonder where I am. I’ll see you around.” And before she could answer, I got up and went back out the basement door and through the dark yard. I was about to hop the fence when I bumped directly into someone and slopped my beer all over them.

  “Sorry,” I said as I jumped over.

  “Hey!”

  I looked back and realized that I’d dumped my beer all over Willow Rothgar, who was equal parts annoyed, wet, and surprised.

  Just then, the lights came on in my father’s bedroom.

  I pushed my empty cup into Willow’s hand over the fence. “I’m really sorry,” I said again, before I ran inside.

  I had to get up at seven the next morning to mow lawns, because it was supposed to be another hundred-degree day and I wanted to finish before I turned into a puddle in someone’s yard. I’d overbooked, and I felt like my arms were going to fall off after I was done, so I hadn’t given Rex’s party much thought. I figured Ellen had probably been covering a story or out for the night and it was just a one-off thing.

  But that night I was awoken in the dark by the sounds of a screeching amplifier.

  At first I thought it was a car going by or something, so I put my pillow over my head and rolled over, but then the screeching faded and I was assaulted by the strains of really loud, really old, really bad white-person rap music.

  My eyes popped open on the second verse of “Thrift Shop” and I sat up and pushed my way out of my bed. It was loud enough that I could feel the bass vibrating up through the floor. The song ended and something else started up—something nasty, with screamed lyrics and guitar riffs that echoed inside my skull.

  I got up to have a better look and found Dad in the kitchen, staring out the window and clutching the counter. He didn’t turn around when I came in, and I knew what that meant.

  The light was off in the kitchen, and the moonlight made my dad look like a statue carved out of paraffin. “Dad?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  The music was so loud our windows were vibrating, and Dad was inches from the glass and totally still. I came around to the kitchen table so that I could see him. He was sweating.

  I got a sick feeling in my stomach that made me want to sit down, but I didn’t. This was the part I never knew how to handle. I could walk over to him and touch his shoulder, which might snap him out of wherever he was or might make things worse. Dad had never been violent, not so far as I knew, anyway, but this was as bad as I’d seen him in years.

  I walked to the sink and got a glass of water, then edged back to Dad a step at a time, holding the glass out in front of me. I was shaking.

  Finally, his eyes swiveled and focused on me, even though his face never moved. But he saw me, and that was good. He looked down at the glass of water, but didn’t make a move to take it.

  “Here, Dad,” I said. “Have some water.”

  He didn’t move.

  I set the glass down on the counter and took a step back. “I’m going to ask them to turn it down, okay?”

  He let go of the counter and turned around, closing his eyes and taking a breath that lasted a good twenty seconds.

  “I’m going to work,” he said.

  My legs went kind of gelatinous with relief. Work. Work was good. Anything was better than standing at that window, sweating and looking all not-there. “Okay,” I said.

  He walked out of the kitchen, and I sat down, hard. At that moment, I would have really liked to kill the Rothgars. I don’t think of myself as violent; Dad had done everything possible to discourage me from joining the service, and I’d listened, so I knew next to nothing about fighting or guns or whatever, but right then, in that kitchen, I’d have happily dispatched the whole lot of them.

  I blew my nose on a paper towel and wiped some random sweat off my cheeks, then texted Ed, who I hoped was still up.

  I have a very big problem please come now.

  It was about two minutes before he texted back, I was so asleep what is it.

  Rothgars. Party. Loud.

  To his credit, Ed doesn’t ask a lot of unnecessary questions. He texted back, Be there in twenty.

  I was dressed by the time Ed arrived, and Dad was long gone. I wasn’t sure if he’d remembered his badge this time or not.

  “Holy crap,” Ed said as he opened the front door. “That is some loud, bad, crappy crap.”

  “I think that may be a little redundant.”

  “It’s midnight, Grendel. I’m allowed to be redundant when you wake me out of a sound sleep at midnight.” He looked down the hallway, as if suddenly realizing he was speaking in a nonwhisper in my hallway in the middle of the night. “There is no way your dad is sleeping through this,” he said.

  “He’s gone. He went to work.”

  “Work.”

  “Yeah.”

  He raised his eyebrows, which was as much as he felt like he could comment on my dad’s situation. “Okay. So what is the p
lan here?”

  “I’m just going to go…I don’t know. Ask them to turn it down? If they even just move the speakers inside…”

  Ed rested his hand on the vibrating glass of the window. It dawned on me that he might actually know people at this party and want to go. But he only said, “That sounds reasonable to me. Where do you suppose the intrepid Ellen Rothgar is this evening? Or do you think this is her party?”

  I could see a line of cars stretching down the block, and from time to time somebody stumbled from a car toward the house.

  “This is Rex,” I said.

  “And you think he’ll turn it down?”

  “Look, I’m just asking him not to run the speakers outside in a retirement development in the middle of the night. I’m surprised the cops haven’t already been here.”

  He shrugged and opened the front door. “Let’s go.”

  The party was bigger than I’d realized from inside my kitchen. There were at least three times the number of people that had been there the night before, and the combination of so many human voices and overamplified music made me want to cover my ears. Through the windows, I could see that the house was completely packed, and in the backyard—where Ed and I were headed—the main attraction was an inexplicable bonfire, heating up the already too-warm and too-humid night. A DJ table was set up next to the deck, and buckets of ice were full of cheesy wine coolers that Ed would have spat on, if he’d been in the mood to spit on anything.

  I recognized our lacrosse teams (boys’ and girls’) and a bunch of other people from school. There were also a lot of people I’d never seen before who must’ve been Rex’s friends from Chambliss. I wondered if Lauren and Adrienne were there, but I didn’t see them. I didn’t see Rex anywhere, either, but I really didn’t feel like pawing my way through the house to look for him.

  “Dude,” said Ed. “It’s like every douche within thirty miles is here.”

  “Nah,” I said. “I haven’t seen the football team yet.”

  And then, coming out of the house, was Colin Farnsworth, whose head had been shaved stone-bald and then completely covered in Celtic designs. It was, I thought, the most extensive—and painful-looking—tattoo I had ever seen.