Californium (2 page)

T
he night before school starts, I write my first letter to Uncle Ryan, which is weird because I've never written a letter to anyone before. Not really, unless you count the postcards they made us send from outdoor education camp in fifth grade. And there was that note I got from Linda Donofrio in seventh grade, asking if I wanted to be her dance partner for the square dancing unit in PE, which I didn't because I was going to ask Regina Campbell as soon as I had the nerve, but I wrote back,
I guess,
because she was nice and I didn't want to make her feel bad. But here I am, spilling my guts out to Uncle Ryan, telling him how it feels to leave everyone behind in Jersey and move to a place I've never heard of and live around a bunch of people I don't know. I don't say how moving in the middle of summer was extra awful because it meant leaving my baseball team right before the playoffs, or how we got to California too late for me to join a new team.

Instead, I tell him how much I miss him and how on the way up the hill from the freeway there's a sign that says
WELCOME TO
YORBA LI
NDA, LAND OF GRACIOUS
LIVING
. “Better be,” my dad said the first time we drove by it. And maybe it will be. Our new house could swallow the old one back in Paterson. Colleen's room is so big she can keep her dollhouse right in the middle of the floor without tripping on it. Brendan's even got a weight bench in his room, which he thinks he needs now that he's in junior high and allowed to play football. My room's pretty much the same as it was back home; there's just a lot more carpet between my bed and the door.

I tell Uncle Ryan about all the overtime and extra Saturday shifts my dad's working too, because he says Rockwell has more money than they know what to do with. They pay machinists time and a half the microsecond you get past forty hours, double time on weekends. “It's good for all of us,” my dad keeps saying, and I haven't said anything except how summer's gone and we didn't make it to a single ball game. I tell Uncle Ryan that's never happened before, which he probably knows, but that it's like the only places my dad goes anymore are work and church.
And what's fun about either of those?
I write, then think about it for a long time before adding the
Ha! Ha!

.

The first day of school and the sky is one giant gray cloud. Only this is California so you know it's not going to rain. It'll burn off to some kind of blue and the guy on the eleven o'clock news will lie and say it was another perfect day. But either way, Mom's not letting me out the door without something for the rain that won't come. My Paterson All-Stars jacket from last year doesn't fit anymore and I don't have my back-to-school clothes yet, so she gives
me my dad's old work jacket—a navy-blue, sharp-collared, cut-tight-at-the-bottom-so-it-doesn't-get-sucked-into-machinery machinist's jacket. There's a patch over the heart with my dad's nickname on it,
Packy.

Mom says she's excited about all the new friends we're going to make at school. And that's probably true for Brendan and Colleen because little kids don't care what you're wearing or how you do your hair. Not like high school, where everything matters. Especially when you're new. That's why the All-Stars jacket would have been helpful, because then people would know how good I am at baseball and they'd like me right away.

When I get to the corner of our cul-de-sac, Keith's across the street, waiting on his front lawn for me. The first thing out of his mouth is “Packy? Who the hell is Packy?”

Keith's the one friend I've got, so if it were anybody else I'd think they were razzing me. My clothes are already out-of-style hand-me-downs from my cousins; the jacket just makes things worse. It's too big, all saggy in the shoulders and so long in the sleeves I'm cuffing them as we walk. But me and Keith decided neither of us were going to the back-to-school sales with our parents. We're waiting until after the first week of school so we can know what the cool people are wearing. Then we'll buy our clothes and make the right kind of impression on everybody. And without Keith, I wouldn't know who the cool people are.

.

The day we unpacked the moving van, Keith just appeared in the garage, his hair spiked and stiff so it looked like he could cut something with it. “Where'd you come from?” he said.

“Paterson.”

“Pad-a-son? Where's that?”

“You razzin' me?” I said.

He laughed, a nice one like I'd told a joke, and said he didn't think so but now he had to know where people who said “razzin'” were from.

I folded my arms. “New Jersey.”

“That's cool,” he said and stuck out his hand.

I shook it. “Where'd you come from before this?”

Keith pointed back out of the cul-de-sac and across the street. “Right there. The house that looks like yours.”

That's the thing about California. If you pay attention, you start to see how there's a pattern to things. My house is the fourth one in, right where the street bends and starts curving back around to come out of the cul-de-sac. But every fifth house is the same house. Sometimes it's painted totally different or the front door and garage are flipped to the opposite side, but it's the same house.

“You going to be a freshman this year?” Keith said, and I nodded. He was too. “Do you know who your neighbor is?”

“I don't know who anybody is.”

Then Keith told me there were only two names to know at Esperanza High School. One was Astrid Thompson, the only sophomore ever to make varsity cheer, and now a junior. That, he said, is my new neighbor. The other name was some guy Keith had never heard of until last year, Marc van Doren. “But the guy's a senior, the lead singer of Filibuster, and he was a state finalist in the sixteen hundred last year. They did a little story in the paper and called it ‘The Misfit Mile,'” Keith said, though he didn't know why they called it that. “I don't even know what he looks
like. There wasn't a picture. I just know I've been hearing about that guy everywhere for almost a year now. Whatever formula he's got going really works.”

.

Me and Keith both have first-period General Science. He sits in the desk behind me and leans forward during roll to say who's worth taking notes on. The classroom is crowded and you can tell it's a mix of underclassmen and upperclassmen. We're supposed to be looking at the guys, but it's hard not to notice girls wearing acid-green and neon-yellow tank tops. And plenty of them are perfect makeup, big bangs, and designer jeans that have you following the white stitches up their legs like little roads leading somewhere you really want to go. The guys are mostly Levi's jeans and T-shirts—
Star Wars,
Superman, and dirt bikes. A couple guys have short-sleeve shirts with their collars turned up. And some guys, like Keith, have those corduroy shorts with the
OP
on them that I thought meant Op, like Op-Ed from the newspaper, but then Keith said, “Are you stupid?
OP
means Ocean Pacific.” Then he said he was sorry for calling me stupid since I'd been living near a whole different ocean and there was probably Ocean Atlantic stuff, but I don't think I've ever seen a little
OA
on a pair of shorts anywhere.

Before the bell rings, the teacher says real loud without yelling, “I'm Mr. Krueger, and that clock is seven seconds slow.” He's looking at his watch and pointing to the clock on the wall. As soon as everyone is quiet and looking, the bell rings and Mr. Krueger gets this grin on his face. He taps his watch and says, “This is set to the atomic clock in Colorado—the most accurate clock in the
world.
Your
watch may not be, so you'd better get to class early every day because we start at the real time, not the bell.”

Behind Mr. Krueger, in the right corner above his desk, hangs a gigantic chart of the periodic table. “Everything that matters starts right here.” He reaches back and pats the thing like it's a dog. “That's why it's behind my desk, the only place where I can never stand in front of it.” Everyone's staring at him, and I'm thinking,
Yeah? What about when you stand up to walk over to the podium?
But then Mr. Krueger shoots out from behind the desk sideways, the metal wheels of his chair humming along the tile floor like a train on its tracks. He pops up at the podium, grinning again. “You learn this”—he points back at the periodic table—“and life here will go smoother than you ever thought possible.”

Mr. Krueger lets us go seven seconds before the bell rings, and Keith stops me by the door. “We've got to get on it,” he says, pointing at a poster taped to the wall. “The Howdy Dance is Saturday.”

The bell rings and by the time we're to the stairs, people are everywhere, headed in every direction. Conversations are buzzing by, people laughing, people yelling to other people going the other way, some people already talking about Friday night and
Are you gonna go?
Then the lockers start opening. They're outside lockers, all along the classroom buildings and crammed into the breezeways, that
click, click, pop,
over and over again like a scratched record.

Keith's not looking at me when he says, “You've got Algebra next and Spanish before lunch, right?” He doesn't even wait for me to answer. “Remember, when they call roll, write down all the names of people who aren't freshmen. No freshmen, no matter what.”

Keith's going to go over my list after school and tell me who to take fashion notes on the rest of the week. “And if you see van Doren,” he says, “write down everything, even if the guy picks his nose.”

.

The Wednesday after I met Keith, my dad dragged me out of bed early. “It's trash day,” he said. “Remember? That's your chore now.”

I had hot summer sleep all over me, and as I got to the side of the house, my hair was standing up on its own. On the other side of the fence, our neighbor was pulling his cans out too, the plastic grinding across the driveway like a plane taking off. Halfway to the curb with my first trash can, I heard, “Hey, trash buddy,” and it wasn't the voice of somebody's dad. It was Astrid.
The
Astrid Thompson. Skinny, muscly, tan legs stretching out forever from her Dolphin shorts to her sneakers. Blond hair feathered into perfect wings, very
Charlie's Angels.
She also had a tank top on under a gigantic sweatshirt that had no collar. You might think that would look more like a potato sack than something cool, except the sweatshirt was hanging off to one side so one tanned shoulder stuck out like it was saying,
You should see what else is in here.
I couldn't dream a girl that beautiful, you know? “I'm Astrid,” she said.

“Reece,” I said, wiping my hands on my pants and holding one out.

She took my hand for this little shake, and it was like dipping it into a sink full of warm water, each finger getting its own dose of soft and nice. She said my dad told her dad that I'd be starting at
Esperanza. “I'll be looking for you at the football games,” she said, real serious. “You better have school spirit.”

“I will. I'm very spiritual.”

She laughed and went into her house.

Now I'm up a little early every Wednesday to make sure I'm not wearing something stupid, and then half the time I don't see her anyway. When I do see her, I have no idea what to say. I mean, what do you say to the most perfect-looking girl ever when you're taking out the trash,
Nice cans
? Actually, I almost did say that one morning because the Thompsons really do have these shiny silver cans with matching lids and no dents, but thank God I realized what I was saying as I was saying it and changed it midsentence to “Nice, uh, day.” And even though it was pretty gray outside, Astrid said, “Yeah. It's gonna be,” which just confirms how nice she is and what an idiot I am.

This is how I know Keith knows what he's talking about with clothes and everything. There's something like three junior highs funneling into Esperanza, so it doesn't matter who you used to be. If you make a good impression right away, two-thirds of the freshmen and pretty much everybody else will think you've always been cool.

“If you get it wrong, though,” Keith said, “you're screwed for the next four years—no cool friends, no cool parties, no girls.” No Astrid Thompson.

.

Almost no one is sitting in Mr. Tomita's Algebra class second period. There are letters and numbers along two of the walls. On
the chalkboard, everyone's last name is listed with a letter and number next to it. A few people start walking down the rows and sitting down. I'm B-4, so I go two rows in and four seats back, which I think is right.

To be safe, I ask the girl behind me what she is and she says, “I'm an American of Japanese descent, just like Mr. Tomita.”

The embarrassment rushes up my neck and spreads out across my face until she grins, like,
Gotcha.
“If your last name is Houghton,” she says, “you're in the right place.”

It takes me a minute to find B-5 on the chalkboard, then I say, “Are you Okuda?”

“Yeah.” She smiles. “Me and my whole family.”

Mr. Tomita starts taking roll and it goes quick since he knows exactly who to look at when he calls a name. I'm guessing which people aren't freshmen and writing names as fast as I can. When Mr. Tomita calls out, “Edith Okuda,” she says, “Here,” then leans forward and whispers, “Make sure you put me on your list as Edie, okay?”

At the end of roll, Mr. Tomita stands up from his desk and he isn't that much taller than he was sitting down. He has a wooden yardstick in his hand and says, “If you want to be successful, remember, when it is time to play”—and he swings the yardstick like he's hitting a golf ball—“play. Have fun.” He's smiling and kind of goofy with his shiny bald head and glasses; then he snaps the yardstick to his shoulder like a rifle. Even though he's only about five feet tall, he's about that wide too, and solid. The smile slips away and his forehead wrinkles up serious. “And when it is time to work, work. Be serious.” His face eases up and the yardstick
drops down like he's putting a golf ball. “So when it is time to play, don't work. And when it is time to work, don't play.” We're all nodding and this big old grin takes over his whole face. He shuffles over to the far left of the chalkboard, places the yardstick flat against it, and in three quick strokes has a perfect triangle. “So now, it is time to work!”