Fitz (13 page)

“Okay,” Fitz says again. It feels like the awkward pause at the end of a class—anyone have any questions? As a matter of fact, Fitz does.

“Why Fitzgerald?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why not Steinbeck? Why not Melville?”

“I was an English major,” he says. “I read
Gatsby
in a course on the twentieth-century American novel. I loved it. I kept rereading it. I’m not sure why. It just spoke to me somehow. The language.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
 … all that. It made me want to be a writer, too. It made me want to write the great American novel.” He smiles a little, as if he’s half embarrassed by the memory of his younger self, his susceptibility to beautiful language, his big foolish dreams.

“So it was you?” Fitz says. He was the Fitzgerald fan? “I thought Mom was the one who loved his stuff. I thought Mom named me.”

“Oh, I gave her some books,” he says. “I’m not sure she actually read them, though. I don’t blame her. It was a little obnoxious. She thought I was trying to remake her, as if she weren’t educated enough for me. But that wasn’t it. I was just sharing my enthusiasm. But it came off wrong.”

Fitz looks at his father. At one time, this guy dreamed about being a writer. He cared about words. Maybe he scribbled in a notebook, too. There’s more to him than Fitz suspected. If they sit here long enough, there’s no telling what he may discover about him.

“I’m pretty sure she read those books,” Fitz says.

There’s someone coming
down the street. Even before Fitz sees his face, he recognizes Caleb’s familiar walk. It’s a slow shuffle, slower than you’d expect a young person to walk, as if he isn’t really all that keen to reach his destination.

He’s got his guitar in one hand, his amp in the other. There seems to be something coiled around his neck, nooselike. It could be some insane kind of goth choker, but that isn’t Caleb’s style. It could be a bike lock, but Caleb doesn’t ride a bike (too dangerous).

“That’s my friend,” Fitz says.

Fitz lowers his window and leans out. “Hey, Caleb!” he shouts. “Caleb!”

Caleb just keeps walking, same glacial pace. It’s impossible that he hasn’t heard—they’re no more than twenty feet away from each other. But Caleb doesn’t even turn his head. “Caleb!” Fitz yells again, even louder this time. Still no response.

“I’ll be right back,” Fitz says to his father. He opens the car door and puts one foot on the curb. He pauses. He looks at his father.
The key’s in the ignition. The motor’s idling. What if he drives off? Fitz has already as good as said goodbye, handed back his father’s phone and wallet, but still, the prospect of his taking off, of watching his taillights disappear at the end of the block, it fills Fitz’s stomach with something like panic.

“I’m not going anywhere,” his father says.

“Okay,” Fitz says. “It’ll only be a minute.” He crosses the street and intercepts Caleb.

Caleb is still moving forward. He looks like someone moving across thin ice, that cautious. What he has around his neck, Fitz sees, is a super-duper guitar cable, something he’s been talking about getting for weeks.

“Caleb!” Fitz shouts. He is maybe three feet away from him.

Now, finally, Caleb stops and turns slowly toward Fitz.

“What is up with you? I was calling your name. Didn’t you know it was me?”

“I knew it was you.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought maybe you were trying to
lure
me somewhere.”

“Why would I want to lure you anywhere?”

“You tell me. You’re the predator.”

“Cut it out.”

“Who’s the guy in the car?”

“That’s my dad.”

“Dude, you don’t have a dad. That’s like one of your trademarks. It’s one of the things that makes you
interesting
.”

“Everybody’s got a dad.”

“You know what I mean.”

Caleb sets the amp down and turns toward the car in a way he must imagine is casual. It’s not. “He’s wearing a tie.”

“I know,” Fitz says. “He’s my father, and he’s wearing a tie.”

“That’s a really nice car,” Caleb says. “Are you sure he’s not an A&R guy? That’s what he looks like.”

“I’m sure he’s not an A&R guy. He’s a lawyer.”

“Because we are nowhere near ready to sign with a label.”

“Be serious.”

“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all day,” Caleb says. “I sent you about a thousand texts. You’ve gone dark, dude.”

“So here I am,” Fitz says. “In the flesh. We can communicate in real time. What’s up? You got the Monster—very cool.”

“This is way beyond gear, Fitz.”

“Okay,” Fitz says. “What? What’s worth a thousand texts?”

“Nora,” Caleb says.

Nora? The sound of her name perks Fitz up a little. “What about her?”

“She’s coming over.”

“Nora Flynn?” Fitz says. “Here? When? When is she coming over?”

“Right here, right now,” Caleb says. “Any minute.” He smiles, a little wickedly.

“Get out.”

“I saw her at lunch and asked her if she listened to the CD. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Loved it.’ ”

“She loved it.”

“She loved it. You should have heard her, going on and on about Ruth Brown. She was obsessed. So I’m like, ‘You wanna
sing with us?’ ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Absolutely.’ ‘Like when?’ I said. ‘Like how about this afternoon?’ she said.”

“I don’t know about this,” Fitz says. “I’m not sure if this is such a good idea.”

“Since when are you anti-Nora?” Caleb asks. “Since when are you not her biggest fan?”

Fitz is trying to find some words to explain what’s going on with him, how he’s spent his day, why this may not be the best time to audition a singer, when he notices Caleb suddenly stiffen.

Fitz’s father is standing there
,
smiling pleasantly. He’s taken off his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was All-American Dad, home from work early.

“Hello?” Caleb says.

“Hello,” he says, and extends his hand.

Caleb gives Fitz a quick glance and then takes it. He gives it a shake. “I’m Caleb,” he says. “Pleased to meet you … Mr. Fitz’s dad.”

“Call me Curtis.”

“Okay,” Caleb says, but he doesn’t.

“You’re in the band,” Fitz’s father says.

“Well, yes,” Caleb says. “Actually, right now Fitz and I
are
the band.”

“I like your sound,” Fitz’s father says, and Caleb gives Fitz a triumphant look, as if to say, told you so, and Fitz suspects that now he will never be able to convince him that his father is not really a record executive.

“We need a drummer,” Caleb says. “But it’s not easy to find one.”

“Drummers are famously problematic, aren’t they?”

Caleb gives Fitz another look.
What planet is this guy from?
“Oh yes,” he says. “Famously.”

In fact, drummers have been, what he said, problematic. Fitz wonders how his father knows. He can’t imagine that he’s ever been in a band. In the past year they’ve played with only two human drummers: one was a kid with a fancy kit but absolutely no sense of rhythm, the other a kid they recruited from jazz band, who was always so busy with extracurricular activities and lessons—student council, Model UN, you name it—he was never available to hang out, much less practice.

“This is a big day for the band,” Caleb says. “Today we’re going to audition a vocalist. And I am pretty sure she’s going to take us to the next level.”

“Really,” Fitz’s father says. “That’s exciting.”

“I don’t know about this,” Fitz says. “I don’t think this is such a good time.”

“What do you mean?” Caleb says.

“I mean,” Fitz says, “there’s a lot going on. Couldn’t we do this some other day?”

“Let me give you a hand,” Fitz’s father says, and picks up Caleb’s amp. Caleb can be touchy about people handling his stuff, but this he doesn’t seem to mind. “Thank you,” he says, and leads the way, guitar in hand, up the walk to the front porch.

They’ve played out here before, Fitz and Caleb, sitting in a couple of lawn chairs. Maybe if Fitz’s basement weren’t a dank
dungeon, they’d rehearse down there. Maybe not—Caleb loves playing outside. He thinks fresh air is good for musical instruments. And he doesn’t mind a little ambient noise mixing with the music—likes it, really. If there were a train rumbling by, he’d be ecstatic. That would be pure Clarksdale. But even the ordinary clatter and hum of Fitz’s neighborhood, he welcomes it into the sonic stew—a car horn, the sound of an airplane overhead, the
click-clack
of somebody trimming a hedge.

The problem with jamming out here is the electronics—how to plug in. There’s no outlets on the porch. When Fitz’s mom hangs Christmas lights, she does it with a complicated jerry-rigged network of extension cords that doesn’t strike Fitz as entirely safe. Not that he’d ever tell her that.

Caleb tried once to run his amp’s power cord into the house through the mailbox slot, but then was stuck in the corner of the porch, away from the chairs. Which is the point of Caleb’s new heavy-duty, extra-long cord.

Caleb looks up at Fitz. “Don’t just stand there, dude,” he says. “Go inside and plug me in. And bring out your acoustic.”

Fitz turns the key
and pushes the front door open. Nothing has moved since this morning, of course, nothing has changed, but things feel different somehow.

It feels like a snapshot of a life—his life—that has been interrupted. On a bench in the front hall, there is a stack of his textbooks and notebooks, a folder containing the geometry proofs he dutifully completed last night, his thoughtful-sounding responses to Mr. Massey’s questions about a poem by John Donne. Fitz was planning to skip, but he did his homework anyway. What did that say about him? It’s hard now to imagine himself taking such pains again, working his way through another problem set tonight, adding and subtracting angles, trying to describe the speaker’s tone, all that work, for what? Points?

He does a quick walk-through of the downstairs. In the kitchen, Fitz feels the weird vibe of Pompeii, the Roman city they studied in Global, buried by a volcanic eruption so quickly that everything was perfectly preserved, daily life flash-frozen, an archaeologist’s dream come true. There is his cereal bowl and spoon
in the sink. A jar of peanut butter on the counter where his mom made her morning toast, a knife balanced across the top. On the table is the multivitamin she laid out for him and he forgot to take. It looks sort of forlorn and sad sitting there, a little still life reminding him how much his mom loves him and what a rotten person he is.

There’s one message on the answering machine, just as Fitz expected, received a little after nine o’clock that morning, about the time he was introducing himself to his father. It’s from the attendance office at school, reporting Fitzgerald’s absence, with a reminder that he’ll need a note of excuse when he returns. Fitz has been planning all along to forge a note. He doesn’t have the skills or guts to pull off a fake phone call. But he has discovered that with very little practice, he can reproduce his mom’s signature reasonably well. She hardly signs her name the same way twice, but there’s always a big Eiffel Tower
A
and an equally tall double-peaked
M
—the rest is squiggles.

Fitz deletes the message. For the first time today, maybe, he really feels that he’s being dishonest with his mom. He doesn’t feel good about lying to her. He’s done just what Dominic and the rest of the detention crowd do every day—pull the wool over their parents’ eyes. Turns out, he’s pretty good at it, being sneaky. It’s not that hard to do, Fitz is learning—except for the queasy feel of betrayal in his stomach.

Just then there’s a noise from near the front door—a click and a soft scraping. Fitz turns, startled and frightened, his hands rising slowly, a man apprehended in the act. But it’s not his mom, not the attendance police, it’s just Caleb’s cord snaking its way from
the mail slot across the tile floor of the entryway. It seems alive, curious. He walks over to it slowly, grabs it by the pronged head, and plugs it in. He remembers what he came for and heads up the stairs and into his bedroom.

The guitar is poking out from under his bed, half-buried in dirty clothes. It supposedly belongs to Uncle Dunc, who bought it a year ago and conveniently left it in Fitz’s custody. It’s a dark mahogany, and he loves everything about it, even the smell. He strums a G chord. It has such a rich and beautiful tone, Fitz sometimes feels unworthy of it.

Before he heads back out, he takes a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. His hair may not look frightened, but it doesn’t look good either. He scratches at it a little, moves it around his forehead. It doesn’t seem to make much difference one way or the other. He holds his guitar up and makes an album-cover face, his best approximation of the Beatles’ stare on
Rubber Soul
. He wants to look profound, he wants to look deep, but really he just looks worried—he looks constipated. He wonders whatever led him to hope that Nora might find this kid attractive, that his father might find him interesting.

When Fitz comes out
of the house, guitar in hand, Caleb is sitting in one of the lawn chairs, playing scales, his father standing back a little, leaning on the porch railing, arms crossed, looking on approvingly. So often Caleb looks awkward and out of place, hunched and squinting, always at the edge of something, the perpetual square peg, but when he’s cradling his guitar like this, bent over it, coaxing something out of it, speaking some special language to it, like a mother to her baby almost, he seems perfectly at ease, when he is most himself.

That’s when Fitz notices her. It’s as if his stomach knows who it is before his brain does: it does one of those little elevator drops. She is walking a black cruiser bike up the sidewalk, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, a cascade of beautiful red hair spilling out from beneath her helmet. Nora Flynn!