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  Why did I want to see Charlene? I hadn’t spoken to her or had contact with her since my parents died. It had something to do with the way I felt for her. I had never felt that way again. I had had a crush on that girl that was so bad. And she had liked me—in a twelve-year-old girl sort of way. But it was pretty heavy back then. Back then, I woke up in the morning and I couldn’t wait to get to school—so I could see her. So I could talk to her and look in her eyes. When you are love-struck as a twelve-year-old boy, you are positively gooney. But what was I doing now?

  What I was doing now was waiting for my best and only friend Gloria—a girl who maybe was becoming much more than just a friend, a girl whose parents were about to break up, a girl possibly suffering from true depression—to find my old girlfriend. Was I crazy or what? I tried playing a video game but I couldn’t concentrate. I checked my e-mail but there was only junk.

  My mom yelled up and said it was time for dinner. I wasn’t hungry but I always ate dinner with my parents. It was about the only time of day we were all together. And my father would freak if he thought I wasn’t watching my nutrition. My guess is that it would be Indian food—it was my dad’s night to cook. There would be curry for sure.

  And then the phone rang. I saw that it was Gloria so I picked it up. “I found her,” she said. “The Internet made it almost too easy. I still don’t see why you asked me to do this for you. I feel like such a ... pimp.”

  Ouch. I’d never heard Gloria use that word before. And I could see that she was downright pissed at me. I pretended not to notice. “What did she say?”

  “She seemed to think it was a little strange. As do I.”

  “But?”

  “But she’s willing to meet you. Tomorrow at her school. Three-thirty out in front by the buses. You really want to do this?”

  “I don’t know why. But yes.”

  “Good luck, then.” Gloria was about to hang up. She was mad at me. She was jealous. I didn’t quite know what to do with that.

  “But I can’t do it alone. You have to come with me.”

  “To meet your old girlfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “No way.”

  “If you do this for me, I’ll do anything you ask me to do.” I was desperate. It was a totally generic “anything” but I meant it. Gloria had never asked me to do anything special for her. She was so undemanding. I think that was part of why I liked her so much as a friend.

  “Anything?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Then we have a deal.”

  I guess you’d like to know how that reunion worked out. So I’ll pick up the tale from where I left off. I was nervous through the school day. Gloria acted kind of cool toward me and that was new. But she seemed to have broken out of her blues. “How are your parents doing?” I asked.

  “They’ve stopped speaking to each other. It’s very quiet around the house. And they don’t sleep together anymore.”

  “That’s a bad sign.”

  “Used to be they’d argue but they still went to bed together. But not anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the way it goes,” she said.

  Gloria had done a little research to figure out how to get to Riverside by bus. We’d have to split from school early to make it there by three-thirty. It would have only been a twenty-minute ride in a car but it took an hour by bus, with one transfer.

  On the bus, everyone looked bored. I was feeling kind of scared but tried not to show it. I still didn’t know why I was doing this. And why was I doing this now? And what would I do once I got there?

  “How often have you been back to Riverside since you moved in with Will and Beth?”

  “Never,” I admitted.

  “Not once?”

  “I’ve driven through here with my parents but even then, I never looked at anything. I pretended I’d never lived there.”

  “You were protecting yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you remembered, it would hurt badly. So you shut it out. I think I understand about shutting things out. But I’ve never experienced what you went through.”

  She was right. There was a lot I had shut out. Big chunks of my past I could not recall. I had found that I could get on with my life if I just shut out a lot of things.

  “We’re here,” Gloria said, pointing out the window to Riverside High. I felt a cold chill go through me. I sat motionless. Gloria noticed this, took my hand, and led me down the aisle of the bus.

  She was still holding my hand as we walked across the street to the school. I had not attended this school, of course, and I don’t recall even seeing it, although I must have gone past here as a kid and looked at the building, thinking someday I’d be a big kid and go there. But now it all felt like unknown territory to me.

  Most of the kids were hurrying off—some getting on buses, some walking. A couple of girls were sitting on a low stone wall chatting and some guys were patting pockets, looking for cigarettes. I looked for someone I thought could be Charlene, tried to picture her when she was twelve, tried to imagine what she might look like.

  Gloria spotted her before me. Exactly how she knew it was her, I don’t know. Maybe she’d found a photo on the Internet, maybe not.

  “Charlene?” Gloria asked a girl—a very old-looking girl, a very good-looking girl, that I would have assumed could not be Charlene.

  The girl scowled at Gloria, then gave me the once-over. “Joey?”

  I nodded. The young woman in front of me resembled nothing I could remember of the Charlene I knew. She was beautiful like a Rachelle Drummond, but hard-looking like Rachelle also. The kind of girl who would not even look at me in my high school and would not ever talk to me.

  “I’m Gloria,” Gloria said. “Joseph asked me to come along.”

  Charlene looked me over again, like she was examining a piece of gum stuck to her shoe. “What’s this about, anyway?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said with as much courage as I could muster. “I’m trying to fit some pieces together.”

  “This has to do with your parents, right?” Charlene asked in a rather cold voice.

  “I think so,” I said.

  Charlene looked a little nervous, like she wished she had not said yes to the meeting. “Can we go over there?” she asked, pointing to a park next to the school. “I need a smoke and I can’t do it here on school grounds.”

  “Sure.” So we walked to a picnic table and Charlene sat down on it. She fished for cigarettes in her purse and lit one. She didn’t offer any to Gloria or me. She took a drag and relaxed slightly but now looked away, not at me. I realized that she and I were so totally different that it was hard to believe that she had ever been my girlfriend, my first girlfriend.

  All three of us were sitting on the table. We were all uncomfortable. Gloria was quiet now and Charlene was taking quick drags from her cigarette. “Do you remember much about us?” I asked.

  “It was a long time ago, Joey. We were just kids.”

  “I know. But I have this feeling there was something unfinished.”

  She let out a cynical laugh. “Kind of a funny way of putting it.”

  I didn’t know what to say next.

  Charlene seemed even more agitated. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened to your parents. We all felt bad about that. It kind of shook us all up. Like it could have been any of our parents. And I had decided I’d do anything to help.”

  “I can’t remember much about then,” I said. “A lot of it is just a blank. Can you tell me something about what happened after the accident?”

  “Not really. You just disappeared. I tried calling you but you never returned my calls. I tried going to your house but you weren’t there. You just disappeared and never came back. Never phoned, never wrote. Not one word.”

  “I guess I didn’t know what to do. I was only twelve.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “Well, so was I.” She seemed angrier
now and I didn’t get it.

  I tried to change the subject. “So, like, tell me something about yourself—now.”

  Charlene stubbed out her cigarette on the top of the picnic table. “Look, Joey, Joseph, or whatever you call yourself now, I’d like to help you with your little therapy session but I don’t think I’m up for it. I’ve got a life and maybe you need to get one, too. I was hurt when I never heard from you, okay? Even though it was you who lost your parents. I could not believe you never contacted me again. But I’ll be honest, I got over it. I’m not sure why I agreed to meet with you now. Just curious, I guess. But I don’t have much more to tell you. I think you better just take your nerdy little girlfriend here and go back to wherever you came from.”

  Gloria was staring at Charlene as she was standing up. Gloria only had one word for her. “Bitch,” she said, loud enough for other people in the park to turn our way. Charlene glared at her but said nothing. And then she walked away.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Well, that went well,” Gloria said after Charlene had stormed off.

  I didn’t know what to say. I was shell-shocked. I’d never seen Gloria get angry before. But I was thinking, maybe angry is better than depressed.

  “I think she has issues,” I said, referring to Charlene.

  “Well, next time you want to track down old girlfriends, leave me out of it.” Now she was mad at me.

  “No more old girlfriends to track down. I think we should go home.”

  It took Gloria and me an hour to find the bus that would get us back home. Once we found a seat, Gloria seemed to calm down a bit. She leaned against the window at first and then leaned the other way against me, putting her head on my shoulder. I bent down and kissed her on the top of her head. She squirmed in a funny way that made me think she liked it. And I started to think about Gloria in a whole new way.

  Dean called to tell me that he read somewhere that you could cure anything with magnets. “So I bought some at the Dollar Store. I’ve got eight of them taped to my head right now.”

  “Is it working? How does it make you feel?”

  “I feel a little light-headed. I think it must be working. But if I get too close to my TV, the picture goes funny.”

  “From the magnets,” I said.

  “Oh, right.”

  “Why do you think you need to put magnets on your head?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to fix whatever is wrong with me.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.

  “Well, do you think the magnets will work? Do you think they might make me smarter or anything?”

  “Yes, I think they will work. Where’d you get the idea from?”

  “A site on the Internet. A French dude named Mesmer came up with the concept a long time ago.”

  “Well, then, I’m sure it will make you smarter.”

  “Thanks, dude. See ya.”

  “See ya.”

  You can see why I worried about Dean. Dean was out there. And what was it with all the French? Wasn’t Mesmer someone who pioneered hypnosis? Could magnets really change your mind or your body? Anything and everything can change your mind or body, I suppose.

  So what am I to make of my meeting today with Charlene? People change. My tracking her down scared her. Scared me. Pissed Gloria right off. Some kind of lesson there. I think I’m getting a headache. I wonder if my mom has any Dollar Store magnets.

  Primordial soup. That’s where we come from. Way back. The earth was this big steaming watery sphere and that’s where life started. In this broth, some chemicals randomly (or not) combined and bacteria was formed. The bacteria eventually evolved into you and me and learned to play video games and figured out how to cheat on taxes and parallel park a car. I’m leaving out a few steps along the evolutionary pathway, but you get the picture. A lot of missteps occurred along the way, of course. Many tragedies and some really funny stuff.

  In the 1860s, others like me who were wondering about the various steps up from the basement of our origins wondered what our human ancestors were like. Were there families and monogamy or was that relatively modern? One lawyer-anthropologist (and there’s a real career combo) named J.J. Bachofen suggested that at some point along the human road to civilization, there existed what he called “primitive promiscuity.” This, I guess, is quite possible. No marriage licenses, no church ceremonies, no annoying uncles and aunts getting drunk at the wedding party and falling into the cake. Pairings were rather random and unregulated, and then there were babies. These were our ancestors. It must have been some wild times back there near the roots of the old family tree. Primordial soup to primitive promiscuity to this very confusing world we live in today.

  This reminds me that I am cut off from my biological roots. I am the result of Henry and Seal. Jackhammer Jack and Pacifist Seal combined to create me. And only me. No brothers. No sisters. In one sense, I am all that is left of them except for those photos and the Fender Strat and possibly some grown-up kids out there who had my mom for a teacher and are refusing to fight in wars.

  What if I hold in my head for just a minute that I am here on this planet for a purpose? Up, out of the soup and scandalous ancient sex, and descended from generations of Euro-white trash, no doubt, created by a rather wonderful pair of humans, and presented to the waiting world. Here I am. Here to do what?

  Graduate high school and be emptied like yesterday’s trash out into the great vacuum of the modern world. That’s the only purpose I can see. And so, that makes me expendable.

  The oddest thing of all about the death of my parents was this: the world continued on. It really did. It continued on more or less as if nothing happened. The sun came up. Buses ran on schedule. Someone took over my mom’s teaching job. Someone else was hired to sell power tools. The vacuum filled.

  Today I discovered why Dean was hoping to fix himself with magnets.

  The cyber bullies are after him. Oh, God. Did we truly ever evolve beyond poking each other with sticks, cannibalism, and tribal hatred? I think not. There is a video clip taken by someone’s cell phone of Dean stuttering a wrong answer to a teacher’s question in health class. It makes him look really stupid. There is a laugh track at the end of it. And people on the site have posted comments about him. All insulting. Not just kids from school. That’s the kicker here. People from all over. Making fun of him. Saying cruel things—really cruel things.

  The worst one was this: “This human piece of crap should not be allowed to live.” Posted anonymously, of course. Who would do such a thing?

  Dean told me about this during third period. I cut class and we hung out in the library. The librarian, Ms. Gray, said we could stay there. She understood Dean. She could see he was hurting.

  “Just ignore it and it will go away,” I told Dean.

  “Why me? Why did they pick me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think they cared who it was. They just made you the victim.”

  “My mom says I should go to the principal and tell him.”

  “Nah. I think that will only draw more attention to it.”

  “Kids look at me in the hall. They laugh at me.”

  “I know what that feels like,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So do nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah. Nothing. Head high. Eyes straight ahead. Forget about the magnets.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone about the magnets?”

  “No, I didn’t. Besides, I think you’re onto something. In my father’s store, they sell inserts for your shoes. Guess what’s in the inserts?”

  “Magnets.”

  “Yep. My father’s not convinced, but some people buy them and say it cures their aching feet.”

  “I feel a little better.”

  “Good. Was it me or the magnets?”

  “A little of both, I think.”

  “Dean, when you and I are thirty, I want the two of us to climb a really high mountain.”

>   His face lit up. “Like Everest?”

  “No. Something smaller. Something manageable.”

  “That would be sweet.”

  Dean will one day be a very important person. The pain of his youth, cyber bullying included, will fuel him to save the shrimp and salmon, and possibly rid the world of deadly floating fishnets that kill untold numbers of fish. He will move on from trying to improve himself with taped magnets and probably kick some serious ass in the intellectual world. I know this, or at least, I believe this. And I wonder what the difference is between knowing and believing.

  Gloria is getting over being angry at me. “I was jealous, you know,” she told me.

  “Why would you be jealous?”

  She gave me a look.

  “Oh, the bitch, you mean?”

  “Yes. Her.”

  “That whole scene wasn’t what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Some clues. About then. About me back then. About who I was.”

  “Do you think you learned anything?”

  “No. Not from Charlene. But I think I have to go back to Riverside again. There’s this big hole in my life.”

  “Maybe it’s better to live in the present than in the past.”

  “Does that work for you?”

  She looked less sure of herself now. “No. Not really. The past was not so bad for me. Back when my parents got along. The present is not so good.”

  “What can I do to help?” I asked.

  “Make the world go away.”

  I flicked my hands out in opposite directions in the air. “Phht,” I said. “Gone.”

  Gloria smiled and what was left of the world, a small little cocoon around us, became very bright. And there was a sound track. A single, surging chord that sounded like it came from my father’s electric guitar plugged into his big old Marshall amp with the stacked speakers.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I am alone with my digital recorder right now in the forest and it is spring. I have nothing really to say or report, so don’t expect this to “go anywhere.” Just some random thoughts.