Full Tilt Part 2

"Is there any rule that's not optional for you?"

Then, as I braked for the next stop sign, a little green car barreled across the intersection, completely ignoring the four-way stop.

"See? If I didn't stop, we would have smashed into that Pinto. Do you know what happens when you hit a Pinto?"

"What?"

"They blow up!"

"Cool!" said Quinn.

As it turned out, explosive Pintos were the least of our problems. I could tell what type of evening it was going to be when we drove up to our house and saw Mom out front with Carl, boyfriend of the month.

So you get the complete picture, I ought to explain about my mother and her boyfriends. You see, Mom is sort of like a blue whale. I don't mean she's big-she's actually on the small side. What I mean is that Mom filters losers through her baleen as if they were krill. I don't know why; she's a good person with a big heart-enough of a heart to raise Quinn and me alone on what little she makes. But when it comes to herself, I don't know, it's like she never aims as high as she deserves. She could have graduated college, but she dropped out because Dad wanted her to. Then when Dad left, she never went back, because she had to support us.

Most of the guys she's dated were like Dad. They drank too much, demanded too much, and when it came time to give something back, they bailed. But her latest boyfriend seemed to be an exception to the rule. Aside from a bad hair transplant that looked like rows of wheat and a wardrobe that was just a bit too young for him, Carl seemed to be an okay guy. But I reserve judgment on anyone Mom filters through her baleen.

Now, as I drove up, Carl had a new mark against him, because he was making out with Mom on the porch-and I mean really making out, the way I should have been doing at around this time in my life. I was thankful we'd dropped Maggie and Russ off already so they didn't have to witness the scene.

"Now, that's what I call a vomit ride," I told Quinn as we pulled up the driveway. He snickered. No matter what disagreements we had, we were of one mind when it came to Mom and her boyfriends.

As soon as we got out of the car, they stopped sucking face. Mom looked embarra.s.sed at having been caught.

"Hi, guys," Carl said. He noticed the bear I held. "Looks like you came up a winner."

"Carl was just saying good-bye," Mom said.

"Really," I said. "He must speak in tongues."

That got me a high five from Quinn. When we were done laughing, Mom raised her eyebrows and said, "Are you done having your joke at our expense?"

Oh, please don't try to sound parental now. "Yeah. Sorry."

"Good, because Carl and I have an announcement to make." She took his hand, and I felt my gut beginning to collapse into a knot, because I knew what she was going to say. I knew because of the ring I saw on her hand. It was a diamond; and I had a feeling it was no cheap zircon, either, but the real thing. I clenched the arm of the misshapen bear tighter.

"We're engaged," she said, and bounced up and down like a cheerleader. Her enthusiasm was met by our silence. "Well, aren't you going to congratulate us?"

Frankly I didn't know what I felt: good, bad, or indifferent. The news hadn't completely sunk in yet. But Quinn took it all in at once. First his ears went red, and the redness spread like a rash across his pinched face.

"Well?" Mom prompted.

"The last guy's ring was bigger," Quinn said, and tried to storm off into the house. Carl grabbed Quinn by the arm, and Quinn braced himself to be hit. It was a natural reflex after years of Mom's boyfriends, who spoke in fists rather than in tongues. But Carl, to his credit, wasn't like that. He only grabbed Quinn to get his attention, and he let go as soon as he had.

"Hey," he said, "I've got something for you, Quinn." He held out a small jewelry box, flipping it open to reveal a tiny diamond ear stud. It was just like the one Carl himself wore.

"I don't want it."

"Take it, Quinn," Mom said. It was an order.

Carl cautiously took a step closer to Quinn. "Here, let me." He removed the sputnik dangling from Quinn's ear, replacing it with the diamond stud. "Sometimes one is enough, when it's the right one."

Quinn grimaced like he was having a root ca.n.a.l. Finally Carl stepped back. The new stud was still one among three earrings in his ear, but it was definitely less in-your-face than the sputnik.

"Can I go now?" Quinn didn't wait for an answer. He bolted into the house, slamming the screen door behind him.

Carl sighed. "Well, that could have been worse." Then he looked at me. I was still feeling numb about the whole thing, but I knew what I had to say to get me out of this awkward situation.

"I'm very happy for you both." I turned to go in.

"Carl has something for you, too," Mom said.

"It's okay," I told them. "I'm not Quinn. I don't need a bribe." The words slipped out before I could hold them back.

"It's not like that, Blake," Carl said. "I know we're going to be family. . . . But I want to be friends, too."

I cringed at the word family. For years our little family had been about as misshapen as the bear I was holding. It didn't need more stuffing, it needed a complete makeover. The guys Mom dragged into the task never made it through the preliminaries. Was Carl so different? Did I want him to be?

Carl reached into his sports jacket and produced an overstuffed envelope. He held it out to me, a gesture of friends.h.i.+p. "Just some things you might need at college," he said, "and some phone numbers of friends I have in the city. New York can be rough without someone to help you out."

I took it, thanked him, and went inside, riding a wave of sudden nausea-a sort of seasickness from the many unexpected lurches of the evening. They say it's not the sideways motion of a s.h.i.+p that makes you sick, but the pitch and yaw: the constant rising and falling of the bow, both predictable and yet different with every wave. On days like this, it felt like I'd never get used to it.

Once in the house, I spared one more look at the ungainly little bear and his unpleasant yellow s.h.i.+rt. It was my trophy for a twisted evening that wasn't getting any better. The corner of the invitation stuck out of the bear's pocket, but I didn't care about that anymore. I wasn't going. Ca.s.sandra would probably be there, but who was I kidding? She was out of my league.

On the way to my room I pa.s.sed Quinn's closed door. Angry music blared on the other side. I just didn't feel like dealing with him, or his room. I mean, imagine the debris field of a tornado, and you'll begin to understand what it looked like. There were dust bunnies that lurked in corners, evolving into higher forms of life. Half-eaten sandwiches growing thick green fur filled the bookshelves.

No surprise that my room looked nothing like my brother's. I opened my door to a clean floor, a neat desk, and a host of evenly s.p.a.ced travel posters lining the walls. Russia, England, and Greece hung over my desk. Above my headboard was Italy, with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and on my closet door was France, with the Eiffel Tower and the Arc De Triomphe looking like a hundred-foot keyhole into all the places I'd never been. An oversized poster of Hawaii was strategically placed as a backdrop for some World War II model planes I'd hung from the ceiling in a mock dogfight.

The posters had been free because they knew me at the travel agency down at the mall. When I was younger, I hung out there, and they would pretend to book me on trips to faraway places. Then they'd give me the posters, along with whatever other promotional stuff was lying around in their office. That was how I got the two carved heads from Easter Island that now served as bookends and an authentic imitation totem pole from Alaska that stood in the corner.

My desk was empty except for a desk organizer holding paper clips, pens, and sharpened pencils. Quinn called it "a.n.a.l" the way I kept everything, as if being neat were some weird complex. As if there were something wrong with having all my pencils sharpened and my books in alphabetical order and my clothes hung up by color. So what? I used to do that with my crayons, too.

I sat at my desk and opened the envelope Carl had given me. Like he said, it contained a list of names and phone numbers of people I didn't know in New York, but there were other things in it as well. Like a subway map I couldn't figure out no matter which way I held it. Like a brochure from Columbia University's sports department that featured the school mascot, a menacing blue lion, stalking forward as if trying to intimidate me out of trying out for their swim team.

And then there were the airplane tickets.

American Airlines. 6:45 A.M. departure. September 4. One was round-trip, for my mom. She got to stay for two days. The other ticket was mine and was one-way. The flight landed at an airport called LaGuardia. I'd never flown-never had the need to-but now here was a ticket, with a date only one month away.

Ever have the real world hit you like a steel pole to the head? Until now all I had from the university was an acceptance letter and a dozen forms to fill out. But here, spread out before me, was solid reality on a collision course with me. Wham! Sixteen years old and living at a college in New York City? What was I, crazy? Was I totally out of my mind? My head was spinning, and whenever that happened, it always called back that memory of my first ride.

Screaming. Spinning out of control. Gripping tightly on to the seat. So dizzy . . .

Too tired to resist, I let the memory come. I was seven. There are so many details I still remember, like the smell of cherry-flavored bubble gum in the air and the cold feel of the seat and the screams of my friends, each voice a different pitch, like a terrified choir, all out of tune. And yet so much is also gone. Not so much forgotten as exiled from my brain. Maybe that's because the ride didn't take place at a carnival or an amus.e.m.e.nt park. It took place on an icy December morning. On a school bus.

Mom never talked about it, and so neither did I. I always figured the memory of that ride was best left buried. Problem is, rides like that have a way of coming back, and then you're stuck riding them again. And again. And again.

I brought my hands to my temples, pressing until the spinning feeling went away. Then I took the subway map, the list of names, and the brochure, and dropped them in the trash. I made sure the brochure was facedown, so I wouldn't have to see the eyes of that blue lion. As for the plane tickets, I shoved them as far and as deep in my desk as I could, knowing I really couldn't throw them away but wis.h.i.+ng that I could at least make them disappear.

I went to the kitchen as Mom came inside.

"Did you look in the packet Carl gave you?"

"I'm tired, Mom. Can we talk about it in the morning?"

I scavenged through the fridge, finding doggie bags left over from her and Carl's big engagement date. Wan Fu's Szechuan Emporium: the most expensive Chinese restaurant in town. At least the guy had good taste in food.

Mom leaned against the wall. "Why does Quinn have to be like this? It's like I'm not allowed to have any happiness around here."

I didn't feel like getting into it. "Not everything's about you, Mom."

"Yeah, well, not everything's about him, either."

I s.n.a.t.c.hed up the doggie bags, and instead of escaping to my clean room, I went in Quinn's pigsty. At least there, the chaos was all out in the open, instead of hiding in unseen places.

I pushed open his door. A dart zipped through the air headed straight for my face. I deflected it with the doggie bags, and it punctured the flaming Hindenburg on Quinn's cla.s.sic Led Zeppelin poster instead, which had once been Mom's until retro became cool and Quinn nabbed it.

"That would have been a bull's-eye," Quinn complained. I looked at the dartboard on the back of the door.

"Fat chance. It wouldn't even have hit the target."

Quinn shrugged and turned his attention to a flight simulation game on his computer. It was typical Quinn: playing darts while playing computer games while blasting music loud enough to shake the house from its foundation. I turned down the music a few hundred decibels so I could hear myself think, as Quinn ditched his plane in a cornfield.

"Isn't the object to actually land the plane?"

"Where's the fun in that?" Quinn quit the game and flopped bonelessly onto his bed. I sat on his desk chair, handing him one of the bags of food. "Here, stuff your face. Mom and Carl had Chinese."

"Great! They're engaged five minutes, and we're already eating his table sc.r.a.ps." He riffled around his desk until he found a fork with dried ketchup on it and started eating.

I studied the diamond stud in Quinn's earlobe. "I like it better than sputnik," I told him.

Quinn looked at me as if I'd insulted him. "You gave me sputnik."

"Yeah, but when I gave it to you, it was a key chain."

He returned to his food. Lo mein noodles dangled from his chin like worms as he sucked them in. "You watch," Quinn said. "This guy's going to bail, and we'll never hear from him again. Just like the other ones . . ."

I looked away. He didn't have to say it-I knew what he was thinking: Just like Dad.

I wanted to reach out to Quinn somehow, but I couldn't. It made me think of this thing I once read. Scientists now think there are actually nine dimensions instead of three, but the other ones are so folded in upon themselves, we can't experience them. Maybe that explains why I could never reach out to Quinn, because although he was only a few feet away, he somehow felt much farther than the s.p.a.ce between us. When Dad left us all those years ago, it tore open a wound that led to a whole lot of unexpected dimensions.

"Hey, maybe this guy'll hang around," I said. "And maybe it won't be so bad."

"Easy for you to say. You'll be off at Columbia."

I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. "I never said I was going."

Quinn laughed, his mouth full of noodles. "Yeah, right. You're gonna turn down an Ivy League scholars.h.i.+p."

When I didn't answer him, his expression changed.

"Wait a second. You're not kidding!"

I began to pace, kicking the debris on the floor out of the way. "That scholars.h.i.+p doesn't cover everything. And do you know how expensive New York is?"

"One month to go, and you're gonna talk yourself out of it?"

"I'm being practical. I know that particular word never made it into your vocabulary."

Quinn put down his fork. "You're chicken, aren't you?"

"It's better for everyone if I get a part-time job and take some cla.s.ses at a junior college."

But Quinn wasn't buying it. "You're scared! I can't believe you. I mean, you paste your room full of places you'll never go, and when you actually get the chance to have a life, you're too scared to take it!"

He had a point. But so did I. "If I go to junior college, I can live at home," I reminded him, "and maybe keep some balance around here. Besides, you never know when someone might need their a.s.s saved from a roller coaster again."

"Oh, right. So it's my fault?"

"Do you really want to face life with the newlyweds alone? What if they do crash and burn?"

"You mean like you're doing now?" Quinn crushed a fortune cookie in his fist and let the flakes fall away. "Fine! See if I care. Go turn your life into a car accident. Or should I say a bus accident?"

I spun to face him, feeling his words like a slap. So he did know! But to use his knowledge against me like that-it was unforgivable.

"Accident?" I said. "No, Quinn. You're the only 'accident' in this family!"

I regretted it the moment I said it, but it was too late. I couldn't take it back. Quinn's expression hardened into hate, and I braced myself for a serious verbal beating. But instead, he broke eye contact, looking down at the mess on the ground. He brushed the cookie flakes from his hand, pulling out the fortune.

"Hey, don't worry about me, bro," he said, waving his fortune. "It says here YOU ARE EMPEROR OF ALL YOU SURVEY." He crumpled the paper into a ball and flicked it away.

I wanted to say something to him. An apology, maybe, but it was like I'd just thrown a stone at a gla.s.s house and the shards were still falling all around me. I just had to get out, so I went to my room and lay down on the taut blanket of my perfectly made bed, looking up at the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower and the Kremlin and the Great Wall of China-things that existed somewhere out there in one of the many dimensions I knew I'd never have access to. Things that were all so frighteningly far away.

Screaming. Spinning out of control. Gripping tightly on to the seat. So dizzy . . .

I am there again. I am seven, on a school bus, spinning. Cras.h.i.+ng through the guardrail, caught on the edge of the canyon now, balanced like a teeter-totter, tilting, tilting. Me, crawling down the aisle, toward the emergency exit at the back. The floor rising like a black wave before me as the front end of the bus tilts forward, and I'm climbing the rising floor toward the back of the bus. Pounding, pounding, pounding the emergency exit door. A teacher screaming, "Open it, Blake." What's her name? I can't remember. I'm hitting the door, banging, kicking. I'm not strong enough to open it. I'm not strong enough to open the emergency exit door.

The floor of the bus is a rising wave. The wave hits. It swallows me.

My eyes shot open, and I s.h.i.+vered uncontrollably until the warmth of my room brought my mind and body back from the nightmare. It was two o'clock in the morning-definitely not my favorite time to be awake. The dream was fading, but something wasn't right. Strange light flashed through the blinds, casting s.h.i.+fting slits of light on my travel posters. I sat up and looked out of the window.

An ambulance was parked on our driveway.

"He was just lying there on the living room floor," Mom was telling the paramedics as I came out of my room. "I couldn't wake him up."

It was Quinn.

They had him on the couch now, but he wasn't moving. One of the two guys shone a light into Quinn's eyes and checked his pulse.

"Accelerated pulse. Eyes fixed and dilated," he said. "Do you know what he was on?"