The same week my father gave my mother a heart attack, Jerry Dentro and I made out behind a triceratops at the Beltsville Area Science Museum. We were on a 7th grade class trip and all of this came as a surprise. Jerry Dentro was popular and blonde haired and I, on the other hand, was known for playing the oboe and not much else, so when Jerry grabbed my hand and said that he wanted to show me something he’d found behind the triceratops, I was waiting for some cruel joke he’d concocted. What Jerry actually wanted to show me was how our tongues could slither into each other’s mouths and how he could rub his palm on my cardigan sort of near my bra.
After we finished making out, I ran to find my best friend, Heather. Heather was sitting at one of the experiment benches. She’d taken a skin scraping from the inside of her cheek and was looking at it through a microscope.
“Gross,” she said to me, “my mouth’s full of worms.”
She moved aside to let me look. I saw what she was talking about – there was a hairy centipede-like thing spasming back and forth on the glass plate.
“Jerry and I just made out,” I told her. Even though I was giddy, I tried to sound calm, like kissing Jerry had made total sense to me, like I had expected it to happen.
Heather had been in love with Jerry since 3rd grade. She and I were constantly competing with each other and I was hoping the news of making out with Jerry would shock and annoy her, but Heather didn’t react at all. She just kept staring into the microscope. I continued on, told her how when we were done making out Jerry pointed at the triceratops and told me that “everyone should really respect the triceratops because their bones became the oil and gas that made our cars run,” and how I nodded and kissed him again.
Whenever Heather slept over at my house she practiced kissing boys on her allergen free rice pillow. The boy Heather always pretended to kiss was Jerry Dentro. When she practiced making out with the turkey sandwich in her lunchbox, she pretended the sandwich was Jerry Dentro. Now that I’d kissed Jerry in real life, Heather was doing a great job of caring less.
“Look at that,” she said, shaking her head. “Just look at all the crap that lives inside our mouths.”
When I got home from school that afternoon, I found my father on his hands and knees underneath our dining room table. There was a wad of pink gum the size of a fist sitting on a placemat.
“Someone stuck a bunch of this watermelon flavored shit under here,” he said. “Was it you?”
I pointed to my braces. My braces were my alibi for everything. When I didn’t want to eat something for dinner, I said they were bothering me. When I didn’t want to go antiquing with my parents, I pointed to my teeth and said my braces were giving me a headache. I largely hid my mouth from the world, grinned but never smiled.
“Of course,” my father said, “the braces.”
I lugged my backpack upstairs and knocked on my older brother Karl’s bedroom door. Karl had returned last month after a stay at Carolyn House, an eating disorder treatment center. He hadn’t come out of his room much since he’d been back.
Karl was lying on his bed, scrolling on his phone. He was still rail thin, but much better than a couple months ago when a couple of the veins in his right leg had collapsed and his calf had turned the color of an eggplant. He was still wearing the paper slippers from the treatment center and his body was wrapped in a fluffy robe of my mother’s. According to my parents, I was supposed to give Karl space. When it was determined how much space he needed he would re-enter our lives in a manner he could handle.
“Dad’s scraping a crapload of watermelon gum from underneath the kitchen table,” I said. “Wanna come watch?”
“Sure,” Karl said. “Anything that’s sad for Dad is fun for me.”
Two months ago, my father lost his job as an investment banker. Since then, he’d applied for every job in the tri-state area. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of other younger, hungrier investment bankers who were also out of work, so he hadn’t even landed an interview. He had started to feel old and useless and acted out in unpredictable ways. The day he gave my mother the heart attack, he had hidden inside our linen closet for a half hour, waiting to scare her. When she finally opened the door, my dad screamed “Ahhhh!” and jumped out. My mother fell back against the wall, clutching her chest.
“I can’t even believe the amount of gum under here,” my dad said, upon noticing Karl and I watching him. “It’s like it’s someone’s life’s work. Someone with an absolutely indefatigable spirit.”
My father had put a lot of pressure on Karl during high school. He’d gotten a perfect score on the math portion of the SAT and he’d only made one mistake on the verbal, choosing the wrong definition of the word “indefatigable.” Before Karl left for treatment, my father wove this word into a sentence at least once or twice a day. Now that Karl was in a much more fragile state, he only did it once or twice a week.
“Your sister says she’s completely innocent of this crime,” my father said to Karl. “But what about you? Are you putting this gum under the table?”
“That gum has calories,” Karl said, “so it’s not me.”
Karl walked over to the fridge and took out a bag of baby carrots. He bit down on one of them. His entire body was hunched and tight, and I could tell he wasn’t enjoying it. None of us knew what to do. He liked to snack in front of me and my parents so we might think he was eating more than he probably was. I hated to see him like this, hated to see him still struggling so much, hated to think it might be like this for him for the rest of his life.
“I can’t believe all this goddamn gum,” my dad said, taking out his putty knife and scraping away another piece.
“Is your father still working on the table?” my mother asked when I went upstairs to see her. She was supposed to be on bed rest for a couple more days before starting her cardiac rehab.
“Yep,” I said. “It’ll at least take him a few more hours.”
My mother took a notebook from under the mattress and crossed this off her list. She’d started the notebook to keep my father busy. She didn’t want him parked on the couch, watching reality TV or home-improvement shows for hours on end. She wanted to give him some purpose until he found a job again.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“When your father goes to sleep tonight you’re going to toilet paper the trees in the front yard,” she said. “He’ll have to clean it up and he’ll also want to investigate who did it. That’s a day or two of work for him right there.”
I had a ton of homework, but I knew how important this was. My family was falling apart. We’d all felt the fraying over the last few years, but no one had summoned the energy to figure out how to bring us back together. Even though her plan seemed misguided, it was the first attempt to rally us anyone had made in a long time. I wanted to do my part, so I filled up my duffel bag with a dozen rolls of toilet paper. Ultimately, I didn’t have any better ideas about how to save our family other than going to the front yard under a full moon and vandalizing all of our trees and bushes.
I studied for an hour and then Heather facetimed me, looking for an answer on our chemistry take home quiz. It was almost 10:00pm, but she knew I’d be up. Her parents were like mine, always piling on, always wanting more. At least my parents hadn’t made me play volleyball for an extracurricular. Heather hated it, but there was something inside her that wouldn’t let her be bad. She had sprained her wrist and had all these dark bruises on her arms and legs from diving on the gym floor.
“Has word gotten around about Jerry and me?” I asked.
“Word about what?” she asked.
“About the two of us making out?” I said.
“In the end, what’s there to say?” she asked.
“That we made out by the triceratops?” I said.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “Thinking about how no one else saw you two. Thinking about how it happened behind the triceratops. It all seems pretty convenient, you know?”
“Convenient?” I said.
“Who knows what happened behind that dinosaur?” she said. “Maybe nothing. Maybe all you two did was talk. Triceratopses provide a lot of cover. Triceratopses hide a lot of lies.”
I remembered how, once in Spanish class, Heather picked up a hangnail of Jerry’s he’d chewed off and spit on the floor. She put the hangnail in a Ziploc baggie and stuck it in her freezer. One night when I was over at her house I watched her take it out of the baggie and run it gently across her cheek.
“You’re just jealous,” I said. “You just want Jerry for yourself.”
“How can I be jealous of something that didn’t happen?” she yelled and then hung up on me.
◆
My father was up late, searching for more gum under other pieces of furniture. I watched him tip over the ottoman in the living room, then the recliner. He found a piece of gum under the couch, one I hadn’t put there, one that had turned black and looked like it had been there for ten years. I figured this was going to take a while, so I went upstairs and knocked on Karl’s door.
“Shouldn’t you be toilet papering the yard?” he asked.
“You know about that?” I said.
“Mom and I have been texting,” he told me. On cue, his phone vibrated on his nightstand.
“Is that mom now?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said.
My mother was an interior decorator. She was also a workaholic. She felt guilty that she hadn’t noticed Karl’s eating disorder quickly enough. She’d quit her job when she found out, and drove the hour to Carolyn House every day to visit him.
“Do you want to help me?” I asked him.
“I guess so,” he said.
When my father went to bed, Karl and I snuck outside. We tossed rolls of toilet paper into the oak tree in the front yard until it dripped white. While I chucked my rolls up in the branches of the tree willy nilly, Karl took a more measured approach, slowly ringing the toilet paper around the bushes, trying to make it look symmetrical. When we were finished, we stood on the sidewalk and admired our handiwork. It looked like a gentle snow had fallen, blanketing our entire yard.
◆
When I woke up the next morning, my dad was already on the ladder, slapping a broom at the toilet paper that hung from the trees.
“Was this one of your little school friend’s idea of a joke?” he asked as I walked to catch the school bus.
“I don’t have friends like that,” I said.
“Maybe this was some dumb boy who liked you and he expressed his feelings with toilet paper instead of words?” he asked.
I thought about how I would’ve loved to learn that Jerry was responsible for this, that he thought enough of me to create a mess so large and annoying. I wanted him to come over to my house and wreck something, to throw a rock through a car window or spray-paint some graffiti on my garage just to show the world that he knew I existed.
“Maybe it was just totally random,” I told my dad. “Like how most things in life are totally random.”
“Lately nothing that happens to me seems random,” he said. “Lately it seems like someone is out to get me.”
When I got on the bus, the first person I saw was Heather. Her mother was a dental hygienist and had to be at work too early to give Heather a ride to school. I usually slid into the seat right next to her, but if she wasn’t going to acknowledge my relationship with Jerry, I wasn’t going to acknowledge her. I walked right past her without saying a word, sat a few seats in back of her and stared angrily at the back of her head.
I had decided last night that I was going to play it cool with Jerry too. If he wanted to pursue me, great. If not, that was fine too. Unfortunately, when I got off the bus I immediately saw him playing basketball and I couldn’t help myself. I walked right over to him.
When I got close, his best friend, Cam, blocked my path. At the beginning of the year I saw Cam unbuckle his pants and piss into a ficus in Ms. Williams’ class. I knew I should have ratted him out but I didn’t. I watched the ficus die slowly over the next few months, its leaves browning and crinkling, unable to fight off the toxicity of Cam’s Dorito-filled piss.
“Just walk away,” Cam said.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“He plays with people’s hearts,” he said. “It’s what he does for fun.”
Jerry just kept on shooting baskets, didn’t look over at us. He was either very good at pretending not to see me or actually not seeing me.
“I just need to talk to him for a minute,” I said.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Cam said when he saw I wouldn’t be persuaded.
I walked over to Jerry. I didn’t want to make small talk, didn’t want to discuss basketball, didn’t want to gossip about any of the other kids in our grade. The thing I wanted was for him to kiss me in public and not behind a goddamn dinosaur. When he saw me coming toward him, he chucked his basketball toward a 15-passenger van that was parked by the school’s air conditioning unit. He jogged over to retrieve the ball, but didn’t jog back. Instead, he stood by the van and motioned to me to join him. I looked around. There were no windows looking down on that area of the playground. It was, again, hidden from the view. While Jerry wasn’t in any of my AP classes with me, he was incredibly knowledgeable about all the spots that existed in the world to makeout with someone without being seen.
“Maybe we could go somewhere else,” I said after I walked over to him. “Somewhere with a view of the front steps and maybe a window or two.”
“I am a really private person,” Jerry said. “If you want to know one thing about me, that’s it.”
I heard a bus pull away from the school, then another, heard some kids on the soccer field yell, “Goal!”
“Are you trying to keep us secret?” I snapped. “Is that what this is?”
“No, no,” he said. “I would never.”
Maybe the next time we’d be out in the open and Heather and everyone else would finally see that I was telling the truth? I stepped toward him, back into the shadow of the van. I tilted my lips toward his.
“Fine,” I told him. “Okay.”
When I got home from school, all the toilet paper had been removed from our front yard. Karl was in the kitchen, eating a small carton of yogurt. My mom was standing near him, sipping some iced tea, dressed in yoga pants and a tank top. She had just returned from a walk, part of her rehab. She was supposed to start walking around the neighborhood, gradually increasing her pace and distance.
“There’s news,” she told me. “Your dad got a job interview. It’s with one of his old banking friends. It looks promising.”
I looked over at Karl. He was scraping the last of the yogurt out of the container. He raised his eyebrows and gave me a weak thumbs up.
I knew my father would get that job. Then he would be distracted by it, constantly checking his phone, only engaging us in conversation when we’d done some task incorrectly or wrecked something either cheap or expensive. Occasionally he’d say he was proud of us, but this would only happen about once or twice a year, usually on a holiday, when he’d had a number of glasses of wine. He seemed to think it balanced out all the times he’d said he was disappointed in you.
“Let’s take a break from our project with dad for the time being,” my mom said. “ see how this job interview shakes out.”
The next morning before the all-school award ceremony, I walked into the band room to get a new reed for my oboe and found Heather and Jerry making out behind the tuba. I saw Jerry’s hand under Heather’s shirt and Heather’s lips on Jerry’s neck because, while a tuba is a large instrument, it is not a triceratops.
“How could you?” I yelled, walking toward them.
“Jerry says he never made out with you,” Heather said. “He said you made the whole thing up.”
I saw Jerry trying to contort his body, trying to disappear behind the tuba, but Heather grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out in the open air.
“He’s lying,” I said. “We also made out yesterday behind the school van.”
Heather looked at Jerry and he shook his head no.
“And even if you did make out with him, you knew I always liked him and you made out with him anyway,” she said. “What kind of friend does that?”
I wanted to argue with Heather some more, tell her about how Jerry was an expert at hiding his makeout sessions, but she was done talking to me. She pulled Jerry back behind the tuba and the two of them started kissing again. While I stood there, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that said the award ceremony was starting in five minutes, so I left the band room and walked toward the gym.
It was super hot in the gym and we were all packed in the bleachers. A note had recently been sent home to the entire school to remind everyone that they needed to start wearing deodorant, but not everyone had heeded it.
Principal Tentis stood by the podium. I had once seen him working out at Lifetime Fitness and looking at a picture of a naked woman while running on a treadmill. He smiled now, and told us to quiet down.
“I’m really proud of how hard some of you have worked this quarter,” he said. “Really outstanding stuff.”
He began to announce the names of the honor roll students for this quarter. When he called my name, I walked down the bleachers to get my certificate. Heather’s name was called, but she was not there, she was still in the band room making out with Jerry.
I was exhausted, up late from studying, up late worrying about my brother and about my parents’ marriage. Principal Tentis called the rest of the names. I looked up into the bleachers. All the kids were sectioned off into their groups — the football players elbowing and shoving each other, the theatre kids laughing over some inside joke, the mathletes huddled around a laptop.
My legs were shaky. Principal Tentis kept on calling name after name. I tried not to think about Jerry and Heather but I couldn’t stop. I thought I was going to faint so I spread my feet out wide beneath me. I tried to think about something other than the two of them behind the tuba. I thought about how under the gym floor was concrete slab and how below that slab was shale and bedrock and other old ass rocks. I kept on going. I thought about how under those rocks were shitloads of diamonds and coal and below that was a vast pool of oil from the all the dead dinosaurs, and finally under that, under such unbelievable mind blowing pressure, pressure that no one could probably even imagine, was the molten center of the earth, blood red and pulsing.