Нил Шустерман - Antsy Does Time

“Maybe it’s not you she likes. Maybe it’s the idea of you.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, maybe you should take the idea of yourself into that bathroom, because I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

She stormed into the bathroom without anyone’s help, and with the grace of someone who knew exactly where they were going. Any human asteroid in her way had better watch out. Well, I wasn’t going to walk her back. I pulled aside the busboy who couldn’t pour water right and told him to escort Miss Crawley back to the table when she was done.

She was jealous. That was it. Had to be. Just like I was jealous of her and her clicking celebrity boyfriend. But that would pass. Things were just getting started between Kjersten and me, and I wasn’t going to let Lexie ruin it.

When I got back to the table, Kjersten was putting on her coat.

“What’s the matter? You cold?”

“I’m sorry, Anthony. I’ve got to go.”

My first response was to look at Raoul. “What did you do?” I asked, figuring maybe he clicked her cleavage, and told her the size of her bra.

“Nothing,” said Raoul. “She had a phone call.”

“It was my father. I’m grounded.”

I just looked at her for a while in stunned denial, like the time I was a kid and my mother told me we’re not going to Disney World, on account of the airline suddenly decided to go out of business.

“What? You can’t get grounded in the middle of a date. That’s like ... that’s like against the law.”

“I was grounded before the date,” she admitted. “I’m not supposed to be out, but my mom doesn’t care, and my dad wasn’t home.”

“Exactly—he’s never home, so that voids the grounding, right?”

“He’s home now.” She zipped up her jacket, sealing away the view of her amazing dress from me and the paparazzi.

“Can’t you be like ... rebellious or something?”

“I was rebellious—that’s why I’m grounded.”

I found myself wondering what she had done, and coming up with things that were probably much more exotic than what really happened. Then I said in a voice far more whiny than I meant it to be, “Can’t you be rebellious with me?”

She looked at me, and I could tell that she really did want to stay. But I could also tell from that look that she wouldn’t. Then she kissed me, and by the time I recovered from the kiss, she was gone. The waiter, totally clueless, brought the meals and set them down, but right now it was just me and Raoul—and it was anyone’s guess if Lexie would come out of the bathroom after what I said to her.

I sat down, dazed by the crash-and-burn of it all, and Raoul says, “So do you want me to echolocate the number of people in the room, or not?”

I want to make it absolutely clear that what happened to Gunnar’s neighbors was an accident—and for once, I get to share the blame with someone else.

With our dust-bowl due date just a few days away, Gunnar and I were under a time constraint, and we were working too hard on this Steinbeck project to get marked down for being late. I have experience in that department, and know for a fact that there are teachers who measure lateness in microseconds on that world clock they got in England. And there’s no bottom to this pit. I actually once got a Z-minus on a late paper. I pointed out to the teacher that she coulda marked me even lower if she used the Russian alphabet, on account of it has something like thirty-three letters instead of twenty-six. She was impressed enough by the suggestion that she raised my grade to a Z-plus.

To avoid letter grades in the lower half of the alphabet, Gunnar and I needed to kill off the plants quickly to get our dust bowl rolling, so we used a lot of herbicide. Now Gunnar’s next-door neighbors were all ticked off because their yards were smelling like toxic waste. It was Sunday morning. The day after my not-quite-a-date with Kjersten. I really didn’t want to be there and have to face Mr. Ümlaut, who I held personally responsible for ruining my evening. And I didn’t want to face Kjersten just yet, because it was too soon after the walkout. But I had to go through the house to get to the backyard. I was hoping Gunnar would answer the door, but he was already working out back.

Kjersten answered the door.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Nice day.”

“Sunny.”

“Sun’s good.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway...”

“Right.”

I tried to put an end to the misery by moving toward the back door, but she wasn’t letting me. Not yet.

“Sorry about last night,” she said. “We’ll do it again, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem.”

“No,” she said. “I mean it.”

And I could tell that she really did mean it. Deep down, I had kind of felt that a ruined evening meant ruined hopes. It was good to know that another, better date was still on the horizon.

“When’s your grounding over?” I asked.

“As soon as I get the grade back on my chemistry test tomorrow—and my father can see I didn’t need to skip my tennis tournament to study.”

I smiled. “And here I thought you cut school for a wild ski trip.” Which was one of my tamer scenarios. I took her hand and stood there for a long moment that, believe it or not, didn’t feel awkward at all, then I went out to the backyard.

There was all this cardboard in the yard, because today’s project was a cardboard shack for Steinbeck’s starving farmers. At the moment I arrived in our little dust bowl, Gunnar was being scolded by his next-door neighbor over the fence. “Look what you’ve done to my yard! It’s all dead!”

“It’s that time of year,” I offered, pointing out the dead leaves around her yard. “That’s why they call it ‛fall.’”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “What about the evergreens?”

She indicated some bushes way across the yard that had gone a sickly shade of brown. Then she looked bitterly down at some thorny, leafless bushes in front of her that could have just been dormant if we didn’t already know better—because if the herbicide had made it all the way across the yard, these nearby bushes were history.

“Do you have any idea how long I’ve cultivated this rose garden?”

My next response would have been a short and sweet “Oops,” but Gunnar has last week’s vocabulary word, which I lack: eloquence.

“‘Only when the Rose withers can the beauty of the bush be seen,’” he told her. It shut her up and she stormed away.

“What does that even mean?” I asked after she was gone.

“I don’t know, but Emily Dickinson said it.”

I told him that quoting Emily Dickinson was just a little too weird, and he agreed to be more testosterone-conscious with his quotations. He looked over at the neighbors’ yard, surveying the ruins of the garden. “A little death never hurt anyone,” he said. “It gives us perspective. Makes us remember what’s important.”

I hadn’t been too worried about the neighbors’ plants dying until now. Collateral damage, right? Only this was more than just collateral damage—and only later did we realize why. See, guys all have this problem. It’s called the we-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-directions problem. Gunnar and I had bought half a dozen jugs of herbicide, coated the plants with the stuff like we were flocking Christmas trees, and we were satisfied with the results. We could have done a commercial for the stuff . . . However, if we had read the directions, we would have seen that the stuff was concentrated—you know, like frozen orange juice: we were supposed to use one part herbicide to ten parts water. So basically we sprayed enough of the stuff to kill the rain forests.