Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

It was warm in the car. “Hey, sugar,” Mom said. She pulled away from the curb, humming with the radio. We stopped at the end of the street as a gaggle of kids crossed in front of us.

“So how was school?” Mom asked me.

“It was fine,” I said, slouching in my seat, hoping I wouldn’t be seen.

“I was thinking of doing tuna casserole tonight,” she said. “And L.A. Law .” My mother and I enjoyed this show, but I wasn’t in the mood. For the first time, the fundamental syllogism of adolescence occurred to me: Your mom loves you. Your mom is biologically obliged to love you, even if you’re a total loser. Therefore her love means nothing, and you probably are a total loser .

“That’s great, Mom,” I said. “That sounds great. Um, I need to talk to you about something.”

She shifted instantly into concerned mode, which comes more naturally to my mom than any other mode. “What is it, sweetie?” she said.

“I don’t want to ride home with you anymore,” I said. I wasn’t even looking at her, but everything suddenly felt different, and I knew I’d hurt her badly.

“I just… no one else rides home with their mom, you know?” I said. A long pause.

Finally she said, in a voice almost entirely devoid of inflection, “So how does everyone else get to school?”

“They get rides with other kids,” I said. “Or they take the bus.”

“I’ve always said you can get a ride with someone else’s mom,” she said. “That was the whole point. And if there was a bus for you to take, believe me, I’d be more than happy for you to take it.” I didn’t say anything. “Do you think I like spending an extra forty-five minutes every morning and forty-five minutes every evening in the car?”

I remained silent, partly because I had believed that she did enjoy it. She always seemed happy to see me, and happy to be driving along listening to the radio, just the two of us. I wasn’t sure if she’d never liked it at all, or if she was pretending because I’d hurt her feelings. We drove the rest of the way in silence, except for the radio: “More Than Words,” “Justify My Love,” commercials for local mattress stores. Of course there was no way for me to get to school without her.

My mother parked on the street and I shadowed her into the house. She put her handbag heavily down on the kitchen counter and, still in her coat, began grabbing cans of food out of the cabinets. I skulked past her and into my room, where I took off my shoes and sat on my bed with my knees tucked under my chin. For a long time I played out the conversation we’d just had in different ways: sometimes I said, Thanks for driving me to school, Mom, I really appreciate it; other times she said, Well, we’ll just have to move somewhere closer to a bus line . After running both versions half a dozen times without much satisfaction I gave up and reached for my backpack. I had a few new pieces of information to add to the notebook: Danielle Orr had said hi to me in the hallway, and Rebecca Castillo seemed to have dumped Steve Papp for Dave Breuer, a definite trade-up. I unzipped the bag and flipped through the items inside: my ring binder, my chemistry textbook, my paperback copy of Stranger in a Strange Land . I couldn’t see the notebook at first, but this was not unusual because it was smaller and thinner than most of the books I carried to and from school. I went through the bag’s contents again, more systematically, and felt an abyss of panic open beneath me. I pulled the books and folders out of the backpack one by one. I held each upside down by its spine to allow anything hidden between the pages to drop onto the bed. I reached my arms into the empty backpack and ran my fingers over the interior’s nylon surface, peering inside and taking in the rubbery scent. I unzipped the small pocket on the front of the backpack, although the notebook wouldn’t have fit inside, and removed my wallet, my calculator, the house keys I carried in case of an emergency, two black pens, a green marker, two Jolly Ranchers, a Jolly Rancher wrapper, and a dime. I stopped and looked at the pile of objects on the bed. None of them was the notebook. It’s probably in my locker at school , I thought. Or if it’s not I can always kill myself .

It wasn’t in my locker. I unpacked the contents — textbooks, binders, two sweaters, returned homework — and scrutinized each item before setting it on the checkerboard linoleum in a pile that Ron Nathorp, at the locker next to mine, kicked over with the back of his heel. Kids packed the hallway, bumping and shouting, and I expected each one who passed to say something like, So, Danielle really likes Guns N’ Roses, huh ? or Yeah, how about Vicki Gordon’s tits ? or You must be the lamest person in the world !

I tried to recall every step I’d taken since the previous lunchtime, when, in the privacy of a third-floor toilet stall, I had added a datum about Karen Longnecker and Julia Mossman. (Many of the observations in the book, to my surprise, described the friendships between girls.) I thought I remembered replacing it in my backpack afterward, although in these situations it’s impossible to know whether you’re recalling a specific event or just appropriating memories of similar events from other occasions. I didn’t believe the backpack could have come open by itself: it was sturdily built, and the zipper was made by YKK, which is the sign of a reliable zipper.

I walked into homeroom with something large and fleshy in my throat but, to my relief, no one paid me any attention. By third-period English I found I could go without thinking about the notebook for minutes at a time, although eventually my thoughts would land on Gwen Vries or Nancy Chang and I would experience the urge to write something in the notebook and once again I would be filled with the dull certainty of imminent disaster.

Class ended, and we all joined the flow down to the cafeteria. Each stairway doubled back on itself at a landing; on a trip from the fourth floor to the cafeteria you changed direction seven times. Between classes this was chaos, since we didn’t self-organize into a file going up and a file going down, so every little flight of fourteen steps between a floor and a landing resembled two medieval armies colliding on a steep hillside. Before lunch, though, it was a different kind of chaos: the entire student body hurtling downstairs, gathering reinforcements at every floor. You could get swept down the last couple flights without effort, as if your feet had been lifted off the ground. One or two kids struggled upstairs like climbers in an avalanche.

I attained the cafeteria and looked around for somewhere to sit. Instinctively I took note of the four or five girls who were at the center of my narrowing researches. Ginny Oyler was sitting with Leah Toomey’s crowd, which was new. And there was unusual hilarity at Michelle and Tara’s table. Michelle’s back was to me; she seemed to be reading something to Tara and Louise and Becky Busch and Lisa Buonano. I wondered what the joke was. And then my eyes met Tara’s and she stopped laughing and began to make frantic shushing motions to her companions, patting the air with her hands, and the cafeteria seemed very big and very noisy, and I was sure there had to be some way to reverse one of the steps that had led to this moment, but of course there wasn’t. And Michelle turned around in her seat and scanned the room and finally gestured in my direction with the gentlest nod imaginable, and the entire table looked at me and broke into laughter, except for Tara, who stared down at her lunch with an expression that I was unable to read.

The bathroom in the school’s basement got very little traffic, and its heavy air smelled of damp cement. Warmed by the giant boilers next door, I sat in a stall and tried to reconstruct from memory my observations of 39 ninth-grade girls — not to preserve the information, which was useless to me since Michelle Kessel’s lunchtime reading yesterday, but to imagine it through the eyes of its subjects. What would Becky Busch think, for instance, when she learned that, next to her name, I had written Never smiles and Insists that trees are not alive b/c they don’t walk around ? Or Nancy Chang, whose entry, in its entirety, read Smells good: publicly she’d be repulsed, but would she also, secretly, be pleased? Counting out the thirty-nine girls on my fingers I reviewed my useless notes, meditating on each in turn, in the hope that I could wring the shame from them. I could distract myself for brief periods by examining the shapes where the paint had peeled off the cubicle’s wooden wall: under the blue-gray was a coat of forest green. In sixteen minutes I was due in biology with Michelle and Louise and Tara. I had skipped it yesterday. I could skip it again today, become a truant, get expelled, start over at another school, but what I’d done would follow me there. When Carl Driesdale transferred to Wilson, everyone knew he’d been thrown out of his previous school for biting some kid on the dick. Was that even true? I tried to remember arriving at school yesterday, before I had ruined my life, and I wanted to weep from nostalgia. And then the bell rang, and by some autonomic reflex I got up and headed out of the bathroom into the treacherous world.