Californium Read online

  In Algebra, more names arrive on the wind: The Variables, The Unknown, and Solve for X. Mr. Tomita is talking about prisms, so as soon as I write down V = Bh I’m back at it with Volume!, Volume = Base x hate, and Prism Bound. My head jumps to fourth period, Spanish, and I get a head start with Los Punks, Vamos Loco, and ¿Habla Anarchy? It’s going really good until class is about over and it hits me how the margins of my notebook paper are crammed with ideas and the middle of the page is blank except for that one formula. I peek behind me, and Edie has a full page of notes, formulas with prisms and pyramids, really complicated-looking stuff, and sharp drawings. She smiles. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  She leans closer and whispers, “It’s my new shirt, isn’t it? You can’t take your eyes off it.”

  Edie’s wearing a plain white button-up, except it doesn’t button all the way up. It’s not like Edie’s got much of anything to show off, but now I see these speckled white puka shells I’ve never noticed before because I’ve never really noticed anything below Edie’s neck. And suddenly I really can’t take my eyes off her because her skin looks smooth and tight and there’s this hint of a lacy bra just peeking out, and even though Edie probably doesn’t need a bra, it’s still a bra.

  “Yeah,” I whisper. “I’ve never seen a white shirt before. It’s so exotic.”

  She grins and leans back. Then I hear Mr. Tomita clearing his throat. He’s at the board, chalk in hand, solving a problem and staring at me. “Mr. Houghton, should I move the chalkboard to the back of the classroom?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Should I move Miss Okuda in front of you?”

  Everybody laughs and Mr. Tomita raises on his toes a little and bounces, which is his way of laughing without laughing. “That’s okay,” I say.

  “Good,” Mr. Tomita says. He looks at the clock at the back of the room. “Now, it is almost time to go.” A couple people thump their books shut. “But”—Mr. Tomita is bouncing on his toes again—“until it is time to go, it is time to work.” He goes back to carving away at the board and for the last five minutes I take real notes.

  On the way to the stairs after class, Edie says, “What were you writing?”

  “Some band names for a friend.”

  “Who?” she says.

  “Keith. He’s thinking about starting a punk band.”

  We stop at the staircase. Edie pulls her folder and book into her chest and squints at me, all Superman X-ray vision. “Are you in the band too?”

  “Kind of.”

  She tugs my math folder out of my hand and writes Innocents, only she spells it Inno¢, like money. She puts her phone number underneath and hands the folder back to me.

  “You want me to call you if we use the name?”

  “No.” She rolls her eyes the way she does whenever she’s waiting for me to get the answer she’s had for five minutes. “Call me if you need help with the notes you didn’t take today.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I say. “I’ll tell the guys about the name, too. It’s cool.”

  “I know,” she says without even grinning. Then she jumps into the stream of people heading up the stairs.

  .

  We meet in Treat’s garage after school. It looks cramped at first with boxes stacked everywhere and a VW Bug right in the middle. The Bug doesn’t seem old like you might think. It’s shiny and has that plastic smell, new and fresh and tasteless. Even the boxes around the garage are in good shape, not ripped and coming apart with old baby clothes or Christmas lights spilling out. They’re perfect two-foot squares, sealed with clear tape and as solid as bricks. Treat says they’re computers. Not the kind you see in movies where they’re as big as trophy cases and light up like skyscrapers. Treat’s dad helps design and build them, and he sells them to stores too. That’s why Mr. Dumovitch can have a ponytail, because smart people always have freaky hair. When you think about it, Albert Einstein looks as punk rock as Johnny Rotten. And the only difference between Adam Ant’s hair and Thomas Jefferson’s is the color of the ribbon they put around their ponytails.

  Mr. D is fine with us practicing in the garage as long as we stack all the boxes along the two walls that are connected to the house. I’m thinking it’s to keep us from breaking something. Treat says it’s to soundproof the room.

  Treat opens the door to the Bug and says, “I’ll get this out of the way.”

  “You can drive it?” I say.

  “I’ve got my permit,” he says.

  Keith looks in the passenger-side window, then up at Treat. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough to know.”

  “Know what?”

  Treat leans on the roof of the car to get closer to Keith. “Know where to hide your body if you ask too many questions.” He smiles and Keith does this chin-scratching, squinty-eyed nod, like, Yes, that’s exactly what I thought.

  I run my hand along the curvy back fender. It’s so smooth and waxy the metal feels soft. “Where’d you get it?”

  “My dad’s had it since college,” Treat says and climbs in. “It’s still pretty cherry because as soon as he got a good job he stopped driving it.”

  “Why’d he keep it?”

  “I don’t know,” Treat says. “Sentimental shit, I guess.” He fires up the engine and it sounds like a baseball card when you strap it to your bike so the spokes hit it—loud and trilling and sputtery. “Somebody get the garage door.”

  With Keith backing away from the car and heading over to the door to the house, I walk to the garage door. Just as I’m about to start pushing it open, the door moves on its own and I almost fall over. With the car’s engine zinging and the springs on the door creaking and popping, I’m as confused as a rookie in an all-star game. Then I look back at Keith standing by the door to the house, his finger on some little box on the wall and laughing at me like he’s the Great Oz.

  Once we start stacking boxes along the two walls, we get this rhythm going where I hand Treat a box, he spins and places it on the wall, then turns around and Keith’s handing him the next box. Treat’s twisting and placing so fast the shaved parts of his head start beading up and the Mohawk sags a little. He climbs up on the wall, four feet high now, and says, “You guys got any band names yet?”

  “How about the Tix?” Keith says. “With an X. Or Fluff Knuckle?”

  “Yeah,” Treat says without turning around from the box he’s slamming into place. “If we wanted to tour with the Village People.”

  I hand a box up. “Sometimes girls like stuff like that. Like if we were called Innocents but we spelled the last part with a cent sign?”

  Treat slaps my box up against another one. “No.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Do you get it? We don’t spell it out all the way—”

  “I get it,” he says. He starts walking along the box wall he’s built, rubbing the shaved parts of his head, getting his hand right up to the base of the Mohawk before sliding it back down to his neck. “Punk is about going against that candy store shit. Punk walks right up to the cops, knocks the doughnut out of their hands, and says, ‘Oh, and one more thing, Officer Swine. Fuck the po-lice.’”

  Treat walks back to the middle, stops, and stares down at us. He’s already half a foot taller than me and I’ve got a couple inches on Keith, and with four feet of boxes beneath him and the Mohawk reaching up to the rafters, I’m not sure if we’re supposed to bow or clap or what.

  Before I talk, I put my hands in my back pockets and pull my head back. I think I saw this on an album—maybe it was Mick Jagger—but it looked kind of cool. “So, punk is about saying, ‘Fuck the Man’?”

  Treat folds his arms, which only makes them bulge out bigger, and gets this little grin on his face.

  Keith nods. “How about Fuck Knuckle?”

  “Almost,” Treat says. He counts bands off on his fingers: “The Sex
Pistols, Black Flag, the Clash, the Dead Boys, Buzzcocks.” He waves Keith up for the next box. “Think like that.”

  It takes a few more boxes for us to get our rhythm back; then the names start coming: the Convicts, Screaming Mimes, Second Thoughts, and Kurfew with a backward K. Treat says the names sound better, but he just isn’t seeing them on album covers. We take a break and Treat brings out a Dead Kennedys sticker to show us how the initials DK look like a tomahawk the way they’re pushed together with the stem of the K extra long like a handle.

  “My dad loves Richard Nixon,” Keith says. “How about him?”

  Treat looks at the rafters. “Dead Nixons?”

  “Tricky Dick?” Keith says. “That’s his nickname.”

  Treat shakes this off. “Sounds too much like Soft Cell, and that’s just one step above disco.”

  All week in Science, Mr. Krueger’s been talking about how combining two things doesn’t make them half of one and half of the other; it makes a third, totally new thing. “Dick Nixon,” I say. “We leave out the c and push it all together, d-i-k-n-i-x-o-n.”

  “Diknixon,” Treat says. “But with the N capitalized right in the middle.”

  I can see the name coming out of his mouth as he says it. The Mohawk starts moving up and down, Treat smiling and saying faster, all one word, and angrier: “Dik-Nixon. DikNixon. DikNixon!”

  A smile creeps across Keith’s face. “It’s good,” he says. “It’s got the word dick in it.”

  .

  As me and Keith walk home, we feel good about being DikNixon. All those guys playing soccer in the park, who knows they’re soccer players when they’re not in their uniforms? Who can tell if you’re in Math Club or Spanish Club when you aren’t at the meetings? But when you’re in a band, people know. They know it exists because of you, and if you quit, it goes away. That’s huge.

  At home, all I want to do is talk about DikNixon, but I can’t. My parents don’t need to know, Colleen’s too young to understand, and Brendan couldn’t care less if it doesn’t have anything to do with football. So here I am, geeked up in my room and just writing the name in different ways on notebook paper until I’ve got the word Dik angular with the D and the K shaped like two arrows, the I in between them: >I<. Then I stack it on top of Nixon with all those letters the same height and it looks right. I draw it careful and slow on the notebook I use for letters to Uncle Ryan, right next to the NY of a Yankees logo I drew, only bigger. Now it’s official. I draw it on my English folder, then Spanish, and then I see Edie’s number, swirly and blue across the top of my Algebra folder.

  My heart’s pounding—full-count, bases-loaded, bottom-of-the-ninth pounding—and in a second I’m downstairs in the kitchen, dialing. The phone hums and crackles and hums and crackles and then, in mid-hum, clicks. This tired-sounding “Ha-lo” comes through the line. With my best church voice I say, “Hello, ma’am, this is Reece Houghton from Edie’s Algebra class. Is she home?” There’s a mishmash of talking and the only word I can make out is “Edie!”

  The phone crackles and thumps a little, there’s this shuffle of footsteps, and did Edie just say something in Japanese? Then I hear, “Reece?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s going on?”

  It’s weird how clear she sounds, like she’s right next to me, and even though I’ve never been to Edie’s house I can see her standing next to the phone in her kitchen, leaning against the counter.

  “Who was that?” I say.

  “My grandmother.” Edie has this way of talking while she smiles, especially if she’s making fun of you, and I hear her face doing that. “Are you just calling to see if I gave you the right number?”

  “No. We got a band name.”

  “Cool,” she says, and she says it cool: not excited like she won a prize but long and smooth, like each o really matters.

  “Yeah. Only, we didn’t go with yours because Treat wanted something more punk rock.” Just as I’m saying this my mom walks into the kitchen and starts pulling things out of the cabinets. My face and chest flash hot like I’ve been caught looking at panty ads in the Sunday Times.

  “That’s okay,” she says. “What name did you pick?”

  I look at my mom. Her hair is still done up, her nose freckles still hidden beneath makeup, but she puts on an apron over her work clothes. She’s going to be here awhile. “Dick Nixon,” I say just above a whisper.

  Edie laughs. “Richard Milhous Nixon? For a punk band?”

  “It’s how you write it,” I say.

  And just as Edie says, “How do you write it?” my mom says, “Who are you talking to?”

  “In English,” I say.

  “Reece?” my mom says.

  I cover the phone. “Someone from school.”

  She nods and starts washing off potatoes.

  “Oh,” Edie says like I just told her the earth was round. “So you’re not going to write it in Japanese characters?”

  I know her arms are folded now and she’s smiling like she’s tough. “Characters?” I say. “They’re not letters?”

  “Not really. It’s complicated.”

  “Oh. Well, this isn’t complicated. It’ll still look cool, though.”

  Edie laughs, a nice one, not like she’s making fun, and then neither of us says anything. I’m staring at the floor tiles, listening to Edie breathe. Then it hits me: There isn’t any other sound. My mom’s at the cutting board, potato peeler in one hand, a potato in the other, only she’s not peeling. She grins at me and mouths, A girl?

  I shake my head no and she looks down to start peeling. “Have I met this person?” she says out loud.

  “Is that your mom?” Edie says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I have?” my mom says.

  I glare at her and cover the phone. “Not you.”

  Edie says, “Tell her I said hi.”

  “My friend says hi.”

  My mom keeps whittling away at the potatoes. “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “My mom says hello,” I say.

  “What’s she do?” Edie says.

  “Reece?”

  “Manages some office,” I say.

  “What kind of office?”

  My mom clacks the potato peeler down on the cutting board. “Reece?”

  “I don’t know,” I say to Edie.

  My mom’s eyebrows rise. “I asked you a question.”

  “It’s nobody,” I say. “Just a person from my math class.”

  My mom gives me the Now, was that so hard? look before picking up the peeler and returning to the potatoes.

  “Man,” I say into the phone and don’t hear anything back. “Hello?”

  “I’ll let you go,” Edie says.

  “That’s okay. Dinner’s not ready yet.”

  “Well, then I’ll let me go. I need to get back to my homework.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” she says. “In math class.”

  The phone clicks and I’ve barely got the receiver back on the wall before my mom’s rattling things off without even looking at me: How I’d better not ever talk to her like that again, especially in front of a friend, and do I think that was cool or something? Do my friends treat their parents like that? I stare at her and think, Nothing I do seems cool, and yeah, Keith and Treat are worse. Only, if I say any of that, I’ll be doing dishes and peeling potatoes every night until I graduate. So I just take it, then say how sorry I am and how it won’t happen again. That gets her because she’s a mom, except she doesn’t say it’s okay like usual; she says she forgives me, which is different, because it keeps the guilt on me.

  Back in my room after dinner, I’m stuck after two algebra problems and spend most of the time drawing the DikNixon logo again and again. Every time I look up at Inno¢ and Edie
’s number, I want to call her back for help, but now I can’t imagine how to ask without sounding stupid.

  .

  I’m early to Algebra on Wednesday, hoping to get Edie’s notes, but she doesn’t get there until just as the bell rings. Mr. Tomita hops up right away with a big announcement about this accident he saw coming in to school today. It gets everybody leaning forward, excited and wanting to know everything. Edie even shushes me twice, so I shut up and listen like everybody else.

  Mr. Tomita says the accident happened at the intersection of Imperial Highway and Yorba Linda Boulevard. And not only did he see the accident; he also heard some of the stories the witnesses told. “I don’t want to say too much,” he says, rocking back and forth, “in case one of you knows the people involved. I’ll just call the two people involved Mr. X and Mr. Y.” Everyone’s nodding like that makes sense; any way he can tell us more is fine.

  Edie lets out this annoyed sigh when Mr. Tomita starts in about how the cops made people stand on one of the four corners depending on what they thought of the stories Mr. X and Mr. Y had told. He draws it on the board so we can understand better how some people believed both, some believed X and not Y or Y and not X, and how some didn’t believe either. “We already know how some people are always positive,” he says, “and some are always negative. They are the easy ones to understand. It’s the people who are a little bit of both that we seem to have trouble with.” He bounces on his toes, and Edie’s sigh makes sense to me now. This isn’t a story; we’re moving on to a new unit and Mr. Tomita is tricking us into learning.

  After class, I can barely keep up with Edie as she walks to the staircase. She hasn’t said a thing, so I finally say, “You never said if you liked our band name.”

  Without stopping or looking at me, she says, “It’s interesting.”

  “That means no.”

  Edie stops walking. “If my opinion offends you, don’t ask for it.”

  “Offend?”

  She starts walking again. “Look it up.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Good,” she says, “because I’d hate to think you need some person from your English class to help you with that homework too.”