Korê in New York

What happens when a kid refuses to leave the past behind? What happens when the past won't go away? Read on and don't worry about the emotional damage.

1. Flies in Winter

   Dad droveall the way to the Tennessee border which meant we left Asheville in a sullen and surly mood on the morning of December 28. Margolin did not like having to do her dirties in the motel laundry even though Dad made us all wash our clothes. “If they have a machine, you should use it,” he explained.

   We also had the Asheville, North Carolina version of pretrip bodega duty early on the morning of the 28th. It was not yet light as Margolin and I ambled down the highway. We were not speaking. Margolin as all of you know is NOT my friend. I was not mad at her. I just simply had nothing to say.

   Margolin’s plastic was once again dead. I suspected Dad might be killing it. I did not like that. If I got sent off to have my brains picked by the ECBAS crowd as Dad believed I would, I’d be subject to the same sorts of petty tricks. Then again, part of me believed it was just perfect to see Margolin get her nose rubbed in her own ignorance and lack of education, and the lesson needed a few repeats if you know what I mean.

   By the time Margolin and I returned from our silent slog, Dad and RoAnn all ready had the van packed. All three of us girls got stuck in the back and I got the hump. We’d switch seats around lunch time. Dad refused to play music. There were snow flurries and lots of fog in the mountains and this kind of winter driving made him nervous.

   I did not want to sleep, but it felt strange riding in such a silent car with not much to see but the grey and dismal winter landscape. I let my mind drift to the coming week. Dad would probably leave some time tomorrow or the day after. I was going to have to get along without him. Margolin would be back with her family or even in California. Thank God for small blessings. Ivanna did not concern me. She had spent three days with her father, had new or additional family, and probably done the best of any of us. She stared out the window lost in her own thoughts. Maybe she felt like shit having to go back to New York. I do not always have sympathy for my stepsister, and I wished I had had it that morning in the mountains.

   As for me, I needed something to get away from the whole mess. I resolved to ask to go to Coney Island or Staten Island to see my friends from school. They would be a great antidote to three days with Margolin Sidlow. That was for sure! They would also help me escape from how I’d feel missing Dad again.

   I had only to wait until I had some privacy to phone Chin on my Blackberry. I kept that in mind through the dull silence which ended when RoAnn took over. The bad news was that she started with the first six cuts. She said she had missed the music as much as we had, so in it went as we began our ascent of the pass. She chose six of the most mouldie and decrepit oldies imaginable. Ever hear of the Steve Miller Band. She even mouthed the words to Swingtown as we asceneded through a blanket of grey clouds to Wytheville, Virginia.

   I was glad when Margolin got to play her six cuts, and then Ivanna. We were just starting my cuts by the time we reached Roanoke. Dad wanted to get us lunch at Subway. He handed Margolin seven dollars. “Everyone pays for and orders their own,” he said in a voice that could have been coated in honey. Margolin stared at the two ones and a five as if they were contaminated.

   “Are we going on a walk after lunch?” Margolin asked.

   “We always go on a prom-en-odd,” snapped back Ivanna.

   “I want to stretch my legs,” RoAnn told both girls.

   Dad let Margolin keep her lunch change by the way. “Think of all the cities we never visit,” Margolin said as we walked through what was left of downtown Roanoke.

   “There are ECBAS kids here,” Ivanna reminded my not friend. “ECBAS is all over the country.”

   “You think kids here will really fight for change?” Margolin asked my stepsister.

   “They had better fight because the other side is all ready fighting,” RoAnn told my not friend.

   “I guess…if you call that church thing not fighting. Those assholes don’t know they are beat.”

   “Are they beaten?” Dad asked.

   “Imagine going to school in a church, a school no one recognizes.”

   “You go to Saint Balandina,” I chimed in.

   “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Margolin.

   “People wonder whether you learn anything,” Dad explained it.

   “It doesn’t matter. Social capital is more important than knowledge. Everything you know becomes obsolete in ten years anyway.”

   “Who told you that shit?” I inquired.

   “Uh….Margolin,” RoAnn interrupted. “Individuals don’t have social capital.”

   “Why not?” asked my not friend.

   “Because that’s not the definition of the word. Social capital is a group’s political influence. Are you a group?”

   We got out RoAnn’s laptop and checked the definition using a Wi-Fi connection just so my stepmother could prove herself right. In a way, though, it felt good.

   “Wait until this time next year,” Margolin attempted her rant from a new angle as Dad drove toward Staunton, the last leg of the trip. I don’t have to tell you that I did not get to hear all my cuts on the CD player.

   “What do you think you’ll be doing next year?” Dad asked. He did not want music, but he did not mind talk. I wondered how soon he’d decide that our conversation was “bickering.” “Bickering” is the adult term for interesting and animated conversation by kids.

   “We’re going to win,” Margolin boasted.

   “What about all those kids in the church?” asked Ivanna.

   “They’re going to realize they’re nothing. That’s how it works. Someone has to be nothing but if you try…Well some of them will try and some of them wake up and hurt. That’s the way it has to be.”

   “Have you ever been nothing?” I asked Margolin and then I wished I hadn’t. It would have been a hundred times better to feign sleep.

   “No,” she replied. “Why…have you?”

   “Yeah and it sucked.”

   “What did you do about it?”

   “Got out. I studied for the New York City Specialized High School Exam and got into Brooklyn Tech,” I replied.

   Margolin sniffed.

   “Yes, Margolin,” smiled RoAnn. “What are you going to do about schools like Brooklyn Tech?”

   “Maybe we’ll leave them alone or maybe we’ll try and talk to the kids there. You see most people want to be cool…if they have a chance. If we give them one more chance…they won’t have to take second best.”

   “But your social system has guaranteed losers in order to have guaranteed winners,” RoAnn enjoyed herself. Thankyou Stepmom. You rock!

   “Yeah, but the kids who are nothing. Half of them don’t try, and there’s also…well there’s also kids with stuff wrong with them too. People don’t like to talk about that, so they’re politically correct, but that’s the way it is.”

   “Margolin,” RoAnn began. “There’s a book you need to read.”

   “I hate reading,” the girl told us all. “I hope it’s not a long book.”

   “It’s long, but you may find it intersting. It’s called Lord of the Flies.”

   “Lord of the Flies is not realistic,” I spoke up.

   RoAnn made a startled noise.

   “When the Fast Crowd takes over,” I stammered. “They don’t wreack death and destruction. They take all the good stuff or themselves and have a good time. They don’t need to kill. They just leave out all the kids they don’t like and make life hell for the younger kids who get left out.  It’s political and cool, not savage, but it still sucks.”

   “A meriticoracy is probably a better way to go,” Dad added, reviving the flagging conversation.

   “Yeah if you are a tool,” snarled Margolin. “But what if all the tools woke up one morning and realized that what they were doing was worthless?”

   “It’s not going to happen that way,” Dad spoke. “StarCorp has a five year head start. That means a lot now but a year from now it’s going to be a four yer head start. Our side only started fighting with the general strike on October 26. It’s new  to us and we won’t give up a year from now.

   “And the timelines are common knowledge among those who care about these things. It is nothing your parents don’t all ready know,” Dad added.

   Margolin did not answer. She like the rest of us was stuck in the van until we reached Staunton and checked in. I offered to take the roll away again. We went for a predinner walk and found our way to a Chinese buffet place for supper. RoAnn took Margolin and Ivanna under her wings as the three of them ate mostly desserts. The talk turned to bath bombs, smoothies, and other comfort measures to ease frayed psyches.

   “Why did you become a tool?” Margolin asked my stepmother?

   “Being academic was the best thing out there when I was a kid,” RoAnn replied.

   “You mean you just gave up?” Margolin rephrased RoAnn’s answer.

   “I did not say that,” RoAnn answered. “Margolin everyone looks at the future and there comes a time when a girl knows she won’t be a model or a dancer. Maybe some girls are on dance team or cheerlead so it takes them longer, and there are some real models, but I’m talking about most girls. We still have a future though, and we have to pick what we will be.

   “I looked around and saw my mothers and aunts. They graduated from high school. They had kids. They shopped. They watched TV. They worked or stayed home. They hoped there was enough money. Sometimes there was. Sometimes there wasn’t. Either way, their life was boring.

   “There was my father, but he was a man and male things never interested me. I just didn’t have a Y chromosome and I never had an urge to go hunting, join the army, and I never considered a car more than just transportation.

   “Then there were my teachers and school. I loved to read. I was good at math. If I worked hard, I could go to college and teach other people. My oldest sister followed my mother. AnnaMarie was interested in babies and interior decoration. Mom and she were best friends. My younger sister lived dangerously, which is another approach but not one that appealed to me. Other kids carved out other roles. I have seven siblings so two of us or so took each choice and we spread ourselves out like birds find ecological niches. Does that answer your question?”

   Margolin stared at her half eaten and very mutilated chocolate cream pie. She declared to all and sundry that her pie tasted gross and she pushed it to the center of the table.

   She looked as if she would bolt out of the restaurant. She looked as if she would cry, and then she wept and shook. She told us tools were “really evil people.” RoAnn thanked her for the compliment. We took her for a long walk in the cold to let her cool off so at least she could sleep. I think she cried in her sleep too. If she were Ivanna, I might have felt some sympathy for her, but having to learn that the academic side in the culture war is willing to fight and tells its own stories is reality lesson one. Learning that you need some academic skills to survive in the world is lesson two, and the reading list: Lord of the Flies is just a bonus. Art sometimes reflects life.

2. Burying Minerva

   Dad scored my practice Regents. I got a ninty-two which is low for a test taken under something approximating home conditions. It had grown dark outside even though the sun set later in Asheville than it did in New York City.

   “When are you going to go abroad again?” I asked Dad. It was not the question I usually asked. I usually waited for Dad to tell me this stuff because I did not want to know, and it was better not to know until you had to know.

   “Probably after we get back to New York,” he said which told me nothing.

   “How soon?” I was surprised at how anxious I sounded. Some part of me must have been afraid of being left alone with Ivanna, Margolin, and RoAnn though Margolin would when I thought about it be back with her family of course.

   “Probably the day after we get back.” Dad at least was honest. Ivanna, Margolin, and RoAnn were still not back.

   “Want to go get supper?” Dad asked.

   “What about RoAnn and Ivanna?” I asked.

   “We’ll leave them a note. I think they went to get smoothies or ice cream. They won’t want to eat much if they want to eat at all. I’m starving.”

   “Where’ll we go?”

   “What do you feel like eating?”

   “Pizza or Italian unless you want a sub or there’s a cafeteria.”

   Dad leaned over his laptop and ran a few searches. “OK, let’s go get some dinner,” Dad smiled at me. “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “That Regents score can only go up.”

   “Why are you so sure?” I asked him.

   “Because I know you and I know how hard you can work.”

   “Thanks Dad.”

   It was a good three miles to the J & S Cafeteria. It was a southern place which meant fried okra which I had with chicken livers and carrot salad. Chicken livers in any restaurant are a rare treat. Dad had broiled fish, spinach salad, and a corn stick. We watched the waitress boggle when we asked for cups of hot tea with our meals. We sat by a window. The snow had all ready refrozen and the temperatures outside had dropped. I thought of riding the subway in winter.

   “Dad,” I told him. “I look at those poor kids in the church and I feel so rotten for them. I mean…”

   “They’re fighting,” was Dad’s only reply.

   “Yeah but I don’t have to fight. I mean it’s easy.”

   “Was it easy when you were in seventh or eighth grade?”

   “Did you worry about me?”

   “Sometimes.” Dad at least was honest. “Sometimes I figured it would just get better.”

   “Yeah, but now…Those kids are in the wrong place at the wrong time, Dad.”

   “I know. Want me to talk to Georgia. I don’t know what she can do with it being North Carolina and all, but she’s good at helping adults set up charters. North Carolina can’t be any worse than New York, and New York is terrible.”

   “You still talk to Mom?” I asked.

   “Sometimes. It’s just business now, but at least we can talk business, and she and I are on the same side. Anyway, we have joint custody of all you kids except Ivanna. We have to talk.”

   “What do you talk about?” I was curious now.

   “Mostly her work and what may happen if she has to go to Old Forge or Booneville, New York for an extended period.”

   “If she leaves the kids in New York and they come to live with us, RoAnn will have to watch them. Kyril will love that.”

   “I have to earn a living and RoAnn has plenty of patience, much more patience in some ways than Georgia ever had. She drove you out at the end of eighth grade remember?”

   “She didn’t drive me out Dad! I ran away.”

   “She made your life miserable from what you said, and she didn’t try very hard to get you back. She said it was more peaceful without you and you might do better with me. She had had it too.”

   “We fought very badly,” I confessed.

   “If Kyril and Minerva have to stay with us they stay with us, understand?” Dad steered the conversation back to the present.

   I understood but I couldn’t picture the combination. In grown-up talk Kyril would surely “test limits.” I tired not to think about that as we walked slowly back to the Family Suite at the motel.

   We said nothing for the first mile or so. The wind was fierce. It helped me digest my food which needed serious digestion. “Kore,” Dad resumed the conversation. “Just so you know. The Sidlows may reciporicate the favor we did Margolin.”

   “Huh,” this one caught me blindsided.

   “They’re going to invite you to go on a trip with them. I don’t think you’ll get as disoriented and unhappy as Margolin and Young Achievers is a public organization. If they hope you’ll reveal secrets, you won’t have any to give, but it might be a good idea if you say yes, when they offer you a vacation.”

   “Dad I’m starting school the after the first of the year,” I replied.

   “You have winter break in February. Consider it a reward for a good grade on the Math A Regents.”

   I wanted to laugh, but I wasn’t sure that was a good idea.

   ---

   That night in the Family Suite, I dreamed of Kyril and Minerva. I dreamed Dad was not coming home and Mom was far away somewhere in the Adirondacks and it was just RoAnn, Margolin, Davida, Ivanna, Kyril, Minerva, and me. Yes, it was just a lot of people.We were running out of food. There were long lines to use the bathroom. Minerva lay on the couch refusing to move, and we all thought she was dead. Ivanna, Margolin, and I got into a great argument over whether to cremate or bury my youngest sibling. I finally convinced them that burning up Minerva was not a good idea.

   Then we argued where we should bury her. It might be a good idea to dig a hole for her in Riverside Park, but the ground was nearly frozen and we’d have to ask the door people for the tools. I decided to try phoning a cemetary to see if we could find a proper grave for her but then I woke up.

   It was December 27, 2009, and I was parked on the roll away in the Family Suite of a motel in Asheville, North Carolina. Margolin was complaining loud and long about the absence of a Starbucks. Dad was trying to teach her how to search for one using a company web site. I half watched. Dad and I drink tea. I thought of last night’s dinner and felt light headed and empty. We had to wait while Margolin showered.

   We rode as a horde to a hotel on the other side of town to see the gingerbread house show. “I can’t believe people waste their time doing this shit,” Margolin proudly proclaimed as we entered the hall. Several middle aged ladies stuffed into polyester pants gave my not friend dirty looks. I felt secretly gratified.

   Then we found the junior section. There were kids as young as ten and teenagers too, and all of them had made gingerbread houses. Then I saw the sign taped to the pole:

   No Brawling
   No Cussing
   No Fighting
   It doesn’t matter what club you belong to!
   This means YOU

   The sign repeated on each pole and beam with arrows pointing downward scrawled in blood red magic marker on most of the signs. Some kid had written in pencil: “Young Achievers Suck” on one of the signs. Another kid had written below that: “ECBAS are Assholes.” I felt my face flush. I could almost hear Dad saying: “Well you wanted to fight, Kore?”

   Two kids with Young Achievers’ shirts sat on stools guarding what looked like a fortress of gingerbread. I walked up to the girls and handed them my Founding Member business card. They blinked and then they handed me their cards. They were members of the Greensboro chapter: North Carolina 1 - 3. “You know the schools here fell,” one of the girls told me. I nodded. “I hear none of the schools fell up north,” she twanged. I had to tell her about Adirondack Central. She sighed. I also had to explain where it was by drawing maps.

   One of the ECBAS kids got into an argument with RoAnn. The kid explained how she had the time to really learn to build great gingerbread castles now that she no longer had to do dull stuff like study. It wasn’t a bad argument, except that the vast majority of ECBAS kids did not build gingerbread houses or do much that was worthwhile other than shop and compete on popularity.

   By the time we left the hotel in search of lunch, Margolin looked ready to cry. “Are you OK?” I asked her because that is what you are supposed to ask.

   “I can’t believe what kids are like outside New York,” my not friend spat.

   “Where would you like to eat lunch?” Dad asked Margolin.

   “I just want a smoothie.”

   “You had a smoothie last night,” RoAnn reminded her. “We sort of have to get food.”

   We ended up at a mall food court. We decided to split up for the afternoon. Dad and I would go tutor at the Presbyterian Church on Oak Street and Margolin, Ivanna and RoAnn would shop at the mall or tour the boutiques downtown. We’d meet for dinner at CiCi’s Pizza, and then call it a night.

   “I think Margolin will be glad to get back to New York,” Dad told me as we walked from an intersection he picked out back into downtown Asheville. The sky was grey, and it looked like more snow, but this far south and this high in the mountains, it might just be fog. There were kids in the church. There were always kids. I taught two girls how to multiply and divide fractions. I even drew them diagrams to help them understand. I thought of a really dumb book called Farenheit 451 where those who can remember books, hold them in their heads to keep knowledge alive. Would the struggle between ECBAS and Young Achievers end up making me a high school teacher? I tried not to think about that. Kids my own age are very nasty and scarey, unless of course they want to learn.

3. At the Feet of Giants

   The next morning, we headed down to the First Presbyterian Churh on Oak Street in Asheville, North Carolina. “The place will probably be shut up tighter than a drum,” Dad mused. Margolin snorted. She probably did not believe a word Dad said. Ivanna’s eyes glazed over. She was used to the glassy eyed stare though the best practitioners of this strategy were my two younger natural and whole siblings who were either in New York or Miami this Christmas break.

   As for me, I knew what I dreaded. I had to know. I dreaded that Young Achievers had collapsed and that the whole city of Asheville was fallen. It was very possible. The rabbi with her congregation of worn out, old people could well be a purveyor of old news. I wondered how I would face her at lunch after seeing the church empty and no sign that there was a Young Achievers group in Asheville.

   We parked a block or two from the church and trudged over its dirty snow lawn. A large sign next to the one advertising the theme of this Sunday’s sermon said: SCHOOL OF INDEPENDENT STUDY — Founded by Asheville Young Achievers November 16, 2009. The sign looked fresh, though on close inspection, someone had dumped what was probably ketchup or salsa on it.

   We made our way to the front door of the church. It was locked. An equivocal result was almost worse than there being no Young Achievers at all. Then we tried the side door by the social hall. Dad has a sixth sense about buildings, and a cooler head than I had that morning.

   The door was unlocked and someone had taped a somewhat fresh paper that advertised the hours of school and lab and something called Open Study and Gym. Those hours included Saturday morning, but this was the Saturday after Christmas.

   Dad pushed open the door. The rest of us followed him inside. I was ready for a dark, silent space. Instead the voices almost hurt me. Then the silence that followed in the hallway was even more excruciating. The church basement smelled of old food and damp coats. It was not a special place despite abstract paintings tacked to the wall and also what looked like some kind of scientific poster presentation about cell division. I was reading it and feeling a kind of warm sensation, when two voices caught my attention.

   “They’re not trouble,” drawled a male voice with a twang that made him hard to understand. “They’re just visitors.”

   “Let me see,” answered a female voice that emerged into the hall and invited us into the kitchen. Through a pass through in the kitchen, I could see a social hall with tables and books and several sad looking kids hunched over their work. On a dirty shag rug in the corner two or three other kids lay with books or curled up on beanbag chairs reading.

   “It’s all clear!” a tall African American girl with straightened hair, the owner of the hospitable voice, yhelled through the passthrough. “They’re just guests or tourists.”

   “You’d better be guests or tourists,” said a boy with a sandy mop top and freckels. He wore a black watch plaid flannel shirt, red and white suspenders, faded blue jeans and a Santa hat.

   I reached into my wallet and pulled out one of my business cards. As a founding member of a Young Achievers chapter, they came in surprisingly handy. “Holy shit!” gasped the boy who handed the card to his female companion. I introduced, my father, stepmother, stepsister, and Margolin.

   “What’re you doing in Asheville?” the boy asked.

   “We’re here so my daughter can visit her father,” explained RoAnn. “I’m divorced and remarried.”

   “Well things are pretty bad here,” the girl who sounded the all clear explained. “There really aren’t any schools left so the minister here and some of the parents helped us start our own. It’s not easy. The younger kids go back to their neighborhoods and the other kids…” The girl sniffed. She did not want to complete the sentence.

   “It would be good if we could get accredited or get a charter. The grownups say they are working on that, but I think we just make a lot of work for them most of the time,” the boy explained.

   We of course had a tour of the facility. There were tutoring offices in what had been Sunday school classrooms, a main study room in what had been the social lounge. There was a gym and an art room. “The only thing we don’t really have is a locker room and a pool,” the girl whose name was Lavender explained. The boy, whose name was Liam said they went swimming at the Y and ice skating at the recreation center. There was a roller rink on the edge of town. One kid had been fired from his job for studying at the independent school. Another girl had lost her drivers’ license when colleagues at her mother’s job had made life miserable for the mother. I stood stunned. Life at Brooklyn Tech was so mcuh easier. At least the kids did not ask me about that.

   I did not want to be envied for something that was none of my own doing. My parents moved to New York City, and for the last three years of middle school, my life had been misery. I’d paid the price to be where I was but I was just lucky in terms of not being somewhere like Central Adirondack. I couldn’t explain all that. Dad and RoAnn both signed up as volunteer tutors and I found myself drafted to help kids with algebra.

   We found spots on the tutoring offices with other tutors, college students, adults, and peer tutors. I tutored a black girl with zits on her face who wasked me what New York City was like. I told her about Fairway and snow in Riverside Park and taking the long bus ride to Staten Island to see my friend Chin Wang.

   I missed Chin, I realized as we emerged into the late morning sun which was thin but strong enough to leave muddy, bare spots in the snow. “At least you have beautiful weather for your vacation,” said the head tutor. Dad thanked him. He said we’d be back.

   I wasn’t up for lunch with strangers, let alone a female rabbi. I couldn’t back out of the invitation though. I sat on the hump in the back of the van because it was my turn. Margolin wanted to talk, and I was grateful for that.

   “This was my first time in the basement of a church!” she told us.

   “Did you get to go upstairs and see the altar?” asked RoAnn.

   “Yeah..It’s very old. People are looking for God in themselves now.”

   “Did your parents tell you that?” RoAnn’s voice sounded weirdly fierce. She was herself unchurched though neither atheist nor agnostic.

   “Isn’t it obvious?”

   “What’s obvious,” commented RoAnn “Is that there is a minister and Board of Directors who cares enough about education to loan out the building. There are still believers.”

   “Those kids…” Margolin let the conversation which was fairly unmoored drift. “I never met people like them before.”

   “They’re nerds and geeks,” Ivanna explained.

   “That too, but they’re not like city kids. They’re simple, but they’re busy and smart…sort of. I’m glad Mom sent me out here.”

   “I’m glad you’re learning something,” Dad answered. He told Margolin that neither he nor RoAnn had grown up in a major city on either coast.

   “Do you hate New York?” Margolin asked?

   “No way,” answered RoAnn.

   “I sometimes think people lose touch with nature and self reliance in cities.” Dad’s answer was more complex.

   We found the rabbi’s house in the hilly suburbs. She gave us a three course lunch with a table full of food that made our “Food Fortresses” as Ivanna called them seem paltry by comparison.

   We talked about the differences between different branches of Judaism, the importance of a good, secular education, and the kids and adults who were fighting. Margolin asked the rabbi if she had ever been to Israel. She asked if she felt sorry for the Palestinians. Margolin wound up asking: “What are human rights?” She did not know the term.

   “Shit, this vacation is making me feel so dumb and small,” Margolin told us. It was mid to late afternoon. We needed a promenade in downtown Asheville. I needed to take another practice regents. Dad wanted to go back and tutor.

   Ivanna stared at clothes in a boutique window. “In New York this store would be nothing special,” my stepsister told us all.

   “It’s nothing special here, except the locals don’t know it. Where do people go to buy their clothes?”

   “Check a map?” RoAnn suggested.

   “How’s a map going to tell me anything?” Margolin frayed and angry whirled around at us.

   “Think it through,” RoAnn held down her trapped quarry.

   “Maps sometimes show you how big a city is. A big city might have designer clothes stores, but there’s no way to tell if they’re as good as the stores in New York or Paris. You need to go on the net and find that out,” Margolin gave us all the answer.

   “You’re not a fool, Margolin,” RoAnn told my not friend. “You’re just ignorant.”

   “Thanks, but I bet there’s shit you don’t know, like how bad those kids in the church are hurting themselves. There’s a reason parents here want their kids going along with new ideas… You know?”

   “You and I are going to have to beg to differ on that one,” Dad told Margolin.

   Margolin repeated the words: “Beg to differ.” “How do you talk to ordinary people?” she asked Dad. This was a pretty good trap. Dad leaped out though and told my not friend: “Ordinary peole can figure out what words mean.”

   “Yeah…. You’re not really begging,” Margolin observed. “You just want to be polite and agree to disaggree.”

   “You did it,” I told my not friend.

   Margolin shrugged.

4. The Information Harvest Continues

   “Young Achievers doesn’t do much,” a man with a salt and pepper beard told me as we gathered for a pitiful oneg after services at Temple Shearith Shalom in Asheville,  North Carolina. They prayed in a mixed group. I had actually counted as part of a minyan, not something that happens where I usually go to services. That did not impress me because I made the minyan. Also, there were no other kids there, and everyone there looked older than my parents which is pretty old when you think about it.

   Still, I got to talk to the sad adults. There are few things sadder in the world than adults who think they have been beaten. Even the people who wanted their story told in the video about the fallen school system in the Central Adirondacks weren’t as beaten as the adults who surrounded me at services on Christmas night.

   I didn’t ask where their kids were. A few of them told me that their grandchildren had been sent away to boarding school or were going there in January. Others said that the kids had helped bring down the schools or who “weren’t doing much of anything,” and “until the federal government comes in to clean up the chaos, it’s a lost cause.”

   “There’s no Brook-lynne Teck in this part of the country,” drawled a man with a bald head as pink as an egg except for grandfatherly, scraggly, white sideburns. I wanted to spit in this man’s face. When grownups give up it just plain pisses me off.

   The rabbi took me aside. She was a plump, middle aged woman, very different from the black suited men I had met in Coney Island and their modern Orthodox cousins at Lincoln Square.

   “You’re on the road to being what they call a bal tshuva aren’t you?” she asked. It was a rhetorical question. Having teachers and linguists in the family makes you sensitive to language.

   “Maybe, but I can’t really keep kosher. I like coldcuts too much,” I confessed.

   “Coldcuts aren’t healthy,” the rabbi told me, “though at your age, you don’t worry.”

   I realized that the rabbi had been fourteen a very long time ago. Still my parents were good at remembering. Then again, all of them were probably around kids a good deal more than Madame Rabbi.

   “If you want to find Young Achievers,” Madame Rabbi continued, they meet at the First Presbyterian Church down on Oak Street. You can find it on Bing or Mapquest. They have their own school since the public school won’t let them administer the pledge. That was a nasty legal strategy put in place by the current school board we just elected.

   “It’s made it very hard for the parents’ here. A child in Young Achievers is ostracized and there is a lot of peer pressure not to do anything academic. Most parents’ are torn, don’t know what to do.”

   “What do you tell them?” I asked.

   “I have to be careful what I tell them. They pay my salary. If they can handle honesty, I tell them whom they should support. Our religion teaches us that learning is one of the three pillars that holds up the universe. You think that would be obvious, but not when one pays a price to learn or defend learning.

   “Are your parents coming to  pick you up?” the rabbi had switched to a maternal role which I neither wanted nor needed, but I no longer cared.

   “My dad is coming,” I said, but he was late. I worried  and then he showed up. He greeted the rabbi and smiled at her.

   “You must be proud that your daughter goes to Brooklyn Tech,” she said to him.

   “I’m extremely proud,” Dad replied.

   “Kore is a founding member of a Young Achievers chapter or so I hear.”

   “It’s true,” Dad was starting to blush.

   “May I invite you to the parsonage for Shabbos lunch?” asked the rabbi.

   “My wife is not Jewish,” Dad confessed.

   “I don’t care,” answered the rabbi. “This is Shabbos lunch, not a beit din.”

   “All right. I’ll let my wife and her daughter know. We also have a house guest traveling with us.”

   “Bring them all. I always have enough food,” the rabbi smiled at us.

   I said nothing to Dad in the van as he drove me back to the motel. When we entered the Family Suite, there was a fight underway between RoAnn and Margolin. Ivanna sat hunched on the very foot of her double bed trying to watch the television and block out the argument which had probably become old and stale long before I arrived.

   “Yes, you are going to visit Young Achievers tomorrow. Your father sent you with us to learn about the resistance and how it works. Well, you’ll learn all we know and more. You’ll learn it as we learn it.”

   “But…” Margolin sputtered.

   “But what…”

   “They’re tools.”

   “So are we. Get used to it.”

   “I’m not a tool,” Ivanna spoke up.

   “How do you stand it?” Margolin asked my stepsister. “What tools do to kids is child abuse.”

   “I’m just a kid and my mom makes me do stuff. There’s not much I can do about it.”

   “Yes, but if you’re mom’s really a tool then she’s…”

   “I’m hurting my daughter by making her study. You know Margolin, the next time we walk out to the convenience store, I’m going to make sure that Kore or Ivanna doesn’t handle the money for you, and you’d better hope they take your plastic.”

   “Fuck you!” snapped Margolin.

   Ivanna gasped in mock astonishment. I stifled a laugh. RoAnn glanced at me. I gazed back.

   “Yes, you don’t have to work in school. Too bad you can’t add money or read a map. Too bad you didn’t know where North Carolina was. That felt real good didn’t it?”

   “You have no right to yell at me,” Margolin looked ready to sob. In fact her face was melting in the blue light of the television.

   “I’m just telling it like it is,” my stepmother replied.

   “Do you want to convert me?” Margolin asked the adults.

   “It’s your choice what you do,” Sammy answered. “If you think you would like to study academics because they are useful, it’s up to you. It would be nice if you didn’t call those who work hard in school and believe in academics tools. It’s an insult.”

   “I’m sorry,” moaned Margolin.

   “No need to be sorry, but you are going to have to figure out how to add up money to pay for things where they won’t take your plastic.”

   “OK,” my nonfriend said, and of course after that the fight was over. We went to a convience store that night, walking single file on the shoulder of the road. At the store, Margolin tried to pay for her drinks and her chocoate and yogurt covered peanuts with her debit card. The plastic was dead. The clerk even asked her if the card was stolen. Margolin’s face turned red. “I’ve got money,” she pleaded. It took the poor girl three tries to count out the change.

   “What could have happened to my card?” she asked all of us as we trudged back to the Fairmont Inn.

   “Computer glitch most probably,” RoAnn comforted Margolin. She even asked the girl if she wanted to call her parents. Christmas night the Sidlows got treated to a whinge from 900 miles away. I did not feel one bit sorry for them or for Margolin either.

5. A House of Hubris

   Christmas morning, RoAnn and I made our third trip up the road from our motel into town. The landscape of prefabricated steel buildings in various calming pastels made dirty by winter snow and grey skies, the trees without leaves and the dusty conifers were all becoming distressingly familiar.

   “I bet you wish there was a bakery open this morning,” I said to my stepmother.

   “No,” answered RoAnn. “It’s just close and crowded in the motel room. Having us all in one suite instead of two rooms is not the greatest idea.”

   “You’d like to close the door and just forget about us girls,” I nearly laughed.

   “It probably wouldn’t help,” RoAnn mused.

   “I’m sorry about you and Tony,” I blurted out. I had dreamed of Mom and Barry last night. It was a bitter dream because at the end Kryil cried and screamed. My parents’ divorce like nearly all divorces was mercilessly cruel and it was crueler to the younger kids in my family than it was to me.

   “It was a long time ago. Ithaca is a cruel town… Kore, have you figured out why the Sidlow’s asked us to take Margolin to Asheville?”

   “Marital problems. Justine, the…real mother thinks Davida and Margolin are too sheltered.”

   “That’s the official reason. What’s the real one?” RoAnn smiled.

   “You’re enjoying this.”

   “It works better if we enjoy it. Now what’s the real reason.”

   “She’s spying on us for ECBAS? But if you knew that….”

   “We’re all in close quarters,” RoAnn replied. “I don’t have to pry. It will come out. Also, I want to see what’s happening with my exhusband. You know, there is a good chance that the schools here are in terrible shape.”

   “They may have fallen,” I answer. Suddenly I am cold. I want to back to the motel. I shivered as I stared at RoAnn’s fiercely smiling face. Oh, I hated that smile.

   ---

   “Tony and his friends may let down their guard. Keep your ears open this afternoon.”

   I removed my skirt from my duffle and ironed it while Margolin and Ivanna looked on. “You’re really going to a synagogue where you don’t know anybody in a strange town?” asked Margolin.

   “Yeah,” I replied. It really wasn’t such a big deal. I even invited my nonfriend to come along with me. She refused.

   “Do you know how big a tool you are, Kore?” Margolin’s guard was down today.

   “We’re all tools here. This Christmas trip is Tools 101 for you, Margolin,” Dad spoke now.

   “I hate tools. Most people do,” Margolin was in fine form.

   She quieted down once she got in the van for the ride to Tony’s. Ivanna had his address. She sat on the hump in the middle of the backseat. She had her father back. That must have felt good. I had never lost my dad or mom. “Divorce is cruel,” I reminded myself.

   Anthony lived in a McMansion that made step Uncle Gabriel’s brown house in Dix Hills look like a sad, brown mound. In the back yard were children’s climbing toys. On one side was a toboggan run that had four or five takers in the wet, sloppy snow. That looked like fun. On the front lawn was a huge collection of free form metal sculptures. “Wow!” I exclaimed.

   “Impressive,” Dad said as he found a place for the van in the big, multicar driveway. There wee close to a dozen vehicles parked there all ready, and the house was full of a never ending party. Kids danced to the latest pop tune in the den while a computer game let them chase guitar chords on the screen or follow dance moves in a flashing light electronic mat on the floor. Many kids though just danced. There was a huge buffet that looked great at first until one drew close to the sideboard for a real look. The food had just been thrown out every which way and some of the small children had stolen out bits or pieces or maybe careless adults had mutilated the food.

   Empty dirties littered the living room and another den that belonged to the adults. A whiteboard was full of diagrams and notes. I read them. It was something about personal freedom and unschooling.

   RoAnn and her ex talked glibly. “Yes I’m going to write a book….The way I see it, Asheville is really one great social experiment. We are  honoring kids’ autonomy and freedom, and you know something, we’ve killed off the whole rat race. Kids’ natural curiosity and intellect is going to shine through. They’re going to learn and learn and outshine kids who go to traditional schools within five years.”

   I slumped down on the couch.

   “If there are any traditional schools left.” My stepmther didn’t  miss a beat.

   “There probably won’t be, not here.”

   “Where do you intend to get your control group?”

   “Who says I am publishing in an education establishment journal.”

   I noticed my father in the study, the big living room with the white board also had a computer. Bits of conversation emerged from that room.

   “I’m so glad I don’t have to prod my daughter to get up at the crack of dawn…”

   “…I hated supervising homework and when you get down to it, most homework is still pointless.”

   “Do children really learn from what you make them read? How much of my schoolwork do I still remember?”

   Dad had heard enough. He emerged and walked over to the buffet. He mentioned to me to follow. “Let’s step outside,” he whispered. I did not bother to get my coat so I froze.

   “Kore, can you use the main bathroom downstairs?” Dad asked me.

   “I don’t need to go,” I replied.

   “Then pretend you do and camp out there for a while?”

   “Why?” I asked.

   “We’ll discuss it later,” Dad headed inside. At least the bathroom was warm, but it was not my favorite place to spend a party. I was glad to reemerge. I saw Anthony DiFranco and a woman in a red sweater with a snowman on it putting out new items on the buffet.

   “Why don’t you have something to eat, Kore?” Ivanna’s father suggested.

   “I’m not really hungry,” I answered. Then I saw the plate of cold cuts. It was no ordinary plate of cold cuts. There was liverwurst and even smoked or pickled beef tongue slices on it, not blood and tongue loaf which is poor person’s beef tongue, but honest to God tongue. Near the plate of cold cuts rested a fish shaped ceramic platter with what looked like assorted types of German canned herring and fancy sardines in it.

   “Dad,” I called out. “You have to see this.”

   “Your father went upstairs to use the rest room,” said the lady serving the food. There were seven layer cakes, what looked like a French Yule Log cake and other delicacies. Where had all this food come from? Several teenage girls began carting away the more or less empty plates and the more mutilated items from the buffet. I watched.

   I thought of grabbing a plate of the good stuff, but something stopped me. I walked back out into the main living room. RoAnn sat and listned to a plump blond woman with two very straight, dirty blonde pony tails. The woman spread out her fingers as she talked in short, breathy sentences.

   “It’s not that we don’t want the tools in the public schools, it’s that they don’t want to be there with us,” she explained.

   “Shawna’s right,” explained Anthony DiFranco. “We have a new mission statement that takes the autonomy of the student into account. Young Achievers wants to break that autonomy. Have you ever read their pledge. Students have to swear an oath of obedience to their teachers. Yes, in the year 2009! Can you believe it? Well, we can’t have that so they aren’t part of the program?”

   “So what are they doing?” RoAnn asked. At least no one asked why my dad was taking so long in the bathroom. Somehow tha twas a relief.

   “Well they are holed up in a church. This happens quite often, especially out in the country,” Anthony sighed indulgently.

   “Now they can stay holed up, but it only goes to show how narrow-minded they are,” a woman with curly, nearly black hair told the small knot of elect and enlightened adults.

   “I had to think back to college to realize how much tools really scare me,” pony tails steered the conversation around.

   “Well, there’s a bunch of them in this house today,” Anthony smiled.

   I smiled back. “This kid who won’t go down to the den with the others is the founding member of the Young Achievers’ chapter at  Brooklyn Tech. Kore, tell us your chapter number. Watch this.”

   “It’s New York 2-2. That’s New York District Two second school,” I smiled. “Well doesn’t ECBAS have a similar arrangement.”

   “No, we’re not organized by numbers. We don’t need to be. By the way, there’s new food on the buffet. There might be something you like there.”

   “I’m not that hungry,” I replied.

   “Are you afraid?” Anthony asked. RoAnn glared at him. Anthony smiled.

   “There’s some kind of canolis on the buffet,” I told RoAnn.

   My stepmother raised her eyebrows. She rose and walked toward the buffet, and then she turned around as if struck. “Tony, how did you know what everyone in my new family likes to eat?”

   “Let’s just say it was intuition,” he replied. “It’s not something you tools have.”

   RoAnn sighed. Eventually I did eat. Eventually, Dad emerged from the bathroom upstairs. Eventually, I got bored. Berhe, Anthony DiFranco’s present wife let me change upstairs for synagogue and Dad drove me over there.

   “Did any one miss me downstairs?” he asked once we had left the party. It was all ready getting dark. I just wanted to stare out the van’s dirty windows and forget the party ever happened.

   “Well…” Dad asked.

   “No,” I answered.

   “Good,” he told me.

   “Anthony DiFranco is a damn fool,” Dad said.

   “He’s a lucky fool,” I replied. I still remembered RoAnn’s weirdly sympathetic story.

   “No, a stupid fool. Those computers should be under lock and key or carry extra security the way mine do.”

   “Oh shit,” I said.

   “Don’t worry. He’ll never know. Anthony DiFranco is no longer a building contractor. The industry started contracting in 2008 and he got out. He became a personnel trainer for Star Corp. Star Corp is the parent company of Youth Voices and ECBAS. Those malls would need staff. Those rallies would need field workers. Someone has to coordinate all those buses when teens go somewhere. Tony DiFranco was in the right place at the right time, and Star Corp pays very well.”

   “What else did you find out?” I asked Dad.

   “I can’t tell you everything, but I know where the Manhattan Center for ECBAS is now and you’re not blacklisted any more.” Dad smiled. “The bad news is,” he continued. “The schools here have fallen pretty much completely.”

   Neither of us said anything. Dad pulled up in front of a large, old fashioned synagogue, now way too big for its congregation. “It hurts,” Dad told me. “I won’t lie to you, Kore. I’m going to do what I can to see if I can undo some of the damage. I can’t promise you anything. I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.”

   I did not answer. “Go have a good time at services. I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours.”

6. This Has to Hurt

   “What is that stuff?” Margolin pointed to the Greenwood’s sweet and sour red cabbage which resided in a jar on the table pulled out for our dinner in the Family Suite of the Fairmont Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. It was ten pm on Christmas Eve. RoAnn was the only Christian among us or maybe she was an agnostic. She was not the kind who went to church. She was the one who should have cared about spending Christmas crammed into a common space that was no where from home as Margolin had told us during our walk to town and back. The little, white, Christmas lights were pretty by the way, but everything was locked up tighter than a drum. Even the Salvation Army Santas with their kettles had gone home to family.

   “That’s sweet and sour,” I told my nonfriend whose parents had foisted her on our family. Yes, I’d never forget who Margolin was though she had acted surprisingly civil on the walk. She’d asked questions. She hadn’t whinged. I was very glad of that.

   I was glad for RoAnn’s sake rather than my own. I knew about married and divorced women. I’d watched my own mother, Georgia Wolfson, turn from one to the other and then go from almost getting married again to being broken up the year I was in fourth grade, that was the year my parents got divorced because both of them were screwing around. Dad had RoAnn, and he followed her to New York City, but Mom had Barry. Barry looked quite a bit like Anthony, Ivanna’s father, but he lacked the beard and had very blue eyes.

   They were gorgeous eyes, but beauty is as beauty does. Barry preferred Kyril. Kyril laughed at all his jokes and the two had sports practice out back, something my dad had seldom done even before he had started screwing around. I was not used to being second best. I considered Barry shallow and stupid. I thought Mom could do better.

   Minerva, my younger sister,  was just a baby, and she was nobody’s favorite. Some people might say she had been conceived to save my parents’ marriage, and she had failed miserably on her mission. Now everyone was too busy having a good time for her. Poor Minerva. No wonder she is such a sad sack of a five year old these days.

   Barry and Mom had a love affair that in retrospect seems very torrid for about five months while I was in fourth grade. I was glad when Dad came along Saturday to extricate me from the household where Barry’s presence hung like a disgusting pall. I’d go to work with Dad. I’d go to visitation with Dad. Oh thank HaShem for Dad.

   Then it came to an end. Barry and Mom had a fight, and Mom has never told me why, but Barry moved out. Kyril who loved Barry better than he loved Dad blamed me. He blamed Dad. He stuck by my wounded mother. You know what wounded moms are like. If you don’t, just consider yourself lucky. If I wanted to make Mom mad when I was in middle school or if she was letting me have it just a little too much or if she had crawled just a bit too far under my skin, I just had to say the word: “Barrrrrrie.”

   Barry was a shit head and an asshole who left my mom’s heart so barely scarred, I don’t think she’ll ever remarry again. He left three kids to deal with the damage. He left Minerva without a decent parent to raise her. He left Kyril crazy with anger, and he left me trapped under a roof first in Scranton and later in Battery Park City with three crazy and unhappy people. Thanks you prick!

   Well, long ago, when Ivanna was a baby or a preschooler, Anthony DiFranco had dropped RoAnn the same way Barry dropped my  mother. Dad came along four years later. By then RoAnn had moved from Ithaca, New York where she went to graduate school to Scranton, a new city and a new life, but when a man drops you like a stone, you never forget because you are not a stone.

   RoAnn was hurting tonight. It must have been like a knife in her heart to watch her exhusband who had wounded her so walk away with her only and precious daughter. I, after all, was just a stepchild. It was Ivanna who came out of her cervix from her own knotty womb. Now that baby was a whinging, unhappy middle schooler but she was still RoAnn’s baby. There’s a reason custody fights are such ugly battles. You know that…

   “Want to try it?” I asked Margolin, pushing the jar of sweet and sour red cabbage in her direction. Sweet and sour would taste good with the smoked turkey breast she had bought in the deli at the Kroger’s. Margolin made a face of disgust.

   “Here,” sighed RoAnn who was eating a chocolate frosted pop tart with chocolate filling because she thought this tasted better than fruit preserves. It doesn’t, but that’s another story. “Want some of mine,” she said. “I got it for everyone. They’re not as bad as people say they are…”

   Margolin smiled as RoAnn tore open another pop tart pacakge and started Margolin with half a one. I guess it tasted pretty good with smoked turkey if that was how your tastes ran. Ours was a house of different tastes. Maybe that would distract poor RoAnn.

   “Anthony may invite us to his house some time while we are  here,” RoAnn’s words sailed in from left field.

   “You think he wants to meet his exwife’s new husband?” asked Dad.

   “He might. I know it’s hard to believe, but we broke up amicably…well sort of. The ugliness was among the faculty. I could do no wrong, but Tony…. He went from hero to zero, no recommendations. He could have stuck it out, graduated with a  masters degree, and gone elsewhere, but he had too much ego and quite frankly, he was a bit sick of school if he could not do what interested him, he did nothing. He was always like that. Brilliant in some ways, very creative…but….

   “He got on the wrong side of a few professors. This happens a lot. There are a lot of people in their second choice of careers who have a masters in some field or a masters from one school and a PhD from another. It’s a common story. No one feels sorry for such people, and maybe no one should. I feel sorry for Tony because he was my husband and we lived together and we had a child.

   “Anthony was bitter and angry. He took a leave of absence, and then pretty much dropped out.  He picked apples. He worked construction. He was good at it. He’d done it summers. Eventually, my brother, Gabriel, yes I put him in touch with Gabriel loaned him money, and he started his own business. He headed south and I left Ithaca for Scranton. He resurfaced a few years ago, in business for himself, a new wife, and it even seems another child.

   “I did my background research on him. Sometimes Google is your best friend. He got elected to the school board here in Asheville in November.”

   I felt my Greenwood’s sweet and sour stick in my throat. “You understand then,” RoAnn directed her remark to her husband. “Kore all ready has it figured out. Of course I hope that I am wrong, but the educational system ultimately betrayed Tony and I can understand why he might be working with ECBAS.”

   “The tools lost here,” Margolin informed all of us.

   “Do tell,” RoAnn all but purred.

   “Well, we won here. New York State is atypical cause of the Regents system and there’s a lot of tools in New York. In the South people are more auth-en-tick.”

   “Oh really,” sighed RoAnn who looked ready to laugh. I felt my guts cringe up with fear.

   “Yeah…” Margolin ate some more PopTart.

   “I wonder if your exhusband knows about Kore,” Dad spoke up.

   “He probably has access to the database,” I said remembering Elissa’s two children and their Blackberry.

   “Then we won’t be seeing much of him,” RoAnn quipped. “If Kore is personna non grata at a center and he wants to take us to a center, we can’t go. If one of us is kept out, then all of us are kept out. If you want to go Margolin, you can go in with Ivanna, but as for the three of us…”

   Margolin said nothing. She’d forgotten that her parents had sent her to have Christmas break among the enemy.

   “You want to call home and wish your parents a Merry Christmas?” Dad asked Margolin as we cleaned up from supper. There was ice cream for desert, a quart of something with lots of chocolate pieces. There were also apples. We’d replenish the apple bag when the stores opened again on the twenty-sixth. There were also power bars and Pop Tarts for breakfast in case the motel forgot to serve us tomorrow, something Dad said was extremely possible.

   Margolin shook her head. “You can do it outside if you want privacy,” Dad suggested. “None of us can hear through the walls.” Somehow this probably made things worse. Margolin remained mute. She ate ice cream. She played Monopoly with RoAnn and me until around 1:30am.

   About 2:15am, Anthony DiFranco returned with a tired and subdued Ivanna. He knocked on the motel room door, and RoAnn let him in. Anthony glanced around. I peered at him from my spot in the alcove. I was reading for Global Studies. Margolin listened to her I-pod. Dad emerged from the more private rear bedroom of the suite.

   Anthony pretended he was not there and asked: “What are you reading, Kore?” He got my name right. I felt the hairs on my neck stand up.

   “The Famished Road, by Ben Okri,” I smiled. I told myself that Anthony DiFranco was nearly Dr. DiFranco like RoAnn was Dr. Testa.

   “Is that your own choice?” Anthony’s voice was smooth as the frosting on a chocolate Pop Tart.

   “No, but I think it’s a good book. The words sound like poetry.”

   “There’s much more to the world than words.”

   “Not at two in the morning there isn’t. Literature beats infomercials on TV.”

   “What about family?” Anthony was good.

   “They’re all here,” I chimed.

   Anthony laughed and turned to Dad and his exwife. “I’d like to invite all of you to my house for Christmas.”

   “When should we arrive?” asked RoAnn cool as the proverbial cucumber.

   “Whenever you want. You’re still family to me. We’re all family. We don’t believe in formalities.”

   “We’ll be by around noon then,” RoAnn cut off further conversation. Ivanna bounced on the end of her double bed. Margolin did not move.

   “He weathered the recession of 2009 way too well,” said RoAnn when the likeable, red SUV pulled out of the Fairmont Inn parking lot.

   “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Margolin.

   “Ask your parents. I told you that you were free to call them.” With that, RoAnn and Dad retired to the bedroom space that had a door that closed and locked. Even on vacation, and perhaps more so, parents needed to have a social life. Parents and adults in general were far pleasanter when they had a social life. Breaking up  made them wretched and angry.

7. Swim, Sink, and Drown

   Dad opened the door between his and RoAnn’s rooma the Microtel and the one I shared with Ivanna and Margolin. We were stowing our drinks in our fridge. Margolin wanted to change her shirt in the bathroom. No way was she letting any of us see her breasts. Dad glanced at Ivanna and me. Then he folded his arms and glanced about impatiently.

   Dad was used to women. Except for a few years in college, he had lived among them nearly all his adult life, wives, girlfriends, daughters. He did not complain if any of us needed to pee. Women peed more than men and girls were just young versions of women. Women were more cautious on the road. Both Mom and RoAnn dreaded road hynotism. Mom periodically got off the interstate and took state and county roads so she’d have something to see. RoAnn resorted to music and walks at the safety breaks. Both Mom and RoAnn did not care if they made time. Every trip included copious safety breaks.

   We also have better senses of smell than males. Sometimes we do have to change a dirty shirt or have a clean nightie with us. We really do need those things, but Margolin was probably tweeting in the bathroom and had snuck in there for mental health reasons which would have been disasterous if any of us needed to pee. We held it.

   Margolin emerged, half list in combing her sand colored hair which was mussed. “God even my hair got dirty,” she groaned to everyone and no one.

   “You can take a shower tonight,” Dad told her. “You girls are going to settle on how to use the shower,” Dad warned us. Margolin didn’t get it. She’d get it later. “OK, I need you over in the grownups room, now. We have to decide about dinner.”

   “Here it comes,” I thought. “Oh food fight, food fight. Time to whinge and groan.” I’d do my share though I despised it. I had to stick up for myself or we’d be somewhere with dull tasting, plastic food.

   “OK, most of us here eat some sort of pizza and the Chinese is a buffet. It’s closer than the pizza. There are probably some American foods and lots of desserts in the Chinese buffet. On the other hand, you may like pizza better and pizzarias have sandwiches. We’re going to do a straight up down vote. There are five of us so a tie is impossible. Majority rules for tonight. If this doesn’t work we’ll try something different in Asheville.”  RoAnn took out a piece of hotel stationary and folded it and then folded it again. She got six pieces and left one on the desk. She gave one to each of us. “Two choices,” she reminded  us, “Pizza or Chinese.”

   “No food fight,” I thought. That was impossible. “How can we vote if we don’t see the places and don’t see menus?” I asked.

   “You vote in the abstract,” RoAnn explained.

   “What if one of the places smells like something died?” I asked.

   “Doesn’t matter,” Dad replied. “If it stinks we go elsewhere,” RoAnn answered. “You and Ivanna are my sniffers. Now can we vote?”

   We voted by secret ballot. RoAnn read off the votes. There were two for Chinese and two for pizza, and Margolin voted: “Can I have a smoothie instead.”

   “What are you smiling about?” my stepmother asked me.

   I was enjoying the humor of an incipient food fight, but was not going to tell my stepmother that. I’d be sick of the fight soon enough.

   “Coin flip,” snarled RoAnn. “Since we have a tie, we’ll decide by a flip of the coin. Heads is pizza, tails is Chinese.”

   Margolin groaned. Ivanna rolled her eyes. Dad smiled. I got to toss the coin since I was the most useless kid in the bunch. Tails won. We got our coats on and trudged up the road to the Kwa Loon Buffet.

   Chinese outside of New York is not good old fashioned Chinese. It’s part American, part sushi, and part Korean.  They had kimchee and not much else that wasn’t just all beef or chicken or maybe pork. Margolin got a big plate of half french fries half tater tots. RoAnn said she couldn’t deal with an entree after the day’s stressful drive. “I’m being bad,” she said over her bowl of chocolate pudding. Dad had hot and sour soup and blew on it meditatively. Later he tried some of the hot dishes, avoiding the fried and greasey things. We both had kimchee. It tasted good with potatoes. I also had eight or nine pieces of sushi, and a rice dumpling, two or three crab rangoons whatever they were, and pineapple for dessert. We all managed to gorge ourselves without a single whinge.

   I figured we’d fight over the shower afterwards. Ivanna complained about how we had to walk all the way back to the motel. “No one walks here,” she said.

   “Can’t we call a cab?”whinged Margolin. “It’s dangerous.”

   Dad and RoAnn were impervious. I kind of liked hearing the other girls whinge. Of course dealing with the shower was another matter. Margolin wanted to go first. “If you shower now, there’s no shower in the morning,” I explained. Margolin blinked. She grunted.

   “There’s three of us and we have to share. It’s two tonight and one in the morning,” Ivanna explained. Margolin took the first shower anyway. Ivanna went next. I decided to do practice problems on the roll away until everyone else was asleep and around two in the morning I took my shower. I wanted to sleep as much in the van as possible on the way to North Carolina.

   ---

   The next morning, Christmas Eve, brought chaos. I had asked the desk for a wake up call. RoAnn made Margolin walk inside with me to watch me request the call. This was my first time asking for a wake up call. I guess I knew I’d be staying up late. Well, my stepsister and my companion (Margolin is NOT my friend!) were still asleep. “Hey assholes, get the fuck up!” I roused them.

   Margolin asked if I was showering. I told her “no.” It was easier to get dressed and pack the toiletries without a shower.  I reminded my stepsister and Margolin: “Make sure you get the cold drinks out of your fridge. We’re going to eat breakfast on the road somewhere.” Margolin said she was not hungry. Ivanna looked distressed. Dad had to argue about the bill which had a problem. Dad did not want CD’s. Margolin asked where we were going because she felt lost.

   There was snow on the ground and the trees at this elevation were bare long ago. It was still dark as we made our way out to the interstate which ran through the mountains. We headed south toward Roanoke. Sometimes there was fog and black ice on the road, and all the towns were small and dinky. Dad threatened to take RoAnn to a Waffle House. She made gagging noises which reminded me of Ivanna. Ivanna snorted with laughter and suggested we try fake fart sounds.

   “I’m going to pee my pants,” wailed Margolin.

   “For real?” asked Dad.

   “Yeah sure…” sighed my not friend.

   All the fun and games came to an end when we reached Roanoke, Virginia. We skipped the rest stop. “Another promenade,” Ivanna groaned.

   “Big safety stop,” RoAnn replied.

   Dad drove through downtown Roanoke until he found a shopping center with a large Kroger’s. That was the name of the supermarket. There are no Fairways in Virginia. We had Kroger’s and Food Lions and Giants back in Scranton. The parking lot at the Kroger’s was crowded.

   “I think Mom and Sammy have turned into lemmings,” Sammy said. “All the grownups are here to jump off a cliff.”

   “We can’t jump off a cliff,” I answered. “We’re down in a valley.” The city of Roanoke, Virginia is shaped like a bowl. We were well down the sides.

   The day was clear and cold. We stood outside our van in a huddle. “OK,” Dad began. “RoAnn is getting the food box. We are going to fill it. Now why are we travelling to Asheville with an empty food box?”

   “You’re too cheap to eat in restaurants,” Margolin responded.

   “Bzzzzzzz,” I thought.

   “Tomorrow is Christmas, and everything is going to be closed,” I answered. We were all going to be stranded in the motel room in Asheville except for Ivanna who was going to her biological father and her new stepmother and stepsister.

   “Actually,” Dad told us. “Everything is going to close down between five and six o’clock tonight.We’re buying tonight’s dinner and all the food for Christmas.”

   “Wonderful…” sighed Margolin.

   “Well what do you suggest?” asked RoAnn. Margolin had fallen into a trap, and it wasn’t fair. She did not know how our family worked.

   “We’ll find stuff to do, so you won’t be bored,” I told Margolin. She glanced at me. Ivanna smiled. Ivanna knew the supermarket drill, so she kept her mouth shut. When we reached the supermarket, RoAnn glanced around. It was a crowded place with shoppers herded betwen ropes before they went into the checkout lines.

   “There’s an express line,” Dad reassured RoAnn.

   RoAnn herded us toward one of two benches near the front of the store. “This bench is where we are going to meet after we buy food,” RoAnn told Margolin, Ivanna, and me. “We are splitting up so we can use the epxress aisle. Here is twenty dollars. Buy whatever you need. Kore is getting bread, but it’s going to be soft stuff. If you want crusty bread get it for yourself.”

   “Bread is full of carbs,” Margolin informed us.

   “Can we have ice cream?” asked Ivanna.

   “The room will have a freezer but it won’t survive the trip…no ice cream. Frozen vegetables and fruits are fine though. So is Lean Cuisine.”

   “Just what I want,” snarled Margolin.

   “Sorry, this is not the restaurant tour,” RoAnn answered.

   With that we headed off. I hoped there would be liverwurst in the deli. I ended up with a Kahn’s chub which took me back to middle school. The deli salads looked gross. Dad stared at them with disparaging eyes, but I got half a pound of cole slaw anyway and we also got a jar of red cabbage and a bag of frozen fance mix that had peapods and baby corn in it. We still had plenty of apples left, but we needed a box of Constant Comment tea for me and some kind of plain tea for Dad who also got smoked herring in a large can and a can of artichoke hearts and calamata olives.

   Ivanna helped Margolin find the Power Bars and the cookies. I saw them when we stood in a huddle in the express line where a dorky looking boy about Piper’s age with bright red zits glowing away on his pale pink face directed us through the tangle of ropes. Margolin wasn’t sure that her twenty dollars would cover he cookies and poptarts and something wrapped up from the deli. I forgot the Dijon mustard so had Margolin hold my basket. I estimated her bill and she was under twenty bucks. Twenty dollars buys a lot of food.

   We walked back into the parking lot and stowed the frozen things in the box with the cool pack and the threw the other grocery bags on the floor. It was time for our walk on residential streets or back toward downtown passed tumble down houses. This was not a great neighborhood. Everything looked sad.

   I tried to remember neighborhoods like this from Scranton, but I remembered them mostly from road trips. It had just been Dad and me then. I tried not to think of that. The walks had tired out Margolin. She dozed as we drove up into the hills beyond Roanoke. It was Ivanna’s turn with the CD’s. RoAnn drove so we could have music.

   ---

   “Are you going to play CD’s when we go through the pass?” Dad asked my stepmother.

   “Yes,” RoAnn answered. Let’s have a safety stop first though. I saw the pass on the map. It doesn’t look like anything but we were going to drop a good nine hundred feet on highway that frequently froze over. The sky was overcast up in the mountains.

   “Feels like snow,” Dad said as we walked in a very rural looking neighborhood. “Do you think the people here wished they lived in California?” asked Margolin.

   “Probably not,” replied Dad. “People in the country like to stay there.”

   Margolin shook her head. RoAnn put her complilation of Broadway tunes in the CD player and to the tune of One from A Chorus Line, we came down the pass. No, I did not sleep. Margolin and Ivanna had dozed off in the morning. Now it was early afternoon. The roads were crowded with cars full of presents. I tried not to think about where we were going. I concentrated on the music instead.

   RoAnn’s CD’s ran out a few miles beyond the bottom of the pass. It was Margolin’s turn next, but she was snoring. Yes, she really snored. It was a pleasure to hear her. Ivanna skipped ahead in the cue and trashy pop singers and a couple of boy bands seranaded us until we arrived in Bristol.

   “Safety stop and driver change and piss break,” RoAnn announced in a voice loud enough to wake poor Margolin who awoke disorineted and miserable. “We’re going to open the food boxes?” she asked.

   “Nope,” Dad said. “There’s a Subway here. Let’s hope it won’t give us ptomaine.”

   “Most Subways are good,” replied Ivanna.

   “You eat Subway?” Dad asked Margolin.

   She shrugged and managed to get through half a turkey salad bowl. I had an Italian sub and Dad ordered a veggie pattie. Ivanna had her usual chicken sandwich. We walked off the big lunch in a sad rural setting. Margolin asked if the locals were hill billies.

   “We don’t call them that,” Dad replied.

   “Does that mean yes?” I needle Dad and RoAnn.

   “It means it’s an eptithet,” RoAnn replied.

   “What’s an epithet?” asked Margolin. “Is it like a curse word?”

   “Yes,” RoAnn answered. Margolin wanted the map again as we headed further south. Dad was sick of the music so we had no CD’s. We watched for the border into Tennessee and then the next border into Virginia.

   At 5:30pm still in the Eastern time zone, we arrived in Asheville North Carolina at the Fairmont Inn where we had a family suite that included a kitchenette with a fairly big minifridge. It took a long time to divvy up the beds. We had to find the washing machine. Ivanna sat on the bed calling her stepfather. I had a bed in the alcove. I wanted a walk, yes another walk, but no one was going out until Anthony DiFranco arrived to pick up Ivanna.

   I saw Anthony pull into the parking lot. He drove a bright red SUV. It was a likeable car. Anthony was a plump baby faced man with strawberry blonde mutton chop sideburns and a thin beard. Something about him said he should be on TV as the father of a warm and loving family. My own Dad looked tired and far too serious. My Dad could have played a college professor on TV though it was RoAnn who was the professor. On TV, RoAnn would have no part except maybe as the villain in a spy movie.

   I tried not to think about any of that. I watched Ivanna hug her father. RoAnn watched too her face blank. Then she closed the door to the family suite where few of us were family. I helped Dad put away the food. “I need another walk,” I said absently. “Think we can walk all the way downtown?” Dad asked me back. “It will look pretty even if everything is closed,” RoAnn mused. Then I remembered Margolin.

   “Are you up for a walk?” I asked her. She looked tired and disoriented.

   “I hate motels,” she said to everyone and no one.

   “Why?” Dad asked.

   “It’s a common place used by everyone and besides, it tells you how far away home is. Don’t you want to be home instead of no place.”

   “It’s not no place,” RoAnn answered. “It’s Asheville, North Carolina. Once everything is open again, we’ll do some sight seeing. There’s a lot to see and do here. And we have cards and a few games and books, and we can always go for walks. You won’t be bored.”

   “If you let little things amuse you, you’re never bored,” Margolin complained.

   “You prefer being bored?” RoAnn tripped up the stranger girl.

   “I prefer really good things happening to me,” Margolin replied.

8. Useless to Even Herself

   That was how I reached Staunton, Virginia totally stiff, cold, and a bit sick. I was in no mood for dinner. I was in no mood for anything. We had two rooms in the Microtel. We three girls had one space. The parents had the other because parents on vacation want to pursue their social life even after being together all day in the car.

   “OK, don’t unpack just yet,” RoAnn announced. She was in charge and not one bit tired. The safety stops  had worked their magic. She had chosen to drift away as I had. Now I fought to come back as my stepmother gave marching orders. First, we had to decide which of the three of us had to sleep on the roll away. I volunteered to make the whole business go faster.

   Next, Margolin needed “proper attire,” because we were going for a walk to find a supermarket and then to find a restaurant for supper. It was too early to eat, but not too early for a combination of bodega duty and a promenade. We walked single file on the edge of roads where the sidewalks either did not exist or had not been cleared of snow.

   “If you walk on the left side facing traffic, you can walk on the shoulder of the road,” Dad explained. Margolin was noticeably afraid of cars. We did not find a supermarket but there was a pretty good QT, a Southern convenience store. Virginia, even Staunton which was up in the mountains, was the South.

   I picked up a soda for tomorrow’s trip and Ivanna bought not only juice but also power bars. Everyone paid for their own that night and when it was Margolin’s turn she took out a piece of plastic that the woman behind the counter handed gently back to her. “We don’t take that here, hun,” she called Margolin a Hun. I had to laugh at that.

   Margolin, though, was  not laughing.

   “You have enough money don’t you?” the clerk behind the conter cooed.

   Margolin glanced at me. Then slowly she opened her wallet. She pulled out one bill and haded it to the cashier who said she needed more money.

   “Kore,” Margolin asked. “Can you help me. She wants a dollar eighty-six and I…I’m nervous.”

   “Just give the lady two dollars and let her give you fourteen cents back,” I suggested.

   Margolin got her snacks and we walked back toward the motel. “How do you add money so fast in stores?” Margolin asked all of us. She’d seen both Ivanna and RoAnn come up with exact change.

   “It takes practice and learning your math,” RoAnn replied.

   “You mean I have to be a tool!”

   “No, asshole,” I answered. Fuck it if I insulted Margolin. I’d wanted to do it all day. She deserved it for being part of the Fast Crowd. “You just have to learn how to add money and how to estimate. That’s a survival skill.”

   “Think they’d teach me in school?” Margolin asked no one.

   “They let you study anything you want…” I said.

   “Do you want me to teach you?” it was RoAnn who volunteered and I wanted to warn my stepmother about Margolin but most adults sometimes don’t care about relationships among kids. They really don’t.

   “Yeah…though I’m no good at math,” Margolin confessed.

   “I used to say I was no good at math,” I told Margolin which was true. I’m still thick headed but I did get in to Brooklyn Tech.

   “What happened?” Margolin asked.

   “I wanted to get out of Houghton badly enough it was worth my while to study until my buns fell off,” I told my nonfriend. “Everyone gets better with practice, even thick heads like us.”

   I was not sure Margolin got it. And anyway it was time for the first Bihar/diFranco/Testa/Sidlow food fight. We had to decide between a pizza place or a Chinese buffet place for dinner. Such decisions would be very entertaining to outsiders but in our family, they are just plain ugly. There was a reason I volunteered to take the roll away. We are always just one food fight away.

9. The Captive in Transit

   Dad, who was driving the first segment of the trip to Asheville, was adamant about having NO CD’s until we were well clear of the Lincoln tunnel and the snarl of highway and toll booths that came after it on the New Jersey side. He said he needed to concentrate. That meant the three of us were silent.

   I had nothing to say to Margolin except what might come out ugly. I had no energy for small talk, and Ivanna knew I rated a “friend” on the trip which balanced things out since she was the reason for the trip. She was going to spend five days with her father her new half sister in Asheville. When you are lucky, you shut up.

   We emerged on to the New Jersey Turnpike and I knew it was time for the CD’s to break up the boredom and the inevitable tedium of heavy traffic, but before I could ask Dad to start the music, Margolin spoke up.

   “Where are we going?” she asked. It was a question of such blazingly impecable stupidity, that I wasn’t even angry at her. “Asheville, North Carolina,” Dad reminded my tutoring customer who had never learned a thing from me except that I like good meat as much as the next carnivore.

   “How far is that?” Margolin asked.

   “Nearly seven hundred miles,” Dad answered.

   “Where are we now?”

   In the front seat RoAnn cleared her throat and rummaged around.

   “New Jersey,” Ivanna answered. “We’re near Newark Airport which is where I flew out of when I went down to Asheville over Thanksgiving only the plane went as far as Charlotte. Dad, my real Dad not Sammy, picked me up there and took me to Asheville in the mountains.”

   “You flew on a regular airplane, by yourself?”

   “Yes,” replied RoAnn. “Ivanna’s dad and I split the cost. Actually, Sammy paid for some of it too.”

   “You weren’t scaird to be all alone like that?” Margolin asked.

   Ivanna shrugged as if she flew every day.

   “So how far do we have to by car?” Margolin repeated the question.

   Dad told her it was nearly seven hundred miles and about eleven hours. “We’ll do it over two days. We’re stopping tonight in Staunton, Virginia.”

   RoAnn cleared her throat again and handed the big road atlas over into the back seat. I took it. “Here,” I showed Margolin the map of New Jersey. “This is where we are. This is where we are going. We’re going to get off at Exit 14 and head west and over the line into Pennsylvania at East Stroudsburgh. I also showed Margolin a whole map of the United States so she could get an idea of how far away North Carolina was from New York City. She asked to see California on the map and then the whole US again. She shook her head.

   “I don’t think my parents know this trip is this long,” she told us all.

   “I think they’re well aware of it,” RoAnn spoke up.

   “In your lifetime,” Dad continued the lecture. “You’re going to meet lots of people who make trips like this. Now you’ll know what they are.”

   “Aren’t you going to get tired?” Margolin asked the adults.

   “Yes,” RoAnn said. “That’s why we have safety stops. We made our first safety stop somewhere in suburban New Jersey. It was my job to ask for the restroom key. RoAnn insisted Margolin go with me. It occured to me now she had never asked to use the restroom at a convenience store in her life. I remembered the first time I did it. I was a six year old with a full bladder and I’d been with Mom rather than Dad. She told me that if I was stupid enough not to pee before leaving the house, I could learn to ask for restroom keys.

   “Next time,” I told my companion from New York. (Margolin Sidlow is NOT my friend), “You ask for the key, got that?” Margolin blinked. “They’re usually nice about it in the country,” I clued her in. I also told her when we were out of earshot of RoAnn and Dad that safety breaks were a good time to check Twitter. I hoped she had remembered to juice up her Blackberry for the trip.

   At East Stroudsburgh came the first big safety stop. “I want to take thirty minutes before I start driving,” announced RoAnn. Dad knew what to do. We avoided the rest stop and drove into town so we had space in which to walk. The air was colder than in New York and there were patches of snow on the ground. The residential neighborhoods outside of downtown were semi intact with old houses cut up into apartments or offices and many sporting Christmas lights. I counted three, stupid, inflatable Santas in the yards and two very ugly inflatable snowmen and one sleigh with inflatable reindeer. You don’t see that in New York.

   East Stroudsburgh made me homesick for Scranton where I lived until I was ten. I did not tell anybody. Margolin stared at the semi-rural landscape like a deer in the headlights. She did not feign boredom. She was not bored. She was scaird shitless and I liked that just a little bit.

   “What kind of people live in a place like this?” she finally blurted out.

   “People like me,” I replied. “I lived in Scranton until I was ten.”

   “I grew up in St. Johnsville, New York. It’s a small city out in the country, and it is a lot poorer than this. All the jobs had left. Only the people remained.”

   “How did you get out of there?” Margolin would not stop.

   “I worked hard in school, got a scholarship to Syracuse, and decided I wanted to be an educated person and be a University professor and travel and live all over the world. I only made it to Scranton and then New York, but I did get out of St. Johnsville.”

   “I forget you’re a tool,” sighed Margolin.

   “Would you not call my mom names,” asked Ivanna.

   Margolin blinked. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

   Back in the car, we played CD’s through the mountains. Margolin probably did not hear the music. She glanced periodically from the road atlas to the scenery which was barren and grey and sometimes dilapidated. When we stopped for lunch in Harrisburgh which is the state capital of Pennyslvania, she asked if we were going to take another walk. RoAnn said we probably would. We’d need to walk off lunch anyway.

   “When do we get to North Carolina?” Margolin asked yet again.

   “Tomorrow afternoon,” Dad replied. “Didn’t you see it on the map?”

   Margolin grunted something. I had a meatball sub for lunch, while Ivanna had her usual chicken sandwich and Dad had a super bowl of lentil soup. Margolin ate a hamburger and fries half of which she left on her plate.

   We walked around Harrisburgh in silence. Margolin was out of questions and overwhelmed.

   Back at the car, Dad took the atlas and explained scale and distance to Margolin whose eyes glazed over. Then he explained how to calculate an ETA using distance equals rate times time. I explained how to do this using the mile posts, but Margolin just gave me a blank stare. She made a sad little sigh. I began the lesson again, this time more slowly.

   “I can’t do math without a calculator,” Margolin confessed. “I’m not a…” Margolin hesitated at the word “tool” now. She was a captive of tools and dork lovers and there was nothing a cool kid like her could do except suffer.

   “The sun is going to go down later the farther south and west we travel,” Dad offered. We were near the Maryland border now. At Hagerstown, Maryland was another big walk and rest stop and then it was on into the mountains on the edge of West Virginia and then down into Virginia. The map danced in my head. I was tired of Margolin. Seeing her suffer got old fast. She could rot for what I cared. Her presence in the van was obsessive. I was glad, that Dad turned off the music after Hagerstown. That meant I could sleep and by sleeping be somewhere else at least for a little while.

10. Margolin's First Mission

    The Sidlow’s deposited their daughter Margolin via a town car at 7:52am on Wednesday morning. She emerged from the town car armed with a grey colored, designer duffle and a pair of winter boots under one arm.

    I met her in the lobby which I was crossing to fetch the dolly cart so RoAnn and Dad could load the truck for our trip south and only have to make one trip in the elevator. I was also to fetch several pounds of apples for the trip at the same time.

    “Kore!” Margolin greeted me. Her enthusiasm took me by surprise. Early morning hours are a subdued time when you think about it. I decided to see she got upstairs to the apartment in one piece.

    “Where are the apples?” Dad greeted me as I entered with Margolin. “I’ll get them shortly,” I answered. “Margolin’s here…”

    “Fine,” Dad sighed not impressed and busy. “Margolin, leave your stuff here and go with Kore to get the cart and bring up the fruit. Then I have another errand for you.”

    This sounded fine with me, except Margolin and I aren’t really friends. We can’t be friends. I thought of the YouTube video that made fun of Life After Pardise. Margolin was a member of the crowd that had defamed my school and my friends. That is more than enough reasons to want nothing to do with the younger Sidlow girl.

    Needless to say, I was super glad when the elevator reached the lobby and I could show Margolin the stairs to the basement. “You come down here often?” Margolin asked.

    “Yeah,” I replied. “Our pantry is down here and so is the building laundry room.”

    “You don’t have laundry service or a maid?” asked the girl.

    “We have a cleaning woman who comes once a week, but we do our own wash.”

    I unlocked the pantry door and began emptying the apple basket into two Duane Reade bags. I gave Margolin one of the bags. Margolin insepcted the shelving and the carts. She even read some of the cute labels. “We need a freezer in here. People can’t always get to the store,” I explained. I thought about the cooking lessons I had this fall. I wouldn’t be having any over vacation, but Ivanna needed to see her Dad and know she had family even if it was in North Carolina.

    I found the dolly cart behind the delivery counter and asked the staff person if I could borrow it. He let me have it and Margolin suddenly asked if I could give her a ride on it. I shook my head.

    “Afraid you’ll get in trouble?” she asked.

    “Afraid I’ll get my whole family in trouble,” I answered.

    “You really are a tool!”

    “Fuck yourself.”

    “Oh, the language.”

    “They’ve heard it all before. Look you don’t fuck with building staff, not door people, not other people’s help, not delivery counter people. Got that?”

    Margolin said nothing and stayed silent for the long ride up on the padded service elevator. Instead of talking she inspected the padding.

    Too bad we had to get off at the ninth floor.

    I gave Dad the apples when I reentered the apartment. He inspected them and then handed me a sheet of paper. I smiled. I liked the trip to Gristeedes to pick up soda for a trip. “We’re on bodega duty,” I told Margolin who did not know what a bodega was. Oh well, when I lived back in Scranton, I didn’t know that either. “RoAnn and Dad want us to go over to Gristeedes on Amsterdam Avenue and pick up cold drinks for the trip.

    “Come on,” I told Margolin. “We’re running an errand. You get to pick your favorite soda or soft drink for the trip.”

    Margolin snorted, but she followed me back downstairs. She kept her own counsel as we headed out. The door person on duty was the Dominican so I did not have the awkward duty of introducing Margolin to Sidlow to Flemming who would probably gossip about her visit to the Ardsley. There is a reason you don’t fuck with the staff.

    “Where are we going?” Margolin finally asked as we rounded the corner to head west on Ninty-Second Street.

    “Gristeedes,” I told her. “We have to buy drinks.”

    “Is it far?” I tried not to look at Margolin’s face.

    “No,” I said. Then I checked to see if she had adequate clothes. Her coat was kind of OK, but her head was bare and she was not wearing gloves. I asked if she had a hat and gloves and a sweater or sweatshirt to wear under her coat. “I thought we were going south?” Margolin told me.

    “Asheville is in the mountains and it will take two days to get there,” I reminded her. “And when you drive you have to take safety breaks. My family also likes to walk around a lot.”

    “I know. Your mom…I mean RoAnn told my parents about all that. You should have seen the email she sent, ambarassing.”

    “So did you pack the right stuff?” I asked.

    “Yeah, but I’m not wearing it.”

    “Well if you keep moving, you’ll be warm. When you get back to the apartment just tell the grownups. They’ll help you get the stuff out of your duffle. That OK?” It would have to be.

    “Fuck,” replied Margolin. “This trip is really going to suck.”

    She said it, and she was right! Margolin glanced up and down Amsterdam Avenue. “It’s a shame we have to leave the city,” she finally admitted.

    “Ever eat in these places?” she asked.

    “Some of them,” I replied. “My family has to find a place where there is food everyone likes.”

    “I bet you go to the Arena a lot…” Margolin wanted to laugh. “Dad says we get half our meals from there, but you actually go…”

    I shrugged. “The Arena has good food, plenty of variety.”

    “Goat meat….You realize, Kore, that that was the first time any one in the Berna asked for goat meat.”

    “It was great,” I answered. Margolin snorted. By now we had reached Gristeedes. I gave her some of the soda cash. I was not sure she was used to handling regular money. She was going to have to learn fast. I really did not want Dad and RoAnn and even Ivanna looking down on her.

    “I don’t drink soda,” Margolin informed me.

    “Then get an ice tea or a juice,” I replied.

    “I feel like such a dork walking down a street in New York City with a bag of drinks,” Margolin informed me on the return trip. Margolin had pocketed the cash discretely in the store and used a credit card to buy her Fuse drink in a fancy bottle. Once on the street, she dug the two bills out of her pocket and handed them back to me. “I’m sorry,” she confessed. “Stores just make me nervous.”

    I didn’t answer. I was thinking of trips into anthracite country with my Dad. It had started to snow and it was cold enough to make the flurries stick to the sidewalk in a slick coating. The attendant had brought the truck out of the garage on the side of the building and it was standing while RoAnn and Dad back and forthed over the proper arrangement of duffles and the box of apples and other snacks. The snacks had to be within reach. Ivanna stood against the wall pretending to not be there, but secretly watching.

    I walked up to RoAnn. “Margolin has her sweater, hat, and gloves in her duffle, can she get them out and go change in the bathroom in the basement?”

    RoAnn, unlike my mom, was a fairly matter of fact sort, and since the duffles were not in their final arrangement, she pulled out Margolin’s duffle and slid it toward her. Margolin glanced around realizing she’d have to expose her inner dork in public. A dork inner or otherwise is not a dork unless it comes out peridocally. “I hope you brought CD’s,” RoAnn was in a chirpy mood. She liked road trips.

    “They’re in my purse. I was up all night this weekend burning them.”

    “Terrific,” answered RoAnn who had no idea what Margolin’s taste in music was, but only knew she’d have to endure it six tracks at a time.

    I got Margolin back in time so she could add the sweater layer and stuff her gloves in her pocket. She hated the hat. “I never wear a hat.”

    “Fine, then freeze,” I informed her. Margolin stuffed her hat in her purse. By the time we emerged the truck was packed. We hemmed Margolin in tightly in the center of the back seat. Actually it was a big truck and all three of us fit. It was also clean and the packing meant it was not overloaded. Margolin glanced behind her. “Wow, you people are so organized. I expected…” Margolin stopped. Whatever she inspected she knew only from DVD’s.

    “We don’t travel like that,” RoAnn instructed her. “Would you like to have your music go first?” she asked. Ivanna gave me a look that said both RoAnn and Dad would be sorry.

    “Can we wait until we’re through the Lincoln Tunnel at least?” Dad asked.

    “You know the alternative,” RoAnn told my father. “Music is better.”

    “You could learn to behave,” Dad suggested sounding suspiciously like Mom.

    “Not in close quarters early in the morning,” RoAnn took our side. I was not sure that Margolin appreciated it one bit.

11. Night, Snow, and Sand

    I skipped lunch again on Teusday. There was no reason to eat when I could watch YouTube in the back corner of the computer lab. Piper wanted to see Life After Paradise again, and so too did several Drama Club and several Computer Club kids. We had the chairs pulled around the machine with the large monitor.

    Piper searched YouTube and chose the first entry. The footage was familiar to any one who had watched countless run throughs, rehearsals, and the play itself three times. but the sounds and captions and order were all off. In fact, the barn yard noises, simulated sexual grunts, crude jokes, and occasional sound effects combined with sloppy editing made nails sliding down a blackboard sound like totally inspired harmony.

    “Someone fucked with us,” Javonovich declared.

    “Let’s see who made the movie,” Piper suggested. It was…I don’t have to tell you. I needed my Blackberry and I needed it now, but I wasn’t going to take it out in the middle of a classroom where a teacher might nose in.

    Instead, this had to go through channels. I was late to my mathematics class which was a shame since I had managed to break ninty on an official practice Regents only yesterday afternoon.

    The administrative suite at Brooklyn Tech was all decoarted in blue and purple tinsel and little white lights in honor of the approaching holiday. Someone had a boom box softly playing Christmas carrols. “No one wants to listen to a whiney freshperson who is complaining that someone made fun of her, except it wasn’t just me and the ridicule was national and…maybe there was something else. Didn’t we own the rights to our play?”

    I got to see one of the Assistant Principals’ secretaries. In a school of four thousand students, the administrative beaurocracy is byzantine on a good day. I explained the situation and made her watch the video. “That’s disgusting!” she exclaimed and I got an audience with an Assistant Principal for External Affairs for later that afternoon which meant I had a note excusing me for Global Studies. That’s nonWestern history in case you don’t know.

    I usually enjoyed this class. I like most subjects at school, but this was more important. The principal tugged on his beard as I told him the story of Piper finding the YouTube that took pieces of our play video and turned them into garbage. The principal, Dr. Victor even watched the video with me. Then he made a phone call to the General Counsel of the New York City School Board. The talk was brief as he explained how to do the YouTube search. Then there was silence, a long silence.

    Dr. Victor hung up the phone and cleared his throat. “We’ll get this taken care of,” he told me. “What Ms. Caldera will do is send an email and a registered letter on letterhead to YouTube and Google and ask them to remove the video. It’s copyright violation. We clearly have the rights.” That was all.

    I felt stupid all over for taking up everybody’s time. I stared down at the desk. Dr. Victor spoke again. “Bihar,” he told me. “That video is going to be toast in a day or two. You have a great Christmas.”

    I limped back to French which was my last class of the day and was glad to be up in the computer room after school organizing the parts cupboard. I did not want to be anywhere near the stage now that Life Afte Paradise had run its course and no while the nightmare continued to chase me down through daylight.

    Larisa came to get me while I was still boxing circuite boards and writing “Test Me!” on the boxes. “It’s getting dark,” she told me.

    “It’s December,” I said.

    “Your parents are going to be angry,” she informed me.

    “No, I have until nine o’clock to be home.”

    “Let’s check, before everybody leaves,” Piper told all of us.

    “Check for what?” asked Larisa.

    I told Larisa about the offensive YouTube. It was still listed, but when Piper clicked to subject us all once again to torture, there was a blank white spot on the screen that said: “Video Unavailable.”

    “Doesn’t prove anything,” I said. “It could just be too popular. That’s how it got on top.”

    ---

    Larisa and I said nearly nothing as we rode the subway to Coney Island. I pulled out my Blackberry to check my Tweets. I did not want to show that video around Larisa’s younger brother who was turning out very conservative due to his religious education.

    Sxxy_Pache @Leya @Unity_grrl @Sxxy_Raven @Alepha Young Assholes got their fucking lawyers after YouTube.

    Sxxy_Raven Oh that’s too much….

    Sxxy_Pache No it means that our video of that stupid musical is gone. YouTube won’t let us show it.

    Unity_grrrl Some kind of bullshit about copyright infringement.

    Leya New York City Public School’s lawyer called YouTube, sent them an email, all at three o’clock three days before Christmas.

    Leya Talk about being a tool!

    I showed the screen to Larisa and explained how to read the Tweets and what they were. She shook her head and then she sighed. “Why do you stay in touch with those rich assholes from your old school?” she asked.

    “I can’t let go,” I confessed.

    We let it drop. I wanted to walk on the beach even though it was night. It was a dark December night with the waxiest thin sliver of a moon hanging just above the ocean that never freezes. Larisa climbed nervously down the boardwalk steps. I had no fear. There were patches of snow glowing white on the gray, Coney Island sand which was frozen hard and good for running. Even with a heavy backpack, I still could run on the sand, and Larisa ran after me.

    “Thankyou HaShem!” I called out as I ran. “THANKYOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

    Larisa stood there and laughed and then she was crying out: “Thankyou HaShem!” too. We ran until we were out of breath and our lungs felt parched. Larisa blinked back tears. “I’m lucky I’m not peeing in my pants,” she told me.

    I had nothing more to say. I felt drained and light headed. We had a victory today, but tomorrow, we were taking one of the enemy to North Carolina. “I don’t fucking want to go to North Carolina,” I told my friend.

    “Did you tell your parents?” she asked somewhat dorkishly.

    “No,” I said back.

    “You’re stuck then,” Larisa advised me. “Look it’s only a few days.”

    Maybe she was right. I drank my soda on the subway. I did not need to consult Twitter. I let the train rock me back to Manhattan. It would not take long to pack. I’d read nonWestern studies or my Ben Okri novel in bed. There was still some breaded okra in the freezer. There would be hot tea under the fake, sunny, blue sky in the kitchen, and maybe Margolin would not show up or miss the trip for some other reason. It would be interesting to hear what reason she used to get out of the Carolina trip.

12. We've All Lost Our Minds

    I was on back stage by myself in the auditorium at Brooklyn Tech. Everyone had left. Maybe I did not want to go out and catch the subway. Maybe Micah made me stay to find the wrench I dropped when I fell off the battens Friday night. I couldn’t go home until I found the stupid wrench.

    Then I heard the noise. Someone was in the auditorium. Several people were in the auditorium, just beyond the curtain. I walked toward the front of the stage and parted the heavy velvet drapes. If you can see them, they can see you. That’s the first rule to operating back stage, but everyone was gone. I expected the auditorium to be dark, houselights off, emergency lights on.

    Giggle, giggle, giggle, went the voices. “She’s up there. Yeah…she’s looking at us.” Somehow Stephenna Crowe had come back east to watch Life After Paradise. “Yeah…how’s the show Kore?” I couldn’t tell whose voice it was, but my mind supplied pictures of the fast crowd at Houghton and the Hollywood crowd who lived in their tweets. “Yeah…some show! Great show! You know you ran away to nothing.” Someone started imitating a fictional parent. “Look you’re all alone, Kore, nobody’s here but us.”

    They were down there, down in the audience, waiting for me. I had to get them. I forgot about the wrench, ran out to the proscenium, leaped off the end of the stage and hit the concrete. Then I ran up the aisle. They were drinking smoothies and painting their nails. They had a mental health exemption from dress code so wore belly pants to school and long nails done at the Korean nail parlor or something….

    The alarm clock rescued me. My sheets were soaked in sweat that had a potent bitter smell. My lower guts were on fire, and I suspected something was stained. I hoped that was all it was because if I didn ‘t have my period, I was dying. I did not have to scramble to find the supplies. They hung in the back of my closet. I had stopped counting the days, but at RoAnn’s insistence, had not hidden the supplies.

    I grabbed a pad and hobbled off to the bathroom. I had stained my pajamas. I needed pain medication. I was not sure I was up to going to school. I felt like Napoleon’s army leaving Russia as I transferred to the 2 Train at Times Square, but by the time I hit the  Calliope on the way to school, I was able to stand nearly erect. I wondered how I would survive my practice Regents that afternoon. Micah and Javonovich also needed someone to help with stage cleanup. I thought of last night’s dream and shuddered.

    We actually had a bit of sun through the window when I took my practice Regents Monday afternoon. I remember being thirsty all through the test. I hadn’t eaten lunch. I’d watched the videos of Life After Paradise on YouTube in the library and then I’d looked at Twitter. Unity_grrl and Alepha discussed Sxxy_Sistah’s plight. Alepha moaned of how life was unfair. She got to go to Aruba while her younger sister was being turned over to my family on Wednesday morning. No, I should have been studying, but I was beyond guilt.

    I handed in my Regents long after it got dark. I stood outside with my nervous fellow students. One got down on the ground and prayed in Spanish. Others leaned against wall and door jambs. I thought of the warm Cherry Coke only one third drunk and in my backpack. I was going to go get it when Mr. Gomez indicated the tests were graded and ready. He came out with the scores.

    I had a 91. I wanted to whoop for joy but I thought of the invisible Fast Crowd in the dark auditorium. I did not even want my soda. I wanted to sit under the fake sunny, blue sky in the kitchen and sip hot tea cooked in a Pyrex. “We tied,” Chin told me. She was happy today for some reason. I hugged her trying to squeeze some of her joy like sweet fruit. She had a pleasant smell like fried noodles. Piper smelled of clean boy. I dreamed of my friends’ smells all the way home on the Subway. I wondered how any of my friends could stand my own stench of corruption.

    I studied in bed and then at RoAnn’s prodding put on sweats and went down to the laundry room to wash all my dirties in preparation for packing to go to North Carolina. “Remember to bring all your books home tomorrow,” RoAnn told me. “You do need a vacation don’t you?” she asked me. I nodded. I had nothing to tell any body and then, I did have something I needed. “Tomorrow,” I said to my stepmother. “I’d like to go visit Larisa. I’ll get back in time to pack.”

    RoAnn shrugged. I hadn’t done much visiting since we started dress rehearsals for Life After Paradise. With that over now, I was a bit freer than I’d been in weeks. “Sure,” she said. “Just be back by about 9pm. Call if something happens to the trains.”

    Noblesse oblige can be wonderful at times.

13. (FLASHBACK) -- The Last Night in the Woods

    It was the summer before Dad went to live in Manhattan with RoAnn. That meant it was the summer before I went to middle school and took the Greyhound to New York with my brother Kyril to visit my Dad after he moved there.

    I used to go to work with Dad. In those days he talked a lot more about work and he talked about it a lot less abstractly than he does now. I’m fourteen and a half and in ninth grade at Brooklyn Tech now in case you are wondring. My mom moved with my siblings, Kyril and Minerva, and me to New York when I was in sixth grade. Until I was in sixth grade I grew up in Scranton, Pennyslvania and until my parents’ marriage fell apart, I thought I’d live there at least until I went away to college.

    It was a bad time that last summer. Some time in the spring, Mom and her boyfriend, Barry had broken up. Dad and RoAnn who was his girlfirend managed to stay together. Parents are happiest when they have boy or girl friends.

    When Barry dumped Mom, she was pissed off at the whole world including Dad, but Dad was handy when he came to pick me up for visitation. Kyril felt bad for Mom and sided with her. I was just glad to get out of the house. Minerva couldn’t go visiting “any time Dad felt like it” because according to Mom who was right in these things, Dad kept any visiting kids out late, especially if  he took us along to work. Thus the only one of the “us” to go to work was me. I did not mind. I loved going to work with Dad.

    Dad worked out in the country. Dad is a civil engineer. That means he builds things out of earth and helps make sure buildings and bridges are sound. You have to know a lot of mathematics for that plus a branch of physics called mechanics which is similar to mathematics, and having some knowledge of geology doesn’t hurt either, especially in Pennsylvania.

    The mountains around Scranton are anthracite country. Anthracite is a kind of hard, black, and shiny coal. It is the queen of coal, but when people would rather burn oil and they can mine cheap, dusty, bituminous coal by blowing the top off a mountain, there’s not much money in anthracite and there are a lot of empty, abandoned mines.

    The earth does not want you to take coal from it. Down in the coal mines there is sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and the earth always wants to close the wound that you make in it. Worse still, coal dust is flammable. There is a town in Pennsylvania called Centralia where a fire burns just under the soil. No one has been able to put it out.

    Dad often made good money closing down and “remediating,” a fancy word which means fixing abandoned mines. One night in July of the summer before I went to Middle School Dad had a particularly tough assignment. He had been working on this one for a while. I knew where it was because I had been to the site a couple of times before. There was an abandoned mine that had started to burn in the town of Cato.

    You’ve probably never heard of Cato. When a mine dies, its town dies with it. The businesses close and the miners and business people who depended on the miners’ pay checks leave. This is capitalism hard at work and at its best. RoAnn, my stepmother, says that economists call this comparative advantage.

    There was nothing left of Cato. All the stores were boarded up. Most of the houses were abandoned. The miners, who were left lived mainly in trailers. Beyond these trailers was a construction and destruction trailer and several truck tailers turned into offices that served as the mine head. The old mine buildings if they had ever been there were long gone. Thick second growth forest full of pricker bushes and mosquitoes and a few berry bunks crowded in around this tiny settlement.

    Dad parked outside the mine office. It was late in the day. We should have gotten supper but there was no where but ptomaine pits along the net of county and state roads we had used to get to Cato. One of the reasons that the fire at Cato never became another Centralia was that it was in a very out of the way corner of the state.

    Dad told me what he was going to do. He and a hand picked crew of miners were going down below. Last week, Dad and his crew had inserted a special sort of metal and synthetic screen to block the fire from the entrance to the mine which served as its source of oxygen. Without oxygen the fire wold die. Temperature sensers said the fire was probably dead. If the fire had died, Dad would watch the hand picked crew remove the screen and then initiate a controlled collapse of the mine so it would not catch fire again. This sounds easy. It also sounds scarey. Dad figured he would not get done with the collapse until about 11pm or so. “I know an all night place out on the interstate where I can get you dinner…remember that big diner.”

    I vaguely remembered it. I vaguely worried about Dad. I worried more about how I would kill four to six hours in a town which was completely gone. Collapsed was too kind a word. The mine manager solved my problem. He sent me to “Bessie’s trailer.” Bessie was a miner’s widow who ran a kind of coffee concession and who didn’t mind “babysitting” for a ten year old. I had books with me, and Bessie had light and promised to turn down the TV which wasn’t getting anything anyway because the “cable was busted. Damn cable people are a bunch of stinking crooks,” Bessie said. She was old, plump, toothless, and washed out with hair people called strawberry though if any strawberries were that shade of orange, people would either think them genetically modified mutants or else no good to eat and fit only for the garbage pail.

    I found a corner in Bessie’s living room. The lazy boy was for old people and I wasn’t lazy so I sat on a big square ottoman in a trailer that smelled of dirty coffee and stale cooking. I made it a point to refuse all food. As it turned out, Bessie did not mind letting me read in a corner of her living room because she was going to be home that evening anyway. She had visitors, other women of indeterminate age though they all looked old, used up, and bloated to me.

    They were going to have a Bible Study, but it quickly turned into a gossip fest. Gossip fest is too gentle a word when you think about it. Later when I went to middle school in New York, the big girls who could either make or break us sometimes sounded like the biddies in the trailer that night.

    The object of the old ladies’ scorn was a new, young, and pretty woman or at least I pictured her that way at the time who had stolen away one of their sons from one of their daughters. By the time the story got going, I wasn’t reading any more and the old ladies weren’t studying their Bibles.

    The pretty girl whose name was Joceyln had broken up Jimmy’s marriage. That was the son’s  name. I wish I didn’t remember this shit, but I do. Jocelyn worked as a computer operator for some back office from Philadelphia that had set up in the country because rents were cheaper and labor eager to work. Jocelyn had insisted Jimmy leave a “good paying job” in the mines and go to college and now the pair lived in town and were poor as can be because Jimmy was a newspaper man. I kind of thought being a reporter was a lot nicer than being a coal miner and a lot safer.

    Also the Jimmy and Jocelyn though not rich were doing well. This made the old women furious, but they said that Jocelyn had cheated by avoiding responsiblity. What this meant, I learned as the conversation continued, was that she had gotten an abortion rather than raise a child she and Jimmy could ill afford. Joceyln was no good. Jimmy needed to come back to Heaven, his first wife.

    Poor Heaven was so lonely, attested a grey haired woman who walked with two canes. She was Heaven’s mother. Heaven had returned to her trailer and was moping about except when she had to go out and go to her CNA training class. I did not know what a CNA was in those days. Now I know it is some kind of practical nurse. Suffice it to say, Heaven was unemployed but a lot of people in rural Pennsylvania are.

    “We’ll deal with Jocelyn tonight,” Bessie told grey head. She put aside her Bible, and a lot of the other women put away their class materials. Bibles went back into their pouches and zippered cases.

    Just then the trailer door flew open and in walked a pasty faced, plump woman of indeterminate age. “Heaven,” cried out a woman with lank black locks. “You are just the girl we wanted to see.”

    “I dreamed of Jimmy again,” Heaven confessed.

    “That’s OK, your dreams are going to come true girl. We’re going to take care of Jocelyn.”

    Heaven did not ask how these women planned to make Jocelyn’s life a misery though I could imagine it. Fourth grade was just one year shy of middle school, and I knew girls could be very mean. Why should grown women be any nicer?

    “They’re destroying old Shaft Number One,” Heaven told the ladies.

    “I heard about that” said black and greasy.

    “Yeah, but you can’t do that,” grey hair answered. “The mines have a life of their own. There’s stuff down there. Once you wake it up, you can’t just kill it off. That’s why the fire started.”

    “That’s not what that engineer from the city thinks,” a woman with blonde hair and sand blasted skin told the others. “He took a bunch of boys down there to pull out the temporary wall and now their taking down the mine.” Sandy skin sniffed with disgust.

    “They won’t get away with it,” answered black and greasy. “I feel sorry for those fools of boys and their mothers. The mine will get them before the sun rises.” The other women nodded and grunted agreement.

    “Let’s get back to Joceyln,” Bessie suggested. “Now do we have the candle?” Grey hair limped to the kitchenette and extracted several red candles with what looked like the Virgin Mary on them. I am Jewish so I don’t know much about Catholic Saints. My favorite Catholic Saint of course is Jeanne d’Arc, but she is everyone’s except maybe the folks who prefer Elizabeth Seaton or Kateri because they have a kind of home town advantage.

    “Is this the right candle?” asked Heaven.

    “It sure is, Lori, get the lights.” Lank and black turned off the lights. Now I couldn’t read. I realized as I sat quietly on my ottoman that the old ladies had forgotten I was even there. I hadn’t expected them to have a seance in the trailer. I watched. “This was going to be fun,” I thought.

    Then they began the prayers: “Santa Barbara,” they began, so it was not Virgin Mary on the candles. Santa Barbara I learned later was both the patron saint of ordinance workers who make explosives and miners. This made her pefect except I don’t think the ladies were really praying to Santa Barbara.

    “Holy Santa Barbara tonight, we ask your protection and revenge for a righteous wife and mother scorned and to put an end to the woman who led her astray. Use your powers to destroy the infamous Jezebel, Jocelyn. Let her feel humiliation, shame, and  misery. Let her die in great pain.”

    A song went through my head. “I like Jocelyn with a rope around her neck, a knife in her back, and a bullet in her chest. I like Jocelyn with a rope around her neck, hanging from the Susquehanna bridge — UNDRESSED!”

    I almost wanted to laugh, but then the ladies said something that changed the mood: “And help the powers below the earth take their revenge on those who think they know better than nature. Let the mine close in and swallow those who would close it, the stupid engineer from the city and those dumb enough to go down with him. Make Old Shaft Number One an example of your powers….” I wasn’t listening any more. It wasn’t fair of these ladies to wish my father dead. He’d never done anything to them.

    I thought about telling them to shut up and was even on my feet, when there was a knock on the trailer door. Bessie pushed the Santa Barbara candles aside and Lank and Black turned on the lights. In walked a slim, young woman in faded jeans and a narrow black belt and a white fuzzy sweater. She glanced at me and I glanced at her. “I’ve been looking for Elizabeth.”

    “My mom doesn’t want to talk to you,” snarled Heaven.

    “Easy Heaven,” cooed Bessie. “We can all be friends.”

    “I need to get the rest of Jimmy’s stuff. His fishing rod is still in the old trailer and he thinks you probably took it with you when you moved back in with your mom.”

    “I don’t know about any fishing rods,” sighed Heaven.

    “I do,” answered grey head who was also known as Elizabeth. “It’s in the shed out back. We’ll take you out there in a while to get it.”

    “And what else will these ladies do?” I wondered. I told myself they would do nothing. They only wished for people’s deaths behind their backs. That’s not committing murder.

    “Would you like some coffee? Would any body here like some coffee?” Bessie played hostess with the mostest. I was afraid of getting food poisoning, so I said “no.” Bessie made coffee for several of the women though including Jocelyn.

    The women drank coffee in silence.  They talked about Jimmy. He was covering the shaft number one destruction tonight. That meant he was up by the office. “He didn’t come to see me,” Elizabeth, the grey head complained.

    “Maybe he doesn’t want to see…” Jocelyn looked at Heaven.

    “At least I’d be a mother to his children,” Heaven told Jocelyn.

    “And you’d be buying wick milk and juice,” Jocelyn retorted.

    “You were raised on wick milk and juice young lady,” commented blonde Lori with the sand blasted face.

    “I want better than that now,” Jocelyn spat back and then suddenly she doubled over in pain.

    “Santa Barbara works every time,” crowed Bessie.

    “Please…” begged Jocelyn.

    “This is for what you did to Jimmy and to my daughter,” answered Elizabeth who spat in Jocelyn’s face.

    “Out you go slut,” laughed Black and Lank who helped Heaven pushed Jocelyn out the door. Meanwhile all the women laughed. I felt my face burn. I stood rooted to my corner. I’d been a witness. What would they do to me next?

    Then I remembered there was a hurting, sick, dying, or poisoned woman staggering around outside. Yes, she was poisoned. I’d seen Bessie make coffee for her. I’d seen her serve it so no one else would get the poisoned brew.

    I flew out the trailer door.Jocelyn lay on the lawn moaning. “Get an ambulance…” she told me in a hoarse, pained voice. Would an ambulance even be able to find Cato, I wondered. It was so far from everywhere. “Go get Jimmy. Have Jimmy get an ambulance. He knows how to do these things.”

    Jimmy was easy to find. He was in the mine office. I ran up the road. I prayed Jocelyn wouldn’t die while I was gone. Jimmy sat in the mine office with a headset on. He had strawberry colored hair. Could he be Bessie’s son or one of her close relations. That was very possible out in these back woods.

    I asked for him and he turned when I spoke his name. I told him that Jocelyn was poisoned and had been dying. She was on the lawn outside Bessie’s trailer and that Bessie might stomp her to death or pour acid on her. If she could poison someone there was no telling what she could do.

    I sat in Jimmy’s car while he drove back to the trailer. Jocelyn was on the grass where I had left her. Jimmy felt for a pulse and a heartbeat. He put her in the load bed  of the truck and told me to ride with her. I don’t remember how we got to the hospital in the first large town. I remember that Jocelyn didn’t have to wait long because she was taken right away into the bowels of the emergency room.

    I was with Jimmy the whole time. After a time, a nurse in dirty scrubs came out with forms for Jimmy to sign. She said they were taking Jocelyn to surgery. What kind of surgery, I may have asked. “She has a ruptured appendix,” answered the nurse. “We have to get it out immediately.”

    We went back to sitting in the waiting room. After a time, Jimmy called his editor and the mine owner on his cell phone. The mine owner did not answer. We waited some more. After two hours, a doctor in bloody scrubs came into the waiting room and said that Jocelyn was in the recovery room. If Santa Barbara wanted Jocelyn she’d have a fight on her hands.

    Then, I remembered my dad at the bottom of the mine they were destroying and I remembered my Mom whom Barry had kicked out and I felt scaird and sick that I had forgotten my family. I was sure something terrible was happening to my father.

    Just like in the trailer, no one paid much attention to me after Jocelyn went into recovery. I just sat and sat. They had local news on in the emergency room and on the flat screen TV emergency lights flashed and fire engines lined up in great, ugly phalanxes. A reporter announced that a crew destroying a mine that was “part of the Cato complex,” had triggered a subsidence and that the mine buildings were probably unsafe.

    I jumped from my seat. My father was in that crew. Had they gotten out all right. The news reporter hadn’t said anything about the crew! I needed to know about my father. I needed to know now! I did not even know whom to call. Then the emergency room doors opened and a man in a sweat stained dress shirt and three days worth of five o’clock shadow asked if there was a Corey Beehar in the room. I said that I was Kore Bihar. He said that he was Peter, the submanager at the mine and that my dad wondered where I was. I told Peter I was here, and Peter took me back to the mine. Dad waited between the trailers along with a crew of dirty miners who had no where to change.

    He asked where I had been. I told him about the woman with the burst appendix. I never told him about the death wish and the candles in the trailer. The mining company let us go back to headquarters and get cleaned up. It was 4am then. We went to breakfast on the interstate. I asked Dad if he had any more mine assignments like that. He said he’d be going to New York next month. That was his way of saying, “no.” If  he had said “yes,” I would have just had to live with it.

    I did follow up on Jimmy and Jocelyn. I had Jimmy’s business card and I emailed him about Jocelyn. She survived. Jimmy  never recovered his fishing rod though. I don’t know if Bessie, Lori, Elizabeth, and Heaven are still up there in the woods a quarter of a mile near a hole in the ground that used to be Old Shaft Number One of the Cato Anthracite Complex. I’ve never asked either.

14. Dork on the Stage

    I managed to direct message Margolin Sidlow aka @Sxxy_Sistah on Twitter by Thursday. I only got an eigty-eight Wednesday practice regents. Mr. Gomez, my math teacher said that my scores would gradually rise. The Math A regents was still three weeks away.

    Friday we gathered around 6pm as we set up for Life After Paradise. “Suit up, harness and tools, Bihar…” Javonovich ordered. “Wang, I want you to run the standard test pattern…all of it…” Chin scrambled into the loft. She all ready had her “dirty sweater” on to protect her good sweaters and blouses.

    Chin screamed. “Shut the fuck up!” hollared Micah to her, but the stage was in darkness.

    “I broke it!” Chin cried again.

    “You didn’t break it,” Micah snarled. “One of our circuit breakers is fucked up. It has to happen tonight.”

    “Maybe it means good luck,” suggested one of the boys.

    We brought up emergency lights. Micah and Javonovich, rethrew the circuit breakers, and the test pattern blasted us into black again. “It’s the fucking wiring,” growled Javonovich. “I’ll get this fucker fixed, don’t worry. Lee, get off your fucking ass and help me, now! Bihar, you stay the fuck put.”

    Suffice it to say, the lighting board’s wiring glitch got fixed and the lights stayed on until the end of Act I Scene III. When the curtains closed, we tested out the two main spot lights for Anthony Blaine’s reprise of “I am Alone Big City” which segues into a duet with a girl from the Lower East Side. No, the rabbis in  Coney Island would not like Anthony’s interfaith romance, but this is the twenty-first century.

    The spotlight blew its bulb with a catastrophic pop! “Bihar,” said Javonovich. I was all ready on the ladder to the battens with the bulb in its box hanging from me by a rope strap like a shoulder bag. Stuffed into my work apron were my tools, including the all important WD-40. I hooked up my safety harness and walked out on the battens. I squatted beside the crippled light and went to work. I was able to get the bolts off the light and opened its cover. I was able to get the old burnt bulb out and replace the new one, and I closed the light back up and did all the bolts except one. I had to stand and bend over the light to do the last bolt, and before I could tighten it, I slipped.

    For a second, time stood absolutely still, and I thought I would float in the air forever. I didn’t. The harness caught me. It pulled against me. I bounced a little bit. My left hand which had instinctively grasped the harness hurt because the strap was rough. I grasped it harder, a death grip.

    Outside the curtain, the band began to play. This was to give us more time and to allow us to speak a bit louder than we normally could. “You need help, Bihar?” Micah asked. “Drop the fucking wrench,” called out Javonovich. “You’re still holding the wrench.”

    I knew about the wrench. I stuffed it into my apron. That gave me two hands but I could not pull myself up. I swung wildly. It might have been fun. The harness felt very secure. I adjusted my grip and tried drawing up my legs. This time I pulled myself higher. Then I dropped again.

    I swung again and drew up my legs. This time I grabbed the batten with one hand and then with both hands and was able to pull myself up on to my chest and then belly. I swung my leg over and sat straddling the batten. I tucked one foot under me, and then the other and pushed myself to all fours and then to standing.

    I checked my tools and tightened the last bolt on the light. I strapped the dead light bulb that I had placed in the strap box earlier over my shoulder, walked to the ladder, and climbed down. I felt a bit light headed. I did not begin to shake until I was on solid ground.

    Chin ran a half test pattern and checked out the spot light. A few minutes later the curtain parted for Act I Scene IV. At the end of the premier performance of Life After Paradise, I walked out into the lobby outside the auditorium. RoAnn, Dad, and my stepsister were waiting for me, but so too were Marcus and Kayla Sidlow, Davida Sidlow, Margolin Sidlow, and a woman I hadn’t met before but who looked like a small, washed out, older version of either Margolin or Davida. She turned out to be Justine Sidlow, Margolin and Davida’s mother.

    “You came all the way to Brooklyn to see the musical!” I cried.

    “Why not,” said Justine Sidlow. “My daughters need to see the real world.”

    “It’s not the real world, but the rest of the world,” Marcus corrected his exwife.

    “It’s about time,” I thought, but did not say.

    “I’d like to discuss something with you, Kore,” Marcus spoke.

    We needed to do this somewhere more quietly. I found a hallway near the bathroom which while it had some traffic, was less hectic than the lobby.

    “Kore,” Marcus Sidlow began. “How would you like to have Margolin spend vacation with your family?”

    “That’s for my parents to decide,” I spat back. It was the best excuse. I glanced at Dad and RoAnn and even Ivanna.

    “How do you feel about it?” Kayla asked.

    “Are you blackmailing my family?” I wanted to ask.

    “I feel fine. I mean, I’m not sure Margolin you’ll like the way we do things. Besides we’re going to North Carolina.”

    “Where?” asked Kayla.

    “We’re going to spend some time in Ashville over break,” Dad explained.

    “Isn’t that in the Mountains?” asked Marcus Sidlow.

    Dad nodded. “We can adjust the motel reservations. It’s not a problem. I assume you’ll pay for your daughter’s expenses.”

    Marcus and Kayla nodded. After more back and forth my father and stepmother made a deal with the Sidlows. It was really quite a deal. Dad patiently explained that Margolin could bring only four days worth of clothes and she’d wear her winter coat on the trip down. The same was true for her boots if it was messy enough in New York. She could carry them separately from her duffle. She’d need spending money and she’d need to be at the Ardsley  on the morning of December 23rd at 8am sharp. Oddly enough, the Sidlows agreed to everything.

    On the way back to Manhattan in the truck,  Ivanna asked: “Do you think they’ll really do it?”

    “Yes,” Dad replied. “The Sidlows are believers. They’ve raised their kids that way, but they need to learn about the world. We’re the other side, but the Sidlows trust me because we have some mutual work contacts.”

    “Like what?” I asked.

    “It’s secret,” RoAnn replied for Dad.

    “It’s OK,” Dad said and we let it go.

    Saturday, there was both an afternoon and evening performance of Life After Paradise. We lost some blue and gold lights and I did batten fixes between acts. I was not that scaird of falling off the batten. I knew how to climb up now. Besides, God had spared our production. Only the scrape on my left hand reminded me of the accident.

    After the last show of Paradise on Saturday night, Mom met me in the lobby. She had Kyril with her. To his credit, my full brother looked bored. Mom said I was fabulous and she asked me which part of the lighting I had done. I told her as I had told Dad and RoAnn about fixing lights on the battens and about falling off on Friday. Mom asked to see my injured hand.

    “How do you feel about lighting?” she asked me.

    “I like it a lot.”

    Late Saturday night, I sat on my bed and brought up Twitter.

    @Alepha They’re sending @Sxxy_Sistah to North Carolina

    @Alepha @Unity_grrl @Leya @Sxxy_Raven @Sxxy_Pache To fucking North Carolina with a family of TOOLZ!

    @Sxxy_Raven @Alepha @Sxxy_Sistah Can you stop them?

    @Alepha No! We need to take this direct message.

    I signed out of Twitter and laughed. Then I pictured the whinging in the back of the van over Christmas break and I wondered if my dad and stepmom had lost their minds.

15. "This is not the end of the world."

    I left my Dad’s apartment on Central Park West just after dawn on Sunday, December 13. Though the snow was all ready melting in the streets, there were mounds of it everywhere, not quite dirty yet, and pushed up against the sidewalks. The sun was gone though it was light outside.

    Battery Park City’s lawns were shrouded in snow. All the word was white and grey and flecked with little black soot spots. The security guard asked me how I liked the snow. I said I neither liked nor disliked it. Snow after all was what it was.

    Mom sat in her living room. The curtains were drawn. On the other couches and chairs sat my younger brother, Kyril, and my younger sister whom I barely knew when you think about it, Minerva. Minerva looked straight at me. Kyril stared down at the floor and then gave me an ugly look. I wondered what I had done. If Mom wanted to put me on trial for running  off on her and going to live with Dad she was a day late and a dollar short. “Overcome by events,” I thought and then pushed the thought away.

    “There’s something I need to tell you,” Mom began. It took me several seconds to realize she was addressing all of us, even the younger kids. “I lost my job.”

    “How?” I asked.

    “I serve at the pleasure of Houghton’s Board of Trustees, and they fired me. You all know I have enemies. The idea that kids should work in school is not popular everywhere, especially among rich kids.”

    “You violated your own unwritten rules or maybe they are someone else’ unwritten rules, Mom, ” I thought and I felt deep shame at my own throughts’ cruelty. If bad karma had gotten my mother, there was no need for me to pile on.

    And bad karma hadn’t gotten to my mother. My Mom had enemies, genuine, evil enemies. I even knew who they were. I remembered the high school kids with their mental health exemptions from the dress code, the ones with priviledge on top of priviledge, making life hell for the younger kids who were NOT their favorites. I could not forget. What sort of parents did such kids have?

    “I’m sorry,” I sputtered.

    “What are we going to do?” it was Kryil who asked.

    “Well, you have free tuition until June. After that I’ll have to decide where to send you to school. There probably won’t be much school left at Houghton unless you are very much a self starter but if there’s no demand for real academics, I doubt they will last.”

    “You’re not going to send me off to military school?” Kyril actually looked scaird. Minerva rocked back and forth.

    “No, why should I do that? I’d be afraid to send any kid to boarding school. The boarding schools are collapsing faster than the day schools and parents’ can’t keep an eye on things.

    “Come on kids, let’s go out and get some brunch. We haven’t had a family meal together in ages.” Kyril did not move. Minerva glanced at her older brother.

    “Come on,” Mom cajoled her peace making son. “We need to go out. I can still afford to do that much. This is not the end of the world.”

    “Of course it’s not,” I thought cynically. “Dad will bail Mom out. He will do it because she has two of his kids and because he knows how and why she lost her job.” I thought of that video about Adirondack High School. “FALLEN!” I pushed the ugly thought out of my head.

    I missed the Bihar/Testa/DiFranco promenade because I ate with my Mom and two whole siblings on Sunday. From Mom’s bathroom, I phoned Dad and RoAnn and explained the situation. Dad said to eat with Mom. We’d have time together either this week or in a week or two. “Mom needs you, Kore,” he told me.

    That night I studied. Life goes on. Mom still had some consultancy work and she was advising the folks up on Boonville and Frankforte, far away in New York State’s North Country. I sat for a practice regents in the study/off and got a 91. It was my first foray above ninty percent. I felt a bit like celebrating and even thought of calling Mom with the good news.

    Instead, I checked my Twitter and found a direct message from Margolin Sidlow (aka @sxxy_sistah). Bak in NY. Bak before going to Arooba for Xmas brake. Come c me soon.

    I wondered how to explain to Margolin that I was just TOO FUCKING BUSY to see her. I wondered if I could ever deal with the Sidlows again. I wondered if I could face any of them without scratching their eyes out. Like my mom. I too had enemies.

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