"Yes."

"Then I'm a freak."

I parked my bike in the garage, entered the house, and found it dark and quiet.

CHAPTER 22: I CAN BE A NORMAL DAMN TEENAGER, SORT OF.

Jerri was out cold the whole rest of the afternoon. I checked on her a couple of times. She was breathing. It actually occurred to me that I was acting like Jerri when she'd stand there watching me while I watched TV (pretending to be asleep so I wouldn't have to talk to her). Is she really sleeping? One time, I got real close to her and put my hand in front of her face to see if she'd flinch because maybe she was pretending to be asleep so she wouldn't have to talk, but she didn't move. Plus, there was no TV in Jerri's room at that time, so there wasn't anything she could be squinting at.

I spent most of the afternoon watching TV myself, a Big Ten Network replay of the 1994 Rose Bowl game, where Wisconsin beat UCLA. Wisconsin had this little bowling ball running back who ran over people and stomped on their heads. He's tougher than you, but you're faster. As I watched, I stretched my legs because they seriously hurt. Andrew never came inside.

Around seven, I took him out a goat cheese sandwich. He still sat in that stupid lawn chair out on the driveway.

"Why don't you come inside?" I asked.

"I'm not welcome in my own home," he said.

"Yes, you are, Andrew. Just come in and watch TV, okay?"

"I don't think so," he said.

About ten minutes later, he did come in though.

"Can I watch cartoons?" he asked.

I got off the couch, motioned for him to sit down, then went into my bedroom to email Gus from my laptop. I wasn't sure where to start. So I just said: jerri lost her marbles today. might be in trouble. I hit send and went into the bathroom to shower. While I scrubbed my fur-bursting, pee-smelling jock body, I figured Andrew had stayed out of the house for over twelve hours. He's no dickweed. He's tough as hell. I also thought, Gus will reply with something good. He'll help me figure out what to do about this crazy shit.

Gus is only sixteen too, of course. What was I expecting?

I dressed in the biggest jeans I could find, not that they were big. They were far too small for my body. Jerri bought them for me in late May, just a month before. I was still growing like a weed (not a dickweed). All this growth and too small pants, etc., made me wonder if I could seriously take that jerk Ken Johnson in the 100 meters. My guess was yes. If only I had the chance. I pulled on the longest T-shirt I had, so as not to show off my furry belly button, and headed out past Andrew watching SpongeBob.

"Where are you going?" Andrew asked.

"Bike ride. Call if you experience any trouble."

Andrew pulled the phone off the side table and sat it in his lap but didn't say anything else; just kept watching the sponge.

Of course, I couldn't tell him I was going to see Aleah.

Why couldn't I tell him? Because he'd probably have wanted to come with me, okay? Or he might have tailed me and gone all peeping tom in the windows. He had my cell number if something went wrong, and Jerri had it on speed dial on the phone, so he could just press a button, and I'm very fast. I could get back to the house in mere minutes if need be. There was clearly no reason to bring up the sore subject of Aleah. What if he woke Jerri? What if Zombie Jerri was in a Frankenstein mood and got the word from loose lips Andrew and decided to lumber over to the Jenningses' again? ("Give me some wine!") I sincerely doubted my relationship with Jennings, both father and daughter, could withstand another dose of drunken Franken-Jerri. It was good judgment, sound judgment on my part not to tell Andrew anything, okay?

Crap.

So I biked toward my ridiculous paper route, not to deliver papers but to see a girl who plays piano and who lives in my best friend's house. The sun was still pretty high because it was summer. I sweated in my tight jeans because it was summer. I smelled the pee-smell of my own athlete's body. I biked to see a girl, it occurred to me, who may well not want to see me at all, who may well be under instructions from her father to bring me to her house for purposes not even remotely regarding the love I had in mind.

I haven't yet reported on the sound of my anxiety fantasies. Sounds like this: What if this is some kind of intervention? What if Mr. Jennings called a social worker, some harsh-looking old lady who tells me that I'm going to be pulled from my home and stuck in foster care or the care of the state because Jerri is obviously an unfit mother because we call her Jerri and she doesn't really work ("What kind of work is being a crossing guard, Felton? That's not real work."), and she has hair under her arms, and she sleeps in her car when she's drunk ("Jerri Berba is entirely unfit."). This could be it, Felton. This could be the beginning of a nightmare without end. Andrew and I will send letters back and forth from shag-carpet country homes, rundown, stinky, dirty homes owned by dirty people who make money taking in defenseless foster kids. They'll use the money to buy beer and cigarettes, and they'll blow cigarette smoke in my face and burn Andrew's forearms with their butts, and they'll force him to drink beer too. I'm sorry! I'm sorry! The letters between me and Andrew will be filled with our love for each other and be filled with the severe abuse we're enduring. But it won't matter because the abuse will eventually break us down, kill our brotherly love, because we're not strong enough, and we'll grow apart and get hardened and do crimes and get no cards or calls from Jerri. Poor Jerria"screaming for wine, crying, stuck in a straitjacket in some rat-sack dirtbag asylum in some dirty city. This is crazy. Come on. Snap out of it, Felton. Come on. No! No! You're not being crazy at all! This is not implausible and stupid at all! You found your dad hanging from a beam in your garage! Five years old! You know the whole wide world of horror isn't something from a stupid movie. It's reality. It's true! The whole wide world of horror will open up. It's ready to swallow you whole at any given moment, particularly this particular moment because this moment with Andrew saying he's an animal that pees in the yard and Jerri buying ten bottles of wine is just the kind of moment whena "Are you planning to park your bike?" Aleah was standing at the end of her driveway, her arms hanging at her sides, her mouth open, her eyes blinking. I realized I'd been circling her block for like ten minutes.

I can be a serious head case. Truly.

I stopped my bike and breathed (om shanti shanti shantia"dang it).

"Sorry. I was just thinking."

"What about?"

"Bad stuff."

"I figured that. Would you like some iced tea?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Come inside then."

"Okay. Thanks."

Aleah is an odd person. I found that out right away. She's extremely intense all the time. This is not reserved for piano playing. Her piano playing is just a normal part of how she is second to second, minute to minute, day to day. On fire.

"I love human drama," she told me.

"Oh." I wasn't sure I agreed.

"Your family's weird."

"Yes. That's true." She was certainly right.

"I'm weird. It's okay to be weird."

"I don't know."

"I embrace being weird."

"Oh." Huh?

We sat on opposite ends of Gus's couch in the living room. She'd poured me some really sweet iced tea that tasted almost like blueberry juice. She sat cross-legged, facing me. She was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and jeans and a red bandanna tied over her hair. I couldn't exactly turn toward her because my legs are long. They felt twenty feet long. I'm spaghetti man. So I had to keep them on the floor in front of me because if I tried to sit cross-legged, I'd fall off the couch. I didn't tell Aleah, but just three years before, Gus and I had made a fort out of this couch's pillows. We'd written out a list of people who weren't allowed in the fort, which included our mothers. We then played with super balls inside the fort. We named the balls after honkies (a couple of whom I'd eaten lunch with that day), and we threw them hard against the wood floor, saying crap like "Take that Karpinski!" Several times, the balls bounced off our faces, which hurt and which made us even madder at the honkies. You want to hear about weird, Aleah?

"I've always been weird," Aleah said. "But I'm weirder now than ever."

"Where's your dad?" I asked.

"He's teaching. Then he goes for a glass of wine with another English prof."

"Wine?"

"Yes."

This was not to be an intervention.

"Does your dad know I'm here?" I asked.

"Of course. Daddy suggested I invite you over. I would've anyway. He's worried about you, you know?"

Okay. "Tell me what happened last night, okay?"

It wasn't as bad as I thought. There was no screaming or breaking and entering or talk of turnips or engagement or Tito. Jerri didn't mention me or Andrew at all either. She'd just knocked on the door sometime after midnight. She said she only knocked because the light was on. She looked like she'd been crying. She told Aleah's dad, who's named Ronald, that she had a lovely time talking to him. He agreed it was nice to talk. Then she left. "Daddy said she smelled like alcohol, but she wasn't acting drunk," Aleah said. "We both thought it was odd, of course, but not that odd. My mom acted much crazier than your mom."

"Oh. Okay. That's not so bad. I figured Jerri kicked in your door and killed your cat or something," I said.

"We don't have a cat."

"I mean, not literally."

"Yes, well, there's a little more." Aleah nodded.

Aleah was playing piano around 3 a.m. when the doorbell rang again. Ronald came bounding out of his bedroom in his pajamas, looked at Aleah, and said, "This is a little much," assuming Jerri was at the door. But it wasn't Jerri. It was a police officer.

"Sorry to bother you. Saw the light on. Just wondering if you know Jerri out there?" The police officer turned and pointed to Jerri's car, parked out front.

"Oh, shit," I said.

Ronald told the officer that he did know her. The officer asked Ronald to dump out the bottle of wine he'd found on the front seat.

"She's asleep," the officer said.

"That's the bottle of wine she brought over when she came for dinner," Ronald told the officer, which was a lie, of course. "She didn't drink much of it."

The officer paused for a moment, stared at Ronald, looked over at Aleah, then told them to be nice to Jerri. He said that he'd known her all his life and that she's a good girl. He said she's had a rough life.

"Oh my God. That cop was Cody Frederick's dad."

"The policeman said he'd call your mom in the morning to check up on her."

"I don't know. I don't know if he did."

"Why has your mom had a rough life, Felton?" Aleah asked.

"Ummm, suicide?"

"Suicide. Your dad?"

"Ummm, yes. But Jerri's never beenaShe's never been bad off. She's always been okay until this year. I think."

"It's getting dark! Let's go for a walk!" Aleah said, jumping off the couch.

There is one social class in Bluffton I've failed to mention. It's the class, I guess, that Jerri probably belonged to, at least when she was a really young girl. You've got your honkies. You've got your poop-stinkers. You've got your college kids. Then you've got this big group of sort of hidden kids whose parents work at Kwik Trip or Subway or in bars or not at all. It's a pretty fine line between honkies and these people sometimes, and the big difference is parents that drink a lot of beer and are noisy when they do, which is maybe why Jerri was sort of one of these people. (My grandpa, who died of lung cancer when I was a baby, owned a bar, made a lot of noise, drank a lot of beer.) The reason she wasn't exactly one of these people is that her mom, Grandma Berba, who now lives in a condo in Arizona, sold insurance, divorced my grandpa, and didn't drink a lot of beer. Plus, Jerri is really smart and was really good at school, which means she turned honky, or almost college kid, from how she described it. This class in Bluffton tends to ride in the back of ugly cars, live in ugly houses close to Main Street or in trailer parks on the outskirts of town, wear clothes from garage sales, swear a lot, get into fights when they're in middle school (or pregnant in eighth grade), then sort of disappear when they're in high school. If they don't disappear, it's either because they're serious criminals, or loud, raspy girl-drunks, or because they've migrated into honkiness, which means they're probably okay at school or sports. You might call them townies or burners or druggies. Gus calls them dirt balls, but it didn't catch on with me because the name made me feel bad for my grandpa and for Jerri. It's the serious criminals you have to watch out for.

Herein lies the story of how Aleah was made aware of townies (or dirt balls) because of an interaction with a couple of serious criminals, Rick and Rob Randle.

Aleah and I left her house and walked out onto Hickory Street. The sun was setting, and the sky was all orange and purple. It was really pretty.

"I really love how the air smells here," she said.

"Like poop?" I asked.

"Is that poop?" she asked.

"I've always thought of it as poop," I said.

"It smells like the country," she said.

"Like poop," I said.

"Chicago smells worse in the summer," she said.

"Chicago smells worse than poop?"

Aleah laughed.

"Uh huh," she smiled and nodded.

"Do you miss Chicago?" I asked.

"No. Not really. I've had a bad year."

"Why?"

"My mom."

"Suicide?"

"No. Not even close! Too much life in her. That's what Daddy says."

"Oh."

We turned right on Davis Street and walked along the curb. There aren't many sidewalks in this newer part of town.