100 Sideways Miles Read online

  The visitors in his book were called incomers.

  When you think about it, that would be the smartest way for creatures from way out there to get here: Blast all these mechanical doors that are no bigger than atomic dust particles out into the universe and hope they hit pay dirt. Then you open them up and send yourselves through.

  In the story, most of the doors landed on shitholes, but some of them made it here.

  Poof!

  Pay dirt.

  I liked the novel, but some people went crazy over it. I didn’t find this out until after I started high school, that Dad had actually received death threats for making fun of characters from the Bible.

  Imagine that.

  Some people are overly sensitive about Bible stories.

  When the incomers came through the little doors, they popped open—usually right in the middle of peoples’ skulls and stuff, since the doors were small enough to go in your ear, or wind up under your eyelid. It was a very violent story. But the aliens looked exactly like angels—so beautiful, and completely naked with gleaming silvery-white wings.

  Well, the incomers weren’t angels. In fact, they liked to rape people and then eat them. Planet Earth was an endless party for the angel-aliens.

  In Dad’s novel, a lot of starry-eyed Christians got raped and eaten.

  You’d think they’d have caught on a bit sooner!

  So Dad stopped writing for publication. Everyone kept asking him when the next part of the story was going to be published.

  Dad’s answer, through his agent, was always this: never.

  His novel sold all over the world, and they even made a movie from it too, which my father had never been able to bring himself to watch.

  It’s just as well. I saw it when I was thirteen. The movie was pure horseshit.

  My father, whose name is Mike, wrote under the name Easton Michaels.

  Easton Michaels, who wrote six novels, was an inordinately private person as a general rule.

  Nobody around here knew much about us—Mike Easton and his son, Finn.

  Of course, my best friend knew all about what my father did for a living, but Cade Hernandez didn’t care and was generally unimpressed by all the things that most people tended to make into such monumentally big deals.

  • • •

  Two years after my mother was killed by a dead horse, when I was just beginning to walk again, my father married a pediatric nurse named Tracy Snow.

  Tracy took care of me every day after the knackery horse turned me and my real mother into something else. I thought Nurse Snow was actually Snow White. I still call her that sometimes.

  I fell in love with her.

  Dad fell in love with her.

  What else can you do? It all just keeps going. Twenty miles per second. Twenty miles per second.

  I have a six-year-old half sister named Nadia, and we all live in a big house in San Francisquito Canyon, which is the location of one of the greatest disasters in the history of the state of California.

  Not our family—a dam broke there in 1928.

  Fifty billion miles ago.

  Imagine that.

  • • •

  I met Julia Bishop the morning after Kommissar Nossik threw Cade Hernandez out of our class for asking about the punctuality of his boner.

  I suppose the things that transform your life don’t appear as you fancifully imagine they will. They appear as knackery trucks that carry dead horses, as collapsing dams, and maybe as beautiful girls with long dancer legs who drift silently through the dust of a California desert morning.

  I had never seen anyone like her before at Burnt Mill Creek.

  Anywhere, actually.

  I found myself wondering how many atoms from the same calamities out there in the universe our bodies shared. I imagined that parts of my insides and parts of her insides may have come from the same exploding star, billions of years ago. Maybe my right hand and her left hand both came from the same supernova.

  The atoms inside me sparked and jangled nervously as soon as I saw her.

  This was new.

  I rubbed my eyes.

  I was ahead in credits, and a good student. And everyone in the office knew about my epilepsy, so they were always so careful around me. During third period, I worked as “Office Concierge” for Burnt Mill Creek High School. It was among my responsibilities to show visitors and new students around our campus.

  I had very polite atoms.

  Usually, getting a new student in May meant something bad—like the kid had been expelled from another school because of drugs or fighting.

  Nobody moves in May.

  The head counselor, Mrs. Hinman, tried to snap me out of my daze. She said, “Finn, this is Julia Bishop. She’s starting classes today.”

  “Uh. Uh.” I was completely dumb.

  Mrs. Hinman handed me Julia Bishop’s class schedule. She had an extra-concerned look on her face when she said, “Finn? Are you all right, sweetie?”

  She thought I was blanking out. I knew that look. Nobody calls a sixteen-year-old guy “sweetie” unless he’s pissed his pants or something.

  “Oh. Sorry. Um. Hi. Here, let me show you where your classes are,” I said.

  Then I snatched Julia Bishop’s papers and escorted her out of the office.

  • • •

  “Is that your name?” Julia asked.

  On the south side of the office building, the stairsteps of a tiered grass field led down to an outside amphitheater and the cluster of classroom buildings that made up the campus.

  I was sweating. It was hot. And something else was going on too.

  “Uh. Finn. Yes,” I answered.

  The girl paused, studied me.

  She said, “There are fish on your socks.”

  This is what I wore that day: red and black Burnt Mill Creek High School basketball shorts and a white sweatshirt from UCLA with the hood pulled up over the mess of my straw hair. I had gray and black skater shoes and dark blue socks with sharks swimming and swimming up around my ankles. Somehow, I felt as though I were standing there naked in front of that beautiful girl.

  “Uh. Sharks.” I was slack jawed, immobile and helpless, frozen in the grass. Cade had given me those socks on my sixteenth birthday, the summer before. I didn’t know what else to say.

  What can you say to someone like that—someone who so obviously had been paying attention to your socks?

  “Well, they’re cute. I like them. How tall are you?”

  I went completely dumb.

  Then she leaned forward and looked directly at my eyes.

  “Huh! You have two different colored eyes. That’s beautiful.”

  I couldn’t help but look back at her eyes. They were brown. Julia Bishop’s eyes were wondrous.

  “Uh.”

  I squinted, trying to focus on the papers I held, the ones that would contain the mysteries of Julia Bishop.

  I wondered why she’d come here—if she had parents who were monsters, or if I could find anything that might say, This is why I ended up here on this grass staircase walking beside you, Finn.

  I smelled flowers. I prayed that it might only be her perfume. I repeated in my head, over and over, a command for my atoms to stay here, to not blank out.

  Julia Bishop.

  Grade eleven.

  She lived in San Francisquito Canyon.

  Remember that address, Finn.

  Don’t walk so fast.

  “Hey. I live in San Francisquito Canyon too,” I said.

  “Well, nice to meet you, neighbor,” Julia answered.

  I smell something sweet.

  I struggled to come up with anything clever that would make her need to keep talking to me, looking at me and my socks, so we wouldn’t have to hurry to her class. And my dumbfounded seconds ticked by.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  Twenty miles.

  Before I could unstick my throat, she stopped in front of me and pulle
d open the door to the art building.

  Click!

  “Well, nice socks, anyway, Finn. And eyes. You have a cool name.”

  “It’s from Mark Twain.”

  Julia Bishop took her schedule from my hand.

  “Why are you wearing a hood? Aren’t you hot?”

  I was definitely hot.

  Without thinking, I put my hand on my head to see if it was true. I was, in fact, wearing a hood. I was also unaware of just about anything in the universe that wasn’t named Julia Bishop.

  I pulled the hood down. My hair was a mess. Some of it fell across my eye. I refused to blink.

  I only stared at her. I realized, relieved, that what I smelled on the air must have been atoms from the perfume on her neck floating across the gap between us, because Finn Easton would have been on his back and staring out at the wordless universe by now if he were having a seizure.

  And Julia Bishop said, “I’m not flirting with you, you know.”

  “I didn’t think you were,” I said.

  “I’m not,” she said.

  The door shut.

  She disappeared inside.

  Six foot one, I mouthed. No sounds came out.

  Eventually, staring at the shut door, I got my lower jaw to rejoin the upper.

  SPACE DOGS AND BULLFIGHTERS

  My dog enjoys rolling around in dead things. Her name is Laika.

  Laika was named for the dog who died in space.

  I have always been somewhat obsessed with that unfortunate animal.

  When she slept outside, which is what we made her do whenever she rolled in dead things and then returned home stinking with a guilty canine grin on her snout, Laika was exiled to a small plastic cube with a barred chrome door that made it look like an old jail cell.

  I penned “Sputnik 2” and drew the ringed planet Saturn, stars, and comets on the outside of Laika’s crate.

  Almost nobody gets the joke.

  There is more room for my little dog inside her plastic crate than there was inside Sputnik 2 for the original Laika.

  Laika means “barker” in Russian.

  At least my Laika lives through her Sputnik experience. The original Laika, as most accepted theories go, died about five hours into her spaceflight when the internal temperature of Sputnik 2 began to rise sharply and the satellite lost communication with the planet of humans and dogs. Nobody really knew what Laika was doing up there, besides getting uncomfortably hot.

  For all that the scientists down here on Planet Earth knew, she could have been singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to herself over and over and over.

  Not a very cheerful voyage.

  But the satellite stayed in orbit for more than five months after that—a lonely and most certainly dead dog circling and circling overhead while the earth traveled about 240 million miles through space. Eventually, Laika and her spacecraft were incinerated when their orbit decayed in April 1958.

  She was definitely dead after that happened.

  Laika’s fourteen-billion-year-old atoms were free again.

  I believe many of those atoms found their way into my corpse-loving rat terrier—possibly into me as well.

  The knackery never shuts down.

  • • •

  After that first day, I did not manage to catch a glimpse of Julia Bishop for the rest of the week.

  Thinking about Julia Bishop made me crazy. I found myself considering doing things I would never have thought possible: waiting for her outside classroom doors or taking a walk up the canyon to see where her home was.

  I didn’t have the nerve.

  • • •

  I did not say anything to Cade Hernandez about meeting Julia Bishop.

  What could I say, anyway? That I had fallen in love with a girl I didn’t even know, just because she admired the socks I was wearing? That she actually noticed my eyes?

  That was ridiculous.

  But I had never felt so messed up on the inside. I imagined myself as some kind of hero who could overcome all his self-doubt and do something absurd like ask Julia Bishop, since she was practically my next-door neighbor, if she would like to come over to my house and visit, or maybe look at my socks, or do the kind of shit that normal kids do.

  But I knew there was not the slightest chance of that happening.

  I didn’t know what normal kids did in these situations.

  If I asked Cade what I should do about Julia Bishop, he would ruin everything. It would be innocent enough—just Cade being Cade—but it would happen as inevitably as the pull of gravity.

  I couldn’t let that happen.

  So Cade and I drove quietly to school the morning after I met her. We stopped at Coffee Kiosk and bought coffees with sugar and cream, and we drank them in the student parking lot at Burnt Mill Creek High School while everything kept moving, twenty miles per second, twenty miles per second.

  • • •

  My actual next-door neighbor in San Francisquito Canyon was a very old man named Manny Castellan.

  Manny Castellan was seventy-three years old. That’s an awful lot of miles through space. His atoms were probably getting very tired of holding on to one another.

  We lived on four acres. Most of the homes in the canyon had enough land to keep horses. Manny’s house had stables, but they were empty. Our place had a pool, a gazebo, and an entire guest house.

  Dad’s imagination paid all the bills we ever had.

  We lived well.

  Manny was from Mexico. His real name was Manuel.

  Manuel Castellan used to be a bullfighter in Mexico, forty years ago and about twenty-five billion miles away from here. He complained to me once that modern people had generally lost their respect for the art of bullfighting.

  He told me his bullfighter name was Manolito.

  I thought it would be cool to have a bullfighter name.

  One time I said, “What do you think my bullfighter name would be, assuming I ever fought with a bull?”

  Mr. Castellan studied me thoughtfully. He looked me up and down as though he were receiving some signal from out there, somewhere.

  He said, “I would call you Caballito.”

  “What is that?”

  “Caballito is a little horse.”

  “I am not little,” I argued.

  “You are for a horse,” Manuel Castellan said.

  I nodded.

  I wrote down what Manuel Castellan told me. Sometimes I carried a small red moleskine journal in my pocket.

  He asked, “Why are you writing that down?”

  I said, “I never get to talk to bullfighters.”

  “Bullfighting is dead,” Manuel Castellan said.

  Good for the bulls.

  I asked Mr. Castellan what they did with the losers of the match, if they were rendered into useful products like explosives, or lubricants on condoms.

  Manuel Castellan asked me, “What are condoms?”

  I had to tell him what condoms are. It wasn’t embarrassing, and the bullfighter was fascinated by my description of how condoms worked. Then he asked if I had one I could show him, and I told him no.

  Why would I ever need a condom?

  The bullfighter said, “You never know, Caballito.”

  Manuel Castellan told me the dead bulls were dragged away and their meat was sold in butcher shops. Dead, tormented bulls produced a very popular meat.

  Who knew?

  They could have thrown them from bridges for all I knew.

  THE POLITICS OF TEENAGE GRUDGES

  At the end of the school week—the week of Nazi Day and Julia Bishop—Cade Hernandez brought a suitcase filled with his belongings to my house in San Francisquito Canyon.

  My parents and sister were leaving to spend five days in New York City without me.

  I pouted to Mom and Dad, “I never get to go anywhere.”

  As soon as I’d said it I calculated the worthlessness of this autopilot adolescent protest.

  Tracy
said, “What about that trip you have planned to visit Dunston University with Cade this summer?”

  If Cade didn’t get drafted into the big leagues in his senior year, we had plans on going to college together, and Dunston was the place. Dunston University was a private school in Oklahoma, with a top-notch baseball program and one of the nation’s best liberal arts schools.

  “That doesn’t count. It’s a school.”

  “I’m sure you and Cade will manage to turn the next five days into a vacation filled with debauchery and vice,” my dad countered.

  He probably had a point.

  I nodded. Mom and Dad exchanged concerned and mature glances.

  Cade Hernandez was going to be my babysitter.

  Nadia, my sister, was on school break, and I had to stay home, since my school year was not over yet. But my parents allowed Cade to live there with me during that time, despite Dad’s reservations about my friend. They knew Cade could keep an eye on their epileptic boy, but I thought it was all part of the master plan to ensure Finn Easton’s atoms would never escape the state of California.

  Dad had to go to New York for work.

  • • •

  I had bunk beds in my room.

  I believe the idea behind them had something to do with an expectation that I was to conjure some kind of invisible little brother, a playmate, because I never understood why Tracy—Mom—stubbornly clung to the aesthetic notion that boy plus bedroom equaled bunk beds, while my sister’s room was designed like a perfumed pillow palace.

  Nadia was the princess of San Francisquito Canyon.

  Cade was asleep in the lower bunk when I woke up on Saturday morning. I never slept in the bottom bed because it made me feel like frozen food—all closed in and boxed away in the dark.

  Cade was pressing a pillow across his head with the bend of his arm.

  Cade Hernandez was an expert sleeper.

  I pulled a T-shirt on over my bare chest and went downstairs. The sun was not up past the rim of the canyon behind our house, but it was already sweltering hot. Most of the time, wearing shirts was a habit of mine.

  I didn’t like it when anyone paid too much attention to the emoticon scars on my back.