He keeps at it until he completely rids himself of them, coiling them there on the deck, dirty from the dust but the metallic bits catching the sunlight and reflecting it back at him sharply, almost aggressively. There’s no writing on them that he can find, and the metallic part is like nothing he’s ever seen before in America or England.
He steps away from them. There is something alien in the way they look. Something wrong. Something invasive.
Seth crosses his arms tightly against himself, and he shudders, though the sun is beating down clear and hot. He is completely na**d now, and that’s the next thing that has to be remedied. He feels unbelievably vulnerable like this, more so than the literal fact of it. There is threat here, somewhere, he’s suddenly sure of it. He glances back to the fence and the prison he knows lies hidden beyond, but this place is more wrong than even all that’s obvious. There’s an unreality under all the dust, all the weeds. Ground that seems solid but that might give way any moment.
He keeps shivering under the heat of the sun, under a clear blue sky without a single airplane in it. All at once the energy he spent on eating and drinking catches up with him, exhaustion settling over him like a heavy blanket. He feels so weak, so unbelievably, physically weak.
His arms still crossed, he turns back to his house.
It sits there, waiting for him, a memory asking to be reentered.
9
I’ll have to see, Seth tapped onto the screen of his phone. U know how my mum is.
It’s mOm, U homo, Gudmund wrote back. And what’s her problem now?
B in History.
Ur mom gets upset about GRADES?!?! What f-ing century does she live in?
Not this one & only girls text this much, U homo.
Seth smiled to himself as his phone immediately vibrated with an incoming call. “I said I’d have to see,” he whispered into it.
“What’s the matter with her?” Gudmund said. “Doesn’t she trust me?”
“Nope.”
“Ah, well, she’s smarter than I thought.”
“She’s smarter than everyone thinks. That’s why she’s always so pissed off. Says she’s lived here eight years and everyone still talks to her in a loud, slow voice, like she’s a foreigner.”
“She is a foreigner.”
“She’s English. Same language.”
“Not really. Why are you talking so quiet?”
“They don’t know I’m awake yet.”
Seth took a moment to listen from his bed. He could hear his mother stomping around, probably trying to find Owen’s clarinet. Owen, meanwhile, was in the next bedroom over, playing a computer game that involved lots of dramatic guitar solos. And every once in a while there was a banging from the kitchen downstairs, where his father was ten months into a three-month DIY project. Typical Saturday morning stuff, so, no, thank you, he’d stay here as long as no one remembered he –
“SETH!” he heard shouted from down the hall.
“Gotta go,” he said into the phone.
“You have to come, Sethy,” Gudmund insisted. “How many times do I need to say it? My parents are out of town. It’s like a commandment to party. And we’re not going to get many more chances. Senior year, dude, and then we’re out of here.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Seth said hurriedly as his mother’s feet came pounding toward his door. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up as she flung the door open. “Jesus,” he said, “knock much?”
“You have no secrets from me,” she answered, but with a forced half-smile, and he could tell she was trying to apologize, in her bizarrely hostile way.
“You have no idea what secrets I have,” he said.
“I don’t doubt that for a second. Get up. We have to go.”
“Why do I have to come?”
“Have you seen Owen’s clarinet?”
“He’ll be fine for an hour –”
“Have you seen it?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Are you listening to me? Where’s Owen’s goddamn clarinet?”
“I don’t goddamn know! I’m not his goddamn butler!”
“Watch your mouth,” she snapped. “You know he loses track of things. You know he’s not as on the ball as you. Not since –”
She didn’t finish her sentence. Didn’t even trail off, just stopped dead. Seth didn’t need to ask what she meant.
“I haven’t seen it,” he said, “but I still don’t see why I have to come and just sit there.”
His mother spoke with angry patience, enunciating every syllable. “Be. Cause. I. Want. To. Go. For. A. Run.” She dangled the running shoes she was holding. “I get precious little time to myself as it is, and you know Owen gets upset if he’s left there alone with Miss Baker –”
“He’s fine,” Seth said. “He puts it on because he likes the attention.”
His mother sucked in her breath. “Seth –”
“If I do it, can I stay over at Gudmund’s tonight?”
She paused. His mother didn’t like Gudmund much, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain herself. “I don’t even like his name,” he’d overheard her saying to his father one night in the next room. “What kind of name is Gudmund? He’s not Swedish.”
“Gudmund is a Norwegian name, I think,” his father had said, not paying much attention.
“Well, he’s not that either. Not even in the way Americans go on about being Irish or Cherokee. Honestly, a whole population who refuse to call themselves after their own nation unless they’re feeling threatened.”
“You must hear them calling themselves American quite a lot then,” his father had said dryly, and the conversation had soured somewhat after that.
Seth really didn’t understand it. Gudmund was damn near the perfect teen. Popular enough, but not too popular; confident, but not too confident; nice to Seth’s parents, nice to Owen, and always got Seth home by curfew since he’d gotten his car. Like all of Seth’s classmates, he was a bit older, but only by ten months, seventeen to Seth’s sixteen, which was nothing. They ran on the cross-country team together with Monica and H, which couldn’t have been more wholesome. And while it was true that Gudmund’s mother and father were exactly the sort of scary American conservatives that tended to horrify Europeans, even Seth’s own parents had to admit they were pretty nice people one-on-one.