Cold Fury

saying exactly the same thing over and over again sounded idiotic. But the best part of talking to Max was the simplest-he made me feel interesting. As someone who had never opened up to many people outside of her family, it was a wonderful, weird sensation to have such close attention paid to my thoughts and opinions. It was as if, in my years of mental and emotional solitude, I’d warehoused a vast array of exotic information, and I’d finally found someone to share it with. Whether it was sports or movies or yeah, even slang (Max informed me that “hipster” was actually from the 1940s; I countered with “geek,” enlightening him on its early-1900s German origins), we usually ended up talking about how something began. In the three weeks leading up to my birthday, if Max didn’t think of me as a girlfriend, then I was definitely a friend who was a girl. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I had to admit that our constant chatter was a good way, maybe the best way, to get to know each other.

And then, when he asked me to the spring dance-something I had wanted so badly-I couldn’t have cared less.

That’s because, a few seconds earlier, he said something even better.

He told me I was gorgeous.

Actually, he didn’t use the word gorgeous and maybe he didn’t realize he was paying me a compliment, but he’d said it, and then he asked me to the dance.

Let me clarify-he kind of asked me.

We were staring at a flickering screen in the theater room at Fep Prep, just me, Max, and Doug, with Doug grazing from a family-size bag of Munchitos, his junk food of choice. He’d recently been on a “great Italian directors” kick-we watched films by Fellini, Antonioni, and Rossellini-and had developed a minor obsession (he was easily obsessed) with the director Vittorio De Sica. First we watched The Bicycle Thief, which was the saddest movie I’d ever seen, and then Marriage Italian Style, which was about a guy cheating on one girlfriend with another girlfriend. It starred Sophia Loren, with whom Doug developed another minor obsession, and we moved on to an old Hollywood film she starred in called Houseboat.

Sophia Loren was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

On-screen, her face glowed and her body shimmered.

It was at that moment-the greatest of my life-that Max whispered, “Hey. . you look like her. Especially your eyes. You have little bits of gold in there.”

I thought I heard him wrong. I was scared to move, scared to breathe, and the seconds that followed felt like hours. Finally I said, “Who?”

“Her,” he said, nodding at Sophia, whose face filled the screen like a sexy angel. I didn’t know what the scene was about and didn’t care-all I knew was that Max told me that I looked like her. I was about to say something witty (i.e., stupid) when he said that his mom was forcing him to go to the dance and that maybe I should suffer too. I said something back like, “Yeah. Whatever. Maybe,” while trying to stifle a smile that, if I’d allowed it to run its course, would’ve dominated my face.

“I mean, we could meet there,” he said, still staring at the screen.

“I guess so.”

“Shh!” Doug hissed.

“If you go and we run into each other, you know, well. . great,” Max whispered.

“Great,” I said in as casual a tone as I could muster, even though my heart was almost thumping out of my chest. Maybe it wasn’t the hearts-and-flowers way that I’d hoped he would ask me, but he’d asked me, and it was enough. I was going with, or meeting, or running into Max at the spring dance!

“My mom keeps telling me that I need to meet other kids, and that, quote, it’s not going to happen by spending all of my extracurricular time in a geeky movie club, end quote,” he whispered. “I reminded her that every kid with half a brain is a geek about something. With me it’s motorcycles. I’ve got this vintage Triumph Thunderbird and she promised that if I went to the dance, we’d get it out of storage. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”

“No, but I can drive a car,” I said shyly, and felt a small blush cover my cheeks.

“You can?” Max said, looking at me more closely, giving me the happy shivers.

“Shh. . for the second time!” Doug said.

I leaned in and whispered to Max how I’d sat next to my dad in the Lincoln a thousand times watching him turn the key, put the convertible top down, and drop the long, flat car into drive. One afternoon when I was thirteen, when he was at the bakery and my mom was out with Lou, I grabbed the Lincoln’s keys. Ten minutes later I was stuttering down Ashland Avenue-too much gas, too hard on the brakes, squeal of tires, repeat-until a red light came out of nowhere. I jammed both feet on the brakes as the Lincoln shrieked to a halt, rear wheels smoking and my heart punching my chest.

I looked to my right and a guy in a Mustang shook his head.

I looked to my left and it was my mom in her little Fiat, a red-lipstick slash of disapproval on her mouth.

“And then what?” Max whispered.

“She surprised me.”

After she followed me home and the Lincoln was safely in the garage, I expected a stern speech and punishment. Instead, she told me that normal society would expect her to say that driving at age thirteen was wrong, but that she didn’t agree. She said it was important to play by the rules, but that sometimes it was just as important to know how to break them, too. So the disobeying-the-law part, driving without a license-yeah, obviously that was wrong-but not the learning-to-operate-a-car part. As a teacher, my mom encouraged the accumulation of knowledge. If I wanted to learn to drive, she would teach me.

“That was cool of her,” Max whispered.

“So cool.”

I didn’t tell Max about what happened next because it didn’t seem to have much to do with the story. In fact, I wouldn’t realize until later that what my mom said at the end of our conversation was the real story-that it was best not to tell my dad about my little joyride. I should’ve been relieved that she encouraged me not to tell my dad about taking the Lincoln for a drive, but it surprised me, and I asked why not.

“It might upset him,” she said, looking away. “That old car was presented to your grandpa in 1965 to celebrate the birth of your dad, his first child and oldest son.”

“Presented?” I asked. “You mean like a gift? From who?”

“Just. . friends,” she replied vaguely, and for some reason my mind went immediately to the Men Who Mumbled.

“What about Uncle Buddy?” I asked, thinking of his beater convertible. “Was that a gift for Grandpa too? To celebrate the birth of his second kid?”

“No,” my mom replied. “Buddy bought that car himself.”

Back then, the idea of Uncle Buddy buying a convertible so he could have one just like his older brother made me sad for him. Of course, what I feel now-that he’s a twisted, world-class bullshitter who was jealous of my dad when they were kids and hates him now that they’re adults-is completely different. However, at the moment, telling Max the story in the darkened theater room, all I could really think was, I’m going to the dance with Max! Or at least going to a dance where he would be.

“Listen,” he said, pushing brown curls out of his eyes. “After I get this dance thing out of the way, do you want to go for a ride on my motorcycle? As soon as I get my license, I mean.”

“Yeah, sure. . I guess so,” I said breezily, with my heart about to burst.

“People, please,” Doug said. “There’s rude and there’s pathological. For the last time, and with feeling. . shh!”

I mouthed “sorry” to Doug as he settled back with junk food on the left and a root beer on the right. Watching him, I realized that Max was partly correct. Yeah, most kids with half a brain are geeks about something, but others require no brain at all.

Like Billy Shniper, for example.

Bully the Kid displayed zero evidence of having anything remotely resembling a cerebral cortex, yet he was a geek about teasing Doug.

Over the course of the school year, his bullying had progressed from frequently to constantly in pursuit of the goal he had yet to accomplish-making Doug cry. After Max witnessed one particularly intense display, he told Doug that he was going to intervene the next time it happened, and didn’t care what Bully the Kid said or did to him.