Bad Move

“Yeah,” said Angie. “I captured them just the way they are. And see how the trees look like twigs, and in this shot, I’ve lined up the houses so you can see how they’re all exactly the same.”

“Very effective,” I said.

“I’m calling it ‘Dying in Suburbia: A Study in Redundancy.’”

“It’s good,” I said quietly. “It’s very good.”

Angie was still on the same theme as I drove her to school later, since she’d missed the bus. She said, “How much longer are we going to live out here?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much longer? We’ve been out here, like, almost two years and when are we going to move back into the city? Would we be able to buy back the house on Crandall? It wouldn’t have to be that house, although it would be nice, unless the new owners are, like, a bunch of psycho goths who’ve ripped out the walls and painted the ceilings black or something.”

“Where did you get the idea we were moving back into the city?”

“I just figured, sooner or later, you’d see what a terrible mistake it was to move out here and we’d go back.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, glancing over at Angie as I pulled away from a stop sign. “Who said this was a terrible mistake?”

“Well, first of all, the house is falling apart and-”

“The house is not falling apart.”

“Mom said last night the ceiling fell right into the pasta.”

“The ceiling did not fall. A small chunk of it fell because it was wet because there’s a leak in the upstairs shower, which can be fixed, which does not mean the house is falling apart. And the builder has some two-year warranty or something, so don’t worry about it.”

Angie looked out her window and said nothing.

“I go to school with a bunch of losers,” she said, finally.

I let that one hang out there for a while. “What do you mean, losers?”

She shrugged, a kind of like-this-needs-an-explanation? shrug. “I know you and Mom thought moving out here would mean you’d never have to worry again about schools, about drugs and all that shit. But you have no idea. We’ve got the Crips, and crackheads, and-I mean, look at Columbine. That was, like, the middle of nowhere. That wasn’t some inner-city school or something. And look what happened there.”

“What are you saying? That there are guys in long black coats waiting to shoot up the school?” I had shifted into parental overdrive.

“No, no, jeez, no, God, don’t go all hyper on me. All I’m saying is just because we moved out of the city doesn’t mean that there aren’t still weird people in my school. There’s weird people wherever you go. Just ’cause we’ve moved doesn’t mean we’re never going to run into crazy people again. It’s really no different out here than anyplace else, at least from that point of view. But you don’t have people willing to be eccentric.”

“Okay, you’ve lost me. We’ve got weird, but we don’t have eccentric.”

“I mean, like, remember my friend Jan? The one with the boots, and the tears in her stockings, and the orange skirts?”

“And the thing in her tongue?”

“Yeah. Like, she barely rated a second glance at my old school, but if you moved her out here, where everyone’s wearing their Abercrombie & Fitch, they’d think she was totally strange.”

“She was totally strange.”

“Yeah, but that’s the point. She kind of was, but no one noticed? You could do that downtown, and no one really thought about it. Out here, there’s this suburban thing, where you have to be borderline normal all the time.”

In some inexplicable way, I knew what she was talking about.

“That’s why, for example, Paul wants to get a tattoo,” Angie said. “So he can be just a little edgy out here.”

“Paul wants a tattoo?”

Angie glanced at me, realizing she’d broken a confidence. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You didn’t hear it from me, but he’s thinking about it. There’s a place, in the plaza, that’ll do them.”

“He can’t get a tattoo. He’s not even sixteen yet. They wouldn’t do it.”

Angie rolled her eyes. We were almost to the school. “Is there more?” I asked.

Angie was quiet.

“Haven’t you made any friends here?”

Angie shifted her chin around, a nod in disguise. “Not really. I had friends at Bannerman, like Krista, and Molly, and Denny, but I had to leave them because it wasn’t safe there, we had to move to a neighborhood where everything would be okay.” There was a mocking tone. “Well, so what if there was a flasher and a few hookers or some needles on the sidewalk? At least it was interesting.”

“You know you’re welcome to have your friends out here any time you want,” I offered. “Invite them on Friday or Saturday, do a sleepover thing in the basement.”

Angie looked at me as though I’d just stepped out of an episode of Ozzie and Harriet. “God, Dad, I’m not five. And, like, they just can’t wait to come out here.”

I stopped the car out front of the school. “I hate this place,” Angie said, slipping out the door and closing it behind her.

I SWUNG BY KENNY’S HOBBY shop to see whether a model I’d ordered, of the dropship the Marines use to fly from the mother ship to the planet’s surface in the movie Aliens, had come in. I could have phoned, but going in person to check gave me an excuse to wander the shop and see whether any other new things had arrived. Kenny catered to a variety of hobbyists-model railroaders, slot car fans, fliers of radio-control airplanes-but his selection of SF-related kits was fairly extensive for a full-range hobby store.

My model hadn’t shown up. “Maybe next week,” said Kenny, who was leaning over the counter, mini- screwdriver in hand, trying to reattach a wheel to a metal reproduction of an old Ford Thunderbird. “You ever wonder,” Kenny asked, not taking his eyes from his work, “why men have nipples?”

I thought about that for a moment. Not about the question itself, but at the sorts of things that preoccupied Kenny. “Not really.”

Kenny bit his lip and held his breath, not wanting the tiny screw to slip from its hole. “It just doesn’t make any sense at all. They don’t do anything, they serve no purpose.” Then: “How’s the house?”

“Shower’s still leaking into the ceiling in the kitchen, drywall’s falling into the kitchen. The tub taps drip, the wind whistles sometimes around the sliding glass doors. The caulking around our bedroom window is useless. I don’t even bother to take down the ladder. I’m squeezing caulking in every couple of weeks.”

“There’s another guy, lives in your neighborhood, says he’s had trouble with his windows, and wiring problems, you know? Breakers popping, that kind of thing.”

“We haven’t had that. Yet.”

I asked Kenny if he had the latest issue of Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, which he didn’t, so I said I’d see him later and got back in the car.

Driving home, my thoughts turned to Angie. Our problems with shoddy house construction were minor compared to hers. Her world was falling apart. Paul had adapted to our move out here much better. He made friends more easily, didn’t place a lot of demands on them. As long as they were interested in playing video games and didn’t have any moral qualms about sneaking into movies that they weren’t supposed to see, that was good enough for him. He’d even struck up that semi-friendship with Earl, developed an interest in gardening and landscaping. Not that things were perfect with Paul. His marks were lousy. School bored him. There was that upcoming appointment with his science teacher. And now, there was this new development about Paul wanting to get a tattoo.

He and I would have to talk.