Useless Bay(5)

My brother went to this swanky, plaid elementary school. Every spring they held “awareness week” for kids in the fifth grade, when they taught the kids how to play the bongos and what an erection is.

I wanted to say my eye didn’t hurt that much, but it totally ached. Worse, Dad said I couldn’t have any painkillers until I’d “learned my lesson.” Which, supposedly, was not smacking someone in the boathouse with an oar and fracturing his clavicle.

“That’s not it at all, Grant,” Dad said.

Liar.

It would’ve been okay if my brother had stopped there, but Grant pressed on. He tugged on his chapped lower lip. “What does ‘nail’ mean?”

Dad wheeled around. “What?” he said. “What kind of stupid-ass question is that?”

You know how parents like to get together and say, “I don’t care if kids swear—they hear worse from us at home”? Our family was like that. Only with a bigger vocabulary. Lyudmila, my stepmom, was Russian, and the Russian language has more swear words than any other language on earth. Or so I’m told. They even have one that means “woman who farts a lot,” which I think is pretty cool.

Grant blinked. “I know that a nail is a thing you pound with a hammer. But Todd Wishlow used it like a verb.”

I pulled up my hood and sank into the beige leather seat.

Todd Wishlow was the guy on my crew team with the broken clavicle. The same one who’d given me a black eye. Dad said we were both lucky that it hadn’t been worse, but I didn’t feel so lucky.

I’d seen Todd twice since the fight, and each time he pointed at his ruined collarbone, which had a lot of sutures where the rod went in. “See this, Shepherd? This is gonna get me a full-ride scholarship wherever I want to go.” Surgery, college—Dad was paying for it all. As long as Todd signed a nondisclosure agreement saying that he would lose everything if he painted me as a rage machine to any media outlet in the known universe.

I, on the other hand, got the three-hour rant. Dad said a lot of things I tried to tune out but couldn’t. The one that pissed me off the most was, “How can you do this to me? How can you do this to our family?”

Now, in the luxury SUV, I sent vibes to Grant to leave it alone. The last thing I wanted was another mega-harangue.

I slumped farther in my seat and stared at the tight bun on my stepmother’s neck. I often wondered what her hair would look like if it wasn’t cemented into a certain shape. Even when we vacationed in the Kalahari, she kept her hair off her face and penciled in her eyebrows.

I would find out Sunday.

It would not be pretty.

Meanwhile, Grant wasn’t done getting me in trouble.

“I think Todd said, ‘I nailed Pixie, and she was fabulous.’”

“Slobber, slobber, slobber,” Lyudmila said. I loved hearing her speak Russian. I thought it was a lovely language. But when she swore in Russian, she spat. I think every language should have swear words that require spitting. It adds emphasis.

She massaged her eyebrows, and thick, leaden gunk came off, which she wiped off her hand with Germ-B-Gone patented hand sanitizer. Which was followed by shea butter and Derma White lotion, to prevent those pesky liver spots.

That she was swearing meant she thought Todd Wishlow, whether or not he had nailed Pixie, should not be bragging about it in the Lakeside School boathouse.

Dad pounded the steering wheel with his head. The horn went off. In the holding lanes of ferry-bound cars, everyone looked at us, including the bomb-sniffing dogs and the fat toddlers eating soft-serve seaweed and getting half of it on their rompers.

And here it came.

Dad went bug-eyed. “Is that what happened, Henry?” he said.

Grant said, “I think Todd also said she was a real tiger in the . . .”

“Thanks, Grant. I think he gets the picture.”

“Well? Is that true?” Dad said.

“Which part? The part where I accidentally hit Todd’s clavicle with an oar? Or the part where he goaded me?”

Meredith spoke up from the third row. “Just for the record, he didn’t nail her.”

“Really? How would you know?”

“Because he’s Todd Wishlow. He doesn’t have the guts. He’s just a little kid trying to be big.”

“Will someone please tell me what ‘nail’ means?” Grant said.

Lyudmila said something in Russian that was probably, “We’ll talk about it later. When your brother isn’t around to bust more clavicles.”

Don’t get me wrong—Lyudmila was cool. But she wasn’t my mom, didn’t teach Meredith or me to speak Russian. At least she was cool enough to know that she shouldn’t be explaining trash talking about Pixie in front of me—in any language.

Dad wasn’t done. “We’ve talked about this, Henry. It’s stupid to have a girlfriend in high school. You’ll just get separated. And then, even if you get through college together, you’ll grow apart, and then you’ll be divorced at twenty-seven.”

He wasn’t talking about me and Pixie now—he was talking about him and Mom. Meredith’s and my real mom.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been able to excavate a nugget of a memory about what life for us was like before. Before Lyudmila, before Grant. Back in the days when Meredith and I had a real mother, and we all thought we were happy—Dad included.