Whisper to Me(2)

“There’s a guy on the forum got some beautiful Tonkinbolus from Koh Chang, Thailand—he went there and collected them himself, you believe that? Anyway, he’s selling them, fifty bucks a piece. Blue-and-reds, fire-legs. Amazing.”

Oh: this is something you need to know.

There are forums for people who collect bugs. I know. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? And these people have little avatars that say whether they’re newbies or Grand Master Bug Collectors or whatever, and signatures every time they post that tell you how many different bugs they have, and the names of them all, and sometimes some kind of generic inspirational quote that has nothing to do with bugs as far as I can see. My dad’s list has a lot of bugs on it.

“What’s a Tonk—whatever you said?”

He shook his head at me, like my ignorance on the topic of bugs was a great disappointment to him. “Millipede.”

“Right,” I said. “Anyway, see you later.”

“Millipedes are ancient creatures,” he said. “They’re survivors. When threatened, they roll into a ball, protect themselves, you know that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You told me.”

“Okay. So don’t be late.”

I nodded and turned to leave—he was already facing the screen again, typing something on the keyboard. Then he smacked his fist down on the table.

“And clean your ******** room, Cass. I’m not going to ********* tell you a-*******-gain.”

This is living with my dad:

He says nothing nothing nothing nothing all day long

and then sometimes he says millipedes blah centipedes blah stick insects blah blah blah

and then

flash

like a camera going off, he hits you with something like that.

The only good thing is he doesn’t actually hit me. Like, with his fists. Just with his words.

It isn’t like he doesn’t have excuses, for his anger. I have to admit. His wounds, I’m talking about: the ones you can see and the ones you can’t. He didn’t have armor, like a millipede; he couldn’t roll himself into a ball. We’ll get to that later.

Also, he curses a lot. And I don’t really feel comfortable with writing down those words so I’m using stars, which I like, because it means when he’s really, really pissed—and that will happen later in this story—the page will be filled with stars, like a constellation.

I got out of there quickly, left him with his stupid forum. I went out into the little front yard with its grass brown already, even though it was only May, and over a month of school still to go. It was shaping up to be a hot summer, the air sticky and close, though the ocean was still cool—I knew that because I had gone for a swim the previous day and nearly froze my fingers off. Not that it was stopping the vacationers: I had seen the buses unloading blinking college kids into the sunlight, and the boardwalk filling up with people in T-shirts, crackling with the energy of being released, from work, from normality.

Only this place is the reality for me.

And there were still fewer vacationers than the year before, a continuation of an ongoing trend that was the source of pretty much all of Oakwood’s problems. Who knows? Maybe the local psycho was killing women because he worked in one of the strip malls that closed down and he’s pissed that he lost his job.

Anyway.

Our house, as you know, is in what the locals call the “town.” Which is to distinguish it from “the walk,” i.e., the strip that runs along the beach lined with arcades, slot machines, stores selling BURGERS PIZZA HOAGIES, fortune-tellers, games, tattoo studios. And of course the amusement park on the piers, on which more later.

I don’t know how you saw our house, when you first came. How it made you feel. Me, it always makes me feel sad. It’s like you’ve stepped from VACATIONLAND! into the clapboard shored-up, scaffolded reality behind it, as if you’ve gone behind the film-set veneer. You can still hear the ocean—we’re three blocks back from it, and the sound of the waves, the constant tssschhh, pervades the air for maybe four blocks. And as I stepped out into the yard that morning, I could smell the ocean and hear the calling of the seagulls.

The walk is all neon and lights—me, I lived backstage. Among the trash.

Sorry! This is super not-cheerful already.

What I mean: all the houses on our street are the same—little, cheap identical white blocks. Porches that, if we were facing the water like in Green Harbor down the coast, would be charming. But ours are usually covered in car tires and broken furniture and other junk, some of it human.

A yard out front, a garage to the side of it, with an apartment above it. That part you know very well, but we’ll come to you later.

I think it would be bad enough to live in a place that looks like every other place on your street, the suburban nightmare of America. But add to that the squalor and the pretending to be something it isn’t, and to me it’s everything that’s wrong with Oakwood, New Jersey.

Or it was anyway. I guess maybe I feel kind of different about it now, after everything that’s happened.

The part I love is the walk to the beach, because you go down Ocean Boulevard and as you get closer to the water, you start to pass those old historic motels that you love too. “Doo-wop architecture,” they call it. Or “New Jersey vernacular.” Like Vegas with more modest ambitions: strange space-age structures like interstellar ships that landed in the wrong place, and Egyptian pyramids and Hawaiian palaces. Neon signs, fifties’ angles.