The Music of What Happens(89)

It was limiting me, big-time.

“Quarter for your thoughts?” Dad asked. Inflation, he explained.

“Just mulling,” I replied. I was thinking about how snakes shed their skin every year, and how awesome it would be if people did that too. In lots of ways, that’s what I was trying to do.

As of tomorrow, I was going to have new skin, and that skin could look like anything, would feel different than anything I knew yet. And that made me feel a little bit like I was about to be born. Again.

But hopefully not Born Again.

Dad opened the hatchback and began to put my duffel bags and boxes on the hot concrete. Sweat beaded up on my forehead and dripped onto my upper lip as I struggled to lift a box that had been underneath the duffels. It was a wet heat, something I’d first experienced when we hit the Midwest, maybe Iowa. I’d never even been east of Colorado before the trip, and now here I was, about to live in New England.

It took us four long, sweaty trips up the stairs to the fourth floor to get all my stuff to my room. My roommate, a guy named Albie Harris, at least according to the e-mail I’d gotten, wasn’t around, but as we opened the door, we found that his stuff sure was.

Albie’s side of the room was messy. Like earthquake messy. The furnishings were all pretty standard stuff: linoleum floors, two faux wood desks side by side, two white dressers at the feet of two metal-framed single beds on opposite sides of the room. But a box of Cap’n Crunch was open and spilled across the floor. A pillow, sans pillowcase, had traveled across the room and was under my bed, along with a black T-shirt, a science textbook, and what appeared to be a fake nose and mustache attached to a pair of eyeglasses. He’d gotten here maybe one day before me, since the dorms just opened yesterday, yet there were at least five crumpled Sunkist soda cans underneath and around his unmade bed. Two open suitcases lay in the center of the room, still full but with clothes overflowing in all directions. On his desk was a pair of two-way radios, as well as another radio with tons of buttons. Above his bed was a huge, menacing poster that depicted a car exploding. In big, bloodred letters at the bottom it read, SURVIVAL PLANET.

I looked at my dad and opened my eyes wide, and he got this half grin he gets when he is savoring something that he can use for later. I’m the kind of kid who keeps spare Swiffers in his closet, and he knew me well enough to know how horrified I was at the sight of this disaster area.

I flopped down on the bed the roommate had left untouched. Dad stood in the doorway and took out his iPhone, and I groaned.

“A perfect match,” he said, panning the room with his phone.

Nothing was more annoying than when my dad had an opinion, and it proved to be correct. For four months, and more vehemently for the 2,164 miles we’d just driven, he’d told me I was making a mistake. Normally, this would be my time to deny it, to insist he was wrong, but it seemed useless to argue. If my dad and mom could have paid my roommate to have my new room look like the worst possible home for me, this would have been it.

So I gave in. I put my head in my hands and shook it exaggeratedly, like I was really upset. “This does not bode well,” I said.

Dad laughed and came and sat next to me, putting his arm on my shoulder.

“Hey. It is what it is,” he said, always the great philosopher.

“I know, I know. I get to make my own choices and live with the consequences. I have free rein to make my own mistakes,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, shrugging. “The universe is infinite.”

In my dad’s language, that means, I’m just a guy. What do I know?

He stood up. “You want me to help you unpack?” he asked, his tone that of a man who had a 2,164-mile return journey ahead of him and really didn’t want to place polo shirts in dresser drawers just now.

“I can do it,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Dad walked to the window, so I joined him. My room was on the back side of the dorm, which faced the huge, grassy quad. Outside, guys were throwing Frisbees, congregating in small groups. Guys, all guys. Mostly preppy. Very New England conservative. It didn’t look that different from the pictures on the Internet, the photos that had gotten me interested in the first place. Very unlike what I could see of my roommate.

“You sure this is the right place for you?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine, Dad. Don’t worry about me.”

He stared out the window as if the whole place made him sad.

“Seamus Rafael Goldberg. At the Natick School. Doesn’t sound right, somehow,” Dad said.

Yes, my name is Seamus — pronounced SHAY-mus — Rafael Goldberg. Try being five with that name. They called me Seamus as a young kid, then Rafael, which is almost worse, until I was like ten. I picked Rafe when I was in fifth grade, and I have insisted on it ever since.

He crossed the room, leaving me alone at the window, and I watched this kid loft a Frisbee a good fifty yards.

Dad pointed the camera at me, and I winced.

“C’mon. One video for your mom,” he said, and I shrugged. I went to the middle of the room, next to the Cap’n Crunch spillage, and pointed down as if I were a tour guide at the Grand Canyon. Dad laughed. Then I trotted over to my roommate’s bed, put my two hands together, and leaned my head on them as if to say, I’m in love!

With the iPhone still recording, I walked back to the window, trying to come up with a funny pose. But then a strange thing happened. I felt this pang in my gut and I bit my lip. I’m not super big on emotional outbursts, which is what made it weird. I thought I might break down and start crying, starkly aware that as soon as Dad left, I’d have no one but strangers around me. Dad must have seen something in my body language, because he put his phone down, came back over to me, and gave me a sweat-soaked hug.