Thomas and Niko in the City of Trees - Chapter 2
I can walk home from Thomas' house. It only takes about fifteen minutes, and I've done it for years. I recently found out in a book what it means to be a latchkey kid. I guess in a way I was one of those, except I didn't spend much time locked up in the house. Instead I roamed around this whole area. When I was a little kid, I was asked more than once by an adult if I was lost. I had the good sense to say no, thought I was always a little confused and caught off guard by the question. I get it now. Baby Niko must have been quite the sight. These days, if I saw some little six-year-old screwing around the Barnes and Noble parking lot alone, I'd be a little concerned, too.
That road that separates our houses, Cole, is fairly lifeless, but there's more going on if you go down by the mall. We all spend quite a bit of time at the mall. It's call Boise Towne Square Mall. We go downtown, too, but you can't get into any of the places there when you're underage. It's not too hard for us to get our hands on booze when we want it, but I'm still looking forward to the day when I can walk up to the bar and order something for myself. I don't know anyone my age who isn't looking forward to that.
I don't know where my work ethic comes from. My mom is lazy as fuck and I can only assume the same of my dad, though I don't know him personally. At school, I become this whirlwind tornado thing that slips around from class to class just fucking getting shit done. There's this thing that clicks in my brain every time I am presented with a challenge. Go. Do it now. Just fucking figure it out, get it done. I have always been this way. Thank god for that. It's my ticket out of here, I can already tell.
I get home at quarter to nine. My mom is watching some dumb show on Netflix. The volume is so loud I can't even say hi to her. I would have to yell for her to hear me. There's this little cake from Albertsons sitting on the table. I don't quite know how to describe the relief I feel when I see it. I wasn't offended the year before when she forgot. I really wasn't. What bothered me was all the shit that followed—her remembering, crying, telling me how horrible of a mom she was and then giving me that face that demanded I tell her she wasn't. I told her she was a good mom and she just kept saying no, no, there's no way to fix this. It's the worst thing I've ever done. I'm the worst mom. I would say she wasn't again. She kept going on about it for days until I got really tired of the back and forth. Finally I snapped and accused her of making the whole thing about her. It was true but I shouldn't have said it. We didn't talk for a week after that.
Anyway, the cake is there, and I'm so happy to see it, because it makes everything so much simpler. I cut two pieces from it and put them on plates, grab to forks and then I bring one to my mom. She thanks me and says Happy Birthday and all that over the noise of the show. She says, "I should have cut you a piece, not the other way around," and I assure her that it doesn't matter. She goes back to watching her show.
I eat my piece in about three bites because I'm starving and then I eat one more. Then I look in the fridge for something with protein since I worked out with Thomas, but the boneless chicken breasts I bought are gone. I ask my mom about that. I have to yell, which has me annoyed right out of the gate.
"I think those were expired."
"How could they be expired? I bought them two days ago."
"I cooked them."
"Where'd you put them, then?"
"I burned them."
I sigh. At least we have gotten to the bottom of this one. "How'd you do that?"
"I left them in the oven."
I look in the trash beneath the sink and find all four of them, big lumps of coal. They even melted a hole through the plastic bag. "You have to let them cool down before you throw them away," I say.
"What?"
I give up. We live right behind a fancy organic grocery store. They cost a little more there but her car isn't working right now and I don't want to walk all the way to Albertsons. I still can't quite believe she did for the cake. I'll try to get her car going on the weekend. Thomas knows quite a bit about how they work.
It's fully dark outside. I'm really loving this warm night. There's kind of a breeze and it slips through the branches and new leaves of all the trees around here. They are mostly young maples and oaks in this area. I like trees quite a bit, and one good thing about this city is that there are plenty of them.
Anyway I get the chicken and even get some broccoli and steam it up once I get home. I'm trying to look after myself and my health. I offer some to my mom but she doesn't want any. I have homework to do before bed and convince her to turn down the TV a little so that I can focus on it. It takes me almost two hours to get through all of that horse shit. I work at the kitchen table. I have a math test the next day so it takes me a little more time to get ready for it. My mom is still watching TV when I'm done. I do the dishes and turn off the light in the kitchen.
"Night, Ma," I say. I kiss the top of her head. She doesn't say goodnight back. But I know she hears me. I know she's going through some mental health issues right now that make interacting on a conversational level pretty overwhelming. I've put some thought into it and I can see how it would feel to be in her position. So I don't push it. I have no idea how late she'll be up. I have a white noise machine in my room that helps me sleep.
The next day, Thomas and I are just hanging out in the parking lot during lunch. Thomas has done a lot of things to turn the tables in his favor. That's not easy to do in this school, especially when you look the way he does. Seeing as this is fucking Boise, Idaho, you might already be thinking there aren't a lot of ethnically Chinese students at my high school. But you are probably still picturing too many in your mind's eye. He's one of maybe nine or ten asian students out of way over a thousand in this place. I'm not that good at talking about race, so I'll just say that, in general, students who aren't white have to fight harder for respect here. Thomas is a pretty popular guy. Between the two of us, I'm the underdog in that sense. I'll admit it. But he's made his rise to prominence look super easy, when the truth is that it was never easy. You should have heard the names kids called him when we were younger. It was awful, and I never had the slightest fucking idea what to say when it happened. These days, he's so jacked that I doubt anyone would say any kind of slur to his face. He almost got expelled last year for hitting a kid who called him a word I won't say here. But luckily they sorted it out, and times are changing, even here, and the administration dropped it.
He's pretty tall. Of course he didn't have to do anything to get that way. But he's also one of the most jacked guys in the whole school. I know I keep saying that but it's true. He's pretty obsessed with his workout routines and supplements. He's always trying to push his protein powders and shit like that on me. I tell him I don't like the way they taste. They actually taste pretty good. I lie because there's no way I can afford supplements like that, and accepting all his offers would start to feel like charity after a while. I'm sure about that. So I'm not even going to go down that road.
So Thomas and me, we're just bullshitting about something out in the parking lot when out of nowhere he goes, "What do you and Lexie get up to? You know...in private."
When I was younger, I always kind of thought this was something we would talk about when we got girlfriends. I had even looked forward to it. But we never do. We talk about so many other things that it has started to feel like a blank spot in our friendship that needs filling, if that makes any sense. Maybe Thomas feels the same way. Maybe that's why he's bringing it up now.
"We do different kinds of stuff, I guess," I say.
"Yeah?"
"I mean, we mess around quite a bit. At her place, usually, when her parents aren't home."
