American Dream Machine by Specktor Matthew

Author:Specktor, Matthew [Specktor, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781935639459
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2013-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

IX

I DON’T WANT to say I didn’t miss him. What fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t miss his father, even if that father is also a stranger? But I missed Severin more. Ninth grade was the year Williams and I retired our skateboards, our grubby, preadolescent customs. The two of us remained at Untaken, a funky private high school built by refugees from St. Jerome, while Sev was beamed up and abducted to another planet, became the Man Who Fell to Earth.

“Yo, dude.” Williams called Sev from the wall phone in my mother’s kitchen.

“Dudes!” Now it was Severin mocking us when we called. “What are you doing?”

“We’re at Nate’s house hot-knifing hash.”

“Hot-knifing?”

Another Friday night. I guess Williams wanted to prove to Sev we were getting something he wasn’t. But this, my mother’s radical permissiveness, was the best he could come up with. Teddy had left her again, this time for good. And in the absence of any sort of authority—my mother was nodding out in the living room over her fourth vodka tonic—we crouched by the oven, warming knives on which we’d spread hash before vaporizing the substance into a funnel.

“It’s our new thing,” Will snickered, before I came over and wrestled the phone away from him.

“Whatcha doin’, brother?”

“Oh, Nate!” How he soared above me now. Those six months older could’ve been six years, from the sound of it. “Nothing, watching O Lucky Man! Just sitting here in the hotel.”

“How’s pops?” I rolled the word around to make it mocking.

“Phah.” He exhaled, as if this topic were beneath his contempt. “The same.”

He cupped the receiver with his hand. I heard him say something inaudible, a girl’s voice answering him. It would’ve been one o’clock in the morning, there.

“Who are you with?”

“Some chick.”

God. He sounded like an actor himself, in his jet-lagged and exaggerated boredom. It was hard to miss someone like that, but I’d come to believe Sev was my only witness, the only one—in a sense—who could explain me to myself. And yet he barely deigned to do so, then as ever.

“Put Will back on for just a sec, I want to tell him something.”

Bastard. He went to Dalton. He lived at the St. Regis with Beau, just like that girl in the children’s stories. He had his own suite. Williams snorted, at whatever it was Severin told him after I handed back the phone. Fuck them both, really.

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