Two Roads from Here by Teddy Steinkellner

Author:Teddy Steinkellner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

9. WILEY OTIS

I got so messed up last week, I did something I never do.

“Hey,” I said into the phone.

“Hey,” my dad said, grunting like he’d just woken up from a nap. “What do you need?”

“Nothing,” I said. “How’s New Mexico?”

“Great. Better than Utah. How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine.”

There was a long pause. There’s always a long pause.

“If you’re calling about the check,” he said. “You can tell your mom I’ll send it over, but for now—”

“No. Wait. Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Actually I do need something.”

“What?”

I closed my eyes. I just said it. “I got my heart broken by my best friend. What do I do?”

There was another silence, for the better part of a minute.

“Welp,” he said. “Been down that road before. Like the last time your mother let me live with you guys and I followed all the rules. I never came back late, and I stuck to the separate beds, and I threw the ball with you and all that. But then, wouldn’t you know it, she still had the gall to send me packing, all because she had a ‘change of heart,’ all because of some bullshit about ‘living out the consequences of a mistake,’ whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. I mean the nerve to say something like that to your own husband, you know what I mean, to speak like that to the father of your child, the nerve on that bitch—”

“You know what?” I said. “Never mind.”

I ended the call. I put my phone away. I reached for a bottle of orange soda and chugged it all the way down.

Life goes on.

• • •

All the usual things happened to me this week.

Ms. Fawcett pink slipped me into her office to tell me I’m not going to graduate on time, not unless I make “major lifestyle changes.”

The band dudes wouldn’t talk to me during passing periods, which is how they’ve been ever since I quit, probably on direct orders from Allegra.

I tried to hang out with the stoner guys in the parking lot at lunch, but they looked at me suspiciously, made crosses with their fingers, and called me an “emotional narc.”

And this afternoon in math, Ms. Valdez caught me doing what I always do, doodling a scene from a movie. In this case I was drawing the final shot of Boogie Nights, that part where Dirk Diggler is all depressed and stuff, and—spoiler alert—he looks in the mirror and just whips out his dick—

“Wiley!”

“What?”

“That’s . . . not an asymptote.”

“Um,” I said. “Well, it does curve. . . .”

“That’s a detention and you know it.”

I shrugged. “Okay. Whatever.”

Detention. More of the same. I got to the library and there they all were, the same lost souls as always, going through the motions of their same old existence. The three stoners saw me, mouthed the word “emotionarc,” and did a high fifteen. The freshman cheer girls slaved away at a bunch of #PRAYERS4BRIAN posters that won’t ever save the Big Mack but that definitely just killed a few trees.

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