Cut Both Ways Read online

  EPIGRAPHS

  so I wait for you like a lonely house

  till you will see me again and live in me.

  Till then my windows ache.

  —Pablo Neruda, from sonnet LXV of 100 Love Sonnets

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

  They have to take you in.”

  —from “The Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost

  DEDICATION

  To Adrian

  Let me paraphrase Mr. Plumbean from Daniel Pinkwater’s

  The Big Orange Splot:

  Our house is where we long to be

  and it looks like all our dreams

  CONTENTS

  Epigraphs

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  YOU GET USED to it, divorce. Since fourth grade, I’ve lived in two different houses and while that sounds kind of crazy, especially for a little kid, you get used to it. Used to your parents not being together, to scenery changing every other week. Two yards, two kitchens, two beds to jerk off in. You get used to going back and forth in the car, to traffic jams, to waiting and sitting and your dad swearing at other drivers and your mom taking work calls and pretending she wants to know how your week went. People think kids can’t handle divorce, that it’ll make them shatter or something, but it’s not true. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you can’t get good at being used to it.

  By the time I got my license, I’d worn a groove between my mom’s house in Oak Prairie and my dad’s house in Minneapolis, the one I’d been born in. Since I had to attend the same school in Minneapolis, while living out in the suburban asteroid belt of Oak Prairie, over the years I’d gotten to know the best routes, the quickest shortcuts, the worst times for gridlock. And I had it timed too, down to a science. The drive to where my mom lives in Oak Prairie is about a half an hour from where my dad lives in Minneapolis. Though you can do it in twenty minutes if you speed.

  Lately, though, my car’s kinda acting weird, so I don’t speed as much. I just had a bunch of stuff fixed on it, but there’s still this weird sound coming from the engine whenever I go over sixty miles an hour. Since my dad was super pissed about paying for the repairs—parts on an Audi aren’t cheap, even if he got one of his mechanic friends to do the labor for less—I’d started just turning up the radio extra loud to drown out the weird sound.

  “Your mother didn’t give you this car, as far as I’m concerned,” he always says. “She just transferred the debt. I didn’t have a car when I was your age.”

  He’s a pretty bitter dude, my dad. With joint custody, I have no choice but to go back and forth. Plus he barely could stand driving me to my mom’s place before I got a license.

  When I get to my mom’s, my half sisters are playing in the sprinkler on the giant perfect lawn. All the lawns in Oak Prairie look the same. Picture, like, half a soccer field of perfect, pure green, weed-free grass. Then put one spindly, tiny tree in the corner, with the base circled with chicken fencing so the deer won’t gnaw at it. Oak Prairie probably used to be some beautiful untouched forest or some bankrupt farmer’s land. But try telling the deer that. They walk up to yards and chew on shrubs and eat flowers out of pots like that’s natural or something. Those spindly twig-trees don’t stand a chance.

  Compare this to my dad’s house in Minneapolis, where the lawn’s torn up to mud from all the construction, but there’s a huge maple tree that’s over seventy years old. A big, beautiful one, with a perfect V-shaped spot in the middle where you can sit once you’ve climbed it. The summer of fourth grade, after the divorce, my dad and I started building a tree house in it. But our neighbors bitched that it was an “eyesore” so we had to take everything down. If you put anything heavier than a goddamn Barbie doll in the wire-surrounded twig-tree at my mom’s house, it’d probably snap in half. Which might actually be kind of funny to see. But then my mom’d yell her face off at Taylor and Kinney, and Kinney would cry and Taylor would pout, which sort of cancels out the fun part.

  Taylor’s wearing a bikini and Kinney’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt and they are chasing each other through the sprinkler. Kinney’s also spraying Taylor with the hose. They have an entire backyard full of play equipment and swings and crap, but here they are, ripping it up on the front lawn, of course. They are both seven years old and not identical, in looks or behavior. Kinney’s always crying about something; Taylor’s always yelling at her to shut up. But they always want to be together, somehow.

  Both of them rush me as I come up to the house. Kinney’s holding the hose with the nozzle on it but Taylor’s kinking it so she can’t spray me.

  “Mom’s having book club!” Taylor says. “You can’t go inside! The food’s for the ladies only!”

  “They’re drinking wine!” Kinney adds. “There’s three whole boxes of it!”

  “You got new glasses,” Taylor says, stopping and noticing.

  “And you look like a dork!” Kinney adds.

  “I like them,” Taylor says, tilting her head to study me and my glasses. “They look very happy on your face.”

  I rush Taylor and pick her up and flip her over my shoulder and she screams, but I know she loves it. She’s expecting it. Kinney sprays us and Taylor screams. I reach down, kink the hose. Kinney screams at both of us.

  “Our dad’s in the UK! That’s England!” Taylor says, her hands on hips. “So there’s no boys allowed!”

  “Boys are too allowed, because I’m here,” I tell her. “Deal with it.”

  Then my mom is on the steps, yelling. “Kinney! Taylor! What are . . . oh hi, Will,” she says, seeing me. “I forgot you were coming out tonight. Turn off that hose, Kinney! Right now! Take off your shoes, Will, okay? I just mopped this floor ten times already.”

  I haven’t been here since school let out, so I know my mom’s happy I’m here. She’ll just never admit it. Saying something would mean she minds that my dad’s got an edge and talked me into helping him with the remodeling all summer. But she won’t say she misses me, or that she’s jealous. She’ll just say that my half sisters miss me or that she bought me new clothes and wants me to see if they fit. I’m not even sure she misses me at all, actually. It’s more like, every time I stay with her, she wins somehow. Scores a point off my dad or something.

  My mom’s setup for book club looks like quite a spread, even without the contributions the other women will bring. She tells Kinney and Taylor to stop tracking wet all over the floor and get in the bathtub before she “loses her mind.” My mom is always threatening to “lose her mind.” She tells me that I can eat after the book-club ladies arrive—“there will be more than enough!” she says, several times—and that there is a babysitter coming to watch the twins.

  “Can we eat with Will?” Taylor asks. I’ve set her down to unlace my work boots, but she’s still hovering around me. Taylor likes me more than Kinney does. The feeling is mutual too, in both directions. Maybe parents have to l
ove their kids equally, but I don’t think it counts for half siblings. I mean, I don’t hate Kinney or anything. But she bugs me in a way Taylor doesn’t.

  “No,” my mom says, stabbing toothpicks into little balls of cheese. “I’ve already told you that. And I made your dinner and you’ll eat in the TV room once Claudia gets here. But if you don’t finish your bath before she gets here, then you can forget about watching movies.”

  “Awww . . . !” Kinney says.

  “Don’t!” my mom yells. “I’m serious! Don’t test me!”

  I don’t remember my mom being such a yeller to me when I was the twins’ age. She wasn’t even much of a yeller to my dad. But she’s jumping in the twins’ shit constantly. I can kind of see the point, at least where Kinney’s concerned.

  “I might just stay at Angus’s house,” I say. “If it gets late.”

  “Sure, fine,” my mom says. She’s distracted, in a rush, clacking around the giant granite-countertop island in these sandals that don’t look like they’d be loud, but they are anyway. My mom’s always moving. She’s skinny but she has no muscle; her arms are sticks of flab. Though she’s crazy about yoga and Pilates and whatever the hell classes they do at her fitness place these days, the heaviest thing I ever see her lift is her purse and her phone. She’s still a nice-looking lady, I suppose, and I look like her, but not in the same way. We both have blue eyes and the same straight, dark hair. I have glasses, though; I got my dad’s astigmatism. I wonder if she notices this. If she worries I’ll be like him too. When I start to think like this, I kind of hate her a little. I’m glad she’s always twitching off into some new project. I don’t want her to look at me and see the guy she hates so bad.

  “I like your glasses,” she says as she unwraps a platter of brownies. “They’re very hip. Retro, even.”

  “Dad got them at Walmart.”

  She wrinkles her nose at this. She hates Walmart. Because it’s where my cheapskate dad goes.

  “They frame your face much nicer than those others,” she says. “It was time for a change.”

  “Dad calls them birth-control glasses.”

  “What?” she says. I can feel her wanting to criticize my dad or maybe Walmart. Probably both.

  I explain that he thinks they look like the ones they gave him when he was in Army boot camp and that they’re so ugly, nobody would get near you. That he was kidding. But she just fake-laughs and starts arranging carrots around a bowl of dip.

  “I suppose a little birth control at your age isn’t a bad thing, right?”

  “I don’t think he meant—”

  “Hello?” Angus’s voice, coming through the screen door.

  “Come in!” I yell. “It’s Angus,” I tell my mom. She nods, dumps some ice into a big bowl, and adds lemons.

  Angus sticks his head around the corner but doesn’t leave the front hall. “I’m not wearing any socks,” he says. “I don’t want to take off my shoes.”

  He smiles; I laugh at him. His mom is the same fucking way as my mom. But she’s not yelling at anyone. Angus is the youngest kid in his family. His sisters are older. One’s married, one’s in college. After Angus goes to college, which he will, since he’s smart and everything, Mr. and Mrs. Rackler get their big old giant house to themselves.

  I don’t want to talk about my glasses anymore so I just go to where Angus is standing on the rug in his running shoes. He’s not wearing his usual bandanna over his long hair and it’s going everywhere, big curly blond mess as usual, and he’s wearing crappy holey jeans and a T-shirt that says MINNEAPOLIS LOCAL PIPEFITTERS 539 on it. He looks like he doesn’t belong in Oak Prairie. He looks like he could wear my retro birth-control glasses and fit right in at Franklin, where I go to school in Minneapolis. Where all the hipsters go because it’s an art magnet. Where there are actual kids whose parents are pipefitters. I wonder if Angus knows what a pipefitter does. I only know because of one of my dad’s friends who comes over and plays poker sometimes is a pipefitter. But Angus would never wear glasses. Angus has perfect vision.

  “DeKalb couldn’t make it,” I say, putting on my boots. They still feel a little damp with sweat.

  “Bummer,” Angus says. My friend DeKalb plays bass and Angus’s band needs a bassist. But Angus doesn’t sound that bummed. It’s kind of his deal lately, to never be upset about shit. Though he definitely went through a kind of moody goth phase back in middle school. Always carrying around his journal and whatever. Angus is artistic; I think he wanted to try looking that way too. Besides his silver hoop earrings in each ear, though, now he’s back to being a normal kid. If it’s normal to wear blue bandannas in Oak Prairie, that is. You can’t wear anything like that at Franklin or they freak out that you’re wearing gang colors.

  We walk down to his house, which is a block away. I’ve known Angus since the summer before sixth grade; he moved in during a week where I happened to be staying with my mom. I’d been bored, shooting baskets in the driveway, and Angus came up and asked if he could play. He sucked really bad, so we ended up going to the little park down the street, hanging out on the playground equipment, and then in the creek behind the little stand of woods. We didn’t do anything, really, except get muddy and collect rocks and try to climb trees, but I was so happy to have him. My half sisters were still pretty little so my mom and Jay were kind of busy dealing with them every second. And Angus wasn’t hard to be friends with. Though it’s not like it’s hard to make friends with someone when you’re eleven. You just want someone to play with; it’s not like I needed Angus to have the same life philosophy or anything.

  Angus says he’s got some weed and we might as well walk down to the playground and smoke out. I tell him that’s cool; we can go back to my mom’s and eat the food after all the ladies come for book club.

  “They’ll eat, then start guzzling the wine,” I explain. “Then they’ll talk about everything but the goddamn book. So we’ll have tons to eat.”

  “Sweet,” he says.

  “Plus they’ve got a fuckton of wine we can nab,” I add.

  “Cool.” Some guys, like DeKalb, wouldn’t drink wine. Would say it sucks. DeKalb’s super careful about booze, though, since his dad’s a cop. So he’d front like it was too pussy to drink wine, but I’d know better.

  But my mom doesn’t pay attention to shit like that. She trusts me more than she should, because I’ve never been caught at anything. I don’t love wine, but it’s free. Plus no hassle in getting someone to buy for us. Easier to get weed or whatever the hell other drug if you’re my age, than actual alcohol.

  The park’s still full of little kids so we go another block and then duck between the maintenance building and a bunch of trees, and Angus pulls out his pipe quick, because who knows when some annoying adult will come over and bust us. Oak Prairie is that kind of nosy-ass suburb, where the moms with strollers sort of act like they’re the elected officials of anything taking place in the yard or street or park. Like they’re the mom of everyone, no matter what age.

  Angus’s lighter is sparky and keeps foiling our attempts to get good hits, and we laugh a little but get the job done. Then he taps his pipe out on a tree and puts it in his pocket and we walk back to my house. The walk back—it takes much longer this time around. Weed does that—makes everything seem longer. Which can be good and bad. But this? This is good.

  The whole way, we talk about stuff I can’t remember the second after we talk about it. I’m starving. I’m happy. It just hits me, then, that I’m happy to be here, that I’m done working on the house for the week, and there’s tons of good food in my mom’s kitchen, and it’s nice to be out of Minneapolis and come here. It’s quiet out in Oak Prairie. Nobody on the street. Lots of stars. No trees and buildings blocking the view. Just the same house, row after row, one soccer-field lawn running into the next. I’ve got some change in my pockets and I’m jingling it in this rhythm, along with our footsteps. My boots, Angus’s running shoes. I can keep the time, but just barely. It’s
a kind of enjoyable problem to deal with, flipping the quarters between my fingers and our steps and trying to keep up with what Angus is saying. He’s talking about art school and music and a concert and all of these things. He does all of these things when I’m not around. He’s never bored, Angus. Unlike me, he can always think up something to do.

  We slip into the house. Sneaking, not just because we’re high, but because we don’t want to talk to anyone, even a stray tipsy book-club lady. Especially not Taylor or Kinney. Angus loads up plates for both of us while I load up a couple of my mom’s fancy water Nalgene bottles with boxed wine and tuck them into the back of my shirt. Angus nods and we slip out, unnoticed, the book-club ladies talking and laughing, the cartoon noise blasting from the TV room. Successful entry and exit. We cut through yards and head to Angus’s house.

  “You gonna jam all by yourself?” I ask, when we get to Angus’s practice space, where he keeps all his shit: drums, guitar, keyboard, amp. Angus plays a little of everything, though it’s regular guitar that he’s good at.

  “No, let’s just eat,” he says. He’s already shoving chips into his mouth. We sit on the old sofa he keeps out there and we eat and drink and it’s just the sound of food crunching and chewing, which is kind of gross. But also, the point. The Racklers have a three-car garage, just like my mom’s house, but instead of all of it being taken up with Jay’s Land Rover and my mom’s Mercedes wagon and their camper, the third garage is all Angus’s space. All his music stuff and the old couch and a little fridge and the freedom to be as loud as he wants. Mr. Rackler insulated it acoustically and everything. It’s pretty keen of his parents, I think. They go out of their way to be understanding to him.

  After a while, I’m full but I keep eating, though it kills my high a little. I don’t care; I still feel that shot of happiness from earlier. I don’t get it that often, not constant good feelings, like normal people do. That happy feeling: it always surprises me. Makes me feel dumb, because it always comes when I’m with someone else, and I can’t ever explain it. How I’m happy suddenly. Plus it’s hard to hide.