Tilt - Alan Cumyn [9]
Stan nodded. Why couldn’t he speak around her? He tried to smile but it felt as if his face was cracking. He was holding his jaw in the wooden way of everyone in his family.
All the others were gone from biology now. Stan needed to go somewhere else, too. Where? He hadn’t the slightest idea.
Why didn’t he have his license?
“You know where my house is?” Janine Igwash said.
Stan nodded. Then she was gone and he was standing on his own with the whole world swirling around him. What day was it? Nothing was in his head, so he had to look it up. This was Day Five and he had just finished biology — he was doing the hell out of biology — and so the next period was . . .
A note fell out of his grasp.
Why was he grasping a note?
The ringers rang. The hallway was empty. He was alone with his empty head, reading a note that said in Jason Biggs’ stupid handwriting: tilted=GWOG=goes with other girls=Janine Igwash=everybody else knows, ok?
5
Tilted. Janine Igwash liked girls. Nothing wrong with that. Stan liked girls, too. He liked Janine. Girls with soft secret flesh, half-hidden tattoos. Visions of them roaming around his head.
Tilted.
She wanted him to go to the dance with her. As a front. An untilted front for her parents. That’s as much as he could make out.
Tilted tilted tilted. All the way home.
Where he met Gary lying in the dirt of the driveway scratching something on the underside of his silver Audi with his fingernail. His beige jacket had fallen open, as had his light blue shirt — it looked like Mr. Stillwater’s shirt. Buttons were open where his pink belly peeked out like mushroom flesh starved for the sun. Shroomis gigantis.
In private his mother pressed herself against this man’s skin.
Gary twisted on his back, rubbed his elbow into the dusty asphalt.
“Hey, Gary.” Stan stepped around his mother’s boyfriend.
“I caught something on that speed bump near the auto wash,” Gary said.
The car was gleaming even more than usual. Another stick shift. Stan wouldn’t be able to drive it very well, either.
“I think my strut got bent,” Gary said.
“Tilted?” Stan kneeled down but he couldn’t see anything.
“It might affect the alignment,” Gary said. He brushed himself off and for a moment the two were uncomfortably close.
Did Stan’s mother really like that aftershave?
“How’s school going?” Gary asked.
“Just great,” Stan said.
—
Stan was helping Lily with her homework before dinner. She was adding columns of numbers:
28
+17
3051
“I don’t know how you’re getting that,” Stan said.
“I’m just following,” Lily said.
“Following what?”
“Two plus one is three,” Lily began. “Carry the zero —”
“Wait, wait, wait! First of all, you start on the right, not the left. Eight plus seven is what?”
“That’s not what Ms. Hennigan said!”
“You probably weren’t listening. The column on the right is the ones column.”
“Eight plus seven isn’t ones at all!” Lily said.
Gary and his mother were downstairs in the kitchen getting dinner together. Stan heard Gary say, “I’ve never seen anybody slice tomatoes that way.” Stan’s mother said, “What way?” and Gary said, “Like you’d rather be squashing grapes.”
It was a Gary joke. Stan didn’t hear his mother laughing.
“On the right is the ones column, and on the left is the tens column. What’s eight plus seven?” Stan asked.
“Fifteen! But then you carry the one to the other side of the five.” She traced over the 51 she’d written on the page.
Stan took the pencil from her. “Don’t make stuff up. You carry the one up to the tens column, up here.” He made a mark by the two. He was trying to stay calm.
“Ms. Hennigan has a different way. Just leave me alone!” She grabbed back the pencil and started an elaborate doodle on the edge of her page.
“You’re going to burn the garlic!” Gary said down in the kitchen.
“No, I’m not,” Stan’s mother snapped. Something smelled like it was burning.
“You are, you are!” A pan clanged and hissed.
“I wonder how old he is now?” Lily murmured, almost to herself.
“Who?”
“Feldon!”
Stan’s palm hit the desk. Lily jumped