First Day On Earth Read online

  The bell rings and I’m the last one out. I don’t care if I’m late. No one cares if I’m late. I move through the hallways slowly, as though time doesn’t exist. I pick my way through the pressure of bodies. Gravity gets heavier as I enter English. Everything slows down when everyone looks up at me standing in the doorway. I try to be quiet as I make my way to the back of the room.

  It takes me forever. Luckily, I know all about how ten seconds can feel like a year.

  After English, I am walking behind Darwyn and his bigness that takes up even more space than is physically allotted to him. Darwyn does not move slow. He moves fast. He’s happy to be bumped into or to bump into others. He buzzes from one person to another. He uses the time between classes as an opportunity to talk to people, especially people who don’t want to talk to him at any other time.

  “Hello, there!” he says. He smiles. He waves. Then I watch as he trips on his shoelace. He is like a big rock in the middle of the hallway, forcing the stream of bodies to part and then come together again. People are laughing as they pass by him, and as I move closer, I can see why. Everyone can see his butt crack. At first he’s laughing, too. But then I can tell that he’s distressed. He doesn’t know how to fix the situation and is trying to play it off as a joke. Darwyn tries to tie his shoe, hold his books, balance his heavy backpack, and pull down his too-small shirt. No matter how hard he pulls his shirt down or his pants up, it will not cover the butt crack. It is an impossible task. I go over to him and take the books out of his hands.

  Darwyn stands up.

  The hall is now empty.

  The late bell rings.

  “Oh, no,” he says. He’s actually worried about things like being late for class. It matters to him.

  I give him back his books.

  He takes them and runs down the empty hallway, turning to disappear down another hallway.

  I am standing alone, wondering when I’m going to bother getting to science.

  I ask myself that same old question.

  How far away from here is far away enough? How far away would I be willing to go?

  Light-years.

  9.

  I’m in the Albertsons, putting milk and cheese and bread and spaghetti into the cart. The wheel is stuck.

  I curse.

  I’m on the ground, trying to see what the problem is, when I hear them talking about me.

  “That’s Lucy’s boy, isn’t it?” a woman’s voice says.

  From where I am fiddling with the wheel, I look up and recognize her, from the now-distant time of barbecues and picnics, games nights and playdates. I almost smile. Because sometimes just making a connection in your brain makes you smile. But then I stop because why should I smile at her? At them?

  It was worse a few years ago, after Dad left. I’d be in the supermarket, picking up food because Mom wouldn’t even leave the house. Now it’s just habit that I’m the one who does the shopping. But back then, when I was eleven, I was confused. I thought they were talking to me, not about me.

  The look on their faces, the crazy poofy hair, the piled-on makeup, the smoker’s rasp as they whisper — it’s inhuman.

  “Yes,” the woman next to her confirms.

  I remember their names. Susan and Jessie.

  Whenever I run into them, I always hear them going on and on. It’s a variation on the same theme.

  “It’s a shame about Lucy —”

  “Well, she did it to herself. Just let herself go —”

  “Obviously weak —”

  “No wonder he left her; she was a mess —”

  “She’s crazy —”

  “He was right to walk away —”

  “He was so nice. Always so polite. A good husband —”

  “Better than mine —”

  “She just hates herself. Who could love someone who hates herself so much?”

  “He was a great guy. She was lucky he stayed as long as he did —”

  “She’s the crazy one. I mean, look how she acts —”

  “You know I tried to reach out to her a few years ago. But she was still screaming about it. And now, a drunk —”

  “She looks ancient —”

  “I feel sorry for the kid —”

  “Tragic —”

  “Well, we all have our lot to bear —”

  “Such a mess. Such a terrible mess.”

  No matter how quickly I try to get out of there, I always hear a part of it.

  I forget about the stuck wheel and about the food in the cart and I head out of the store, leaving those women and their wicked, awful words behind me.

  Those women, the way they talk about her, that’s what’s really crazy.

  You would never know that they used to be her friends. Her best friends.

  There isn’t one friendly thing about them.

  10.

  My life sucks.

  So I shave my head.

  11.

  “Hey, why do you always look so angry?”

  The girls are all around me. One of them is twirling her hair. One of them is chewing raspberry-flavored gum. One of them is picking something out of her nose ring. One of them is painting her toenails.

  It’s free period and we’re supposed to be studying. I’m reading a book that has nothing to do with anything we’re learning in school. Mark and Sameer, the only two people that I’m kind of friends with, are sitting too far away from me to be of any help. They don’t notice anyway. They’re the kind of guys who never look up. They’ve got their buds in their ears and their noses in their books. We’re all reading books.

  Mark is reading The Web Coder’s Technical Manual.

  Sameer is reading The Body Builder’s Guide to Beefing Up.

  I am reading The Undiscovered Self.

  I don’t say anything to the girls. I just hope that they will go away. All the girls at school look the same to me, except Posey. She looks different.

  “He’s got such a bad vibe,” one of them says.

  “You are so angry,” another one says.

  I’m quiet.

  “I can’t believe they don’t just kick you out of school.”

  “Or that you don’t quit. People like you usually just quit.”

  I look for Posey. A lot of the time, she shuffles them away from me. She makes it so that they get distracted by something else. But she’s absent today.

  Maybe my jaw muscle is twitching.

  Mark and Sameer surprise me by looking up. But they don’t really know how to help me. No one can help me.

  I look out the window. The sunlight slants through the columns outside the window. It highlights the dust in the air.

  The girls continue to cluck. But they sound far away. Their voices sound slowed down. There’s only the window and the dust and Mark and Sameer gone back to reading their books.

  I do like they do. I go back to reading.

  Always solace in a book.

  Always silence in there.

  12.

  I find the kitten on the side of the road, mewing like it’s the end of the world. His mom is dead, her guts pouring out of her belly, and two of his siblings are dead, too. But here is this one little runty thing, still alive. Mewling and tiny. This one was smart enough not to follow the others into the street. He lost his mom and he knows it. This cat knows that he’s all alone in the world.

  I know all about that. It’s a painful thing to know.

  “Hey, little guy, I’m here,” I say. I’m careful when I pick him up. He’s so tiny that he fits into my jacket pocket. As soon as he’s snuggled in there, I can feel him relax. He starts purring against my body, purring like a hacksaw, like a hallelujah. I can’t help but smile.

  I wonder if this is how they felt when they found me.

  I do what I always do when I find a lost animal. I bring him to the Del Vista Street Animal Shelter.

  “Hello, Mal,” Dr. Manitsky says when I come in. Dr. Manitsky is Posey’s mom. Today she’s wearing a light pu
rple scrub outfit with pictures of Winnie the Pooh floating off on a balloon. “Who do you have for me today?”

  I lift the sleeping kitten out of my pocket and hand him to her.

  She takes him carefully and places him on the exam table. The little thing wakes up and starts to wander around on the metal table. Dr. Manitsky keeps scooting him back so she can finish what she’s doing.

  “New haircut?” she asks as she takes the kitten’s temperature. She’s not even looking up to stare at my bald head, like other people do. I reach up and touch it. I like the way the stubble feels.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Thinking about college yet?”

  “Just thinking,” I say.

  “That’s good,” she says. “Posey’s wanting to go out east. She’s considering Brown. I keep telling her that’s far from home, but I guess we all have to go on our own way one day. Even if that means going far away.”

  “I guess,” I say. There are days I can’t imagine leaving home. There are days it seems like something impossible. Like I’m in a cage that looks like a house.

  But then I remember. I escaped from here once. Maybe I can do it again.

  Dr. Manitsky starts to baby-talk to the kitten. “You’re such a pretty little thing, aren’t you? Little handsome devil. Going to catch someone’s heart.”

  She’s scratching his back and the kitten is purring away, like he finally knows that everything is going to be just fine. That there is still love in the world despite a dead mother in the middle of the road. Despite being all alone.

  I wonder if this is how I felt when they found me.

  “So is the cat going to be okay?” I ask.

  “A tough guy like this? Sure thing, if all his tests work out, he’ll be adopted for sure,” she says.

  “I don’t like to think of him being all alone,” I say. I don’t like to think of anything being all alone.

  Dr. Manitsky looks at me like I’m one of the animals in the shelter. I don’t like it when she looks at me like that. Somehow, it’s worse than the women in the Albertsons.

  I am not an animal.

  “You and your mother should come over for dinner sometime,” she says as I follow her into the back to watch her put the kitten into one of the cages on the wall. He sniffs around his new home, eats some kibble hungrily, and then goes to the corner and falls back asleep.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say. As though I’m seriously considering it, which I’m not. I never consider it when she asks, which is practically every time I come by. We’re watching the little guy as his chest moves up and down. I’m amazed how his belly, which was flat and bony before, is now suddenly big from eating. Just a little bit of nourishment makes all the difference.

  “Well, I know Posey would love to have you,” she says.

  I know that Posey wouldn’t mind, but I hardly think that she’d love for me to come over.

  “My mom doesn’t really like to go out much.”

  “You could always come alone.”

  “I don’t like to leave her by herself. She doesn’t remember to eat.”

  “You can visit Flopsy. I’m sure she’d like to see you.”

  She’s talking about the rabbit that I rescued from the elementary school when I was in sixth grade. It was the first time I rescued something. One of the kindergarten teachers had forgotten him in the parking lot. I went there on that Saturday, after school had closed for Easter vacation, to practice popping the wheels on the dirt bike I’d gotten for my birthday. I saw the cage sitting there in the empty parking lot, on the sidewalk in front of a faculty parking spot. The rabbit inside was hardly breathing.

  My dad had just left, and seeing that rabbit just about killed me.

  I took the rabbit out of the cage and ran out of the parking lot with him, leaving my bike behind. I ran and ran, even though I didn’t even know what to do or where to go. I remember blind panic. I thought I had to hold him and love him and save him. And when I was running, I saw the animal shelter and came inside and Dr. Manitsky was there, in her scrubs. She looked up from behind the counter and saw the half-dead rabbit in my arms and she knew just what to do. She stuck an IV in him and she let me pet him as she helped him come back to life.

  I said I’d ask my mom if I could take him home. But when I got there, things were bad and I never asked her, because how could I take in a rabbit? It was ridiculous. The next time I found an animal that needed rescuing, I brought it in to Dr. Manitsky, and found out that she had taken Flopsy in herself. She said I could have him anytime. But that rabbit reminded me of before. Even though it happened after. I never asked for the rabbit. And until today, Dr. Manitsky never mentioned anything about it. Which made me feel relieved.

  Sometimes I thought it might be nice to see Flopsy again. Like it would be some kind of test of my strength. But it wouldn’t do to go over there. I know I would just become a blubbering idiot.

  “Tell Posey I hope she feels better,” I say.

  “You can tell her yourself — she’ll be back in school tomorrow.”

  I head out of there, and as I bike toward the setting sun, wind whipping smoothly along my new aerodynamic head, I wonder why Dr. Manitsky is so nice to me.

  The pocket feels extra empty without that little cat. I want that kitten to be my kitten.

  But I remember the same thing I always remember when I drop off a rescue at the shelter. A rescue that I might want to keep for myself. What if I go to college? My mom would never be able to take care of a cat once I left.

  She can’t even take care of me.

  She can’t even take care of herself.

  13.

  I know where he is.

  He has a new family. He lives in Victorville.

  And I hate him.

  14.

  When he was around, we used to do things together. He’d pile stuff into the car and say, “Come on, Malcolm! Are you ready for an adventure?”

  And I’d get excited and have to go pee an extra time before we left.

  I’d sit in the front seat. It would be just me and my dad. I’d stare out the window at the landscape as it passed by. The brown dirt. The palm trees. The outlet stores. The scrub.

  We’d go somewhere cool, like Joshua Tree, or Angeles National Forest, or even the Grand Canyon once. We’d pitch a tent and eat adventure food. Beans in a can. Hot dogs. Trail mix.

  We’d lay our sleeping bags out on the hard ground and we’d look up at the stars.

  “That’s Hercules,” he would say. “The strongest man in the world.”

  “Because he was so big?”

  “Sure, but that’s not the only way a man can be strong. He can look weak and little and be stronger than a tough guy on the inside.”

  I imagined that my dad was like that. Even though he was slight on the outside, he seemed big to me.

  “There’s Cassiopeia — she hangs upside down half the year because she was so vain….”

  I thought of my mother. And her long blond hair. How she wore it loose around her shoulders. She was beautiful, but never vain. She used to be an actress when she was young. A child actor. She showed me the sitcom she was on for two years before it was canceled, and the toothpaste commercials she’d done.

  But no one wanted her when she got older. Except for my dad.

  “What about that star? Why is it moving?” I asked.

  My eyes were trailing a star that had suddenly emerged brightly and then started to move sideways.

  “Where?” my dad asked, and he leaned over to follow my finger pointing up at the night. “Is it a UFO?” I asked.

  “That’s a man-made satellite,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “There are so many satellites orbiting the earth now, that if anything was out there, close to us, I bet we’d know about it.”

  I watched the star as it moved away and then suddenly blinked out.

  The last time we went out there, it was the November before he left, and there was
a meteor shower.

  We lay there staring at the sky blacker than anything, with the Milky Way stretching like an unconcerned spill. And the sky looked alive. The stars fell faster than the wishes I could make.

  I wish I had a better bike.

  I wish I was three inches taller.

  I wish I could grow a mustache.

  I wish I could be in Mr. Jeter’s homeroom next year.

  I wish I had a better video game system.

  I wish.

  I wish.

  I wish.

  Now I think that was childish. I shouldn’t have wished for anything dumb.

  I would have been better off wishing for better things.

  Like a heart for my dad.

  Like that he would never leave.

  Like to know how to make my mom feel better.

  I would even have added world peace in there while I was wishing.

  What I don’t know is whether I would have wished for them to leave me alone.

  15.

  I have my head down, so I don’t notice at first. And pretty much every meeting goes the same. I just walked into the wrong room. Or it’s the wrong day. Or they changed the meeting room. Or it’s a spooky coincidence. This time, when the group leader asks someone to share, I hear something that sends chills down my spine.

  “My name is Devon and I am a contactee,” a little guy says.

  “Hi, Devon,” everyone says aloud.

  “I was first taken when I was a small child. The aliens were reptilian in nature. They told me that they had a right to probe me. It was their right….”

  I feel a little faint. Like I’m going to throw up. Not because what the little guy is saying is weird. But because it sounds so right.

  I want to run out of the room.

  But I don’t. I swallow some of the piss-poor coffee. It hits my stomach like a shot of battery acid. I clench. But the coffee helps.

  I sit and listen. It’s toward the end of the meeting. When Devon is done, Earl, the group leader, gives everyone tips for handling the fact that they’ve been abducted. He says that he has been taken his whole life. Over and over again. That there’s a girl who he’s paired with and breeds with. He says that he’s never met her on Earth. And that she doesn’t speak English. She’s Swedish, or Finnish, or some kind of country like that. He knows that because she looks like Pippi Longstocking. Or a Viking. He says though he’s never met her, if he saw her in the street, he would know her. He says that whenever he’s in an airport, he looks around, scanning the crowds, wondering if he’ll see her. He never has, even though he’s traveled a lot.