Better Nate Than Ever: The Next Part - A Boy Soprano

I mean, he won’t be playing for six weeks or something, which is sort of devastating to him.

“Yeah, it’ll be great to see you. This whole thing has been...really overwhelming.”

It’s one thing to be old, to be forty or fifty with a broken heart, but it’s practically terminal when you’re thirteen.

“You’re very observant,” she says. “But, no, I’m not fired. It’s all good.”

“You know what this means? It means you don’t have to face those boys back at school. It means you don’t have to go back to classes that you daydream through. It means you never have to throw another basketball in another mandatory P.E. class. It means you don’t have to suffer through your dad asking you if you’ve met any cute girls yet.”

And then, sitting here on the futon, I hear Aunt Heidi’s cell phone ring again from her bedroom, and she runs to an intercom thing by the front door (very cool, very space-age) and presses a buzzing button.

She steps out into their hallway, leaving the door an inch ajar.

He knows something’s up, like when Feather could tell we were going to have that one, famous Pittsburgh tornado, and kept knocking Mom’s Sleepless in Seattle commemorative plates off the wall with his tail.

She’s a heck of a driver, Mom is, when motivated.

If E.T. were real, we could gauge his health based upon this plant.

Freckles gets a text and looks at this phone, and he says, “Just a sec,” and presses a button and steps away from the table and stands in the rain, the drizzle turning into a downpour.

“Oh, like super elusive. Beefy and hunky but kind of drinks too much, and...I shouldn’t...it’s not really my place to talk about him.”

And while I’m not technically a midget or a puppet expert or a girl, Mr. Garret Charles, of all people, responded to my knee crawls, and could picture me “bringing to life an alien creature with a weird voice and an underbite and a waddle.”

And while I’m not technically a midget or a puppet expert or a girl, Mr. Garret Charles, of all people, responded to my knee crawls, and could picture me “bringing to life an alien creature with a weird voice and an underbite and a waddle.”

Who knew the vegetable pageant would be such a stepping-stone?

“Yes, only this time I read for E.T.! For E.T. the alien! That’s the crazy part. I did all these wacked-out lip trills and blips and blops.”
“Like from our animal seminar?”

I can almost hear Libby shaking her head in disbelief.

“Yes’m?”
“—tried to plant a stink bomb in the faculty bathroom today, but one of his stupid Bills of Rights got the prank wrong..."

"...He bought the whole package, allegedly, in West Virginia—”

A torrent of children’s screams, white noise on Libby’s bus journey home, threatens to override key aspects of her story.

A torrent of children’s screams, white noise on Libby’s bus journey home, threatens to override key aspects of her story.

Her voice sounds like a shaken pop bottle, opened into a geyser.

“Aw, Natey. She’s good. She’s good. I didn’t even get to tell you yet: She got in to see some really good doctor at UPMC, next Friday. Got the call this morning and she texted me at school. She feels really optimistic about it. Maybe your dad pulled some strings at the hospital or something.”

It turns out that custard can taste really, really depressing when you’re not in the mood for it.

I’m following Aunt Heidi into my first subway ride, and suddenly the newness of a musty underground tunnel, of another thing in New York I won’t have the opportunity to become bored with...well, it makes me so sad that it gets me angry.

I bet a rollercoaster back to Jankburg would be completely flat and devoid of thrills, “The first rollercoaster in the world on which you can actually nap,” I bet they’d advertise.

“It’s Jankburg,” I say in a drone.

Aunt Heidi exhales in such a huge way that I think I see this lady’s skirt flip up, sitting across from us—oh my God, that’s a guy, in a kilt—and Heidi says, “You know, your grandma and grandpa were very, very traditional, Nate.”

You can imagine being your mom, Nate, and getting grounded and having your boyfriend taken away—your dad, now—and how much you’d resent
your little sister.

And one of the Bills is an outcast now.

We pay for everything (Heidi does), and she and Freckles lead me out through the entrance vestibule, and just before we’re about to break to the street, I pass another homeless coat-drive box.

Freckles takes his own coat off and hands it to this man, calling me an inspiration as we walk away.

I’m still stuck on being called an actor. To be part of this club! It’s intoxicating.

They even asked to see some of the things I did a second time, even if Garret Charles said, at one point, “I can’t figure out why that’s so compelling, young man,” in his British accent, “but I could watch you slam into that wall a thousand times. It is...vibrant, somehow.”

Heidi’s walking ahead of us, concealing a smirk.

“It was. Yeah, actually,” Heidi says, with real wonderment.

Even when you yourself have gotten used to being harassed, there is still nothing worse than the feeling of your family being mortified for you.

We stare at one another for about a thousand heartbeats (which, here, only lasts a single second) and Freckles and Aunt Heidi both make the same face. Of bewilderment and awe.

I take her hand, aware that my own is still sweaty with residual Reese’s Pieces; that she'll probably get Dad to shout at me later for not being a hygienic-enough child.

I take her hand, aware that my own is still sweaty with residual Reese’s Pieces; that she'll probably get Dad to shout at me later for not being a hygienic-enough child.