Okay for Now: Chapters 1–3

It wasn't, but he went downstairs anyway. That's what a chump he is.

Except he caught me. Dragged me behind the garage. Took Joe Pepitone’s baseball cap. Pummeled me in places where the bruises wouldn't show.

Lucas is my oldest brother who stopped beating me up a year and a half ago when the United States Army drafted him to beat up Vietcong instead.

He’s in a delta somewhere but we don’t know any more than that because he isn’t allowed to tell us and he doesn’t write home much anyway.

But after he filled the boxes by the downstairs door, he started to load stuff in with the dishes, stuff like screwdrivers and wrenches and a vise that he dropped on a stack of plates, and he didn’t even turn around to look when he heard them shatter.

People started coming out on their stoops and they’d take the pots from her and put them down and they’d hug my mother and then she’d turn away.

And after that, I went out to explore the great metropolis of Marysville, New York.

I put my hands in my pockets and sort of leaned back into the air. Cool and casual.

When I got home, Mom had brought two hot dogs back from the diner, wrapped in aluminum foil and filled with ketchup and mustard and pickle relish and sauerkraut like in Yankee Stadium, and I know because I’ve been to Yankee Stadium, which you might remember.

She was moving around the boxes and still cleaning in the kitchen, and we could hear my father downstairs clanking away at his tools and swearing that Mr. Big Bucks Ballard wasn’t going to get away with being such a freaking cheapskate and what did they take him for?

"I don’t think we’ll undermine all law and order in the state of New York if I let you in early.”

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d start in the nine hundreds, over there—but that’s because I’ve always been partial to biography.”

She had hair as white as clouds, and about as wispy too, and big.

“Splurge. Go on a shopping spree. Book a trip to Monte Carlo. Do whatever you want...”

You move, they see you out of the corners of their beady yellow eyes, and then they swarm for the kill.

There was a rustle, and a crow flew away, grinning.

I was spading up a place for a garden in front of The Dump, and I’m not lying, this was hard work, since no one had spaded up this ground since forever.

It was the eeriest thing. It was like we’d had the same dream or something.

By the time we were done, these daisies were strutting their white hearts out in front of The Dump—which didn’t look quite so much like a dump anymore.

My brother spits on every one of the flowers. Big globs that he hacks up from deep in his lungs somewhere.

“You work like a freaking dog and get ahead in production because you’ve been doing a good—no, a great—job, and so you take a few more minutes for lunch to relax a little. Who cares? You’re still making your quota..."

He handed me a dollar bill. “For services rendered,” he said.

But the blue of the air went forever, and when the houses gave out and the road passed into the open field and there was just the sound of cicadas, Marysville didn't seem so bad.

“We’ll start with contour lines,” Mr. Powell said that first Saturday.

Put your hand up on the paper—no, higher up—the paper is the same size as the page in Audubon’s book, so you want to try for the same proportions.

Mr. Powell smiled again. “You’re talking about something called composition. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Draw the right line. A little faster.”

We filled all three sheets of paper, front and back. And I think we could have filled a whole bunch more if Mrs. Merriam hadn’t come up and reminded Mr. Powell that there were other patrons of the Marysville Free Public Library, not to mention all the cataloging for those new books from Houghton Mifflin, and she couldn’t do that by herself and check books in and out also, could she?

After that, when even the ninth-graders who had Caught the Stupid Spirit were pretty much drooping, Principal Peattie announced that parents were to stay in the auditorium for an informational session on school expectations as well as a discussion of what supplies they were to provide in a year of austerity budgets.

Then my stupid brother took off his stupid sweaty socks and lobbed them over at me.

Mrs. Merriam was at her desk, cataloging like crazy because I guess it’s the most important thing in the whole wide world.

He puffed his breath out and ruffled the light hairs all around his face.

You take away the sleek white feathers of the tern and put on stubby dark ones.

“Do you see how if he had used the horizon lines and the triangle for the Arctic Tern, it would have been wrong? It would have warred against the downward motion. But for these birds, it’s perfect. The artist gives them a stable horizon that you can’t help but see.”

Mr. McElroy in world history, who announced that we were going to start by studying the barbarian hordes of western Russia, and then looked at me.

Miss Cowper in English, whose first words were “This fall, we will be reading Jane Eyre by Miss Charlotte Brontë, and I am not naive enough to believe that you will all like it.”

You could see it in the eyes of Coach Reed in PE, who lined us up in platoons—he was just back from being a sergeant in Vietnam, and he still had his army crewcut—and told me in his sergeant’s voice that I’d better not try to pull any funny business in his class, no sirree, buster, just before he toured us through the locker room, taking us past his office that was Forbidden to All Students, and then told us to shoot baskets the rest of the period.

I thought if I had to hear that again, I’d start plummeting into the sea.

Mr. Powell wanted me to work on the bills and the feet, since they were at crux points in the composition, he said. (Artists know what this means.)

Mr. Ferris told us how we were going to have lab partners and do experiments and create vacuums and aspirin tablets and investigate the concept of mass versus weight and how we’d have to measure with the metric system and we didn’t need to fuss about it because it was for our own good and how the first thing we needed to become familiar with was the periodic table starting with H for...does anyone know?

There was a U.S. Army insignia in the left-hand corner.