The Field Guide to the North American Teenager: Chapters 13–20

DEFINITION: The act of another person trying to help improve your sorry, sorry excuse for game.
COROLLARY EMOTIONS: Pity, shame, total abject despair.

DEFINITION: The act of another person trying to help improve your sorry, sorry excuse for game.
COROLLARY EMOTIONS: Pity, shame, total abject despair.

Her face took on a wistful quality.

Her voice had changed, nearly imperceptibly, into a tone he hadn’t heard from her yet.

Aarti would never not make an entrance a day in her life.
Overture, curtain, lights, then.

“Jesus!" Norris screamed as the small car and its inexplicably manual transmission came to another stilted stop, right there in the middle of Lamar Street.

“Right, um, so, you do...know how to drive, right?” Norris noted as casually as he could manage, bringing a hand to steady himself on the car’s ceiling after another brusque stop.

“I know how to drive!"
Something about her tone instructed Norris to badger the witness. “Do you know how to drive this car?”

Black Ice, the Quebec province’s series of driver’s ed videos, known for its spectacularly gory depictions of fatal car crashes, had profoundly marked Norris the previous year.

On top of the annual film festival that overtook the downtown area, and all the national chain theaters, there was also the local Alamo Drafthouse, a chain of hipster-ish movie theaters with monthly sing-alongs and eighties classics where shadow servers brought you food midscreening, as well as the historic Stateside at the Paramount theater downtown, and finally the artsier Violet Crown, known for its higher amenities and cinephile vibe.

There were dozens of montages of her shelves filled with white angels, purple birds, and small, faceless dogs.

“Plus, we’re both assuming that she was a good person. She was probably a shrew.”

Spring break finally arrived, and, after a lot of hugs and disclaimers, and packing, and digging through still-packed boxes in order to get ahold of his thermal underwear, Norris found himself 39,000 feet above Texas—a welcome buffer between him and the Austin heat.

“Call me when you land,” she said, her face twisted in disdain as she crossed out a particularly offensive paragraph in the essay she was reading.

After casually searching every surface of the apartment for a Post-it with the network and password, then ransacking the entire space for a router, the pair came to the realization that Eric’s uncle lived an internet-free lifestyle, deviant that he was.

“Movies, parents, hockey a little bit, you,” Eric listed after a moment of ruminating.

Eric gasped and moved an exaggeratedly limp wrist to his chest, feigning dramatic outrage.

“Snow, mountains, snow, mountains. It was fun, but I can’t believe I actually missed Austin.”
“Really?” she derided. “You were gone for less than a week.”

Norris quickly played the 15,043 arguments that could ensue from him walking into their kitchen with that statement.

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren’t just you; your success was also your parents', your cousins', your relatives’ still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.

The kiss Norris received on the cheek was chaste and polite, the receipt for an airport snow globe.

THE DATELESS EVENING
DOING YOUR HOMEWORK? Check.
SALVAGING THE DECREPIT REMAINS OF YOUR HOCKEY FANTASY LEAGUE? Check.

Norris’s mom never favored hair extensions or wigs that could pass for real hair like some of her Haitian friends preferred. For Judith they were hats, and strictly matters of fashion. Some days her natural short, natty gray hair fraying around the edges was her go-to look; on others, she would wear a replica of Beyoncé’s pixie cut.

Short of a full lobotomy to erase his mother’s parting blow from his mind, Norris thought of the next-best Saturday evening plan.

“So your relationship with Aarti Puri is doomed because...she didn’t look twice at the snow globe?” Liam repeated verbatim, chin on his hockey stick as he watched the wayward puck glide to a stop across the rink.

Aarti Puri had officially become a conundrum.
Not Norris’s girlfriend, not his crush, but a conundrum. Webster's Dictionary's kind of conundrum.
Conundrum: A question asked for amusement, typically one with a pun in its answer; a riddle.

“As a rich, verdant field where hobbits and other fairy-tale creatures can establish a colony, sure,” Norris said.

“He’s Greek on his mother’s side! They’re hairy people!” Meredith cried defensively, ratcheting Norris’s laugh up to a cackle.

All Maddie had done, in her own quid pro quo way, was try to help.

Afterward, everyone grabbed a bite to eat at a nearby traveling taco stand and gobbled up the food in the skating rink’s air-conditioned lobby. Norris would have normally excused himself from all extraneous socialization, but Liam was his ride home.

“Do we have a name yet?”
“Not yet,” Liam said. “It shouldn’t be a unilateral decision.”
“Not the Bats,” Norris said quickly.
“Agreed,” one of the guys said.

He had arrived early to find a sweat-stained Jim McElwees installing a very hand-painted placard under the Bone Yard’s sign: Key Lime Days Ahead, framed with neon limes and an acid-green pie.

“These are long, limey days, Canada,” Julio concluded, with the gravitas of an old sailor...

“Stop dropping all those limes!” Norris admonished as two more rolled to the ground.

Everything you send her is a snarky joke—I don’t want to alarm you, but some of this stuff just borders on cheerleading squad-level cattiness, by the way.

You’re barraging the poor girl with Ping-Pong balls she has to whack back.

Chastened, he was forced to admit Maddie was—as always—right.

“Um, good,” she said, almost sounding coy.

True, Norris had no idea what being squad captain actually entailed.

There did not seem to be any animosity at the memory; just a sort of wonderment at her best friend’s quirks.