The Field Guide to the North American Teenager: Chapter 29–Epilogue

After Meredith’s perfunctory coronation as prom queen for the second year in a row, Maddie, Meredith, Patrick, and a few others decided to check out an after-party currently taking place at a nearby golf club.

An uncomfortable sensation formed in Norris’s stomach at her words. He felt something roiling.

When an abrasive new foreign kid needed a job and dating advice, Maddie was there.

She looked up to him and returned to flipping through, reading aloud the headlines of Norris’s scribbles. “‘The Taxonomic Differences Between Swim Team and Football Team’...’Teachers Most Likely to Start a Drug Cartel on the Side’...Oh, here it is.”

“That’s a little didactic. Darmactic. Dramatic.” Words were hard tonight.

“Well, you don’t normally call,” Eric pointed out. “Even when you lived here, we didn’t. Or, you didn’t. You text and you email, but the voice-to-voice thing isn’t your forte. Norris Kaplan 101. So, what did you call me for?”

Norris hung up, quickly opened his camera, and took a selfie of himself brandishing the champagne bottle.

Eventually he captured one that looked decent enough. His eyes were less red in this shot. It was enough to assuage Eric...

THE TEENAGE MISCREANT
CHARACTERISTICS: Wise mouth paired with little thought.

They won’t stop talking about some girl for weeks, ask you to dry-clean their suit before going to dinner at her house, then never once bring her over or offer for you to meet her! God forbid you even dare broach the subject.

“You would never get a call at two a.m. that Norris has been charged for disorderly conduct, Judith.” She pointed a finger at him. “Norris would never be arrested for contempt of a law officer, Judith!..."

“Tails, and I would be at the morgue right now identifying you! With some man lecturing me about your blood alcohol level and belligerent language and how you had it coming.”

No Aarti, no Maddie, no friends or “friends” with loaded quotation marks and innuendos.

By and large, Anderson High was an easy school. Not the people, obviously—walking land mines, each and every one of them—but the classes themselves were all fairly simple. It wasn’t an indictment of the American education system, but there really wasn’t much to getting decent grades there as far as Norris was concerned.

He really didn’t want to retake any of these classes; Austin would be best left as a closed chapter in his mind, a weird life hiatus he might remember in passing years from now.

At least he hadn’t reneged on giving Norris a ride home.

That was the uncanny thing about Liam; his ability to voice these statements directly from his heart muscle thingy, stripped of ego or any voices in his head that might constantly worry about how they would sound to the world around him. Norris was envious of this quality; it made Liam seem almost invincible.

Norris knew he needed to make things right with Aarti but hadn’t been quite ready to ask Judith to drive him around on his Make Amends Tour.

He and his mother were somewhere between silent treatment and tense détente.

“So, how are the finals treating your mother?” Mr. Puri asked as they cruised along the small residential streets of Cedar Park. There was apparently no curtailing the awkward-small-talk portion of this show.

Mr. Puri gave him a quick furtive glance as they pulled into the downtown area. Norris could tell he was wondering if he was in the presence of a spy or an ally.

Up close, Norris could make out streaks of navy blue dye in the black of her hair, which matched her nail polish and the highlights of her dress. He suddenly realized that his own jeans and black T-shirt ensemble, day in, day out, must have been incredibly disappointing to someone this fashionable.

“The good news is that I’m going back to Canada. Also, I have a record now, maybe? Well, a citation, whatever that is. The point is, there is some genuine street cred going on back there,” he said, pointing back toward the exhibit and the photo of the hardened criminal she had unknowingly captured.

“Why are you upset?! That was a good apology!"
“Oh yes, because why would my first exhibit ever be about me when you could crash it and make it about yourself and your need to be absolved of any guilt before you up and leave the country?”

“So, what’s going to happen with you and Madison McElwees?”
Aarti had a way of saying Maddie’s full name that, while not resentful, dripped with an intonation of “ooh la la.”

Settling in at their gate, the anticipatory exhaustion Norris always felt at airports washed over him as he watched hurried passengers ebb and flow in a sea of neck pillows and overstuffed carry-ons.

There would be jetlag and cabin pressure, baggage claim roulette...but that wasn’t what weighed on him as he struggled to find a comfortable position on the ergonomically sadistic airport chair.

Austin was in full drought, and the trickling rivulets around Red River were now dusty canals of hardened mud mixed with rocks and dead branches.

Occasionally Norris would spot a Stay Hydrated advertisement with an anthropomorphized water bottle under it, reminding people to twist its skullcap open six to eight times a day.

To make matters worse, his days were spent exposed to the elements in a small, smelly car, floorboard now littered with mini-water bottles he amassed at every possible venue where they were handing them out for free.

“It’s really conducive to this new micromeditation I found online. It activates the spiritual essence.”

Norris pulled the car (yes, he’d finally gotten his provisional license) out of the small office parking lot where they had just dropped off a piping hot tray of wings and lost the game of Rock-Paper-Scissors by which he and Liam decided who was in charge of making the actual trek to the door.

Navigating the family restaurant was second nature to him now; Norris would have missed it had he been unable to grovel his way into getting his job back.

The girls instantly fell silent when the door opened, turning to Norris in a way that definitely wasn’t reminiscent of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

She signed for deliveries, managed the employee timetables, and still had time to invent fun ways to make Norris’s “probation period” as goddamn punitive as possible.

She signed for deliveries, managed the employee timetables, and still had time to invent fun ways to make Norris’s “probation period” as goddamn punitive as possible.

“And apparently, smitten with our little Maddie here,” Meredith added. “He couldn’t stop talking about her after meeting her downstairs.”

Norris also suspected Diego to be very profoundly stupid in person. “Clinical case study” stupid.

Witch who Norris could no longer openly berate lest it cost him points with Maddie.

Happy endings were artificial things manufactured out of less-than-ideal circumstances. A divorce wasn’t the end of family, nor was someone moving away the end of a friendship. These things could be endings, but only if you decided to make them so. Otherwise, things just added up and continued forward, across the map, in new shapes and iterations.