Be Good Be Real Be Crazy Read online

  Einstein nodded.

  “Okay.” Homer leaned on the counter and waited for Melissa to finish taking an order at the other end. Even with the counter taking some of his weight, Homer felt like gravity was working extra hard to pin him to the earth.

  THE HOSPITAL ROOM OF BROKEN THINGS

  EINSTEIN’S WRIST WAS FRACTURED IN two places, the breaks so small the X-ray technician had to take images from four different angles. At least that’s what Dr. Arete told D.B. when Homer handed him his phone.

  Homer had been hoping Christian would pick up the landline, but he knew the chances were slim. Christian slept like a bear in hibernation. D.B., however, picked up after two rings. So, at a little after four in the morning, Homer had to formulate answers as to how he’d lost the car and Mia and let Einstein get hurt. He had to wait while D.B. gave the head nurse insurance and other info, and then talk to him again, trying to answer questions he didn’t have the answers to. When Dr. Arete, the late-night-shift doctor, offered to speak to D.B., Homer gratefully handed off the phone and collapsed into the plastic chair by the bed.

  Homer just wanted to sleep. But the doctor kept talking and talking and winking at Homer like they were coconspirators in something.

  “No big deal.”

  (Wink.)

  “All the time. Every day. No problemo. Right. Yup. I have all the information you gave Nurse Halloway right here. Now we just wait for the swelling to go down.”

  (Wink.)

  “Uh-huh. Not a problem. This is the slow time of year. Might as well use the empty rooms. Sure. Yup. Lactose intolerant. I’m sure Halloway got that, but I’ll write it down again just to be sure.”

  (Wink.)

  Homer began to wonder if the doctor had something in his eye.

  When Dr. Arete covered the bottom of the phone and asked, “Do you want to talk again?” Homer shook his head vigorously and circled his lips in an exaggerated “No” just to be very clear.

  Dr. Arete pursed his mouth, nodded, and gave Homer a thumbs-up. “Great. Great. Super. Amazing. We’re doing just super here. The cast goes on this afternoon. Right. Need that swelling to go down. We’ll keep him comfortable until then. They’re quite spectacular young men. Tired? They’re exhausted. In fact, it looks like young Homer has nodded off in his chair. . . . Uh-huh . . . yup . . . I’ll give him the message myself. Great. Great. Super. Will do. Okay. Bye . . . bye.”

  Dr. Arete tapped the phone screen with one of his long fingers, then handed the phone to Homer. The plastic case was warm from being pressed against the doctor’s face. “Phew. Your father’s quite the Chatty Cathy. He says to call after the cast is on.”

  “Okay. Thank you.” Homer slid his phone into his pocket and slumped even lower in his chair. The dry hospital air had been making his eyes sting since he’d been in the waiting area. Or maybe the stinging had started once a nurse had settled the three of them in a little stuffy room that smelled like plastic and disinfectant. Or maybe, he thought, I’m too tired to care.

  Dr. Arete’s hand on Homer’s shoulder made him jump. “There’s an open bed in the doctors’ lounge across the hall. Why don’t you venture over and get some sleep. Your brother’s in great shape and your friend is down for the count.” He nodded toward Sid, who was softly snoring in the recliner by the window. The way Sid’s long arms and legs hung over the chair’s arms made Homer think of Mr. Bentinelli’s fried dough draping over the sides of cheap paper plates.

  The memory was so close Homer could smell the sun-baked wood of the boardwalk, the greasy sweetness of the dough, the powdered sugar Einstein and he would load on top, the sand, the salt in the air. The need to be home hit Homer’s already bruised heart like a baseball bat.

  “Sorry, I’m being rude.” Homer started to stand, but Dr. Arete stopped him.

  “You’ve had a long night, son.” He patted Homer’s arm mechanically, once, twice. And then he dropped his hand, hesitating before moving toward the door. “I’ll be back in a few hours. But if you need anything in the interim, check in with Nurse Halloway directly. I’ll tell her to take good care of you boys.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “All in a day’s work.” Dr. Arete had one foot in the hall when Homer stopped him.

  “Was there anything else from my dad? Anything other than to call?”

  The doctor leaned back so his head was in the room. “He said to tell you he loves you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dr. Arete’s pressed-on smile faltered. “You okay, son? If I hadn’t seen the X-rays, I’d think you were the one who broke something.”

  “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

  The doctor’s white teeth shone once more. The door drifted closed, then clicked shut. The show Sid had been watching on the small TV in the far corner switched to an infomercial for a cordless, stain-detecting vacuum. Homer pushed out of his chair, wincing as the metal legs scraped against the linoleum floor. He glanced at the bed. Einstein’s chest rose and fell under the white sheet. In the plastic-covered recliner, Sid snorted, mumbled something, and then went back to whistling softly in and out.

  Homer shuffled across the room and shut the TV off just as a guy with inflated muscles said something exciting enough to make a woman in a sweater and tight jeans jump up and down.

  Homer opened the closet by the door. There were only two blankets. He spread one over Einstein and tucked the second one around Sid, who smiled but didn’t open his eyes.

  Homer thought about going to the nurses’ station to ask for another blanket and a pillow. But he didn’t feel like moving anymore. He sank against the wall opposite the bed, just far enough to the left that he could see Einstein’s right hand hanging over the edge.

  And for the second night in a row, Homer stared into space, trying to make sense of things that made none.

  When he woke up a few hours later, he had a blanket draped over him and Sid and Einstein were arguing about what to watch on TV. For one brief moment, Homer was confused, disoriented by the too-bright fluorescent lights and the way they reflected off the shiny floor.

  Then he remembered. He was in a hospital room. He was homesick. And Mia was gone. The hurt began again, so he closed his eyes and hoped that he could will himself back to sleep.

  The next time Homer woke up, Sid and Einstein were sitting side by side on the hospital bed. Sid was playing some game with tinny music on his phone while Einstein looked over his shoulder.

  At least Steiner got a nerdy friend out of this, Homer thought as he stood up. Maybe it was the word “nerdy,” or Einstein’s ringtone, but whatever the cause, Homer suddenly remembered the conference. Did Einstein still think they would go to New Hampshire after all this?

  “Hi, Dad. Fine. Is D.B. at the airport?” Einstein was miraculously peppy for someone sitting in a hospital bed with two fractured bones.

  Homer’s knees cracked as he shifted to his feet.

  “Buenos días, Señor Homer. Estás bien? Muy bien, gracias. Y tu?” Sid said as he scooted to the end of the bed and picked up the TV remote. He waited just long enough on each channel for the picture to come into focus before he flipped to the next one. “Isn’t this amazing? We get all these channels—even the ones with PG-thirteen content. Oh.” Sid glanced at Homer. “You don’t look so great, Homes. Hey.” Sid’s face lit up brighter than a marquee. “Have you tried sugar? It’s a-maze-ing.” He held out a sugar packet with the top torn off. “And free. You don’t even need to buy coffee.”

  “You’ve never had sugar?”

  “Nope, not allowed.” Sid paused his kicking legs. “Or coffee, come to think of it. Huh.” He started swinging again.

  “I would hold off on coffee for now.” Homer cracked his knuckles, one hand, then the other. “Since when do you speak Spanish?”

  “Excuse me,” Einstein interrupted. He tried to cover the bottom of his phone with his left hand, but the thick bandage got in the way. He pressed the phone against his chest instead. “I am on the phone w
ith the dads.” He lifted the phone to his ear with a sigh. “As I was saying, the cast will go on as soon as— What? No, navy blue or black. . . . Because orange doesn’t go with anything and yellow washes me out.” Einstein rolled his eyes and continued chatting.

  Sid swung off the bed, stretching his arms above his head as he spoke. “Mercedes is the nurse on duty. She was born in Ecuador. While you were snoring, she taught us ‘Good morning’ and ‘How are you?’ and ‘Hasta la vista.’”

  Sid’s T-shirt had so many stains across the front that it was impossible to tell the original color. Homer stuck his nose in the neck of his own shirt and sniffed. At least I don’t have to worry about Mia smelling me anymore.

  “I’m going to see if the cafeteria has any doughnuts. Mercedes said they’re estupendos—that’s Spanish for ‘stupendous.’ Want one?” Sid pushed a button on the remote once, twice, a bunch of times, before shrugging and jumping up toward the TV. “Phew. They. Don’t. Want.” He huffed in between jumps. “This. Off.”

  Homer crossed in front of Sid. Reached up. Pushed the power button. The screen flashed and then went blank.

  “Thanks, Homes.” Sid held his fist up for a bump. He looked so goofy and happy to be dirty and smelly and watching TV and eating junk food and hanging out in a place that smelled like lemon cleaner, Homer bumped his fist. He even tried to smile back, but it felt more like a grimace.

  Sid stuck both hands on his hips and looked Homer up and down. “Yup. You look like a man who needs a doughnut. Two doughnuts. Doughnuts for everybody.” Sid clapped his hands together. He was out the door before Homer could tell him that he wasn’t hungry.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” Einstein twirled one of the cords attached to the side of his bed around his ankle, then undid it as he nodded. “She might have been doing us a favor. That car was a piece of . . . I wasn’t going to say it.” Einstein rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh.”

  Homer shuffled around the bed and sank into the recliner. Someone had opened the blinds on the two windows. If I squint, thought Homer, I can pretend that the strip of blue beyond the parking lot is the ocean. And before that is the beach. And maybe it’s getting sucked into the waves so no one else ever has to stand there while someone lets him know he’s been a complete idiot.

  “Yup. Yup. I’ll tell him. Yup. I love you, too.” Einstein started to lift the phone away from his ear, then jerked it back. “You’ve been feeding Madame Curie, right?” Pause. “It’s not disgusting. It’s nature. Well, maybe Madame Curie thinks your gluten-free pumpkin muffins are disgusting. Okay. Love you. Bye.” Einstein flung his phone between his feet and flopped back on his pillows. “Would you believe that Christian is squeamish about feeding a starving snake her mice?”

  “Huh,” Homer said, still staring out the window. Looked down. Looked up. Side to side. Then did it all again.

  “So then I said I had been hit by a meteor and dinosaurs were coming back to life while Bigfoot partied with the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  A wrinkled magazine flew to the left of Homer’s head, smacked against the window blinds, and fell to the ground. “Oil Tycoon Marries Twenty-Four-Year-Old Starlet.” Homer leaned over the recliner’s armrest and tilted his head so he could read all the headlines. “Apollo Arrested for Drag Racing in Vegas,” he read. “Mother of Nineteen Wants ‘Just Five More.’” He sat up. “The articles sound stupid, but your aim has gotten better. Normally you’d miss by feet instead of inches.”

  “Don’t you want to know what Christian told me to tell you?” Einstein moved to cross his arms but remembered that his left was in a splint. Instead he propped his right elbow on the bar meant to keep him from rolling off the bed.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “D.B. couldn’t get a flight to Boston today, so he’s going to try standby tomorrow. He was going to ask Aunt Anele to come from the city—”

  “But she’s—”

  “In France, I know, so I told him that we would be on our best behavior, get a hotel room, and that he could trust us to take care of ourselves. That he shouldn’t rush to get up here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? Just okay?”

  “Steiner, what else do you want me to say? Whoopee? Hooray? That we get however many more hours of crappy food and shitty television? Sorry if my enthusiasm seems disproportionate to the circumstances.” Homer fell back into the recliner and shifted his gaze to the window again. The cars and trees in the parking lot looked like parts of a toy set.

  “I was thinking,” Einstein said tentatively, “we could still make the conference. Not all of it, but the second day, which is when Dr. Az speaks, so it’s the day that matters.”

  “Steiner.” Homer scratched the top of his head, wondering how to say what he needed to say gently. “It’s not going to happen. We don’t have a car. Remember?”

  “Hear me out.” Einstein pulled a pad of paper from behind his pillow. “I jotted down some ideas this morning. Number one, we can rent a car, but you’ll have to pretend you’re twenty-one, which means we need to get a fake ID.”

  “I’d be the only teenager in the world to get a fake ID to attend a nerd convention.” Homer shifted his weight in the recliner, the crack and squeak of the plastic cover making him wish he was home even more.

  “It’s not a nerd convention.” Einstein said “nerd” like it was a pill he was struggling to swallow. When Homer took his hands away from his face, Einstein’s was half hidden by the pad of paper. “Number two, we take the bus. The station’s two towns over, so we’d have to get a ride and hope they have taxis where we get dropped off because it’s still fifty miles from Grace Mountains.”

  “D.B. could be here tomorrow if he gets a flight. Sid needs to get home before his parents do. We can’t—”

  “Number three, we could hitchhike. People might get scared because you’re so tall and Sid’s been eating a lot of sugar, but I figure that my cast will get us some pity points.”

  “I can’t, Steiner.” Homer’s eyes ached, and then his words wouldn’t come out straight. Everything had fallen apart. “I just . . . I need to go home.” He squeezed his hands together until it hurt, but the tears kept coming. He looked up. Einstein’s glasses were smudgy and his hair was the craziest it’d ever been. Homer tried to swallow the ball of hurt and disappointment lodged in his throat, but he couldn’t, so he whispered instead. “I’m sorry.”

  “Mia?” Einstein whispered back.

  Hearing her name made the ball in Homer’s throat slip into his chest. “That and other stuff. What was I thinking? That she’d come back to the island and I’d help her with Tadpole and we’d be this happy little family? Maybe it’s that I wasn’t thinking. Or I thought I was thinking, but wasn’t. I am such an idiot.” Homer put his face in his hands. They smelled like hospital soap and warm plastic.

  Einstein cleared his throat, but Homer couldn’t look up. Holding his head felt like it was the only thing keeping his brain from exploding. Einstein talked anyway. “I have a theory I’ve been working on.”

  Homer nodded into his hands. “Okay.”

  “Human beings are like planets. We have individual orbits that overlap in places, but whether or not we meet at the overlaps is all about timing and chance. But that possibility is enough to keep us spinning in circles.”

  “When the hell did you come up with this?”

  “Homer, we’ve been driving for days. You and Mia were having a lovefest in the front. I was stuck in the back alone, until we picked up Sid. My few choices for entertainment included napping on cracked leather that smelled like rotten fruit and rereading magazines I’d memorized. Staring out the window and pondering the nature of human existence was the best of the options.”

  Homer whistled. “Touché.”

  “For what it’s worth, she loves you, too.”

  Homer snorted as he sat up so he could see his little brother’s expression. “You think our orbits overlapped.”

  “Yeah, I do. Bu
t I also think her idea of love is a meteor and yours is more like gravity.”

  “Sounds accurate.” Homer wiped his eyes on his arm. “So, what does that mean?”

  “Mia doesn’t expect good stuff to last and you’re the most dependable guy in the world, so—”

  “Dependable?”

  Einstein shrugged. “You always do the right thing.”

  Homer rested his elbows on his knees, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. “Steiner, I think you just graduated from How to Be a Person 101.”

  “Awesome.” Einstein turned on the TV and Homer stared at the ceiling and thought.

  UNCLE JOE NO RELATION

  IN THE TIME THAT SID was gone, a doctor had switched Einstein from a splint to a cast and Nurse Mercedes had promised she’d have discharge papers to give Homer by the end of her shift.

  Homer was going into the bathroom to splash water on his face when Sid came in shouting. “Would you believe someone left a perfectly good package of Yummy! Cakes on a table by the cafeteria?” Sid held his hands above his head and shook two fistfuls of plastic-wrapped sweets. “The ones from the table are strawberry, so I got chocolate and vanilla ones and then I ran out of quarters.” Sid stopped in the center of the room and ripped open one of the snacks. A Yummy! Cake with pink frosting fell to the floor. He bent down, brushed it off, and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. “I cawn’t beeweave I awte ooof da flur.” He swallowed. “Hey, your uncle Joe is out in the hall. He had to take a call, but he said he’d be in in five.” Sid bounced as he started to unwrap a second cake. “Is he a businessman? He sounded really important talking on the phone.”

  Homer and Einstein looked at each other, both confused. “We don’t have an uncle Joe,” Einstein said slowly. “D.B.’s an only child and Christian’s family’s all in South Africa, except for Aunt Anele, but she’s not married.” Einstein turned to Homer. “Aunt Anele didn’t get married, did she?”