“What’s your name again?” he asks. I tell him my name.

  “Where’re you from?”

  This is always the question that gets me. After the looks I got in homeroom, I decide to pick the least controversial state I can.

  You think this is crazy. You think states can’t be controversial. You’re reading this in your own state thinking that your state is great, right? But everyone sees the world different from everybody else. If you’re in the South, some people don’t like the North because it’s full of elites. If you’re in the North, some people think if you’re from the South, you’re stupid or a racist if you’re white. If you’re from the East Coast, some people on the West Coast think you’re too uptight. If you’re from the West Coast, some people on the East Coast think you’re a weirdo whose parents probably smoke weed. You’d be surprised at the assumptions people make based on the answer to this question. I’m in Pennsylvania now, so I figure somewhere close by would be safe.

  “New Jersey,” I say.

  Thomas says, “Wow. Bummer.”

  “Yeah,” I say, as if I know why New Jersey is a bummer.

  * * *

  Day one ends and no one beats me up. Thomas stayed with me up until lunch, but never showed up again. I have some homework but not much. When I get home, Mom isn’t there and the car is gone. I walk into my room and the snow on the roof is slowly working its way through the ceiling and into our pots. I call the landlord and leave a message. I empty the full pots and replace them. I look on my phone to see where Mom is. The phone finder app says she’s at the temp agency, which is a miracle.

  I text. Can I borrow the car tomorrow night?

  She answers. Sure. Home in about an hour. I THINK I GOT A JOB!

  I text her a unicorn emoji because it seems appropriate.

  Marla & Gottfried Get Ready for a Guest

  “Did you vacuum the living room?”

  Gottfried can’t hear well anymore. He hears this but doesn’t reply. He already vacuumed the living room and the hall. And every room on the second floor. Seemed pointless—running the vacuum over the marks that were left from the last time he vacuumed.

  “He’s coming at five,” Marla says.

  “He’s not the Queen of England. He’s just a kid,” Gottfried answers.

  Marla purses her lips and tries to count how many times Gottfried has reminded her that the person who was visiting was not the Queen of England. There’s nothing wrong with having a clean house, even if her grown children joke about how her kitchen floor is so clean you could perform surgery on it.

  * * *

  They don’t come around much anymore, the grown children. Marla and Gottfried did it right—they raised independent kids who could do the same as they did. Work hard and save money.

  Of course, Marla and Gottfried are somewhat delusional about things like this. Marla can often be overheard saying, “Our generation didn’t have it any better!” And that’s just flatly untrue. They were Baby-Boomer middle class and then Gottfried had his share from when the family farm was sold. They had money to go on vacations and money to store away in individual retirement accounts. Marla and Gottfried’s children are not so comfortable. One married rich. Marla’s favorite. The oldest girl. Makes her proud but rarely calls. The others are a salad of limp greens Marla won’t touch with her fork.

  Two of them could be dead, for all Gottfried knows. Gottfried wishes he’d have kept in touch more, but Marla had rules. No contact with the children because we want them to thrive. Gottfried thought of thriving children more like a thriving garden and felt calling them was like watering and weeding and making sure the patch wasn’t overrun with voles. They argued about it.

  Marla called Gottfried a simpleton.

  Gottfried didn’t call Marla anything.

  Usually he just felt pity. For everyone. Inside, he was still the boy in the car wash who really cared that two robins would never live to sing another song or mate with purpose. He thought a lot about mating with purpose since that day in the car wash. Robins did it so they could make more robins. He wasn’t sure why humans did it anymore. Seemed some sort of contest—but this wasn’t polite conversation in any circle so Gottfried kept his thoughts about it to himself.

  Gottfried had split in two, right there in the station wagon. In order to get through high school. In order to get through college fraternity brotherhood. In order to marry Marla in 1970. In order to do pretty much everything. The boy who cared about robins was always there, but he was a wart, a sore, a bad tattoo.

  “You’re not going to wear those jeans, are you?” Marla asks.

  “They’re my painting jeans,” Gottfried answers, while storing the vacuum in the hall closet.

  “There’s a hole in the leg,” she says.

  “They’re my painting jeans.”

  Marla sighs and shakes her head. Secretly she thinks Gottfried is the reason her children turned out the way they did. Secretly she thinks he’s the reason they don’t come around anymore. Except Easter. The Resurrection. Always a reminder that things once thought dead can rise again.

  Except they can’t, really.

  Dead is dead.

  And Gottfried knows it.

  The Shoveler: Eyebrow

  I didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect this.

  Gottfried, Marla’s old-man husband, walks me into their large, empty garage. In front of me is a can of white paint, a stir stick, a roller, a roller handle, a long extension for painting ceilings, a paint tray, and a two-inch paintbrush, all laid out on opened newspaper.

  “Just anywhere on the wall there,” Gottfried says. He seems preoccupied with a hangnail on the side of his thumb. He nibbles at it and makes small spitting sounds.

  I open the paint can and stir it. I pour some into the tray, and before I put the roller in, I go to the part of the wall that I plan to paint. I run my hand over it. Gottfried says, “All prepped for you.”

  “Okay,” I say. But I still check my hand for dirt. He’s right. The wall is clean.

  I cut in the top and bottom of the wall with the brush and then start with the roller. Only when I go back to the can to refill do I see another area of the garage wall that’s been painted like this one—white over white.

  I feel stupid for thinking I already got the job.

  I keep painting until I’ve covered the wall in the area I chose—about eight feet wide by ten feet tall. It looks good for a first coat, even with thirsty walls. It looks better than the last guy’s test patch.

  Marla walks into the garage, clutching her arms due to the cold. She smiles and says a bunch of weird grandma stuff to me that all blends into each other.

  Gottfried is busy closing up my paint can, and Marla asks me to wash the paintbrush in the sink they have in the garage. She stands next to me at the sink, and I can feel her watching me wash the brush. I finish and ask Gottfried where he wants me to put it.

  “He doesn’t know anything,” Marla says. “He’s not the boss. I’m the boss.”

  Gottfried doesn’t even look up from what he’s doing. He must know he’s not the boss.

  “Leave the brush in the sink. Come inside with me while he cleans up the rest.” Gottfried is not actually cleaning up the rest. He’s fiddling with a golf bag and looking at his smartphone at the same time. I step up and walk into the house and close the door behind me.

  “Would ten dollars per hour be enough for you?” Marla asks.

  I’m realizing that Marla’s trick is catching people off guard. I’ve known people like her before. One time in Florida, I knew a math teacher like that.

  “I’d need to know how many rooms you want painted. If there’s any wallpaper and what the prep would be like,” I say. Marla raises an eyebrow. It makes me say, “But ten is a good starting rate for regular labor.” Where did that even come from?

  Her eyebrow is controlling me. If she lifts it, I feel I have to say one thing; if she lowers it, I have to say another. It’s a magical eyebrow. As we walk around their huge house, I start to hear an echo in my head and I can’t concentrate on what Marla is saying. I feel my heartbeat. I feel sweat dripping down the valley of my back.

  Shit-shit-shit.

  Not now.

  Stop it.

  I’m fine.

  “We haven’t picked any of the colors for the downstairs rooms,” she says as she leads me upstairs. “But once you get the upstairs done, we’ll figure it out.”

  Two of the rooms up here have high ceilings and skylights. I decide, through my sweating and my heartbeat, that those rooms will cost extra.

  I remember there’s a small notebook and pencil in my back pocket. I pull it out and make note of the two rooms with skylights. I look up a lot. I do not allow Marla’s eyebrow to distract me.

  This is a huge job. Seven rooms including ceilings. Marla tells me she’s decided against the hallways because there isn’t enough time.

  “I want it done by Easter,” she says. “Gottfried says I’m crazy, but I think it can be done.”

  “When’s Easter this year?”

  “First day in April.”

  That’s almost three months. Eleven weekends. But something isn’t right.

  None of these walls need to be painted. None of Marla’s color choices are that different from what’s already there. There’s no peeling or chipping or even scuffing anywhere.

  “So what do you think, son? Nothing you can’t handle at your age, I bet,” Gottfried says when he wanders into the room where Marla and I are standing. The word son makes me want to throw up. Makes the sweat on my back cold. Makes me wish I had my shovel. Son. I feel the tunnels shift. I get dizzy. Blink.

  “It’s a big job,” I say.

  “Did she scare you off with the ten-dollars-an-hour thing?”

  “No,” I say quickly. Marla’s eyebrow has no effect on her husband. She’s moving that thing around like crazy, and he just chuckles and watches me squirm.

  “Gottfried, stop it,” she says.

  “Wait her out. She’ll get up to twelve,” he says.

  I want to smile at him but I stay controlled and try to work out how much extra I should charge for those big rooms with the skylights/for being called son.

  I walk around and feel the walls. They’re perfect.

  There’s no reason to paint this house.

  It makes no sense.

  The Shoveler: Placement Test

  Friday after school, I stay late to take two placement tests because I’m apparently better at math than Pennsylvania kids. I walk out the front door of the high school, and there’s this group of guys standing around this badass dude who looks like he’s in his twenties. A kid from my homeroom—can’t remember his name—says, “Hey, new kid!” to me, and I ignore him because I don’t want any friends. I have Mike. I have the shovel.

  “Hey, shovel boy!” he says and walks over to me. “You should come here. Meet this guy. He’s smart.”

  I keep walking—down the long set of concrete steps toward the street—and don’t look back. Three days of school so far and no one’s laid a finger on me. No smacking up the back of my head, no kicking me from behind between my legs, no grabbing me, threatening me, or spitting. Not even an elbow to the ribs. This is a record for me, and I don’t want to break it.

  A hand on my shoulder. It stops me in my tracks and I nearly fall backward onto the steps. I use my shovel to balance. “I told you to come here,” the kid says. He’s chubby and white. Weird hair. His T-shirt is about two sizes too big for him. “You should listen when I talk to you.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I have to get to work.”

  “This’ll only take a minute,” the kid says, with a firm grip on my elbow.

  He pulls me over to the group of boys. This is it. This is the moment I get beat up. I can feel it. The boys are different ages, different heights, differently dressed—I notice one of them is in a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt. Another is in black canvas military pants and a T-shirt for some metal band I’ve never heard of. Some wear jeans. Some have winter coats on, some don’t. Some have longer hair, some shaved bald. The only thing they have in common is, they’re all white.

  “New face!” the older guy says. He has a tattoo on his neck.

  I nod.

  “I’m Bill,” he says. “Your new best friend.”

  I nod again. The kid who dragged me here says, “Have some respect, dude.”

  I say, “Hi, Bill.”

  “New kid, right?” Bill asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “You like it here?”

  I shrug.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  For some reason I say, “Texas.” It’s the truth, but I’d had a plan to keep saying I came from New Jersey.

  “Southern boy!” Bill says.

  The other kids laugh and say some stuff. One of them says something about how there are too many Mexicans in Texas.

  Bill says to that kid, “You ever even been to Texas?”

  Kid says, “No.”

  “You talk too much, Delaney. You should learn how to shut the fuck up,” Bill says. He turns back to me. “How do we compare?”

  “To what?” I ask.

  “Texas, dumbass.” That’s the kid who dragged me here.

  “Fucking cold,” I say.

  They all laugh.

  “My girl’s been in her tank two months now,” Bill says. “Wait till spring and you can meet her.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  “You don’t even know what he’s talking about,” one kid says.

  “I have to get to work, man,” I say. “Already late.”

  “Go on, working man,” Bill says. “I’m here every Friday. You can count on that.”

  “Okay.”

  “Memorize these faces. Anybody gives you any shit, they can swarm on his black ass and do what I taught ’em to do.”

  I nod and walk down the steps, and it all makes sense now. But it doesn’t make any sense because that shit never makes any sense.

  * * *

  When I get home, Mike is chipping away at some ice around his parking space with a big ice chopper. I wave and he walks over.

  “Late from school—you find some friends?”

  “Placement tests,” I say. “I had to stay after.”

  “As if school on a Friday isn’t a big enough drag,” he says. “Wanna come in and have a beer?”

  I’ve told Mike three times that I don’t drink beer. Mom’s car is gone and I don’t start work at Marla and Gottfried’s until tomorrow.

  “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

  “I got the 2016 World Series ready to go. Game seven. You seen it?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll make sure the hopper’s filled with pellets,” he says. He looks at the shovel, I look at the shovel, we both ignore that I’m carrying a shovel.

  I go home and empty the pots that filled with water from the roof, replace them, pluck a bag of Doritos from my junk-food stash, leave my shovel in my room, and stop for a smoke in the backyard.

  While we sit in Mike’s living room and watch the seventh game of the 2016 World Series, I think about telling Mike about the kids after school and Bill with the weird neck tattoo but Mike is so happy being in 2016 I decide to join him there.

  Control the brain and the rest is easy.

  THE FREAK PICKS UP THE PHONE AND TALKS TO DIRT!

  The dirt talks to The Freak. It calls her on the phone and tells her to warn her new friend. This isn’t freshly plowed farm dirt. It’s clay, mostly. Red clay.

  The Freak doesn’t like when the dirt talks. Sometimes she feels it all around her, wrapped like a tortilla around shredded chicken. Sometimes she can taste it in her mouth. Sometimes she can’t clear her nose of it and can’t breathe.

  Warn your friend with the shovel. Things aren’t what they seem.

  The Freak has no interest in the boy with the shovel anymore. She got him a job. She told him about her dream brain-man. She’s done her part.

  The dirt says there’s something the boy needs to know. The dirt says there’s an answer right next door. The dirt never lies. It’s one thing The Freak loves about the dirt. It’s the cleanest thing going. And look at the reputation it gets!

  The Freak understands. Been there, done that.

  PART 1.2: INTRODUCING MALCOLM

  CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:

  Malcolm

  Malcolm’s Dad

  Random Fliers on Flight 860

  The Flush Toilet

  John the Old Friend in Scrubs

  Marla

  The Painter Kid & Gottfried

  Malcolm Is Annoyed by the Basket

  Dad refuses to go to the Margaritaville restaurant because he thinks Jimmy Buffett is a phony. It’s the only sit-down restaurant in the Montego Bay airport, so we sit at the bar near gate 4 and I eat two bowls of bar snacks while he gulps down two fruity drinks and talks with the woman sitting beside him.

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “We come down about twice a month.”

  “That’s amazing,” the woman says.

  Dad shrugs. “Business. It’s boring, isn’t it, Malcolm?”

  I take the bar snack bowl and empty the crumbs into my mouth. Neither of them even looks at me for an answer.

  “Amazing,” the woman says again. She’s still wearing her sunglasses and a beach wrap around her shoulders.

  Dad runs out of things to say because he’s not interested in women who think he’s amazing. He taps his fingers on the bar top and looks around. Our flight is boarding, and the tourists are doing what they do.