The Spectacular Now (Page 31)

And he’s like, “You’re my stinky sister’s guest, not mine.”

Aimee’s face flushes crimson all the way to the tips of her ears. It looks good on her, better than the lipstick. “Why don’t we go back to my room to study,” she says, waving her hand in the direction of the hall.

“Ladies first,” I say. She seems like she could use the gentlemanly treatment for a change.

“You all better be quiet,” calls Shane. “Randy’s trying to sleep.”

Randy turns out to be their mother’s disability-collecting boyfriend. “Don’t worry,” Aimee says. “One time Shane set off a bottle rocket in the bathroom and Randy never woke up.”

After wading through the debris in the living room and hall, I’m awestruck when Aimee opens the door to her room. It’s like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and sees the land of Oz for the first time, only instead of going from black-and-white to color, this goes from an absolute dump to an awesome, almost geometric neatness.

Welcome to Aimee’s world.

The giant map on the wall stretches out so smooth you’d think maybe Aimee ironed it, and the same goes for the big picture of the Milky Way and the pencil drawings that hang on the other walls. The desk looks thrift-store cheap and the computer is practically twentieth-century like their VCR, but everything—the pens and notebooks and ceramic cats—is arranged to perfection. Her chest of drawers is similarly cheap and neat, but the thing that really strikes me is her books.

A plastic snap-together set of bookshelves stands against one wall, row after tidy row of paperback books lining each shelf. And even though she ran out of shelf space and had to stack probably a hundred more paperbacks against the wall, those rows are just as spruce as the others.

“You must really like to read,” I say, admiring the stacks.

“They’re mostly science fiction.” She gazes at the books with supreme fondness. “Some are mysteries and I have quite a few old classics like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.”

I pick up a book titled something like The Androids of NGC 3031. On the cover, a woman android with one hell of a bod dashes away from low-flying spaceships as they shoot pink laser bursts at her. “This looks interesting,” I say, but what I’m really thinking is, Wow, Aimee, science fiction? Really, could you try any harder to brand yourself with the mark of the nerd herd? What’s next, anime?

“I like to think about space,” she says apologetically.

“Space is cool.”

“I want to work for NASA someday.” She sounds kind of tentative, like she’s afraid I’ll think that’s a stupid ambition or something.

“That’d be spectacular,” I say. “I really think you ought to.”

“Yeah,” she says, a new enthusiasm sparking in her eyes. “And after I’ve worked there for about five years and get some money saved up, I’m going to buy a horse ranch to live on.”

“I don’t see what could be better than that. I guess that’s why you have all these drawings of horses on the walls.” I walk over and have a closer look at the drawings. Actually, her horses look more like dogs, but there’s no need to mention that. I’m pretty sure, for her, drawing them is a lot more important than what they end up looking like.

“I guess this is you riding the horses, huh?”

“Um, no. That’s Commander Amanda Gallico from the Bright Planets books.”

She’s standing right next to me now, and I know she sees a lot more in the pictures than I do.

“What’s her story?”

“She commands the Neexo Ark 451. They’re escaping from the Dark Galaxy and trying to find their way to the Bright Planets system.”

In the drawings, Commander Amanda Gallico looks a little too big for the horses, at least her body does. It’s all athletic and superheroey, but her head’s kind of small and I’m still of the opinion that she looks like Aimee in the face, without glasses.

“You must really like her,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says with that drawn-out, half-committed way she has of saying anything positive. “I guess she’s kind of like my hero and everything.”

This is all too heartbreaking. I mean, I quit on heroes by the time I got to fifth grade. This girl needs some help and she needs it now.

So I’m like, “You know what? You’ll be my own personal hero if you can straighten me out on this algebra business. Where should we do it?”

I realize my wording might have sounded a touch on the sexual side as we both look at her neat little bed with its plaid comforter. It’s the only furniture in the room big enough for two people. She says, “Um,” but that’s as much as she can get out.

So I go, “Me, I always do my homework on the floor where I can spread everything out.”

That sounds good to her, so we get down to it. As soon as we start, she clicks into a more confident mode. But it’s a sort of soft confidence. A kind confidence. She could easily start coming off all superior or even ridicule me for my mathematical idiocy, but she doesn’t even come close to that. She doesn’t need to. Here in the realm of books she’s self-assured. She has some of the control she doesn’t have anywhere else. And you know what? If I was a better listener, I’ll bet she could get me to understand some things that Mr. Asterhole never came close to.

Chapter 26

After we get my homework done—or I guess I should say after she gets my homework done—she starts explaining some more basics that I need to get me through the rest of the semester. It’s a nice thought, but my attention span isn’t really up to it, so I decide to steer her onto another topic.