I don't have a title; it is kind of long and maybe unfinished

Sitting under the protection of the smeared Plexiglas and moisture warped timetables of the bus-stop shelter, Zev Fellman munched on a soggy rice cracker and dabbed at his nose with a hankie. From the curb, I watched him, far enough to pretend otherwise, my sneakers filling with rainwater. My mother had told me repeatedly and as recently as that morning that I ought to be nice to Zev. He really is such a sweet boy, she had said. And I was such a sweet boy. She had smiled too, patting my shoulders and shaking her head as if she still couldn’t believe her good luck. And Zev wasn’t really so bad, was he?

But Zev was that bad. To my mother, who didn’t have to attend Mission Hill Elementary except for the occasional parent-teacher conference or school play, we were all such sweet boys. She didn’t realize that Zev smelled like steamed vegetables and that he carried around his inhaler with a tube of cortisone cream in a velvet bag with a drawstring. She didn’t have to watch him at recess ruin game after game of kickball and she didn’t have to listen to him cry afterward, conspicuously stomping his L.A. Gear, a trickle of salty snot in every instance left to dry upon his upper lip. She didn’t understand just how frequently he corrected Ms. Morgan during homeroom grammar exercises or how he always ate his lunches in the bathroom.

My mother didn’t see this because she was an adult but she also didn’t see it, I suspected, because she had found a new friend in Sophie Fellman, Zev’s prematurely aged, rice-cracker and hanky-plying mother. Zev had enrolled at Mission Hill while we were both in the second grade and up until the present moment I had been perfectly happy to dispassionately ignore him. To the extent that he was aware of it, this arrangement seemed to suit Zev too. We rarely spoke at school. For what it may have been worth to him, I generally allowed him without too much comment or critique his poorly timed histrionics and flamboyantly zealous literacy and unabashed respect for our teachers, despite the popular consensus among all of the other boys that these qualities were all unquestionably gay. I was, after all, a sweet boy.

But things had begun to change that previous June when the major city newspaper and eight-year employer of my mother’s consumed and absorbed, like a bloated, debt-ridden bacterium, the even further indebted employer of Sophie Fellman, the City Observer, spewing in its wake, among a few million dollars in unsatisfactory severance packages and the region’s remaining journalistic standards, my mother and Mrs. Fellman, bound by fate and unemployment.

And so by early September, when the news of such things could prove to be a social liability for me at school, the two women, one the last editor of the Herald’s once and former metro section, the other, a food and culture critic for the defunct Observer, found themselves working and wincing with defeated resignation for the same thinly distributed neighborhood news-journal, the Twin Valley Lookout.

I cannot say how or when the predictable process that drew my mother closer with each workday to Sophie Fellman began. I cannot say when the cool civility of their working acquaintanceship blossomed into the dependant friendship of the newly and inadequately re-employed. What I can say is that one day I came home to find Sophie Fellman sitting and drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Mrs. Fellman, who I knew by sight as a frequent volunteer at our school and by smell as vigorously reminiscent of a dentist’s office, had introduced herself as Zev’s mom, which was unnecessary, and then proceeded to tell me about all the great things she knew about me. She knew all of these things, she was eager to remind me, because her son had told her these things. This, along with her habit of braying loudly when nothing at all was funny and sitting with her legs too far apart, made my stomach hurt.

That was the first visit. After that, she was back at least once a week for coffee. And then it was for dinner. My mother picked me up from my father’s house after their first outing. She let me choose the radio station on the ride home, which made me nervous. I looked out the window and pressed my knees against the inside of the car door. And then as we waited at a red light, the back window fogging up with our breathing so far mercifully uninterrupted with speech, she turned the volume down and told me how nice it was to have a friend, how things could be difficult sometimes and that sometimes just having someone to talk to can make a big difference.

“You understand that, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Green light,” I said.

But she smiled anyway, accelerating and giving the back of my neck a quick pinch. I understood, I’m sure is what she was thinking. Divorces can be so hard on a kid.

The night that followed was worse. I was watching T.V. after dinner and my mother came out of the bathroom and excused herself for just one moment.

I sat up and looked at her.

“I said, excuse me for just one moment,” she said again.

She fidgeted and looked away. I didn’t understand. I was watching T.V. and she was my mom and there was nothing to excuse. “Excuse me” is something she said to people on the bus or at the supermarket or to the mailman whenever she had to squeeze around him in the hallway. “Excuse me” is something she said to strangers.

“I just need to run out for a quick second.” She paused at the door. “Everything is okay.”

Out the bay windows I watched my mother cross the street to the Fellman family’s small white car. The engine was off, ticking and clicking as it cooled, and Sophie Fellman was sitting in the driver’s seat. I watched my mother get in, and then I watched, in the copper-colored streetlight that filtered in through the car windows, as she started to cry. I watched Mrs. Fellman reach her thick, wrinkled arms across the center divide of the car interior, letting them drape around my mother’s neck, looking like bags of wet oatmeal. The two sat like that in the car for over a half-hour and I sat too, watching out the window and watching one show and then the next flicker on the glass in front of my face and realizing that this small white car was the same one that I saw every day at school. Every day it would arrive promptly at the bell and every day Zev would tuck his backpack in the trunk and climb in the backseat, always in the backseat, even when nobody else was riding up front. And I thought about how my mother had said “excuse me” to go sit in that car, a car that probably reeked of steamed vegetables and rattled with half-empty inhalers, and she had gone there to cry.

Soon after that, the two were discussing the possibility of Zev and I getting together. Mrs. Fellman began referring to us as “you boys.”

And so, flicking my big toes back and forth inside my wet socks and watching the wrong bus go by for the second time, I stayed outside the shelter of the bus-stop and away from Zev. I looked at my watch. My father had given it to me for my birthday a month before. Across its face, a ninja threatened me unenthusiastically with a katana. The hands of the clock weren’t even swords, which seemed to me like an obvious oversight on the part of the manufacturer. It read three-thirty, but it was much too dark out for that.

“My mom had a chiropractors appointment today,” Zev said, rice-cracker crumbs falling from his mouth. Or at least not looking up, this much I assumed. I pushed the mode button on my watch. The screen display on the right began flashing the month, 11, and there was the sound of tearing fabric that was probably supposed to be the swinging of a sword. I pressed mode again; another sheet was ripped in half somewhere behind the ninja, who did not seem particularly concerned. I pressed it again and again. Maybe with the distance between us and the cars and wrong busses splashing by through the puddles and my understandable fascination with this spectacular new watch, a watch that my father had purchased for me even though it had violent imagery which Zev was probably forbidden to see, maybe I couldn’t hear Zev talk about his mom and her chiropractor. Maybe he would give up.

“She has a bad lower back,” Zev explained. I imagined him wiping his nose unsuccessfully with a hankie. I imagined that day’s lunch still stuck in his teeth, slowing decomposing against his swollen pink gum-line, tainting his every word with an unspeakable odor. I didn’t turn around; I kept pushing the button. Rip Rip Rip.

“Sometimes it will act up when she’s exercising or moving her plants, but sometimes it just flares up for no reason at all! Like she’ll lean down to pick up her keys and…”

And then from around the corner five blocks away, the bus finally emerged, its window wipers batting furiously across its flat face.

“My dad says its because she doesn’t stretch,” I stared at the street and waited. When Zev spoke again his voice was clear and soft. I could almost feel his rancid breath on the back of my neck.

“But she says it’s because of stress. Like your mom and her eczema problem.”

I turned around. Zev was standing directly behind me. There was no food in his mouth or stuck in his teeth. His hankie was folded and tucked neatly into his pocket. The dark sky and pouring rain made the skin on his face look clean and ghostly pale and the fat crowded around his face, beset around such a calm expression, made him look almost dignified.

Behind me, a pair of slowing tires hissed against the water on the street and cautiously cozied up against the curb. I imagined the bus idling behind me, its doors sighing open. Quickly I would turn, hopping the three steps in a single jump to where the driver sits with no expression, not knowing me or anything about me. I would brandish my bus-pass at him like a katana before turning to Zev and letting him know: “My mom doesn’t have a problem.” Then I would wedge myself past the sad and similar looking people standing at the front of the bus, disappearing behind a jungle thick with damp coats and hanging purses. And into that brightly lit silence I would leave Zev behind forever, waiting at the curb.

But turning, it was not the bus, but a small white car I found waiting. Rolling down the passenger-side window, a narrow faced man was leaning over the emergency break and smiling at me. He wore glasses and a beard and a single eyebrow.

“You better hop in, the bus is coming,” he called out over the noise of rain and traffic.

Zev walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I remained at the curb.

“Your mother mentioned that I would be picking you up today, didn’t she?” The man was still looking at me and I looked back. “I’m Zev’s father,” he said. “Didn’t your mother tell you about this?”

My mother had not told me about this. Zev was still standing behind the car with the trunk open waiting for me. His mouth was open to. He looked like an idiot.

“My mom doesn’t have a problem,” I said. Or maybe I screamed. The rain was coming down hard and loud now, it was stinging my cheeks and bringing tears to my eyes and suddenly, rumbling behind the Fellman family’s car, the bus honked. Inside I could see the bright white lights of the cabin full of people, soaked and with no room to sit.

“We really need to get out of the bus lane now,” Zev’s father said. His voice was calm and deliberate, like the slow, rhythmic tapping of a hammer on a nail. It was the tone of voice that let me know that I had become the problematic center of attention. Because now Zev and Zev’s father and the honking and expressionless driver and the thousands and thousands of adults standing in the bright white lights of the bus aisle were staring at me. And so with the back of my throat aching, I walked around to the back of the small white car, put my bag in the trunk, and climbed into the backseat.