Zen and the Art of Faking It Read online

  I lay there trying to fill up my screaming lungs, while Peter sat up next to me, clutching one hand with the other. Somebody grabbed me from behind and helped me up. Then the ref handed me the ball. We were all tied up, the clock had run out, and I had one foul shot.

  This was unbe-freakin’-lievable.

  I staggered to the line. Peter stood right next to me. The whole gym was silent, so it was easy for me to make out what he grunted at me as I bent my knees. “You’ve still got nothing, Buddha.”

  “Except your sister,” I said as I unleashed my best shot.

  return to sender

  The next morning on my rock I thought about how strange life is. What were the chances that my worst nightmare would have turned into a glorious dream? I was a temporary basketball star, my mom and Woody’s family hadn’t met, and I had one last chance to make things right with Woody.

  Can you believe Peter broke a finger against my chest? During the chaos after my foul shot won us the game, Woody’s dad came bounding onto the court, took one look at Peter’s right pinky, and whisked the whole family off to the emergency room. Peter had only had enough time to give me the threatening glare of a lifetime before Woody’s hair blocked my view of him. My mom had come down onto the court too—just in time to see the Long/Jones clan hustling out the exit door.

  “Was that your friend Winky?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mom, that was Woody.”

  “Where’s she going? Were those her parents? Who’s that horrible boy who kept banging into you? And where did you learn to shoot like that?”

  “She’s going to the hospital. Yes, those are her parents. Her dad thinks her brother—the horrible boy—broke a bone on the last play of the game. And I don’t know how to shoot; that was just luck.”

  “Some luck. Speaking of which, I had none at all meeting up with Woody’s mother. I told her I’d be wearing a bright red scarf, and she said she’d have no trouble spotting me. Her eyes must not be as great as she thinks they are.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Mom. Did you like the game?”

  “Yes, although I don’t know why you had to borrow some boy’s sneakers when you have perfectly nice ones of your own.”

  “Well, I like wearing my sandals, especially now that spring is here. You know, that’s why I stopped wearing my winter coat for the year too.”

  “I wouldn’t count on the weather staying like this, Sanny. You know, my favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, said that April is the cruelest month.”

  Wow, my mom had a favorite poet. Who knew?

  Woody snapped me back to the present with her usual gentle morning greeting: “San, you wouldn’t believe what a pathetic FIASCO my night was! I hate the world, I really do.”

  So much for my confession. “What’s wrong, Woody?”

  “Well, first of all, Peter’s finger is broken. So he’s out today to get this huge cast put on, and he won’t be able to play in the varsity tournament next week. He’s really upset, and he’s blaming the whole thing on you.”

  “Uh, he already hates me anyway, right? So don’t worry about it.”

  “San, I think he might try to start a fight with you.”

  “With his finger broken?”

  “I don’t know, he’s pretty mad. And I’m afraid you’ll hurt him.”

  I started to protest, like, Hello? Have you seen the size of your brother? But Woody wasn’t done talking. “San, please promise me you won’t hurt him.”

  What did she think I was—some kind of fighting Samurai? Did I look tough? I swear, I’ve seen rubber duckies more menacing than I am. Sheesh! Plus, the Samurai were Japanese, anyway. “Um, OK, Woody. If it comes to a fight, I promise I won’t hurt him too badly.”

  She looked relieved. She actually looked relieved that I wasn’t going to use my head to pummel her stepbrother’s precious little ham-sized fists. But she wasn’t done with her list of problems. “There’s another thing too, San.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “When we got home yesterday, the mail was there.”

  She stopped talking and her face broke. She tried several times to keep talking, but I couldn’t understand her through the wave of sobs. I put my arms around her and she cried into my shirt. It was a weird feeling.

  When she finally got her voice working again, she said, “The package came back, San. There was a big red stamp on it: return to sender, no such addressee. She moved. She moved without letting us know. She’s really…” Her voice started to crumble again, but she swallowed a few times and reined it in. “She’s really gone.”

  I just held Woody and stroked her hair, because really, what do you say to make that better?

  “I mean, I knew she wasn’t coming back. I knew she didn’t love me enough. But I still kind of believed.”

  I felt her body stiffening against mine. I pulled my head back and saw that now she looked mad. “I was an idiot, San. I was so stupid. Well, I’ll tell you this: Nobody’s ever going to fool me again.”

  Oh, swell.

  “And another thing: I’ll never play another Woody Freaking Guthrie song again as long as I live. Never!”

  “But you worked so hard to learn all those songs.”

  “For her!” Woody was so angry that I could feel her shudder as she said the word her. Well, this was a fun sneak preview of my future.

  “But it was for you too. You know, I actually wrote about you and your mom on my English essay test.”

  “You what?”

  “I wrote about you. Look, you know the whole middle path thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, the way I see it, when you were playing nothing but songs your mom liked, you were letting her control you.”

  She stamped her foot and spat, “I know! That’s why I’m finished with those songs.”

  “But then she’s still controlling you.”

  “What are you talking about? From now on, I’m doing the exact opposite of what she would want.”

  “Right, which means she’s still controlling you. As long as it’s all or nothing, your mom is still defining your choices. And who says you have to be just one thing anyway?”

  “So what am I supposed to do, play half Woody Guthrie and half My Chemical Romance? What do you call that—Hobo-Emo? Folk-core?”

  “I can’t tell you what to play or what to call it.”

  “So what do I play then?”

  I looked at her. She looked at me. “Play what you feel like playing, Woody. That’s all.”

  She pouted as she murmured, “Easy for you to say. You know exactly who you are.” But she put her head against my chest. It kind of ached because her forehead was leaning right on the huge bruise her brother had given me. But truthfully, I think even without the bruise, it would have ached anyway.

  As the school bell rang, Woody asked, “So did my problems get you an A, at least?”

  “I got a B+ on the test. I missed a couple on the multiple-choice part. But she wrote, ‘Very honest and insightful’ under the essay about you.”

  She grabbed both of my hands and squeezed them. “That’s my San.”

  Inside the school we got mobbed. The game was the Big News of the Day. Everybody was slapping my back, shaking my hand, rubbing my hair. But I had never felt less like a hero. I faked it all day while everyone on the planet ran up to me to recite little bits of their postgame play-by-play analysis, but Woody’s mood and my secrets ruined the whole delusion of popularity for me.

  Don’t you hate it when your mom is right, by the way? As Woody and I were walking to the soup kitchen that afternoon, it started to snow. This wasn’t like a little dinky spring flurry either—in the space of maybe ten minutes, it went from slightly gray and cool to full-out blizzard. Before my dad lost us our computer, I used to be addicted to checking the weather online, so I would have known this was coming. But I had had no warning about this storm. Judging from Woody’s wardrobe—a long-sleeved Beatles T-shirt and holey jeans—she had missed the memo too. By
the time we got to the shelter, we were totally covered in white. Even Woody’s eyebrows were ice-crusted. Normally this would have been the strange kind of fun we both liked, but she was still on a rampage. And like the snow, our problems were going to get a lot deeper.

  Stepping into the dishwashing room felt like jumping from a walk-in fridge into a sauna. The snow melted out of my hair so fast that streams ran down my face and neck. The same thing was happening with Woody, except she had a lot more hair, so she was even wetter. She bent over and shook her hair like a dog, which sprayed water all over me. That finally got her smiling. I was smiling too, because every time she looked happy, I got happy. There was nobody around; Mildred, Sister Mary Clare, and the regular helpers were all cooking and serving, and the basketball team had taken the night off. I don’t know how it happened—and this isn’t just some excuse; I really don’t know—but Woody started hugging me. Or I started hugging her, I don’t know. It just felt good to have a warm moment in the cold day.

  And the next thing I knew, Woody and I were almost kissing. I couldn’t let this happen when she didn’t know the truth. I held her at arms’ length and said, “Woody, wait. This isn’t right.”

  “You mean, because of your whole earthly attachments thing? But we are attached, San Lee. Don’t you know that? I knew it the first day I ever saw you. Can’t you feel it every time we’re anywhere near each other?”

  If my whole face hadn’t already been red from its rapid deicing, it sure would have gotten red in a hurry. “Um, well…”

  She pulled me closer. “Look at me, San. Really look at me. I know you can feel it.”

  Oh, boy. “But what about the other guy?”

  “What other guy?”

  “You know, ELL? You write his initials all over your notebooks and everything? I always thought—”

  “ELL? ELL? Oh, San. Do you mean that day in social studies when you grabbed that piece of paper to pick up the sand?”

  “Yeah, and you got all embarrassed.”

  “I did get all embarrassed. But ELL isn’t another guy. I’m still embarrassed about this. I wrote ELL because I was picturing…”

  “What, Woody? What were you picturing?”

  “My initials. My married initials, I mean. If we ever, uh…” She stopped talking and put her head against my chest. What a day my ribs were having!

  ELL. Emily Long Lee. I was the biggest fool alive. I felt the mother of all goofy grins starting to burst out on my face. “Oh, Emily,” I said into her hair. “All this time I thought…”

  She put a finger to my lips. “Shh…” she murmured.

  “Wait, Emily. I still have to tell you something.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry. A librarian could come bursting in here any minute—or worse, a nun! And I don’t think we want that.”

  As it turned out, either of those would have been better than what did happen.

  the revenge of peter jones

  OK, I just want to make one point here. I mean, it’s important that I emphasize this: I was about to tell her. I was. All right? Even though every nerve cell in my body was screaming KISS THE GIRL, I was fighting off the urge so that I could, at long last, fess up. I ran out of time.

  Because at that instant, my mom came barging in. Her arms were full of winter clothes. She had my coat, my gloves, and of course my bright red Nike high-tops. Woody looked bewildered, like, Who’s the old chick with the hideous wardrobe? But unfortunately, her confusion got cleared up real fast when my mom started talking a mile a minute.

  “Hi, San. And you must be Woody. It’s nice to finally meet you in person. San’s told me so much about you! Well, actually, he’s told me remarkably little about you—but that tells me a lot anyway. San, I brought your winter clothes. There’s about four inches of snow out there already, and it’s still coming down like crazy. Didn’t I tell you April was the cruelest month?”

  She didn’t know the half of it. I said, “Thanks, uh, ma’am.”

  She turned to Woody. “Isn’t our boy so polite? You’re a lucky girl, Woody. My son might not be the best at introductions, but he’s got great manners once you get to know him. Hello. I’m Diane Lee, San’s mother.”

  Woody pushed me away. “You’re San’s mother? And those are San’s winter clothes?”

  Mom said, “Yes and yes. I’m not surprised you haven’t seen the clothes, though. He has this odd habit of shoving them in a sewer pipe every morning.”

  She knew about that? I had to say something, fast. “Uh…um…” Wow, am I brilliant or what? I guess I won’t be a criminal defense lawyer when I grow up.

  Woody was looking less puzzled and more upset by the second. “Wait, this is your mom. She’s not Chinese. Is your dad Chinese?”

  I shook my head.

  “So all that stuff about ‘your traditions’ and ‘your culture’ was just—what? A total lie? You just completely made it up?”

  I nodded, just as Mildred and Sister Mary Clare walked in to see what the commotion was.

  “And what about your whole Zen thing?”

  My mom chimed in, less than helpfully. “Oh, you mean that research project you two are doing? When I first took San to the library, I didn’t—”

  “THE LIBRARY? SAN LEARNED ALL HIS ZEN STUFF FROM THE LIBRARY?” Woody grabbed my shirt like she was going to hit me. “You’re not really a…a…Zen guy?”

  Mildred burst out laughing. “Wait a minute, Emily. You thought San was a real Zen Buddhist? Oh, is that an absolute riot! This boy is about as Zen as Sister Mary here.”

  Woody was going to hit me. Or cry, which would be worse. “San, if you’re not really a Buddhist, who are you?”

  Mom stepped up to bat for me yet again. I wished she’d been born without a tongue. “Listen, Woody, San’s had a tough year. Ever since his dad went to prison, he’s been trying to find himself. I think this Zen thing is just, you know, a phase.”

  “Your dad’s in prison? And this is a phase? Am I a phase too, San? Am I?”

  Boy, the dishes were really piling up.

  “Hey,” I said, “you know, these dishes are really piling up. Do you think we could maybe get back to work? I mean, this is a very interesting conversation and all, but…”

  Woody ran out of the room crying. My mom dropped all of my garish winter clothes at my feet and followed her. Sister Mary Clare left too, so I was standing there with Mildred, alone. “San, you’re a nice boy. I can tell. But what on earth were you thinking, lying to Emily all year? Didn’t you know the truth would come out? For goodness’ sake, the essence of Zen is truth. Maybe I should have given you some philosophy books before the gardening one.”

  I kicked my clothes aside and started in on the dishes. Mildred rolled up her sleeves and got right to work next to me. “I’m not a nice boy,” I said. “I’m a second-generation convict.” Then for some reason I told her everything. By the time I was done talking, the dishes were all finished up. I sat on the counter, as usual, and Mildred swung herself up too, with shocking grace. She must have seen my surprise, because she flexed one bicep and said, “Pilates. And calcium tablets. Anyway, San, you are a nice boy.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Library books. You’ve taken out what, forty books in the past few months? And you’ve brought them all back in the same condition you got ‘em in. That’s a sure sign of character. Plus you’re a great dishwasher—another sure sign.”

  “Character? But I just spent twenty minutes telling you what a total liar I am.”

  “Well, son, I can tell you one thing I’ve learned: The real liars never own up to what they’ve done. So right there, you’re not as bad as you think you are.”

  I smiled and started to thank her profusely, but she cut me off. “You’re still in big trouble with that girl, though. So you’d better go find her and tell her everything you just told me.”

  “Do you think it will work? Do you think she’ll understand?”

  Mildred snickered. “Are you kidding me
, San? There’s no chance she’ll understand.”

  “But—”

  “But you still have to tell her. Now go!”

  I went.

  But Woody was gone. So was my mom. Sister Mary Clare was standing in the lobby, slowly and laboriously mopping up the slush that had been dragged in and smeared by hundreds of feet. I grabbed an extra mop and started helping. Right when I first started mopping, she said to me, “Your mother went to take Emily home. She told me she might come back for you, if you’re lucky.”

  I kept mopping. Sister Mary Clare kept talking. “Have you spent much time thinking about repentance, Stanley?”

  “Listen, I’m not Catholic. And my name is San Lee, NOT Stanley.”

  She grinned wickedly, if that’s an OK description for a nun’s facial expression, and said, “Listen, I’m not being a nun right now; I’m being a nosy old lady. And I know your name isn’t Stanley. What do you think I am—deaf?”

  I kept mopping. You know, it’s actually a very strenuous activity. First of all, a big industrial-size mop weighs like thirty pounds when it’s full of water, and you have to push it all around and lift it into the bucket-squeezy thing. Then you have to crank the handle of the squeezer really hard to squish the water out of the mop. Next you have to repeat the process until you realize you’re weaker than an old lady. An old lady who doesn’t particularly shut up.

  “Anyway, San, I think you have some major-league repenting to do. Not because your father is in jail, by the way, but because you’ve hurt people. You can lay down the burden of whatever your father has done—but you have to carry what you’ve done on your shoulders until it’s ready to be laid down.”

  “And how am I supposed to know when that is?”

  “When it doesn’t hurt anymore to look in the mirror, that’s when you’ll know.”