31
The Teenage Miscreant
CHARACTERISTICS: Wise mouth paired with little thought. Overly confident thanks to alcohol consumption.
MOTTO: “Do your freaking worst, universe.”
MISCREANT KRYPTONITE: The mother.
ATYPICAL OFFENSES: Mouthing off to a white cop. (Hands-down the dumbest.)
There was a specific scent to the police station holding room, as it turned out. To Norris, it smelled like a specific person—some guy named Clyde. Clyde smelled like bureaucracy that hadn’t showered for a few weeks and coated its thinning hair in Crème de Despair every morning. Clyde’s rising stench lived in every corner of the small gray room Norris had been put in, in the mold that had amassed in the corners of his table, in the peeling gray paint of the door, which really did not seem that solid, all things considered.
His stomach was killing him. Too much alcohol, not enough food. Norris wanted to make a run for it; he wanted a time machine; most of all, he really wanted his mom.
Are you all right there? Where are you going, kid? Where are you coming from? How old are you? Are you drunk? Where is your ID? Canada? Don’t lie to me now: How old are you?
There were clear correct answers to these questions, and Norris had apparently failed to provide a single one of them. His mouth’s answers were closer to pointing out the fact that the officer’s shoes were brown and his belt appeared to be black under the car’s tail lights; to the fact that America definitely had a gun problem; and that really, if you thought about it, this whole thing was the fault of some asshole named Ian.
So, now Clyde.
Norris had apparently looked petrified enough, arriving at the station—head pounding—that the officer had put him in this separate space of confinement. Part of it, he thought, was due to the fact that the holding area he had walked past was currently at capacity. The officer had driven them to a small county station nearby rather than what Norris imagined to be Austin’s central station somewhere downtown. Norris had walked quickly behind the officer, but he’d looked in long enough to see two white fraternity bros in popped collar dress shirts, sleeping it off on each other’s shoulders, a Latino guy with his hands tucked into his hoodie pocket and his head sunk low. He looked like he’d been crying. But mostly, Norris had glimpsed enough to make out at least five black men; one wore a suit and two appeared homeless. Either that or film-festival hipsters.
“Your mother is here,” the policewoman offered as she opened the door. From her voice, Norris thought she might have a cold.
She escorted him to another area and slid behind a desk, stamping something. They had all his information. Norris Harrison Kaplan, seventeen, Canadian. Intoxicated. More words that Norris couldn’t make out upside down from his side of the counter.
“Excuse me, ma’am, where is my mother?”
She looked up at him. “I’ll take you to her in a bit. Just need to process this. Protocol for minors.”
It wasn’t a cold, Norris noted. Her voice just naturally sounded like she needed to clear her throat.
“Is she really mad?”
She stopped writing again and looked up at him with a frown.
“That’s . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She waved it off. “That’s just the first time I’ve ever heard someone ask that question here.”
She pushed herself off her chair, shaking her head with a wry smile.
“Yes, kid. She’s fucking pissed.”
Judith had been silent since the station. Normally Norris was an expert on all her silences: Grading Silence, Studying Silence, The-Man-I-Married-and-Followed-to-Canada-Just-Left-Forever Silence . . . but at the moment, Norris couldn’t gauge whether this was the calm before an unspeakable storm or if she was simply ignoring him beyond the bare necessities of retrieving his body and ferrying it home. Plus, he was still tipsy.
“’M hungry,” Norris complained, his face crumpled against the passenger seat window. His head was killing him and his stomach felt like it was rotting from the inside. Judith kept driving, eyes on the road. Her face was unnervingly calm. The only sign that she was seething were her hands clenching the steering wheel; every time an orange highway light flicked by, Norris could make out the veins in her grip.
“Mom,” he tried again. “Tonight was ridiculous, ’m aware of that, but ’m really freaking starving here. I didn’t actually have any food at the prom, and I don’t feel—”
His phone vibrated on the dash: “LIAM.” The blue light flooded the entire car, further punishing Norris’s brain. Everything felt like another ingredient for the soupy headache simmering right behind his eyeballs.
“No,” Judith said icily.
“It’s Liam,” Norris whined, which felt like a valid and coherent explanation. Liam had done nothing wrong. Liam was still one of the good Austin people. Norris picked up the phone, if only to text back, when his mother’s hand moved through his to snatch the phone and slam it back down onto the dashboard. Twice. It was a miracle that it didn’t shatter.
“You paid for that phone, y’know,” he grumbled.
Judith turned up the radio in response, unleashing a new level of Top 40 torture to Norris’s pounding brain. Okay . . . calm before the storm, then.
“The drunk thing I can understand.” Judith finally spoke, dropping her keys into the key bowl and turning on the range-hood light, rather than the insanely bright overhead. It was her first act of mercy all night.
“Teenagers drink. Teenagers lie. They get moody for no reason and sulk in their rooms.”
“Mom . . .” Norris started to explain before catching her eye and thinking better of it as her voice crescendoed.
“They won’t stop talking about some girl for weeks, ask you to dry-clean their suit before going to dinner at her house, then never once bring her over or offer for you to meet her! God forbid you even dare broach the subject. Oh no. Just put the food on the table and pick them up when they text, like you’re a taxi. But that’s okay, because Norris is a good one, right? You’re so lucky, Judith! Norris is so mature; Norris gets good grades; Norris doesn’t do drugs; Norris knows better than to get mixed up with bad people. . . .”
This wasn’t just about the alcohol. Even sober, Norris wouldn’t have been able to track what the hell she was talking about.
“You would never get a call at two a.m. that Norris has been charged for disorderly conduct, Judith.” She pointed a finger at him. “Norris would never be arrested for contempt of a law officer, Judith! You didn’t raise a fucking moron, Judith!”
“I didn’t do anything!” Norris snapped, loudly enough for it to echo through the apartment. He could get loud too. “You weren’t there! That cop was a fucking asshole!”
Ow.
In hindsight, it was weird that Norris had never been slapped. Not that he’d ever deserved it, but considering the aghast looks on Maddie’s face and Aarti’s tonight—even Meredith’s—he’d kind of been expecting one for a while now. He had zingers ready for those occasions when the shadow of a slap might loom overhead. But not for his mother. His own mother had slapped him. A full-on The Young and the Restless slap.
“What the hell, Mom?!” Norris barked, eyes red and cheek stinging. “Are we just doing physical abuse now?! Want to get a branch and turn it into a switch while you’re at it? Jesus Christ!”
“Shut your mouth,” Judith roared. “Shut your goddamn mouth. You’re smarter than that, so don’t play dumb, Norris!”
“Why are you so mad at me?” Norris shouted back. The neighbors could definitely hear them now. His throat was dry, but he didn’t care. “I’m sorry if I interrupted one of your dates, or whatever, but I DID NOT DO ANYTHING! Ground me for leaving the prom, ground me for drinking, but I didn’t drive, I didn’t have unprotected sex, I didn’t even get high! You know that! You’re supposed to be on my side here, Mom!”
“NO!” she hurled back. “Not on this, Norris! I can’t be!”
“Why the hell not?!”
“You know damn well! Trayvon Martin,” she began. “Tamir Rice, Cameron Tillman, so many others that I can’t remember all their names anymore!”
Norris knew too well. It was almost a ritual, even back in Canada. They would sit as a family and watch quietly. “Be smart out there,” Felix used to say.
“You’re not a handsome blue-eyed little Ken doll who’s going to get a slap on the wrist every time he messes up. That, tonight?” she said, pointing to the door. “Do you know what that was? Do you?!”
“I—”
“That was a fucking coin flip, Norris. That was the coin landing heads.” Her finger dug into his chest, punctuating every other word she was saying, spittle flying at his face. “Heads. A good one. Officer Miller, who has four sons, and luckily, mercifully, thank Jesus saw someone else’s kid back-talking him tonight.”
She exhaled, her breath Thai-food hot against his face.
“Tails.” Her voice broke. “Tails, and I would be at the morgue right now identifying you! With some man lecturing me about your blood alcohol level and belligerent language and how you had it coming.”
The last poke was to the middle of his forehead. Norris stared back, tight-lipped and doing everything in his power to keep his eyes unfocused. He couldn’t bear to actually see her right now. Not like this.
“Am I wrong? Hmm? Tell me I’m wrong here, Norris.”
She shoved Norris’s head aside as if she couldn’t think of anything else to do and finally stepped away. Her fingers dug into her hairline, under the wig. She turned back to him, and she had never appeared older to Norris.
“You’re not Liam. Or Eric. You don’t get to be.” She quivered, chest heaving as though she just ran a marathon. “And that’s unfair, and I’m sorry, baby. I really am, but that’s the world. It was for your dad, it is for you, and it will be for your son too, so you might as well get used to it. You . . .”
She started to leave the kitchen but turned back one last time. His mother was openly crying now.
“You’re a statistic waiting to happen, and not only did I raise a kid dumb enough not to realize that . . . I brought him to the middle of Texas, of all places. Mother of the year.”
Her bedroom door slammed.
And the bathroom door behind it slammed too.
Norris went to bed. He wasn’t hungry anymore.