Finn Read online

  Copyright ©2001 by Matthew Olshan

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Bancroft Press

  P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209

  800.637.7377

  www.bancroftpress.com

  Cover design and illustration by Steven Parke, What? Design, www.what-design.com

  Book design by Theresa Williams, [email protected]

  Library of Congress Card Number: 2001086370

  ISBN 1-890862-13-4 (cloth)

  ISBN 1-890862-14-2 (paper)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Edition

  for shana

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  About the Author

  Additional Praise for Finn: A Novel

  Chapter One

  “Angry angry angry, is what you are,” they tell me, but I think I’m less angry than quiet, the kind of quiet that makes people nervous because they can’t tell what you’re thinking, and most of them assume the worst. I do get angry sometimes, but who doesn’t? There’s strength in anger, which goes against what school counselors will tell you.

  Since I’ve been living with my grandparents, I’m a lot less angry, but I’m still pretty quiet. My grandparents go on and on about how lovely I am—which I’m not—and how bright—which I’m definitely not. They give me an allowance, which is something new, and nice clothes. Sometimes, when they’re showing me off to their wrinkly friends, I feel like saying, “She pees when you give her a bottle!” like those talking dolls they gave me when I first came to live with them, before they understood I was way past dolls.

  Still, I like how quiet their house is. I like that there are always clean sheets, even if they do smell like mothballs. Everything in my grandparents’ house smells like mothballs, even them sometimes, but it’s not a terrible smell. At least it smells like someone’s trying. And there are times, late at night, when the smell of the mothballs and the clean sheets and the glow of the stupid little nightlight they insist I need and the cicadas singing outside—when all of it together makes me feel like I’m in a cocoon, like I could become something very nice.

  I’ll fall asleep with those thoughts sometimes, and even if I haven’t had the nightmares, in the morning I’ll be lashed down by the sheets. It’s the way my grandmother tucks them in. They twist around your ankles like ropes. Come morning, I’ll try to hide the fact that I’m in one of my moods, but by now my grandparents know better. When I plop down at the kitchen table, they’ll give each other the look that says, “Watch out.” They won’t bother being cheerful. My grandfather will say, “Another bad night.” He’s right just to say it and not to ask it, because those mornings, I can barely keep my eyes open, much less answer questions.

  They used to try to force me to talk about “it,” whatever “it” was. But forcing someone to talk is like forcing them to eat: you may have to break their jaw to do it, and the whole thing can land you in a hospital.

  They’ve been sending me to a girls school called Field, which is supposed to be different from other schools in that you go on a lot of field trips. At first, I liked it. The teachers weren’t always making me empty my pockets, and I could go to the bathroom without an act of Congress. My main teacher, Ms. Bellows, was extra nice to me, and not in a condescending way. She was the only one who bothered to call me “Chlo,” the way I like, and not “Chloe,” with two syllables and the ugly “ee” sound at the end, which is my actual name. The rest of the teachers insisted on the whole ugly thing.

  Ms. Bellows understood the kind of nice that being nice is supposed to be about. Most of the other teachers practiced the kind of nice where you’ve heard a lot of bad stories about someone and think you have to be their “special buddy.”

  One of the teachers at Field, Mr. Lynch, tried way too hard to be my special buddy, always coming up to me, even when I was with a crowd. It was completely inappropriate. He’d say things like, “Hey, girlfriend!” or “Like those shoes!” It’s not impossible that my shoes were nice, or that Mr. Lynch could have genuinely liked them, but the time to compliment them is definitely not when I’m trying to make new friends. Nothing scares away potential friends like a teacher who’s complimenting you all the time. It’s suspicious.

  Mr. Lynch was getting out of hand, so I decided to do something about it. A golden opportunity came one day when he was showing me pictures of his family—that’s how much he wanted me to feel like his special pal!—and I saw that his wife was Mexican and very young. She was okay-looking, in that stubby way. You know: too much make-up, not a lot of neck. I don’t have anything against Mexicans in general, although a lot of people around here do, but I wanted to get Mr. Lynch off my back, so I started making some seemingly harmless comments about his wife. Such as: wasn’t she exotic looking, how long had they been married, etc. Mr. Lynch said that he and Mrs. Lynch were practically newlyweds in that they were about to celebrate their second anniversary.

  As soon as I heard that, I had my in. Mr. Lynch is not what you would call a young man, although the fact that he’s fat makes his face look pretty young. Unless I’m utterly wrong, he’s forty. A man his age should have been celebrating at least his tenth anniversary, if not more.

  I congratulated him anyway. I told him I thought that two years of marriage was a fan-tas-tic achievement. It wasn’t hard to lie to him. Mr. Lynch is the kind of person who sops up compliments, probably because he doesn’t feel he really deserves them.

  Then, when I was sure he was feeling like my special buddy, I told him—not in a mean way, just as a sort of casual observation—that I was surprised Mrs. Lynch hadn’t divorced him yet. Mr. Lynch was a little shocked by that. He asked me why I would say such a thing. I said it was common knowledge that Mexican women married American men to become citizens, and then divorced them later because they find American men fat and not very accomplished lovers.

  Mr. Lynch was deeply offended, although I wasn’t sure whether it was more what I said about his being unaccomplished or what I said about his being fat. Of course it was both, but I take a sort of clinical interest in insults. I like to know exactly what works, and how well.

  Mr. Lynch put his pictures away and got a little pompous, which didn’t surprise me. He said, “I assure you that’s not the case in our situation.” When I heard him use the word “situation,” I knew I had struck a nerve, because no one uses a word like “situation” unless they’re trying to hide something.

  Mr. Lynch was a lot less friendly after that, which suited me fine, because I was trying to be friends with an interesting girl called Marian Williams, who absolutely hated him. She claimed it was an old grudge, but beyo
nd that, Marian was very secretive about her hatred for Mr. Lynch. At first, she would only say that once upon a time Mr. Lynch had betrayed a sacred trust. Marian’s always using phrases like “betrayed a sacred trust,” which sound ridiculous when I say them, but which somehow sound normal coming from her.

  Marian’s not very popular. She’s one of those people who doesn’t care at all what other people think. Unlike me. Personally, I can’t not care what other people think, no matter how hard I try, but Marian really doesn’t, and I mean really. Half the time she’s in her own little world, so she barely notices that other people even exist.

  Marian reads a lot. Too much, judging from the way she lives life in terms of books. For instance, the business with Mr. Lynch. I finally got it out of her that the “sacred trust” Mr. Lynch betrayed was that he had voted, along with several other teachers at Field, to remove The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the summer reading list. Apparently, there’s a lot of offensive language in the book, and it’s racist. Marian almost took off my head when I mentioned that. She said that only people who hadn’t read the book at all—at least not the way Mark Twain intended it—could call it “racist.” I tried to point out that no one really knows how Mark Twain intended it, and we weren’t ever likely to, since he was dead, but that’s just the kind of argument you can’t win with Marian, because suddenly, instead of talking about Mark Twain, you’re talking about Genghis Kahn or the Holocaust, and how can you argue with that?

  Anyway, after Mr. Lynch voted the way he did about Huckleberry Finn, Marian made a big show of avoiding him in the hallways, flattening herself against the lockers when he walked by, making the sign of the cross behind his back. She was like a bad vampire movie. Once, after a big snowstorm, she spent half an hour in the parking lot carving some crazy footprints in the snow by his car. It was classic Marian. She said she was sculpting the footprints of Huck Finn’s murderous father. “In the book, the left boot heel had a cross in it,” she said. “To ward off the devil.” She’s a real stickler for accuracy.

  Mr. Lynch was supposed to recognize the footprints and interpret them as a threat. When I asked, “What kind of threat?” Marian rolled her eyes at me, the way she does whenever she thinks someone’s being hopelessly thick, which in my case is fairly often. “The Vengeful Cry of the Oppressed,” she said. “Duh!”

  Carving the footprints was a lot harder than she originally thought, because it’s not exactly easy to avoid leaving your own footprints in the snow, not to mention the occasional handprint when you lose your balance. In the end, it looked to me as if a big hairy dog had jumped out of Mr. Lynch’s car and rolled around, but Marian was satisfied that the Oppressor was in for a real scare. I was glad to hear that because, by then, I thought I was going to chip a tooth from shivering so hard.

  We watched Mr. Lynch get into his car that afternoon, and, in fact, he did pause for a while after he squeezed himself behind the wheel, but I had seen him do that before. He’s just extremely out of shape and he fiddles with the radio for a minute to catch his breath before he straps on his seatbelt, because reaching over his shoulder is a big workout for him. But in Marian’s mind, Mr. Lynch wasn’t catching his breath at all. “He’s contemplating the Harvest of his Cowardice!” she said.

  The harvest of his cowardice? I mean, please.

  Chapter Two

  My grandparents have decided to kick out the maid, a really nice Mexican woman called Silvia. Lots of their friends have Mexican maids. It’s what people do around here, but I always thought that if I had to be a Mexican maid, I’d want to work for my grandparents, since they aren’t particularly mean, or if they are sometimes, it’s so obviously because of how they were brought up that I wouldn’t take it too personally. I always thought that my grandparents were different, but that was before what they did to Silvia.

  I had known for a long time that Silvia was pregnant. It was pretty obvious, unless, like my grandmother, you refused to have unpleasant thoughts. Actually, my grandmother did notice something. One day, while Silvia was putting away the groceries, my grandmother pointed out how Silvia’s shirt kept riding up. Silvia must have been five months along by then. Her belly button was already pooching out. But instead of thinking that Silvia could be pregnant, my grandmother called up the appliance repairman to come out and look at the dryer. She thought it might be running too hot and making Silvia’s shirts shrink.

  Calling a repairman because you’re worried about ruining the maid’s wardrobe is actually pretty nice, and I admired my grandmother for it, even if it did showcase her stubborn mind. My grandfather, on the other hand, was noticing Silvia more and more, and not in a nice way. He was always complimenting her, pointing out how rosy her cheeks were, or what a fine figure she was developing. He asked her if she wasn’t eating too much pasta. For some reason, my grandfather thinks that “Silvia’s people” are crazy for pasta. That’s how much he knows about Mexicans.

  Silvia was living in my grandparents’ basement when I came to live with them. I didn’t see much of her at first. I had a lot on my mind and kept pretty much to myself, but beyond that, Silvia really seemed to want to be invisible. You barely knew she was around, which was just how my grandparents liked it. I might not have gotten to know her at all if I hadn’t offended my grandfather at the Navy Gravy.

  At the time, my grandparents were going out of their way to include me in lots of “family time.” At least, that’s the reason they gave for never leaving me alone. It sounds callous, my not wanting to spend time at home with them. I just couldn’t stand the way they floated around the house like jellyfish. I was constantly like: hurry up!

  Even going out with them was claustrophobic. They liked to get dressed up and take me out to eat. There was one seafood place they liked in particular, the Navy Gravy. It had tables with fake “pieces of eight” under the varnish. The manager wore a pirate patch. He was short and oily and acted like a funeral director, except that his hands were constantly on the waitresses, inspecting them, straightening a name tag, puffing up a frilly white collar. He liked to say things like, “Swab that deck, wench!” when a table needed clearing. The waitresses liked to mock him behind his back.

  We went there for the crabs. My grandfather loved smashing crab claws with his wooden mallet and digging his thumbs into the crunchy bodies. He’d suck the juice out of the tiny side legs, then toss them in a revolting heap right on the table. My grandmother and I always finished eating about an hour before my grandfather. Then we had to just sit there, trapped in the booth like hostages, and watch the carnage. My grandfather would hammer away. Every once in a while, my grandmother would ask him if the crabs were sweet. The answer was always, “Not as good as last time.” He had a way of making everything sound like her fault.

  One night, I finally reached my limit. While we were waiting for the umpteenth platter of crabs, I asked my grandfather if he knew what crabs ate. His hammer stopped in mid-air.

  “Crabs, you mean the animal?” he said. “You’re asking, ‘What do they eat for food?’”

  “Right,” I said.

  “In the wild? I don’t know. Fish eggs. Tiny shrimp, maybe. Kelp.”

  “Say, I know,” my grandmother said brightly. “Those itty bitty dots that whales eat. What’s that called? They’re like miniature snowflakes—”

  “You mean plankton,” I said.

  “Plankton. Good for you!” she said. “I think I read that somewhere.” She was so happy that we were having a family conversation. I almost hated to ruin it. “Nope,” I said.

  “All right, Miss Smartypants,” my grandfather said. “Enlighten us.”

  “Crabs,” I said, “are scavengers. Like the vulture. Or the common sewer rat.”

  “Eskimo,” my grandmother said, darting her wet eyes at my grandfather. “Eskimo” was their code word for, “Time to change the subject.”

  “They taught us that at Field,” I said. “Matter of fact, what the crab really likes, even more than fish eggs or
the occasional miniature shrimp, is medical waste. It’s like a delicacy to them. Particularly used bandages. Crusty gauze.”

  This was actually something I’d heard about lobsters, but I didn’t put that kind of behavior past a crab, either.

  “Chloe!” my grandmother said.

  “Well, it’s true!” I said. “We learned it in Ecosystems.”

  My grandfather looked at my grandmother accusingly. “That would be our cue to leave,” he said. Then he took a long drink of water and started cleaning his gory fingers with a Wet-Nap.

  After that, I didn’t have to go to the Navy Gravy with them, which was great, because they’d leave money for Silvia and me to order a pizza and have a “girl’s night in.”

  That’s how I first got to know Silvia. She was nice enough, but pretty ignorant. She was easy to tease, especially about electronics. I guess Mexicans don’t own a lot of the things we take for granted. Or maybe they do, but the instructions all come in English.

  Take the television, for instance. One night, I convinced Silvia that the TV was leaking radiation. I went to the bathroom and brushed my gums until they bled. Then I went behind the TV and put my hands on it and said, “Oh my God!” When Silvia asked me what I was doing, I told her I thought something was wrong with the TV. Then I made a big point of “discovering” my bloody gums. I could tell she was getting good and nervous. I think she was afraid that my grandparents would blame her for my bleeding gums. She came over to take a closer look, but I said, “My mouth can wait.” I held her hand to the back of the television. “You feel that?” I said.

  “I don’t feel it,” she said, which was pretty funny because she didn’t even know what she was supposed to be feeling yet.

  “Yes you do,” I said. “The heat. Televisions are supposed to be cold inside, like refrigerators.” Silvia nodded and tried to pull her hand away, but I kept it there. “It’s hot,” I said. “And that can only mean one thing. Radiation! Which would explain the bleeding gums.”