Number 8 Read online

  Contents

  1. Jackson

  2. Esmerelda

  3. Jackson

  4. Esmerelda

  5. Jackson

  6. Esmerelda

  7. Jackson

  8. Esmerelda

  9. Jackson

  10. Esmerelda

  11. Jackson

  12. Esmerelda

  13. Jackson

  14. Esmerelda

  15. Jackson

  16. Esmerelda

  17. Jackson

  For Judy Thompson,

  with love and thanks for your wisdom,

  commitment, and math panache!

  1. Jackson

  I think the best number in the whole universe is eight. The way I see it, eight has everything going for it. It’s even, for a start. You can divide it by four and two—friendly numbers that come in pairs like brothers, or twins. I can’t stand odd numbers. They’re cold and spiky with nasty surprises inside them like sharp things you step on in the grass.

  We used to have an eight in our address: 2–408 Trenches Road. How lucky was that! When people asked me my address, I’d write it out slowly, enjoying the way the numbers flowed smooth as cream.

  I admire zero almost as much as eight. Nothing divides into zero so you can be ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY sure you won’t get messy fractions hanging over like bits of peanut butter spilling from the jar. My mom leaves the peanut butter like that all the time, dripping down from the lid, even though I tell her that’s what brings the cockroaches.

  Did you know that cockroaches can live for nine days without their heads? Mom knows because I told her, but it doesn’t change her domestic habits. She just says, “Nine, huh? How very strange,” and she laughs at me in her crazy Freddie Krueger way.

  I loved the house on Trenches Road. Apartment, actually. It was small and high up, on a busy highway as loud as a war. If you had a conversation on the street below you had to battle to make yourself heard against all the trucks and buses backfiring like bombs going off. We lived above a Spanish restaurant, but the waiters were all Chinese, and at night I could hear Liu and Chen calling to each other and Liu’s brother had this snorting kind of laugh that made you laugh, too. Often I’d lie there in bed, chuckling myself. I’d wonder why laughter is so infectious, like yawning. The voices downstairs were company, a lot of round, even numbers grouping together in sets. When I listened to them, I didn’t feel so much like the odd one out up there alone in bed.

  There were lots of cafés and pubs on Trenches Road and dry cleaners and secondhand bookshops and music stores, and the other families in our apartment building turned their music up loud and argued and laughed. It was noisy and energetic, as if we were all strung together along some buzzing wire of electricity and we couldn’t get off even if we tried. I didn’t want to get off. I liked it.

  It’s so quiet here. 73 Valerie Avenue. Our new street is wide and leafy with trees planted every three seconds like exclamation marks. Silent ones. “Don’t you love all this peace and tranquility?” Mom says. “You can really hear yourself think!” Yeah, I say, that’s what worries me. Well, I don’t actually say it, because Mom has her bright face on, and I don’t want to see it fall. Mom thinks a quiet suburb where kids can ride their bikes without fear of being mowed down by trucks or drunks is heaven, and what luck, we didn’t even have to die to get here!

  The suburbs. I’ve never lived in a suburb before. I’ve lived in the middle of cities, in a tent when our money ran out, a trailer park, the desert, and once, for five weeks, in America when Mom said we should just take our courage and toothbrushes and “make it” in the Big Apple. Rough end of a pineapple, that idea, if you ask me. When we went broke in New York, we had to stay in a crummy hostel for men. Mom wore a baseball cap all the time and spoke in a deep voice. It was good for her singing range, she said—you have to be able to get those low notes if you want to sing soul. Mom always tries to be positive. What I noticed were the stains on the sheets and the way you could practically pass out from alcohol poisoning if you breathed in fumes from the guy next to you at the sink.

  Here it’s so quiet, yesterday I heard our neighbor sneeze. I was going to say “bless you” but I didn’t know if that was the right thing to do in the suburbs. Were you supposed to pretend you didn’t hear, like the fence dividing you is soundproof or something?

  In the suburbs there are only the polite sounds of lawnmowers on Saturday mornings and the thud of newspapers landing on neatly swept driveways.

  I’m sitting outside on the back step, looking out at the lawn. We have a lawn. I suppose we’ll have to get a lawnmower. I’m so hungry I could eat one of those pigeons pecking in the grass. There’s nothing in the fridge; I already looked.

  Maybe some of those mangoes are ripe. Look, out there in our very own backyard is a mango tree. Mom thinks this is incredible. She goes like this: “Do you know how much people pay for those things in the stores? You’d never grow a mango tree in an apartment.” (Well, obviously, Mom.) “Breathe deep, Jackson, the air is fresh here.” She says this waving her arms around. She’s always waving her arms around. Yesterday I noticed that the flesh at the top wobbles more than it used to. I didn’t like thinking about that, so I looked away.

  I’ve never eaten a mango. Mom says they taste like luxury. The fat green-going-golden ones are very high up on the tree. The ones on the ground are ripe but they have large gouges in them, so you can see the velvety flesh inside. It’s the possums that do the gouging, Mom says. I’ve never even seen a possum in real life. Well, only as roadkill. I wouldn’t mind seeing a live one.

  When I get up off the step, I hear my knees crack. God, maybe the suburbs cause accelerated aging. Everyone just sitting around watching the trees grow. I crack my knuckles eight times for good luck. My thumbs are double-jointed, so I only do them four times.

  I’m just looking in the fridge again, thinking maybe I’ve missed something, when there’s a knock at the door. Ta ta taa. I jump in fright. Why don’t people knock in reasonable numbers, like twos or fours? I take a deep breath as I walk up the hall. It seems to take ages. This house is so big. We don’t need such a big house, I keep telling Mom, an apartment was more than big enough for just the two of us.

  I open the door.

  “Hi,” says Esmerelda Marx.

  I gulp. I can’t believe it.

  “Hi,” she says again. “Remember me? I lent you my pen today.”

  I nod once, my mouth still paralyzed. Esmerelda Marx. I nod twice, to make it an even number. I look down at my hands.

  Esmerelda laughs. “That pen must have been leaky, sorry! Mom’s always bringing home the faulty ones from the bank. ‘Waste not, want not,’ she says. Of course you can’t risk a leaky pen at the bank. Once, she thought a customer tried to cash a check for two thousand dollars instead of two hundred, all because of this black smudge at the end. Claimed it looked like a zero. Ha! Can I come in?”

  In her hands there is a plate with, let’s see, ten cakes shaped like little boats. In each one there’s a filling of lemony custard with sugar frosting on top. Suddenly, my mouth starts twitching and saliva dribbles out the corner so I look like some sort of lunatic.

  I open the door wide, and she passes in front of me. Her long dark hair swings lightly against my cheek. She smells like flowers and something else. Fresh stationery.

  I clear a space on the kitchen table. It’s filled with pieces of paper—shopping lists and bills and little towers of CDs. I can hardly breathe. Esmerelda puts the plate down. I love the smell of fresh stationery.

  “We’ve only just moved in here,” I say quickly, waving at the cardboard boxes piled against the walls.

  Esmerelda nods and says, “Mind if I look around? I find other people’s lives fascinating.” She wanders o
ff into the living room before I can choose between “Sure” or “Go for it” or “There’s not much to see.”

  “I live just across the road,” she calls from the other room.

  “We’re at number sixty-eight. My mom just baked these and when I told her I saw you getting off the bus coming home, she said I should take them over to you. We’re lucky, Tuesday is her early day.”

  I stay rooted to the spot, as if struck by lightning. Sixty-eight! I’m filled with such a rush of envy. Talk about luck! Does she have any idea of her good fortune? Or the way her hair bounces into two perfect sixes? But how lucky am I that she noticed me! We live on the same street! Me and Esmerelda Marx. Maybe there is a God after all. Maybe there are a pair of them. I have so many thoughts and ideas and feelings that I decide I’d better just stand still like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken up, and wait for everything to settle.

  See, Esmerelda Marx was the only good thing that happened to me on my first day at Homeland High School. She was the eight seconds of awe and happiness that made me stop thinking about how terrible it is starting new schools. I spotted her in music, and then during math she lent me her pen. I watched her all morning. While I watched her I forgot to feel clumsy and too tall and that I’d scratched a pimple in the morning, leaving a red angry mark on my forehead.

  The sliding door between the kitchen and the living room bangs open like a gunshot. My heart pounds in fright.

  “Ve vill ’ave to do somezing about zat door,” I say. I wince at the sound of myself. Why do I do this? Whenever I am truly nervous I go into this stupid Mafia boss act.

  Esmerelda stands in the doorway, holding a framed photo. “Iz true, zis door it must go,” she says, and draws a line with her finger across her throat.

  We laugh and make karate chopping motions and shooting gestures at the door. I’m still killing the door when she holds up the photo.

  “Who is this, Jackson? What a cool dress!”

  “That’s my mother.”

  Esmerelda’s eyes open wide. It’s like receiving an electric shock. Her eyes are green. I could fall into them, pools of green light. I haven’t really seen her eyes before. I realize she keeps them half-closed most of the time as if narrowed against cigarette smoke.

  “She’s holding a microphone—is your mom a singer?”

  “Yeah.” I’m still looking at her eyes. There’s something cat-like, a bit magical about her green eyes and black hair. You don’t see that combination very often. You’d see it on a witch maybe, or Wonder Woman. Esmerelda suddenly looks very intense.

  “What does she sing? What is her name?”

  “Valerie, like this street. That’s partly why we moved here.

  Well, I guess that’s what helped her decide, anyway. She sings blues, jazz. She’s not famous or anything.” I look at the photo. “That was taken at the casino in the city, just before she left. She used to do a midnight spot there on Saturday nights.” I look closer. “Her eyes are all red because of the flash. Funny how a flash makes everyone look like the devil.”

  “The casino.” Esmerelda draws in her breath. She studies the photo. “My dad went there once. Is it the Blue Moon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She looks like she’d be a great singer. Do you sing?”

  I laugh. “No way. Well, only in the shower.”

  Esmerelda shakes her head. Her black hair catches rays of light from the window. It looks almost wet, it’s so shiny. Suddenly she grabs my hand and pulls me into the living room. “So that’s why you have a keyboard here, and the guitar, and the amp and microphone, and oh look, you even have those conga drums. Do you know what? I love to sing. I sing all the time. Yeah, in the shower, everywhere. I was in the school choir and last year I even did a solo. Well, it would have been a solo if Lilly hadn’t insisted on sharing it with me. But I wasn’t scared or anything. When I sing, I forget everything else.”

  “That’s what Mom says.” A sharp ache starts just under my rib cage. I think of Mom, how she looks when she’s singing. Happy. She hasn’t looked like that for a long time.

  “Can we turn this on?” Esmerelda taps the keyboard. “I’m taking piano lessons, but we don’t have one at home.”

  I switch it on and she tries out the different rhythms—swing, Latin American, rock.

  “If you know how to play the piano, you can compose songs and accompany yourself as you sing them.” She tosses her head importantly. Her dark hair is still moving as the rest of her stops. It’s like a wave coming into shore. “Does your mother do that?”

  “What?

  “Make up songs.”

  “Sometimes.” The living room is so different with Esmerelda Marx in it. “When Mom worked at the casino, before this new manager came, she used to sing her own songs. They’re pretty mournful, you know, all in minor chords about people leaving each other and having no money, but dat’s dem blues, as she says.”

  I remember how at Trenches Road I’d come home from school and Mom’d be rehearsing. I’d go and make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sit out on the balcony. Her voice would float out to me, as rich as hot chocolate. There were questions and answers in the music, no nasty surprises. I felt full sitting out there, satisfied, and it wasn’t just from the sandwich. Once I told her she was like the number eight. I meant it as a compliment but she frowned. She thought I meant she was too round. “I’d rather be skinny and angular, like seven,” she said. I told her she didn’t want that, because seven is particularly mean-looking, like a medieval scythe. You could take someone’s head off in one blow with one of those things. But she must not have been convinced about the scythe thing because after that I noticed how we had all this Diet Coke in the fridge and tons of lettuce. After work, though, late at night, she’d sneak up plates of french fries from the café below.

  “It must be so great, your mother being a singer,” Esmerelda says.

  “Yeah, well,” I say. “It means we move a lot. We have to go wherever she can get work.” I think of Mom this morning and her bright face as she put on too much lipstick in front of the mirror. “Wish me luck, Jackson,” she said, with a big false smile. I wanted to, but I knew the job she was going for wasn’t what she really wanted. “We have to pay the rent,” she’d said last night. “Dreams are expensive.”

  I could feel the black cloud coming down over me so I shook my head to clear it. I didn’t want to spoil even a second of this miraculous afternoon. “Esmerelda sounds like a singer’s name,” I say, “or maybe an actress.” I’ve read in Mom’s magazines that women like you to ask questions about them and their feelings. And anyway, I was interested. “Is it Spanish?”

  Esmerelda shrugs. “It was the name of a mermaid in a movie my mother saw as a child. She said she always wanted a romantic life, and there’s not a lot of it in the banking world. I guess she wanted something different for me.” She laughs. “‘You’ve got to balance your accounts, Ez. Mind your deposits and withdrawals, otherwise the bottom line of life will reach up and swallow you.’”

  When Esmerelda does her mother’s voice she puts on this flat nasal tone and it’s hilarious. She sounds just like the finance reporter on TV, the one mom throws her shoes at. I start doing it too, not throwing my shoes that is, but making my voice go down like hers at the end of each sentence, as if announcing a funeral. We start laughing, and we can’t stop. I look at Esmerelda hooting away and suddenly I feel like I’ve known her all my life. She doesn’t look like Wonder Woman anymore. Funny how when you laugh at the same thing, at the same time, you feel like you’re not alone anymore. Suddenly I want to tell her everything, about the terrible quiet and the stinginess of odd numbers. But she gets started first.

  “I’ve always lived on this street,” she says wistfully, looking around the room. “I can’t wait to travel. Have you ever been outside Australia?”

  “Yeah, to the U.S. But we didn’t stay long. I remember on our last night we went out to a diner and had chocolate cake for dinner.
There’s a photo of me somewhere with chocolate all over my face.”

  Which makes me remember the ten little boats sitting on the kitchen table. A growl of hunger swirls in my stomach. “Hey, let’s eat, I was practically dying of starvation before you got here.”

  We go and get the cakes and Esmerelda suggests we sit outside. It’s a balmy (not barmy, well, maybe just a bit) afternoon and we can smell the jasmine climbing all over the soundproof fence.

  “That’s nice, the jasmine,” I say casually. “You never get that smell in the city. Where we lived it was mainly bus exhaust and paella.”

  “What’s paella?”

  I tell her about the Spanish dish, the shrimp and chicken, mussels nestled in their shells, and the greasy fingers you get when you eat it. She tells me how great it must be to know that sort of exotic stuff. While she’s talking, I’m eating five cakes. They’re light and lemony, with sugar frosting that melts on your tongue. I’m hypnotized by how good they are.

  “I’d rather eat your mother’s cakes than paella any day,” I say, wiping my mouth. I can feel the sugar tingling on my chin. “It’s not that great, you know, moving around all the time. You’re always the new kid. You hardly have time to learn people’s names before you have to start all over again.”

  “Mmm,” says Esmerelda. “Will you forget mine, do you think?” She opens her eyes wide suddenly, and I get that feeling of falling again. Now I think her eyes are more like a stretch of grass, maybe a golf course: green, smooth, with no odd spiky bits. You could lie down in them, close your own eyes…

  She’s still staring at me, and now she’s fluttering her eyelashes. She looks like an actress on TV. You can tell she’s thinking about how she looks, and I wish she wouldn’t. I liked how it was before, when there was nothing else between us.

  “I won’t ever forget your name,” I tell her. Oh, how corny that sounds. Pathetic. I snort. “I mean, it’s too long—there are four syllables before you can even draw breath.”

  We both look down at the plate. There’s only one cake left. We stare at it. “Well, just call me Ez then if it’s easier,” she says, and takes the cake. “Everyone else does.” I notice her eyes are narrow again.