The Field Guide to the North American Teenager

We all mess things up. It’s what you do with the mess that matters.

Why are you so mad at me?" Norris shouted back. The neighbors could definitely hear them now. His throat 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 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 our blood alcohol level and belligerent language and how you had it coming.

Everyone's a dick by someone else's standards.

Yes, we're all overly polite, forage for berries in the summers, and craft simple wooden objects of great beauty around the fire at night.

You’ve gotten gayer,” Norris noted after a long comfortable silence. Eric gasped and moved an exaggeratedly limp wrist to his chest, feigning dramatic outrage.

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.

The way his mother loved him was occasionally vexing in how overwhelming it could be. Like the sun or some other celestial body; facing it too directly might kill him.

To my mother, Belzie. I would have made a terrible doctor, mom. People would have died.

Who they are when there are other people around isn’t who they are when they’re alone.

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren’t just you; your success was also your parents’, your cousins’, your relatives’ still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.

By and large, Anderson High was an easy school. Not the people, obviously—walking land mines, each and every one of them—but the classes themselves were all fairly simple.

The first skill an only child learns is to be alone and completely satisfied. Norris had fourteen years of experience under his belt; having someone else to talk to was nice, sure, but it had never been a necessity.

Most people—heck, most living beings—have fight or flight as their two responses to crisis. You, Norris? You're a poker. You don't fight; you poke, and then run away. I don't know why. Maybe so you can feel rightfully victimized?

THE END But also, like, not really. That’s kind of the point.

It doesn’t matter if you make a mess. It matters that you fix it. Maybe the whole point of approaching life as origami that the documentary had missed was learning to fold your sharp edges.

But, as his father had said: It doesn't matter if you make a mess. It matters that you fix it.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. It was an unspoken half time in this emotional relay race Norris had been drafted into without notice. Norris couldn’t relate, but he could remember all the eyes that had been on his Habs T-shirt on the way to Austin. It was small and silly by comparison, but he still hated the feeling of being looked at, being judged. People he’d never seen before coming to their own conclusions about who he was. He imagined all those people knowing something intimate and personal about him.

He felt settled in a way he hadn’t since moving to Austin. He had Liam, and somewhere to play hockey on weekends. Work was great too. And Aarti? Aarti was right here. It was almost surreal.

I'm the understudy for Negro on Ice

Um, Liam says that no one is normal,” Norris ventured now that it was clearly his turn again. “He says we’re all just different flavors of fucked-up, hiding it as best as we can. I’m starting to think that maybe he was right.

You’re a little bit of a jock,” Liam mused. “If we’re going to boil individuals down to a single label that encompasses the whole of their being . . . between the hockey and the skiing and the fact that you spend a lot of time with cheerleaders trying to figure out how to successfully date ‘hot chicks,’ your closest category is, well, jock.

Well, I don’t have a car, okay!” Norris began to sputter, hearing his voice pitch higher. “Not everyone can just borrow their dad’s Rolls. That’s discrimination, Madison. Discrimination against pedestrians!

What on earth are you eating?” “Chicken, bacon, both pig and turkey, and sausage patty in the middle,” Goade said, almost proudly. “Does it taste like you’re running around a farm and biting a bunch of different animals in a row?

He wasn’t lonely, just tremendously bored. The biggest fear was that three days in, Anderson High had already run out of anything new to offer.

But that was okay by him, he realized. Liam was going to be his teammate, and that was one label Norris was actually comfortable with.

She’d let out a laugh, not seeming to mind his choice of words in expressing himself—which, let’s face it, definitely boded well for any long-term dating prospects.

And in an instant, the Bone Yard completely disappeared behind a wall of stars. The lights ran floor to ceiling; some of them faded gently in and out, while others threw a soft, steady glow. Still, it was an obscene amount of electrical voltage that turned the place into a fairy-tale wonderland.

Aarti blinked at him, and as the moment stretched on, Norris felt like an old photograph developing in Aarti’s mind. An image suddenly forming.

Another thing Norris and Eric had always had in common in a school that catered to mostly white and Catholic families was that dread that at any point their entire existence might get reduced to a single-letter word. N-word. F-word. Norris never judged Eric for wanting to avoid that if he could.

It occurred to Norris at that moment that Hairy Armpits probably would never give this moment a second thought, whereas, for Norris, it was already congealing into something rock-hard in his chest. It would definitely be one of those repressed high school wounds that only decades of living on a yacht made of nachos would someday come close to healing.