It got so hot that the cheese buses broke down, and we had to walk home from school. Dad would have picked us up if we told him, and he did pick Lorris up, but I convinced him that we’d gotten some special buses shipped in from upstate, where the kids biked to school all the time because it was so safe. My friend Hayden and I walked toward our neighborhood together, taking everything in.
One of those days, Hayden told me that I couldn’t walk straight. I told him he was being ridiculous but it turned out he was right. I’d step with my left foot and fall two or three inches off my forward motion, and then readjust with my right foot, but four or five inches too far. Then I’d have to fix it with my left, but that came off the line a little too. I didn’t know it was happening. Somehow I got wherever I was going, but Hayden showed me how, if he was standing pretty close to my shoulder, I kept knocking him, on every third or fourth step.
We were walking down Thirty-Third, which comes off Kings Highway at a curve, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it all the way home. The more I thought about my feet the more inches I diverged right and left. Hayden held my right arm and tried to force me forward, but I started breathing heavy and told him I needed a break. That’s when the station wagon pulled over, and someone rolled down the window.
It was a high school kid, with a Madison football sweatshirt and the chinstrap beard that everyone who could was wearing that year. Hayden was pretending that the white tuft on his chin counted. The driver also had a Madison sweatshirt on, and I saw him use his right hand to put the car into park.
Don’t you live on Quentin? the guy in the passenger seat said to us. You coming down from Hudde?
Hayden said yes.
Jump in, he said. We’ll drop you off—it’s too hot to walk. He leaned his arm out the window and reached behind to open the back door.
Once we were in the car the Madison kid in the passenger seat turned the music up, and it wasn’t that it was louder than in our car but it was thumping more in my chest. You like Z100? he said, smiling, leaning his left hand behind the headrest.
I was watching the driver while Hayden answered for us. He was driving with two fingers, his index and middle ones on one hand, his other arm out the window. Somehow we were going just as fast as my dad always goes on side streets, but we were getting the soft stops that only my mom, at fifteen miles per hour, was able to get. At the stop sign on Avenue P, he jolted out to look twice, in exact time with the music. His friend was drumming on the dashboard with both hands.
Dad was sitting on the stoop when they dropped us off, and he stood up once he recognized me getting out of the car. The car waved away. I was able to walk again, the zigzag curse gone. Hayden said, Hi, Mr. Favero, and then turned to me. That car was disgusting, huh? he said. I was looking at my dad’s face. When I got up to him, he grabbed me under the armpit and dragged me up the stoop. Hayden didn’t look away. We were inside with the air-conditioning on when he flat-palmed me in the stomach.
Are you serious? he said. Are you serious?
• • •
When Dad came home with the third air conditioner, it was still blistering out. There were tornadoes in Texas, more than they’d ever seen before, and in earth science Ms. Donatelli said it was what we had to look forward to: global warming in America. Someone in the back asked if this meant no more snow days, and she said, Maybe no snow, period.
He had the air conditioner in the trunk of the driving instructor car. You don’t notice until you’re close to it, but those cars are a little skinnier than regular ones. Dad says it helps the kids who have a bad sense of hand-eye coordination. There’s more wiggle room when you’re trying to squeeze through tight spaces. He says that the first thing he asks a student when they get in the car is whether they played sports when they were younger, or if they still do now. If not, he’d know it was going to be a long day. You can’t imagine how crappy those kids are, especially the Hasidic Jews.