Teenager

Advance Praise for Bud Smith’s

Teenager

"Kody and Teal are the latest memorable additions to that venerable American tradition of They’re young, they’re in love, and they’ll shoot if they have to, lighting out for the West and freedom. Wildly romantic, blithely clueless, and always headlong, they are above all else passionately appreciative of the miracle of someone else having chosen, of all things, them, and everywhere they go, they reveal, in all its doofy and intermittent heartlessness and lethality, the America that spawned them."

—Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six

From the Graceland mansion to an alpaca farm in Montana, from a chapel in the Grand Canyon to the ancient forests of California, this is a love story as epic and eccentric as America. In prose that crackles and sings off the page, Bud Smith has written a humorous and tender new classic.

—Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten

"Written in sentences as spare and fine as line drawings, Teenager is a blood-soaked love story that is at once hopeless and hopeful, reckless yet redeeming. A ton of fun."

—Lee Clay Johnson, author of Nitro Mountain

"Bud Smith is a classic writer who taps into the absurd skillfully. His dry, deft, enthusiastic language guts without being sentimental. Teenager is a study on the gnawing American desire for escape; the lengths we will go to elude boredom, find love, and feel connected. From Tennessee to Montana, I’ll follow Kody and Teal wherever they take me."

—Halle Hill, author of Good Women

"Teenager won’t make you want to be young again, but you may be shocked at what it awakens in you, the feelings and memories of long-buried past selves. Bud Smith asks us to not only remember those past selves, but to handle them gently. A rare novel that manages to be both sharp-edged and deeply romantic, classic yet wholly fresh."

—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

A gift to readers who still care about the timeless problem of young men and women finding their place together in this world—or not. Should Tella get in another stolen car with Kody and flee with him to the Montana of his imagination? Both quests are represented here, hers and his, yin and yang, and Smith tells it all with ecstatic wit and feeling and innocence. To have captured this duality on paper demanded more than wildness, more than heart—all of which Smith has to burn—but also will and skill and ingenuity.

—Atticus Lish, author of The War for Gloria

Bud Smith

Teenager

Bud Smith works heavy construction in New Jersey. His story Violets appeared in The Paris Review.

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, MAY 2022

Copyright © 2022 by Bud Smith

Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Rae Buleri

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593315224

Ebook ISBN 9780593315231

Cover design by Tyler Comrie

vintagebooks.com

ep_prh_6.0_148355208_c0_r0

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

Zero

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II

Chapter Nine

Nine and a Half

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Part III

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Fifteen and a Half

Chapter Sixteen

Part IV

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Eighteen and a Half

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Part V

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Part VI

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Part VII

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Part VIII

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-five

Chapter Fifty-six

Chapter Fifty-seven

Chapter Fifty-eight

Chapter Fifty-nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-one

Chapter Sixty-two

Last

Acknowledgments

for the Wiley family

I

Zero

An envelope fell through the slot. The guard called his name.

Me? Kody stood from the table. The chair fell over.

You got something, Green.

The guard held the envelope up to the fluorescent light and squinted. Full of poison or hand grenades or what.

Does it say Tella Carticelli?

Kody had sent her love letter after love letter. Testaments of his devotion. One a day. Counting down the time till he was released from juvie and they could figure out their future together. She was pregnant with his baby. He’d suggested thousands of names.

No sender.

The guard took his pocketknife out and slit the envelope. He carefully shook a slip of paper onto his desk.

Kody walked over and held out his hand. To his surprise, the man actually passed it over to him without making a scene, without reading aloud all the gooey details his girlfriend had finally put into longhand.

But the letter was from her fucking father.

Kody,

Tella is leaving. You’ll never see her again. Move on. She’s not worth it. I have a gun now. The law will be on my side.

Have a Blessed Day,

Arturo Carticelli

The rest of that afternoon was spent calculating. The other kids played Scrabble. Talked shit. He was quiet for once. Devising. The sun fell, the earth got dark. Lights out. Locked in. Everyone else asleep. He heard the guy in the other bunk snoring and then he heard the lazy click of boot steps on linoleum.

The night guard passed by in the corridor with a flashlight. Kody watched through the wired glass as the beam faded around the corner and was gone. The guard was going to the machine to get a coffee.

Kody fished out the stolen ring of keys from under his pillow and let himself out onto the main floor of the facility.

The door closed softly behind him and he padded barefoot down the waxed hall. His T-shirt and sweatpants were bone white and he felt illuminated too brightly, too vulnerable, easy to spot. He threw the pajamas into the first garbage can and rushed naked the rest of the way, keys jangling.

He slipped past the desk and tried three keys in the storage room door before it clicked open. He went inside and pulled the chain and the bare lightbulb came on, buzzing.

Kody saw the bins with everyone’s confiscated property. He pulled them out one at a time, searching for his stuff. Then he saw it, a cartoon chicken screen-printed on a navy T-shirt. His work uniform from Fried Paradise. He pulled the shirt over his head. As he stepped into his blue jeans, he heard the guard coming back humming a song. Kody reached up and pulled the chain and the lightbulb went dark.

He stood frozen, listening, thinking. Tella is leaving. You’ll never see her again. Leaving to where? And when? Tonight? Tomorrow? It was a lie, he thought. Something to scare him straight. Whatever the true tactic, he’d have to go and see for himself. It was one thing to be locked up for some crime he’d committed, but he hadn’t done anything wrong in his life yet. He’d fix that soon.

Kody reached back in the bin and felt for his socks and sneakers, put them on. Found his wallet. His medication was in the nurses’ station but he didn’t know which of the funny fun house doors on the way out led there. He’d have to leave without his pills.

He heard the guard sighing and then blowing on his hot coffee, trying to cool it down for the first sip. Kody felt the jagged teeth of each key to the facility, one by one, trying to imagine in the pitch black which one would get him through the metal-mesh gate and down the hallway where the emergency lights were glowing.

When the guard finally stood up and went down the other hall toward the bathroom, Kody crept out of the storage room and slipped through the shadows.

The first key he tried worked. The gate creaked open. He hustled down the corridor to the second gate.

Again the first key fit. But it wouldn’t turn. He tried another, and another, worrying about the guard, but keeping his cool, thinking of Tella, of the bomb threat that got him locked up in the first place, of his foster mom’s trailer—he wouldn’t be going back there. Thinking of Tella’s father, mother, brother, the water tower, the Scrabble game two of the other kids were playing in the rec room that morning and all the three-letter words they’d made. Their low scores.

The lock disengaged. He stepped through the second gate. He slipped out the front door of the Mayweather, no alarms sounding. He couldn’t hold back his laughter. His sneakers crunched on the frosty grass. He sprinted across the full-moon-lit field. Carefully scaled the far chain-link. Didn’t even damage himself on the razor wire. All of it, beginner’s luck.

One

The air was cold at the top of the water tower. Kody could see the whole town and off into the Pine Barrens. All day he’d gotten ready, planned, prepared, scouted, held back seeing her. Ran reconnaissance. Now it was almost time.

He had no coat. Goose bumps rose on his skin. He shivered in jeans and a T-shirt. It was March, the magic hour.

He raised the binoculars and found Tella Carticelli’s little brick house. The last one on a dead-end street. Right across from the church. The school bus came and she stepped off and walked up the lawn. She was in her Catholic-school uniform, same as when he first met her. Ribbons in her hair. It was understood, they’d use the dress to start a campfire in the hills beyond the reservoir.

His name was Kody Rawlee Green. He called her Teal Cartwheels. They were the same age but went to different schools. It was the afternoon after his escape from the youth detention center and she was hours away from being stuck on an airplane.

—

She walked to the rhododendrons lining the front of the house, knelt down, and tilted back a concrete head of St. Anthony. But no spare house key was underneath it. She let St. Anthony fall and sat down on the front steps, waiting for her parents to come home.

He thought of himself as the pilot of a strange spaceship, lumbering back from utter blackness, controls set solely on the redemptive glory of Tella’s light.

The wind whipped and he shuddered and stomped his feet on the catwalk to warm up. From that distance he couldn’t see her face. He was growing impatient to be near her, hold her, kiss her, talk. There was a lot to say.

Usually he carried a locket with her picture, but it’d been taken from him by the sheriff and he never got it back. It was fine, he’d get another, take her picture again.

The locket she wore had a portrait of him snapped at Fried Paradise, dropping the breaded chicken into a vat of grease. He’d begged for a better photo, but she’d just smooched it and said he looked most handsome.

Teal didn’t have an after-school job. He used to be her after-school activity, in secret. All the while, her mom thought Tella was destined to become a nun.

My girlfriend the nun, he thought, laughing.

Things were in motion. He hugged himself hard. Teeth chattering. He’d wait for her parents to come home and he’d climb down the water tower when everything was perfect and he’d meet them for the first time. He’d reason with them. He’d drive over to Teal’s house and take her away. He didn’t have a driver’s license but he’d stolen a car.

Kody wished he had the orange scarf she’d knitted for him in home economics. He usually hated scarves but now wouldn’t mind one. Forget looking tough. And he wished they’d hurry the hell up.

He was giving her parents one last chance, though he didn’t feel they deserved it. Being diplomatic. He figured life should be like that. Free will and all. No destiny. You get to decide what you will be punished for. Don’t forget, everybody is punished for something.

In the distance, Kody saw a million black starlings swarm together in the sky to form a skull.

Spring was coming, they’d gotten that right.

Kody wasn’t sure if the birds were real. He had hallucinations all up and down a sliding scale. He had a constant headache too. He patted his pockets again but of course he didn’t have his pills. That was just too bad.

He reached in his jeans and took out the wrinkled letter from her father and read it for the hundredth time.

I have a gun now.

Kody loved that part.

He saw Arturo Carticelli’s beat-to-shit red pickup truck wobble down the block. Sand in the bed, broken shovels, rusted wheelbarrow. A lousy mason and father.

Arturo parked in the driveway and appeared from the cab, ghostly with cement dust. Curly hair, messy mustache. Kody wondered how he ever fit inside the cab of the truck. Tella hadn’t gotten her looks from that rhinoceros.

Teal sat up straight on the steps but did not stand. Arturo walked over and crouched in front of her. He spoke a few words. She didn’t respond. He touched her shoulder and kissed her on the mouth. She pulled away.

Arturo stood and went into the house. Tella remained seated. Now Kody thought she might be crying. He waved to get her attention but she couldn’t see him up there. He was too far. He didn’t want that to happen again. He wanted her to see him, wherever he was, for as long as they both lived. He wanted to make everything good for her.

Down below in the car, Kody had camping gear, the U.S. Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76, countless atlases of America. He had five changes of clothes. Canned goods. MREs. Some cash, unscratched lottery tickets, a stolen credit card, and, most important, a gun.

Mimi Carticelli’s silver Valiant rounded the corner and headed toward the dead end. Kody felt his pulse quicken. Teal’s beautiful mother. Smoke began to rise out of the chimney.

The last frozen night was on the way. The light was blue-gray steel and ice. The orange sun vanished over the soft curve of the earth. He worried he’d never glimpse another.

Everywhere he looked he saw pine trees, power lines, traffic lights, houses that all looked the same.

The water tower perch he stood on had a typo:

home of the screming eagles.

According to the water tower, the town was nameless. It existed merely for typos and high school football. It was a careless void in which they lived. But Kody and Teal were leaving.

Mimi stepped out onto the driveway. Long dark hair. A white dress with blue flowers or birds, he couldn’t tell. Shrug sweater around her shoulders. As a young adult she’d drifted on a raft made of tires, crossed the Atlantic from Havana. Now she was the assistant bank manager at the place over by the bowling alley.

Teal looked up at her mother. Mimi breezed by wordlessly into the house. They hadn’t spoken since Teal’s procedure.

Satisfied they were all home, Kody climbed down the ladder. One hundred and eighty feet. At the base of the tower, he was obscured by shadow and felt tiny again.

He knew he was being dramatic. Her parents had only heard horrible things about him from people who didn’t know how he really was. Teal had come to his defense, he was sure she had. It didn’t matter. Kody was coming to the house not only uninvited but forbidden.

This was his big debut. He tucked in his shirt and tried to smooth his cowlick, but his mouth was so dry he couldn’t get any spit.

Kody Rawlee Green got in the boosted car and started it after two attempts. The ignition was weird. Bats swooped out of the trees in pursuit of insects fleeing through the vivid dusk.

It was spaghetti night at the Carticelli house.

Two

The door was locked. But he had taken Teal’s key with the hot pink rubber cover. Kody stepped inside. The house smelled like basil. Sausage cooking. Garlic bread toasting. Potpourri in a dish. Woodsmoke.

Mimi flashed by in the kitchen carrying a steaming pot.

Elvis Presley sang Love Me Tender on the tube stereo.

Kody ducked down the hallway and hid in the shadows. An unfamiliar voice came from inside Teal’s bedroom. He worried about this extra person. A relative. Cousin. New boyfriend. A cop already looking for him.

Then the voice began to speak in a warbled alien tongue. Kody realized it was a foreign-language instructional cassette tape. Common phrases spoken in English, repeated back in Italian.

She was in her room packing. He didn’t have to see it to know. Kody’s sneakers sank into the mint shag. Quicksand. He could have stayed outside her door, forever stuck. He flattened his back against a panel of dark floral wallpaper. A drop of sweat popped on his brow. Peonies all down the corridor.

A toilet flushed. He let out a nervous laugh. Arturo Carticelli, all 252 pounds of him, was in the nearby bathroom and Kody hadn’t known. He’d wrongly assumed the man was already at the table with a six-dollar jug of wine.

On the opposite wall were family photos galore. Teal in her confirmation dress. Her older brother, Neil, dressed up as a bald eagle for Halloween. Arturo and Mimi, younger, more slender, in neons. Kody thought they looked like any average family did, absolutely unhinged.

There had once been many religious paintings and prayer plaques on the walls, but the Carticellis had recently left the Catholic Church. The gaps on the walls had been filled with photos of Elvis, all phases of his career. One of them even autographed to the mother.

The toilet flushed again.

Kody ducked into a different doorway. Her brother’s bedroom was empty. The place had the preserved feeling of a crypt missing the body. He was alive somewhere out at sea.

Neil was two years older than Teal. In the navy. Sailor boy. Had the pull-up record at the academy. Owned a silver Black Phantom bike. Was some kind of reborn hard naval badass. Was serving on some secret warship. Kody didn’t know anything else about him, just that he was gone and that made Teal cry.

Kody felt extremely tired. He looked at the bed. Yes, he could close his eyes and dream the dreams of Neil Carticelli in the bed of Neil Carticelli. The brother’s dreams would be healthy ones broadcasted from a life of disciplined order. A big ship, a uniform, a rank, a stipend, a bunk, bunkmates. They fed you. They prayed for you. Must be nice. Neil, off gallivanting.

But someone had to be here to help Teal. Neil should not have left. Kody sat down on the bed and rested his elbows on his knees, leaned forward, tried to understand.

A poster for West Side Story was on Neil’s wall. Kody didn’t like anything about that West Side Story. Just let the happy couple have their happiness, okay. Shakespeare had it wrong. So did all the copycats. Everything didn’t have to end so viciously.

He leaped up and tore down the poster. Ripped it apart with his sneaker heel.

He walked to Neil’s tiny desk. A notebook just said Breathing on the cover. He looked inside. Dates and times. Each day the time got a little longer. He realized it was from when Neil had been training himself to hold his breath. Neil’s record had been over four minutes. Who knew what it was now. Kody tore out the final page and folded it and stuck it in his wallet.

He opened the closet and saw boots sticking out. Someone hiding inside. He parted the clothes and no one was there. Neil’s polished boots. Dark leather. Kody kicked off his sneakers and pulled one of the boots on. Perfect fit. He yanked on the other boot and tied the laces with a square knot. Less experienced survivalists would use a granny knot. He kicked his old sneakers far under the bed.

Kody put his ear to the wall and listened for Teal. He thought about doing their secret knock but didn’t. Things were happening a certain way. He’d considered the consequences and was fine with all of them. Jail. Death. Hell.

The tape said, Come faccio a contattare la polizia.

Her sweet voice repeated it back.

The instructor said in singsong English, How do I contact the police?

Kody covered his mouth. The universe was toying with him again. He removed his ear from the wall. He was sweating or the wall was.

The power had gone out two summers before. The bedside clock blinked 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. Kody unplugged her brother’s clock.

Arturo came out of the bathroom humming. He knocked on his daughter’s door. Come on out, it’s time.

Don’t want to.

Your mother made a special dinner.

I’m not hungry.

You’ll make her upset.

Kody could feel the slow dragging revolutions of the planet. He felt gravity crushing down. On her side of the wall, Teal felt exactly the same.

Come and eat.

Teal mumbled something neither man could decipher.

Arturo padded off down the hall.

I want Kody here, she said louder to herself.

Kody stoop up, heart bursting. Maybe they could just run away. Maybe he didn’t have to confront the parents. Arturo’s humming grew faint. Elvis ended. More Elvis came on. No, Kody decided, running away was pointless. Her parents would find them. They had to be dealt with. A clean break had to be established. There was tonight and tonight only to do it.

Teal said something else through the wall and he thought it was his own name again. She had no idea he was so close. Just two arm lengths away.

Kody gave the wall between them a kiss, and from the kiss he drew courage.

He walked out of the room and crept up the hallway toward the parents. He felt like a detective in a dime-store pulp novel. He entered the living room and paused. The brother’s heavy boots sunk him deeper into the carpet. A new start was just a few steps away.

Up above the fireplace, he saw the painting of Jesus had been replaced by a black velvet Elvis in a snow-white suit, blue suede shoes. They’d reused the ornate gold frame.

Elvis looked right through Kody. Wherever he stood, Elvis’s eyes followed.

Kody heard the clink of plates in the breakfast nook. The din of cutlery. Arturo and Mimi had already begun to eat.

In the corner of the living room he watched the mineral oil lamp rain down into its porcelain base. Teal’s parakeet, Winter, chirped in his brass cage.

He stepped across the threshold. Neither parent saw him. He watched for a moment. Arturo looked to be slurping up