Everything Breaks (7 page)

• • •

Not many people came to school the next morning. They took the early out we'd been given for permission to skip all day, which I'd thought about doing myself. But you have to do
something
even on the morning they're digging graves for your three best friends. Clevesdale High School, with its bright, humming fluorescent lights and shiny silver-flecked blue floor tiles and general air of safety and boredom, would be so much better than my room, where that rock of Trey's still balanced on my windowsill, teetering mysteriously several times a night with or without there being wind.

And so I spent my first-period study hall in the library, flipping through sports magazines and not really seeing what I was looking at. Then I accidentally picked up an
American Life
and it slipped through my fingers to the floor, falling open to a picture of the airliner that crashed in that Ohio field last month. There was the doomed plane just before the crash, shiny against an innocent blue sky, tilted in a weird way as though it was the pencil in the hand of some crazy god. You could even make out a tiny row of windows running zipper-like right above its burning wing. If I had Bud's magnifying glass, the one he kept beside the TV book, I could even possibly make out the faces of some of the passengers. Then I might be able to figure out what they were thinking, those people in that shiny tube, looking out those thick round windows at a future that was no future at all.

My hands began to shake as I shoved that magazine into my backpack, then grabbed a second newsmagazine, a
Time,
where I found a full-page black-and-white photo of an AIDS victim hooked to machines. The man in that narrow bed was very young and as thin as Zero, and he looked straight out of the picture with hollow, accusing eyes. What did he know that no one knew who wasn't in his shoes?

Next, in a
Newsweek,
I found a picture of a bridge collapse that sent six cars plunging like stones to the bottom of a river. Four of the cars were visible in the picture, three caught in the act of sinking and one teetering on the tongue-like edge of a jagged splinter of asphalt. A blurry face stared from the backseat window of that teetering car.

The fourth picture was of a soldier in some recent war. He was defying the law of gravity, helped along by some sort of explosion behind him that, the caption said, took his life. But in the picture he was very much alive, flying like everyone dreamed of doing, like Zero thought he could do if he leaped from that chat pile, and thinking . . . what?

A
National Geographic
I grabbed had a double-page spread of a cage of monkeys on their way to receive lethal injections because they had some kind of weird tropical virus. The thing about that picture was the way one of the monkeys was sucking on a piece of banana with his eyes slightly closed. Unlike the guy trapped by tubes to his narrow bed or the people in those teetering or sinking cars, or probably even the flying soldier, that monkey had no inkling of what was about to happen to him.

That monkey looked as simply and perfectly happy as Trey always looked.
Don't you dare puke in my car, Graysten!
Trey, cheerful even as he peeled away from me, sailing down that dark bluff road for the very last time. Trey, grinning, easy with life, with his last two minutes of it, of life.

I didn't worry about whether Mr. Mayes, the librarian, noticed me stuffing my backpack with those magazines. That actually wasn't likely, since he's always on the Internet. But I didn't even worry about whether I was overstaying study hall. I had to follow this where it led, had to get that magnifying glass of Bud's to see these amazing pictures better so I could feel my way into that place where . . .

“Tucker?”

My heart took a lurch and I reluctantly raised my eyes to see Ms. Jazzmeyer's orange and black fingernails resting on my left shoulder like some bizarre tropical spider.

“Come with
me,
Tucker, okay?”

It wasn't really a question, since I had no choice. She let me go and turned to lead the way to her office, and I slipped that fifth magazine into my pack, wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans, and followed her.

She sat down behind her desk and gestured for me to drop into one of her two huge turquoise chairs. “I'm afraid the grief counselors from Tulsa were a bit delayed, Tucker,” she explained in a sorrowful voice. “No worries, they'll be here tomorrow. Still, we shouldn't wait that long to get
you
started working on your feelings.”

I swallowed and tried to resist touching my lips with my fingers to see if I was managing to work my face into an acceptable expression. “I can wait, no problem.”

She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes.

“Tuck, your teachers and classmates are terribly worried about you. You look like you haven't eaten or slept since it happened, but you won't confide in
any
one. A couple of young women have reported to me that you even hung up on their calls of concern. You
need
to talk about this, Tuck. Now nothing you say will shock me, and I promise our conversation won't go beyond this office. Just open up and tell me how you
feel.
”

It took me a while to come up with something. “I feel . . . surprised?”

She leaned forward, looking interested, which was the
last
thing I wanted. I desperately needed out of that suffocating turquoise chair, a chair that belonged in someone's living room, not in a high school office. But I was trapped by its bloated plastic arms in this room of ferny plants and Ms. Jazzmeyer's extensive glass bear collection. Also, it looked like the walls were slowly coming together to crush me.

I should have been with them!
Should I start howling that I'd let my three best friends go on without me and that I'd had no business staying behind? I might have done something, stopped them somehow, warned Trey to slow for that curve, jumped up and leaned far over the white leather back of the driver's seat in time to give the wheel a hard yank left? I'd always been their guard, their lookout. That's what a lookout did, he looked out for his people! Did she want me to start
screeching
all that like a person being turned inside out? I was supposed to be with them, I should have been with them, I was always with them, did she want me to start crying real tears about that and the related fact that I was now and would always be soul-tattooed, not to mention haunted by a small rock I didn't dare brush off the outside sill of my bedroom window? Why didn't I just get on the office intercom and explain all that so the whole school could hear it at once and whip out their phones to text me their concern?

And now this new thing, this dream thing, Trey unfriendly to me like I'd never once seen him, Trey's sarcastic voice squeezing in like a rat to gnaw at my aching brain.
Tucker Graysten, you innocent wonder, you . . .
Was Trey's postmortem sarcasm what she and her interested gallery of little glass bears wanted me to chat about?

“Ms. Jazzmeyer?” I whispered. “Let's say you're in an airliner falling from the sky. For those last few seconds, would you think of yourself as still alive, as a thinking person with a head full of plans, or if not, what
would
be in your head?”

She let me go soon after that. When I got to my locker, I dug out my protractor from the clutter at the bottom. I dropped my backpack onto the floor, took out the first magazine, and flipped it open to that jetliner. I measured the angle of its descent at fifty-two degrees, then I packed up and went home to change shirts for the funeral. Funerals.

VII

I HAD BEEN INSIDE
McElderry's Funeral
Home only once before, when my mom died. I couldn't see anything then, the heads all around me were too tall. Somebody gave me my first ever Tootsie Roll Pop, either from sympathy or to keep me quiet.

And now here I was climbing the very same stone steps her casket had been carried down eleven years ago. The very same steps.

“Oh, Tucker, good, there you are!” Aimee was just inside the big oak doorway, standing there in the dimness holding a white rose in each black-gloved hand. She held one of the roses out to me. “Here, take this. We saved you a seat. We're right near the front, right behind the section reserved for the families.”

I took the rose and she put her arm through mine and maneuvered us over the thick lobby carpeting and into the large room with all the church-like pews and the dozens of overpoweringly ugly flower arrangements.

She walked us slowly, showing me off like I was a catch, like I was Josh Hinstrom, for instance, the basketball team captain who'd been junior high homecoming king when Aimee was junior high homecoming queen back when we were all in eighth grade. I'm not Josh Hinstrom, not anyone she'd normally walk with, so I knew she was appointing me captain of this particular event, sole survivor, chief witness of the carnage, interesting for today, just like Zero had been interesting to her for a week or so until she figured out that he wasn't going to be tamed into anyone normal enough for her.

People turned to watch us go by, and Aimee touched a white cloth handkerchief to her eyes, reaching beneath the black veil attached to the front of her vintage hat.

I began to notice that there was no smell whatsoever in the room. The place smelled more like nothing than anyplace I'd ever been. The hundreds of flowers smelled especially like nothing, as if their smells had been drawn out of them with a long syringe.

For a panicked few seconds, I couldn't breathe. I made a gasping sound before I realized I was confusing lack of smell with lack of air. Aimee squeezed my arm hard as she shot me a don't-you-dare-embarrass-me look from behind that black veil of hers.

The organ kept playing long, sad chords that didn't seem to go anywhere. I strained to hear some sort of resolution, or even some sort of beauty, but it never came.

Steve's last music should have been Memphis blues, not this. Anything but this.

We reached the pew near the front where Aimee had organized the cheerleaders and class officers and people like that. She sat us down and I saw that everyone had a white rose at the ready, twirling it or letting it rest on the padding of the pew. Jawbones clenching and unclenching above stiff-collared dress shirts. Red, red lipstick and nail polish on the girls, and that hat of Aimee's with a coolness factor right off the charts.

We were the stars of a heartbreaking movie about fast cars and sudden death. The good-looking friends, the tragic survivors. Except that these people, this row of the class royalty, hadn't
been
Zero's friends, or Trey's, or Steve's. Trey and Steve and Zero were their own friends, we four were, the three of them and me. They were
my
friends. Mine.

I glared, hard, at each of the three shining boxes strategically placed right up front among the worst of those massive clots of flowers.
Do you see me, guys, alone here?

The organ gained some volume and the families were paraded to the front, held up by ushers. They looked doped up and out of it, especially Steve's mother. She looked like she was just learning how to walk. Jasper Nordike was pretty much holding her up. His face looked so weird that for a second I thought he was doing something strange with his wife's makeup to be in solidarity with Steve's trip down the bluff. Then I got a grip and figured out Jasper Nordike had an extreme cowboy tan, his forehead ghostly white from his Stetson, everything beneath it rawhide dark. Two people with Steve's mother and Jasper Nordike but not looking at them must have been Steve's dad and stepmother.

Zero's grandfather had the hot, roving eyes of a lunatic, and Trey's kid sister, Emilie, spotted me and waved a tiny sad wave. I automatically winked and gave her the thumbs-up sign, the sign I gave her about a million times when Trey put me in charge of teaching her how to ride her bike a couple of years ago. Stupid! That had been a stupid, stupid gesture that made me sick.

So I wouldn't do anything that stupid again, I slouched down, crossed my arms, and braced my neck over the hard curve at the top of the pew. I focused my eyes almost straight upward and concentrated on the border that ran just beneath the high ceiling of the room. Somebody had painted a long, skinny picture up there of old marble buildings surrounded by deep woods. Lots of sleepy-looking people in white robes lolled around the woods and sailed golden boats along a blue river that ran between the trees.

If that picture was supposed to be heaven, it looked way too slow for Trey and Steve, let alone Zero. I knew it wasn't exactly supposed to be heaven, though. It was just some imaginary place meant to lull you into thinking things would always stay the kind of bland that must pass for beautiful if you were as old as you were supposed to be to die. Beautiful like the odorless flowers and the going-nowhere organ chords and the cloud-thick pink carpet. I began peeling strips of green from the stem of my rose.

The organ droned on. Time went by. People walked to the podium and read things. A trio of girls from the senior class sang a sad song. Aimee finally dug into my ribs with her elbow, indicating it was nearly time for our big moment here on royalty row, for us to lead the exit from this place by filing past the grief-stricken families and then the three caskets, leaving our perfect white roses in heartbreaking disarray on their closed lids.

I looked down and saw that my hands were suddenly shaking quite badly. My heart had somehow morphed into a flopping fish in the oxygenless river that ran along the border beneath the ceiling. I was drowning in that fake water. I broke out in a sweat that soaked my shirt, and my lips went numb. I couldn't remember how buttons worked, so I grabbed my collar and ripped it open with a jerk of my fist.

And then I shot to my feet, panting, swaying a little in that ocean of seated people.

Aimee clutched at my sleeve, trying to pull me down. I saw an usher hurrying toward me. A few of the family members turned to see what was going on behind them.

When Zero's mother saw me standing there alone, she stood as well. In fact, she eased quickly past some of the knees between her and me and then leaned over the back of her pew to grasp my wrist. We locked eyes and I saw that hers were completely blank, as though all the crazy fun inside her, all the silliness and laughter, had been carved out and thrown away.

One rainy week near the end of last May, I spent hours each afternoon with Zero and his mother, watching movies at the crazy, cluttered trailer where the two of them lived. I was there because Zero had a free trial week of the movie channel, and with all the rain neither of us could work outside at our lawn-mowing jobs or even think about organizing a barbecue. All the dishes were usually dirty, so we used paper cones made from the Sunday comics to hold the cheese popcorn Zero's mother was always making for us.

Once, when the movie was bad, silly-bad, a real howler, Zero and I started throwing popcorn at each other. From where she'd sprawled on the couch, Zero's mother jabbed her bare toes into our sides, tickling us like we were little kids. Then Zero and I rolled around wrestling on the littered carpet while his mother threw
her
popcorn at us and laughed herself into a coughing fit.

Now she whispered my name in that hushed place. “Tucker?”

I looked at her, waiting.

You saw him, didn't you?
she asked me with her hollowed-out eyes.

“Yes, I saw him,” I whispered back to her.

And then she looked slowly down the rest of that aisle of white-rose-bearing junior class royalty. She focused on them one by one, and they all dropped their eyes quickly so that not one of them had to meet her bruised, withering gaze.

When she'd finished that, she gave a hard smile and looked at me again.

“They need to see too,” she breathed so quietly no one else could have heard.

She beckoned to the usher that loomed nearby, and he scuttled to her side and leaned one ear close. She gave him whispered instructions, and you could tell from his expression that he didn't like what he was hearing. He whispered something back, but she glared a response so firm that he gave a sigh and nodded, then grimly signaled for the other three ushers to join him up front.

Together, they unlatched the lid of Zero's casket and propped it wide open.

Aimee shrank back, but I suddenly felt true hot anger making me brave and foolhardy. I took her arm and pulled her to her feet, almost yanked her, and together we walked past the two closed caskets and then stopped before the single open one.

She glanced at Zero, then she jerked her arm from me and hurried on down the aisle that led outside. All the kids that came behind us did pretty much the same, dropped their roses, trampled them into the carpet as they gave Zero a quick look, then made toward the exit with wide eyes, gulping or even retching. A couple of the varsity football players loped down the exit aisle with their hands over their mouths.

I stayed at the casket until everyone on royalty row had left, then I looked at Zero's mother. She stood again and began unwinding a long and beautiful cloth she had around her own neck. It was this batik stuff she makes, a real art form, Janet says. She held the blue scarf out to me and I got it and took it back to Zero's casket.

It wasn't that his head was still missing clear to his eyebrows, like it had been at the beach. No, the funeral people had molded him a replacement skull with some sort of clay. But it was so obviously fake that it was really
worse
than no skull at all. For one thing, it was slightly the wrong color, too gray for his skin. And all his beautiful dreads were gone; what hadn't been taken by the rough stone of the bluff had now been shaved.

I leaned down and wrapped the batik around and around his head, giving him the protection of all those Haitian animals his mother had designed—manatees, fish, turtles.

I glanced at her again over my shoulder, and when she nodded, I closed the casket forever on Zero's interesting, intelligent face. Then I walked outside, into the clear air.

Aimee was waiting. She slapped my face.

“What's the
matter
with you, Tucker? Don't you have any respect at
all
? Doesn't his own
mother
? You should . . . you should be ashamed of yourselves!”

I looked down at the grass. I wanted to drop to my knees and smell it, just to smell something with a smell. I wanted to disappear into it like rain.

Instead, I turned away from Aimee, slung my jacket over my shoulder, jerked my tie the rest of the way off, and trudged home.

Bud was on the porch swing when I got there. Ringo was sleeping with his head on Bud's left foot, and the weird dog was standing nearby with its three tongues lolling. One of its feet was on Bud's shoe. It looked sort of . . . blurry. I broke out in a cold sweat, then immediately recovered. What I saw was impossible, sure, but I had just been innoculated to impossibility and for a while I was going to be immune to it. Nothing could have been quite as impossible as the nightmare of a funeral, not even a giant of a three-headed spiral-eyed dog. So bring it on.

That weird dog looked sort of blurry. Like it was made of light or something?

“Bud? That's . . . the dog,” I told him in a hoarse whisper.

Bud and the dog both looked at me. Bud had his hands on his knees, and he was sitting in his usual straight-backed way. The dog had the hazy look things have when you come out of the swimming pool with water and chlorine in your eyes.

“Whaddaya talking about?” Bud growled. “You don't look so hot, by the way. Must've been bad, that funeral, those boys so young?”

“Pretty bad, all right,” I told him listlessly. My legs hadn't been a factor during the funeral, but now they suddenly throbbed. Did things hurt worse when infection set in?

“You need a diversion,” Bud said, “something different to put your mind on. I got just the thing. Listen, I called the fools at the driver's license office today, the ones what gave me the eye test last week? I figured out it was rigged, so I called and told them so. Threatened to have the authorities after 'em for elder abuse and eye discrimination. You can bet that scared 'em plenty. They're giving me the test again, tomorrow. You're taking me, see?”

He pulled a key fob from his shirt pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it and looked down at it. These two keys weren't to the Taurus. They were different, longer, older-looking. They had four capital letters stamped into their greenish copper—
OLDS.

“So . . . that car in the garage is . . . is yours, Bud?”

That old green Oldsmobile had just been collecting garage grit out there for years. I'd assumed it belonged to my dad, that it was one of the many things he left behind when he walked away. No one drove it. No one talked about it. It just sat like some bloated green insect, using space Janet could have used to park the Taurus instead.

Bud gave a snort. “Think Janet would have a muscle car like that?”

“Guess not,” I murmured.

“It's a shame I don't have my old Ford truck. They'd see something if I was at the wheel of that big old Ford, I'll tell you that. This Olds has plenty of style, though. They made 'em pretty in the seventies. Lotsa power in a V-8 engine.”

The dog had been fading and now was gone. I climbed the stairs, stepping wide around where it had been. “Later, Bud,” I said, pocketing the fob.

“Yeah, we go tomorrow!” he called after me. “Don't forget! No need to tell Janet.”