Holding Up the Universe (20 page)

During dinner, no one really talks except Dusty, who wants to audition for his school's production of
Peter Pan.
Marcus is screwing around with his phone under the table, and Mom's not even yelling at him. I'm too busy pretending we're all friends here and I don't want to knuckle-punch my own father, and he's too busy pretending
Mistress? What mistress?

He finds me later in the bathroom when I'm brushing my teeth. He walks in and says, very low, “You shouldn't have gone into my email. I'm sorry you saw what you thought you saw, but there's the matter of respecting my privacy. There's more to it than you know, so what you read there—it's out of context. But I'm sorry.”

He says it nicely because Nate Masselin is a nice guy and it's important for him to be liked, especially postcancer. I can tell he's waiting for me to forgive him and move on the way everyone else does, and that pisses me off.

I take my time brushing, rinsing, wiping my mouth on a towel. Finally, I look at him. I'm taller than he is by a good inch, not counting my lion fro. I say, “You can't use cancer as an excuse for shittiness anymore.” And of course I'm talking to me too, although he doesn't know that.

I dream that I'm flying from airport to airport, and each one is mobbed with people. So mobbed, I can't breathe or move, and every face is blank—no nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows. I'm searching for someone I know, for anyone who looks familiar, and the more I search, the more my chest tightens and the less I can breathe.

But then I see her.
Libby Strout.
She's lowered from the ceiling by a crane, larger than life, larger than anyone, and she's the only one with a face.

The locker room is enormous. It smells like feet and piss, or like Travis Kearns, whose main identifier is the fact that he sometimes reeks like a skunk because of all the weed he smokes. It's pretty much the last place you want to spend a Saturday. But here we are, the seven of us and Mr. Sweeney (enormous belly, mullet, sideburns, slight limp). We spread out, and I purposely take a corner by myself because I don't want to talk to anyone.

At noon, we break for lunch. Sweeney gives us forty-five minutes to eat outside on the bleachers we'll be painting next weekend, and I take a seat away from everyone else. The bleachers are old and weatherworn, and just the sight of them makes me lose my appetite. Painting these bleachers is one more thing added to the shit pile that is my life. I pop the top on my soda and close my eyes. The sun feels good.
Soak it in, brave soldier,
I tell myself.
While you can.

I almost drift off, but I hear someone yelling “Leave me alone,” over and over, and it's a voice I recognize, bellowing and foghorn-like. I open my eyes and see a big guy lumbering past the school and there's this group of guys following him. They're all around my age, white, kind of interchangeable. I don't recognize any of them, but the foghorn voice sounds like it belongs to Jonny Rumsford.

I've known Jonny since kindergarten, back when he was just Rum for short. He was always bigger than everyone else, a kind of gentle giant. For as long as I've known him, kids have been following Rum around, heckling him for being a little slow, a little simple, a little clumsy, like a pack of hyenas targeting a buffalo.

I'm watching these guys now, and they're yelling stuff at him, even though I can't hear what. The Boy Who May Be Rum's shoulders are all hunched up, like he's trying to pull his head into his neck or maybe right down into his chest. And then one of the guys throws something at him and hits him on the back of the head. Suddenly, I'm seeing myself like everyone else does—I'm one of those heckling, yelling hyena kids, throwing things at people who don't deserve it.

I set my sandwich down, and I take off like I'm being launched to the moon. At first, May/May Not Be Rum thinks I'm running straight for him and he freezes, clearly terrified. The guys are laughing and throwing shit—rocks, trash, anything they can find—and I run right into the herd of them. They don't even have time to think. One lands on his ass in the dirt, and suddenly they're not laughing anymore.

“Did he do anything to you?” I point at Rum.
“Did he?”

“What the hell, Mass?”

Of course they know me. I'm probably friends with these scumbags.

“Tell me one thing he did to you.”

One of the guys gets up in my face, and he's as tall as I am and wider by a couple of feet. But I don't back down because I'm at least three heads angrier. “Seriously, Mass? You're gonna give us shit? What did that fat girl do to you? Huh? Tell me one thing
she
did.”

Another guy goes, “Yeah, how's detention, jackass?”

I don't think. I act. Maybe because I'm angry. At everyone. At myself. I feel like I could take on the whole world right now. I say to Rum, “Go home, Jonny. Get out of here.” And then I turn around and punch the first guy I see. He drops to the ground, and another one comes at me, and I haul off and punch him too. Even when my hand feels broken, even when I can't feel my knuckles anymore, I keep pounding on these guys. And at some point, it's as if I leave my body on the ground and float up into the sky, where I watch the fight like it's happening to someone else.

Some part of me thinks,
What if that's it? What if whatever malfunction in my brain that's causing this face blindness is spreading, so that I can't even recognize where I am or what I'm doing? What if my brain is completely broken and I never get back down there to me again?

I'm not sure how much time passes, but at some point I'm aware of something or someone tugging at my arm. I turn around and I'm on the ground again, and it's Libby Strout. She's yanking me back.

One of the guys says to Libby, “Don't hurt me, Flabby Stout! Don't hurt me!” He pretend-cringes, his hands up in front of his face.

She goes, “Don't call me that.”

“What's that, Flabby?”

I say, “I know you're not talking to her.” All cool and collected.

“She knows who I'm talking to.”

And I don't like the way he says it, so I punch him. Then this tall black guy with a smooth, shaved head is there, and he's glaring at the herd of hyenas. “You better run. My boy here, he's gonna kill you, and if he don't, I will.” This can only be Keshawn Price.

Those boys go walking away, and the Guy Who Must Be Keshawn stands watching them. “Son, you're as stupid as you look.” He's staring at me. “What do you think Sweeney would have done if he saw you?”

“He's inside. He didn't see. Come on.” Libby pulls me toward the bleachers. “Your lip,” she says. “It's bleeding again.”

But I don't even remember getting hit. I look back toward the street, and Rum is wandering across the bridge that I know will take him home.

We've got fifteen minutes left of lunch, and Jack Masselin drops onto the bleachers, lip bleeding onto his shirt. As he stares off into the tree line, I'm watching him, trying to put myself in his skin again.

I think about going home and what it would be like if my dad walked in and I couldn't recognize him. Or if my mom miraculously came back from the dead and I didn't know it was her. If I'm putting myself in the skin of Jack Masselin, I'm feeling pretty lonely. And maybe scared. How would I know who to trust?

I sit down beside him and say, “It's Libby again.” Even though I probably don't need to because it's pretty obvious in this group, even to someone with face blindness.

He's staring out at the street, like he's itching for another fight. The blood is dripping down his chin and onto his shirt, and he's not doing anything to wipe it away. I hand him a napkin.

“No thanks.”

“Take it. You don't want Sweeney to see.”

He swipes at his chin with the napkin, winces a little, and then holds his soda can against it like an icepack. He cocks an eye at me. “Was that about me?”

“What?”

“ ‘Flabby Stout.' Did I do that? With the rodeo? I want to know exactly how shitty I should feel right now.”

“That wasn't about you. That was about Moses Hunt being Moses Hunt—the exact same Moses Hunt he was in fifth grade.”

“Moses Hunt. Great.”

The Hunt brothers are as notorious as the James Gang. There are at least five of them, maybe more, because their parents just breed and breed. Age-wise, Moses falls somewhere toward the bottom, although he looks forty thanks to all the hard living, the missing teeth, and the fact that he's so mean.

Jack says, “Are you okay?”

“We just have history. Part of me wishes I'd let you kill him, but otherwise yes, I'm okay.” Rattled, but okay. Heart pounding, chest clenching, but okay. “Thanks for standing up for me.” Jack shakes his head and stares off toward the street again. We sit there a minute, Jack watching the street, me watching him. Finally I say, “If you're not careful, you're going to run into someone angrier than you.”

“I doubt that person exists.” And this isn't charming Jack Masselin. This is a boy who is burdened by life. I make myself sit there, inside his skin. I do it for Atticus and for my mom.

“If you're not careful, you'll eat too much and get stuck in your house. Trust me. You think no one understands and you're alone, and that makes you angrier, and
Why don't they see it? Why doesn't someone say, ‘Hey, you seem burdened by the world. Let me take that burden for a while so you don't have to carry it around all the time.'
But it's on you to speak up.” And then I shout, “Speak up if you've got something to say!”

The other delinquents turn and stare at me, and I wave.

“You're a very wise woman.”

“I am, actually. You'd be amazed. But I've had a lot of time to read and watch talk shows and think. A LOT. So much time to think. Sometimes all I did all day was just wander around in my mind.”

“So what makes you angry?”

“Stupid people. Fake people. Mean people. My thighs. You. Death. Gym class. I worry about dying all the time. Like, all the time.”

He shifts the can so he can see me better.

“My mom died when I was ten. She got up that morning like it was any other morning and I went to school and my dad went to work, and I only told her I loved her because she said it first. She drove herself to the hospital. She was feeling dizzy. By the time she got there, she wasn't feeling dizzy anymore, but the doctors ordered some tests anyway.”

He sets the soda can down but doesn't say a word.

“One minute she was talking to them, and the next minute she wasn't. It all happened in an instant. Conscious.” I snap my fingers. “Unconscious. The doctors said the thing that caused it was a cerebral hemorrhage in the right hemisphere of her brain. Something just burst.”

“Like an aneurysm?”

“Kind of. I was pulled out of assembly, and my dad came to get me. We went to the hospital so I could say goodbye. My dad had to tell them to turn off the machines, and half an hour later, she died. One of the nurses said to me, ‘It can run in families.' So I was convinced it was going to happen to me. It still might.” I check in with my heart rate.
Yes, it seems okay.
“I went to bed that night thinking,
Last night she was here. This morning she was here. Now she's gone, and not for a few days, but forever. How can something so
final
happen in an instant? No preparation. No warning. No chance to do all the things you planned to do. No chance to say goodbye.”

His eyebrows are drawn together in a V, and he's looking at me like he can see straight into my heart and soul.

“Now you're the only one who knows something about me.”

“I'm sorry about your mom.”

“I'm sorry too.” I stare at my lunch and realize I'm not hungry. In olden times, I would have eaten every last bite because it was in front of me. “I think that makes us even.”

“Does it?”

“You're not punching me, if that's what you're thinking.”

He laughs. “It's not.” In a minute he goes, “What do your shoes say?”

I hold my leg out to show him. “Just quotes I like from books.”

He points at the most recent one, written in purple marker, the one that says,
More weight.

“Where have I heard that?”

“Giles Corey. From
The Crucible.
He was the last person put to death in the Salem witch trials. Those were his final words, a kind of FU to the people who were pressing him to death with stones.”

Mr. Sweeney appears and yells for us to get back inside.

As we're collecting our trash and walking toward the doors, Jack goes, “Moses and who else?”

“The ones bullying Jonny Rumsford?” He nods. “His brother Malcolm and also Reed Young.”

“Malcolm?” Now I nod. “Shit. He's the meanest of them all.”

“I think the other two must be seniors.”

“Thanks.” He shoves his hands in his pockets.

“You're welcome.”

The light catches his wild, wild hair and holds it. And
wham!

Suddenly.

Just like that.

I'm completely conscious of his
guyness
next to me. His long legs. The way he walks, fluid, easy, like he's made to walk through water. But at the same time with purpose, which makes him seem taller than he is. There aren't a lot of guys my age who walk like this.
With swagger.

It's as if I've suddenly discovered he's male. My face is hot and my back is damp and I'm thinking about Pauline Potter, sexing off all that weight, and I'm staring at his hands and I'm like,
Stop staring at his hands. What are you doing? He's the enemy! Well, maybe not the enemy, but you are absolutely not going to think of him like that.

I realize he's talking and so I come zinging back to attention. He's saying, “I want you, Libby Strout. I've always wanted you. It's the reason I grabbed you.”

Or maybe he's actually saying, “You can't tell, but I'm smiling on the inside.”

I say, “I'm smiling back.” I try to keep my face a blank, even though I don't have a split lip. But I can't help it. For some reason, I smile so everyone can see.