Holding Up the Universe (26 page)

I think about making a move on her. It would be so easy—pull the car over, lean in, touch her cheek, lean in a little more (close enough so she can feel my breath), catch her eye, look right into her, maybe brush her hair off her face. All the things I've learned to do in order to be the Guy Girls Want.

Her head is turned away so that I can only see her hair. When she speaks again, her voice sounds a little throaty, a little full, and there's something else in it.

The something else is:

She might like you back.

Which means you might like her.

Because to like someone
back
indicates reciprocating something that was already in existence.

As in you liked her first.

As in I like Libby Strout.

Oh shit, do I?

And because I'm thinking about cancer and this old guy in San Francisco with face blindness and Dr. Amber Klein and aneurysms and how, when you get down to it, so much of life is out of our control, I decide to take control of something.

I reach over and take her hand. It's soft and warm and fits exactly in mine, and to be honest I'm not really expecting anything, but suddenly my entire body is wired, as if I've been plugged directly into the sun.

We stare down at our hands, as if we're seeing them for the first time.

Somehow, I remember I'm driving, so my eyes go back to the road, but I don't let go of her hand. I rub her skin with my thumb, and you can almost feel the electrostatic discharge, that flow of electricity between two electrically charged objects suddenly coming into contact. ESD, as it's called, can create amazing electric sparks, but it can also have harmful effects, like coal dust explosions or gas. Unlike with Caroline, who is mostly gas and coal dust, there aren't any harmful effects here.

Libby is solid. She is real. As long as I hold her hand, she won't vanish before my eyes.

He turns off the highway onto the Amos exit. We pass the Welcome Center and the Ford dealership and the mall and all the chain restaurants. We pass the old Victorians that line Main Street, and the little history museum, and the four blocks of downtown, and the courthouse. We pass the high school and the college and the mortuary, and then, finally, we pull into my neighborhood.

Do I like Jack Masselin? As in
like
like him?

At some point I'm going to have to get out of this car and move up the walk and open the door and go inside. I will have to shut that door—me on one side, him on the other—and he will move down the walk, away from this house, and climb back into his car and drive away. I will go to my room and lie on my bed and wonder if this really happened or if I made it up and how on earth I feel about it.

He rolls to a stop and turns off the car, and we're both staring at our hands again. I don't look up because if I look up, he might look up, and what if he kisses me?

My body might just explode into a million pieces of shimmering, glittering light.

I want her to look up.
Look up,
I think.
Look up. Look up.

My phone buzzes, and we both jump. This is my alarm letting me know I only have thirty minutes before everyone gets home.
Shit.

She doesn't even wait for me to turn it off, just drops my hand like a hot potato and goes leaping out of the car. It breaks the spell, and I sit there thinking,
What the fuck am I doing?

I almost drive away, but instead I get out of the Land Rover, and she's already on her front step. For the first time this year, I can feel fall coming. There's a chill in the air that makes me think of bonfires, but my hand is still warm. I shove it into my pocket, and it burns right through my jeans to the skin.

She says, “Thanks for bringing me home.” And I can hear it—she's nervous.

I look right into her eyes. “You are the most amazing person I've ever met. You're different. You're you. Always. Who else can say that except maybe Seth Powell, and he's an idiot. You, Libby Strout, are not an idiot.”

She points at my chest. “You do like me.”

“What?”

“Jack Masselin likes the fat girl, but you haven't fully accepted it yet.”

Okay,
I think.
Let's see where this goes.

“I'm not saying you're right, but what if I did accept it?”

“I guess we'd have to do something about it, then.” And she walks into her house and shuts the door.

I stand inside, heart skipping beats. I can hear him on the other side of the door. I can feel him there. I know the moment when he walks away, two minutes later, because the air around me goes back to being normal air, not dangerous, electric-storm air that might lightning-strike you at any moment. My heart is still skipping beats as he drives away.

I think about saying it as Mom passes the salad, as Dusty recites his lines from
Peter Pan,
as Dad passes the mac and cheese:
I have prosopagnosia. It's official. I was tested today by a brain specialist.

No one knows I haven't been home all day except Marcus, who keeps saying things like “I called home today but nobody answered the phone. Were you asleep, Jack? You must have been sleeping, right? Otherwise you would have picked up.” All these baiting comments, trying to trip me up. When Mom and Dad aren't looking, I give him the finger.

Dad catches me and says, “Hey. Not at the table.”

I want to tell him not to talk to me. I want to say
You're the last person who should be reprimanding anyone.

But I'm in this weirdly good mood, in spite of Dr. Amber Klein and in spite of my fucked-up brain. So I don't say a word to my dad or to Marcus, which is so much more than either of them deserves. I stay locked in my own head, reliving the ride there, the ride home, my hand intertwined with Libby's, the way she smiled at me, and the way she said,
I guess we'd have to do something about it, then.

After dinner, I'm in the basement working on the Lego robot, trying to lose myself in the process of building something, but the only thing I'm building right now is the world's largest pile of discarded robot parts. The hardest stage of any project is coming up with it. Once I know what I want the thing to be, it's just a matter of collecting the pieces I need and putting them together in the right order. But right now I can't nail it down. I've got fifty different ideas for fifty different robots, but none of them are right or extraordinary enough.

I hear footsteps, and from the stairs a voice says, “Were you really sick today?”

Dusty.

“Not in a flu kind of way.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I'm good.” He wanders over to me, sorting through the parts that are scattered across the worktable and the floor. I say, “Do you want to talk about anything? Are people still being shitty?”

“I'm good too. I'm Peter Pan.”

And I get it. He wants to stay in this moment. The bad moments always have a way of coming around again, way too soon.

I go up to my room and climb out of my window, into the tree and onto the roof. I lie back and stare at the sky. I think about it being the same sky that I looked up at when I was six, before I fell, and about all that's happened in between then and now. It really shouldn't be the same sky, for all that's happened. It should look completely different.

Marcus was playing in the yard. I went up to the roof to get away from him and away from my mom, who was always telling me to watch him. It was harder to get up there than I expected. That surprised me. And it was dirtier
—
bird shit and twigs and an old softball that might have been there for the past twenty years. Our roof isn't flat—it has a slope—and I scooted to the edge of it, looking out over the street and the neighborhood. I held on with one hand, and Marcus looked up just then, and I let go because I wanted him to see that I was strong and fearless and bigger than he would ever be.

It takes less than a second to fall twelve feet, but it felt like it lasted forever. In that moment of falling, they say the memory goes wide open. You can see things you don't usually think of or see or remember. For me, it was my mother's face—specifically, it was her eyes. I can't remember
what
they looked like in that moment I saw them, but I remember
that
I saw them.