Last December (5 page)

Warung, warung, warung.

I died, and Byron grinned and said, “Pac-Man sandwich,” but I’d eaten half the board, the most ever, so I didn’t mind so much.

And then Byron started his next turn, and he could play and talk at the same time, no problem. “So, anyway,” he said, “it all started in England, the Mods against the Rockers, brawling and stuff. Haven’t you ever seen
Quadrophenia
?” I said no, because I really had no idea what he was talking about.

“Well,” he continued while he ate up the screen, “it’s a British movie about this stuff, and now all these stupid kids have taken it up in North America, but they are just going through the motions, acting cool and stuff … they’re like pseudo-mods and pseudo-skins and pseudo-rockers. That’s why I stopped being a rocker, because you have to be true to yourself, man, and it just ended up being about fighting to just, you know, fight, and fighting is effin’ stupid. It just leads to bigger kinds of violence like riots and war and intercontinental ballistic missiles. But, you know, I guess it doesn’t matter because we’re all just going to get blown up by a nuke anyway,
kerpoof
, and then things like mods and rockers and grades and girls and Ms. Pac-Man won’t matter at all. We’ll all just be these mutants with four eyes fighting over rusted cans of tomato soup, or we’ll just be gone … zilch … zero.”

And the whole time, he was eating up all the pellets,
wocka, wocka, wocka,
and then he was almost done with only a few
pellets left in a corner and he had Blinky on his tail, and then he said, “That’s who I am tonight. I’m effin’ Blinky. I’m crazy crazy crazy. … Going after it, balls-to-the-wall. That’s the way it’s got to be. You know what I mean?”

Anyways, Sam, that’s Byron if you hadn’t guessed, and he really was like Blinky that night, leaning across the tabletop almost as if he was chasing me around with words and ideas and stuff, things that I’d never heard about before, and he barely even seemed to care whether I was listening. But I was listening, really hard, because everything he said sort of didn’t make sense to me and I kind of disagreed with it, especially about how science doesn’t give you all the answers. But then what he said sort of did make sense, and I hadn’t talked to anyone about science-y stuff since I beat up Josh, and I sort of had this feeling that I was meant to meet Byron, just like I was meant to bump into the skin-head, and that Byron was going to be my friend, and I remember looking over and kind of wishing he was my big brother, and I guess I can’t blame myself, Sam, because Byron’s synapses were superpositive ones that night, like he was contagious or some-thing, so it was like I really really had no choice in the matter.

Anyways, when I finally told Byron I had to go, he didn’t seem to mind because he was on the sixth level called Junior, when Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man have a baby, and it was way harder and faster and he wasn’t able to talk as much.

I got up and he just said, “See you round, kid,” without looking up, because he didn’t even know my name. I knew his name,
though, because he was always saying it like he was having a conversation with himself, kind of like this conversation or letter I’m having with you, Sam. Except Byron was right in front of me, living and breathing and talking an effin’ mile a minute.

When I got home, it was pretty late, like 10 o’clock. I climbed the stairs quietly so that Mrs. Crapenter wouldn’t hear me, and I turned the key silently and tiptoed into the apartment, and I was kind of expecting Ma to be waiting up for me, but when I stepped inside all the lights were out, and when I turned one on, Ma wasn’t even asleep on the couch. I went to the kitchen and turned on the lights, and I guess I was kind of hoping there would be a note or something, but there wasn’t, and so I went to her room and opened the door quietly, and she was a big lump of covers and I thought I heard her moaning or wheezing or something so I said, “Are you okay?” and she shot up in her bed and yelled, “Jesus! You scared the hell out of me,” and I just said, “Jeez … I didn’t mean to,” and I just closed the door, and then I heard Ma say, “Sorry, hon. It’s just …” but I didn’t want to hear it.

And then I went to my room and turned off the light and slid into bed with my clothes still on, and I noticed that my heart was pounding like crazy for some reason, and I listened to the cars crunching the ice outside with their tires. After a while, I tried to close my eyes, and I could see orange stuff on the back of my eyelids, and I couldn’t focus on one thought without switching to the next and the next and the next, there were super-ball synapses flying everywhere in there, and then I heard Ma’s door open and she creaked over and knocked lightly, but I just wasn’t
able to say anything for some reason, like I was mute, and eventually Ma went back to her room.

And then, I don’t know why, Sam, I started thinking about what Byron said, especially about nukes and how we were all going to get blown up and become zero, and it suddenly made me want to run over to Ma’s room and hug her to death, so that we would never be separated from each other, but it was like I couldn’t, and maybe I felt like we were sort of already separated, getting more and more separated every day. And I guess it was like with Mr. Davis’s science explosion experiments—all of Byron’s ideas were like chemicals put into a beaker, but instead of a beaker, his crazy ideas were put into my brain, and instead of making a small explosion right away like they were supposed to, the chemicals were forgotten in a corner in the science lab, just waiting for the right temperature and agitation level and catalyst to blow me and my life to high heaven.

The next morning when I got up, Ma was in the kitchen, and she yawned at me and asked, “Where were you last night?” and I just shrugged because I still felt a little mute, and then she said, “Sorry about last night. My legs were cramping and my hormones are like a roller coaster these days,” and I said, “Oh … maybe there’s something wrong with your baby,” and her face went white and she said, “That’s a horrible thing to say, Steven,” and I didn’t mean it meanly, really Sam, but I didn’t even get a chance to say this before Ma got up and brushed right by me and out of the kitchen, and so I just poured myself a bowl of cereal and I was eating it when Ma came back and dropped a book in front of me called
Your Baby
, and she said, “After you said my baby brain wasn’t real, I went to the library and got this book. It’s all there, and it’s all backed up by doctors and
science
,” and I just looked at the stupid book, because I was going completely red, and then I remembered something and said, “Yeah, but what about Chaos Factor theory and god with a small
g
?”

And Ma jiggled her head like she was hearing things. “What the heck are you talking about, Steven?” she asked, and I looked down and said, “I’m not even going to explain it if you don’t know,” and then she just stood over me while I ate my cereal,
and she finally went into her room and didn’t come out again. And when I left, I sort of felt sick to my stomach, because I guess even then I didn’t like it when Ma and I fought.

Amoebas

When I got to school, my brain felt like it weighed three hundred pounds, and I saw Trevor from hockey tryouts in front of the doors with all the older kids, and he was smoking a cigarette, and he saw me and waved me over, and this other guy was there, too.

“Hey, Mike,” Trevor said, raising his crooked eyebrow, “this is Alistair,” and I said, “Hey,” trying to act casual and cool even though I felt weird, and Alistair just nodded at me, and he had really curly hair that dangled over his eyes, and the sides and back of his head were shaved short, and he was kind of hunched over in this cool sort of way, especially when he was smoking, and he said, “Hey, man,” and he put the cigarette filter in his mouth with two fingers like normal, but when he took it out, he did it with his thumb and middle finger, like he was pulling out a marijuana joint, and then he let a cloud of smoke out for just a second, like an octopus does with ink, but then he sucked it back in, and then he did some big Os, that he poked with his finger. When he finished the cig, he flicked it so that it went end over end, over end, over end, and it landed in the snow, like a little smoking dagger.

“Um,” I said to Alistair, “my name’s not Mike, it’s—”

“Don’t ruin it, man,” he said, putting up his hand and shaking his head. “Don’t ruin it. Trev told me you got the whole Palmateer
thing going. Anyways … you look like a Mike,” and I didn’t want to seem like a dorky arguer, so I just shrugged and looked at the cigarette Trevor was smoking and said, “Aren’t you worried about the coach seeing?” And he shook his head, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. “The first cut is already up on the bulletin board, and neither of us made it,” and my stomach dropped and my throat got tight and I was barely able to say, “What do you mean?” and Alistair kind of laughed, and then Trevor said, “No one made it from freshman year, except for Dan Daniels, and he’s probably going to be drafted by the NHL.”

“Oh,” I said, and it’s not like I’m a wuss or anything, but I sort of felt like I was going to puke or something, so I just looked away and took a deep breath, and then I said, “Can I have one of those cigs?” and Trevor said, “Sure, man,” and he took the pack out of the inside pocket of his winter jacket, thumbed them up from the bottom, and I went to grab one, but my stupid hand was shaking for some stupid reason, and Alistair said, “You scared of smoking or something?” and I just stared at him and I said, “As if … dickweed,” because I already wasn’t so crazy about him, and Trevor laughed, and said, “Yeah. ‘As if, dickweed,’” and punched Alistair in the arm hard but kind of playfully, and then the bell rang, and Trevor said, “Crap,” grabbing his bag and stepping on his cig. “Mr. Green is going to send me to the VP if I’m late again.”

And so we all flew inside and split ways at the second floor, and then when I got to the third floor on my own, I ran to my home-room, and when I got to class, Mrs. Reese wasn’t there yet for some reason, and so I went to my seat, and I realized I still had the unlit cigarette in my hand, and then I saw Alan coming back to
talk to me so I stuffed the cigarette into my jeans pocket, because I didn’t want him to see it, and he grabbed his head with his hands and said, “If the Leafs lose tonight, it’ll be twenty-three in a row on the road,” and I said, “Oh … yeah, right,” and then he kept on talking and talking and talking, but I didn’t hear a word he said.

Later that morning, I had science with Mr. Davis, and it was pretty much a totally boring class and maybe I had a new attitude because Byron told me that science didn’t have all the answers to the universe and stuff, and also we had to draw these diagrams of these things called amoebas, which Mr. Davis said are unicellular organisms.

Anyways, Mr. Davis also said that amoebas are amorphous, which he told us means that they can kind of be any shape, like Silly Putty, but really really flat, and the other stupid part was that my lab group totally sucked, because one girl just crossed her arms and stared at the ceiling like she wanted to die or something, and then two other guys were fighting over the microscope and being total dorks.

And I finally decided to just sit down and start to draw what I thought an amoeba would look like, and Mr. Davis came over and said, “That was quick, Steven. Did you get a look through the microscope?” and I said, “If the amoeba can be any shape, I’ll just draw my own,” and he laughed and said, “That’s an interesting argument, Steven, but … here are two counterarguments for you.”

(Mr. Davis loves to get sidetracked with counterarguments, Sam.)

“The first counterargument is that there is stuff inside the amoeba that I want you to see and record the way I showed you,” he began. “And the second counterargument is much more serious, and this is it,” and he looked around at the other students and talked louder so everyone stopped, “Someone … actually many people have died so that you could look through these microscopes,” and this surprised me, and I couldn’t help being curious so I said, as tough and undorky as I could, “Like who?”

“Well,” he replied, but he still had that talk-to-the-whole-class voice, “the most famous person was this fellow Galileo Galilei, back in the 1600s. Now Galileo was looking through a telescope, not a microscope, but the idea was the same. He saw these amazing things in the sky, things like the planets and stars that proved scientific ideas like gravity and orbits and the Sun being the center of the galaxy,” and I started drawing my fake amoeba, like I was only half-listening. “But the religious leaders,” he continued, “the people that controlled all the ideas at the time, would have none of it. They believed in a Christian God and the universe being created in seven days … those sorts of things,” and without even looking, I could tell that the white stuff was starting to grow like little creatures on the corners of his mouth. “So they told Galileo to take it back, and he said, ‘Look! Look right through the telescope there, and you’ll see what I’m saying,’ but they wouldn’t and they said, ‘Take it back, or you’ll be executed,’ and he said, ‘No. No way. It’s
right
there. I can see it,’ and then the leaders said, ‘Fine, that’s it for you, big guy!’”

And then the bored girl from my lab group sat up and said, “Why didn’t he just say, ‘Okay fine, I take it all back’ but like
cross his fingers behind his back or something?” and I lifted my head, because I wasn’t expecting her question, especially because I thought she was too cool to ask about science-y things, and Mr. Davis laughed and said, “Good question. A very good question. It was because he really really believed what he saw and he felt it was important for others to see it and believe it, too. It would change the way that everyone looked at, well, … everything,” and then she said, “But then … he’d be, like, dead, and then what would it matter?”

“Well,” Mr. Davis said, finally wiping the corners of his mouth, “he was thinking about future generations, maybe even his own generation. You know it wasn’t that long ago that young people
volunteered
to die for their country, for what they believed in. Now all kids care about is their cassette tapes and Michael Jackson and video games,” and the girl groaned to the ceiling, and Mr. Davis smiled, lifted a finger, and said, “But … luckily none of you have to die for anything today. All you have to do is look through that microscope over there, draw what you see, and label it like I’ve shown you on the board. Now get to it, before I have you doing this in your spare time,” and then everyone slowly got back to their work, except the girl, who I noticed had brown eyes and a few freckles on her nose, and she said, “Well … I never asked Gali-whatever-his-name-is to do anything for me,” and then Mr. Davis said, “Jenny! Enough. Get to work.”