Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (24 page)

“Yeah, well.”

“
You threw your keys at me!
”

My tear ducts swell like boiling fruit juice. Because, I've never for-real fought Necro before. And even though fighting won't at all be like when we were younger—when you could throw a log at Toby's head one day and call him up the next—I lower my shoulders and charge.

Necro is ready. I close my eyes. My arm hooks his stomach and the rest of me whiplashes forward. My right thumb jams into some muscle between his ribs. My left hand crumples his ear. I punch him in the thigh. My forehead rubs against his collarbone. He smells like wood and hair. I sniffle violently. My left eye waters. I open my mouth, and one of us yelps quietly. My midsection collapses—Necro has just cock-kneed me. His breath is like horseradish on the back of my neck. I punch him in his left buttock. He sniffles and inhales
through his teeth. I try to head-ram him in the stomach, but he reverse-pelvic-thrusts away and I miss. Both sides of his Euro jacket hang down around my ears. He bites my shoulder. I think about reaching down his pants and grabbing his wang, not to inflict pain, but just to confuse him, but decide against it. I clamp my arms around him. We pull ourselves toward each other for a few seconds longer, and I realize that, probably, we look pretty much like two dudes who are trying to hug and rob each other at the same time.

I fall and manage to backward-somersault away. I look up at him. My lungs taste like penny-flavored mucus.

“I fucked up, Necro,” I say.

I spit out a grain of something. And, then, I start laughing. I look up at Necro, who is leaning over, one hand on his knee, right arm dangling. The corner of his mouth—I
think
; in hindsight I have to—curves upward, like he's about to laugh, too.

He opens his mouth, and if he responds, we can at least begin the process of un-fucking-this-up. But from behind me, Toby, shoes quacking with water, juggernauts through and shoulders into Necro. Necro's body flies in the air for about a second, his back bounces up off the dirt, and he rolls over on his side. His head sounds like a rock dropped in the mud when Toby punches him.

“Wait wait wait wait wait!” I yell.

I try to grab Toby by the shoulders, but he flings me to the side. Some dirt scrapes up my calf. I see Necro's cheek break open when Toby hits him again—a large, parenthesis-shaped opening.

“I told you Necro was buying fireworks, Toby!”

Necro's brow is snarled up. His digital calculator watch is broken. Blood is smeared on his sleeve. Toby wipes the gravel scruff off his jacket, picks up Necro's hand, and shakes it.

“You got Jungled, Necro!” Toby says into his face.

On the bridge pavement above us, a semi truck hits a seam in the concrete, and bass vibrates through my scalp. The wind rolls an aluminum can from one side of the Aqueduct to the other.

“What!” Toby shrieks. “
Laugh already!
”

So, all of that happens. Weeks after, Mom sets the red pepper jar in front of my egg plate, where my morning Gatorade should be. She snaps a dry spaghetti noodle into small pieces, unscrews the salt jar, and sticks the pieces into the salt.

“I ran into Cheryl Violi outside Kaufmann's,” she said. “She said John's doing well in speech therapy.”

The thought that shoots through my head is: I must be some asshole. Because, this whole time, when was the last time I even visited Wicked College John?

“Cheryl hasn't told many people,” Mom says. “John doesn't really want to see anyone.”

But I go anyway. Have you seen the Heated Driveway District in Mendon, where Wicked College John lives? Hilly new developments with long, noodly roads. Houses with pillars on front doorsteps; dirt covered with this Christmas-colored green spray. Wicked College John's house is mocha colored with an uphill driveway and a lipstick-red front door, two skylights on one long slant of roof. His mom's Dodge
Viper is parked outside the garage. Her keys jangle when she shuts the front screen door. She's wearing pointy white high heels, tank top, and leather pants, and carrying this bright turquoise purse. Freckles are everywhere on her tan. She walks down to the end of the driveway and lights a menthol.

“Oh Nate, sweetie, his speech isn't all there,” she says before I can say hello.

I ask if I can go in.

She does a short inhale. “You can try. But he's really being a little shit right now. He's not eating. I try to breathe slowly around him. I try to touch his arm. I say my name all the time.” She nods her head toward the screen door. “But he's in a torturable place. And I need a break.” She pauses. “I need, need, need a break.”

“What happened?”

“I tried to tell him, sweetie, you're alive. You're making amazing progress. I tried to tell him again what he'd been through, and”—she whispers this part—“he yells at me: ‘I don't care what happened! Look at my face!'”

Through the screen door, I can see MLB 2000 on PlayStation on the living room's TV. Wicked College John himself: sitting on the leather living room sofa. His body looks milked and thin under his T-shirt, hemp necklace and cargo pants. His hair is un-gelled, combed down over his forehead. One crayon-line of scar makes a giant comma across his cheek.

“Sit,” he says, slowly but sharply, like there are weights mounted to his lips.

Crowd noise ensues from the video game. Around him
are sheets of yellow loose leaf paper, each with tiny sketches of baseball diamonds, some with the bases filled in black. That's when I feel like I'd better cram at least fifty missed visits into this one.

“I used to be—” He pauses like it's the end of a sentence. “Good at this game.” I see him write “Nate” in the top margin of a yellow sheet of paper. He drops the controller, either on accident or on purpose.

“You'll get better,” I say.

“No I won't,” he says, voice NyQuil paced. “That won't happen.”

“Do you want to go outside? It's warmer out there.”

“I can enjoy more than nature, Nate. I can still think.”

An infielder on Wicked College John's team positions himself under a pop up, but dives out of the way at the last second, and Wicked College John punches himself in the thigh.

“I have this walker,” his voice jerks a little.

“So there goes your what—modeling career?” I take off my Bills hat and show him the dent I have in my forehead from Raw Dog. “Man, we're just a bunch of ugly—”

“Yeah, but that's you,” he bites his thumb. “The doctor says some people don't fully recover from these kinds of injuries. Which means,” he says, swallowing more now, “I might always be this stupid.”

“But you
know
you're stupid!” I say. “That's the smarter part of your brain working. You build off of that!”

“So you're saying I'm stupid,” he says.

“John! Look on the bright side!” When as friends, we've
never had terms for “bright side.” “Have you seen what's her face? That girlfriend?”

His head bounces slightly when he collapses against the headrest of the couch. I remember his head hitting the pavement in front of the Weapons of Mankind building, and I half-stand up to see if he's okay.

“Word of advice, bro,” he says. “Do not talk to a girl if you cannot actually talk.”

“What did you do to her?” I ask.

“I was just happy my dick worked again,” he says. “She came to the hospital. I tried to tell her ‘Sorry.' I thought I could handle the word ‘sorry' in my brain, but when I tried to say it, I kept saying ‘Tongue.' And the more I tried to say ‘Sorry' the more I kept saying ‘Tongue.' I had this really mad, red look on my face: tongue, tongue, tongue. So no, she hasn't called. No Welcome-Back Chinese Tape Deck.”

“Chinese Tape Deck! A little Tokyo Rocking Horse! Those are jokes, from your memory!”

“Whatever,” he says. “Taco Island Pepper Grinder.”

“
Whatever
whatever. You're very lucky.” I'm on the edge of the recliner, almost setting my hand on his knee. “You could be, I don't know, eating applesauce through an IV, you could be—”

He smiles for a second. Even though I'm not making a joke, he begins to crack up.

“Applesauce,” he says, eyebrows hoisted. “I'll give you that. I'm the boss, applesauce!”

Then he chokes the laughing back.

“I think you have to go,” he says.

So, forgive me, when I whip a trash bag from the trash bag roll at home, go to my room, and spend an entire day throwing out the pictures we took of the pizza delivery woman for no reason that one time me and Lip Cheese ordered Domino's; the sheet of paper me and Necro found downtown that said: “freedom for len freedom for len Freedom for Len Freedom For Len FREEDOM FOR LEN FREEDOM FOR LEN
FREEDOM FOR LEN
.” I throw out the first picture of Man-Serum Bagelheart, on loose leaf paper, his beard a bunch of squiggles in pencil, and I throw out the last drawing, I think, me and Necro ever made, where Man-Serum Bagelheart's limbs grow weak from ague (which Necro pronounced “agoo”), which Man-Serum had come down with from watching a seventy-hour broadcast that just showed a pair of testicles, and worrying, deeply, over whether they were his. Then I think: We were weird kids.

Because we're at Mindy Fale's house and her parents are away, all we've done through the evening is feel each other up on the two-cushion couch in her living room. We're in the dark, lit only by the computer that's set up against the stairwell's half-wall, and after a good hour of General Makeout Fest, well after Conan, I'm feeling sort of fluish, one shoe suddenly off, staring into the fruit-punch vortex on her monitor's screensaver. Which makes General Makeout Fests way sadder and way more annoying than you would imagine.

“It's just Necro,” I say. Her forehead is pressed into my cheek. “The Aurorist?”

She rolls over. “Bitter, Nate.”

Her living room is cramped as the inside of a music box, porcelain trinkets on heavy wooden shelves built into the walls.

My lips feel raw from kissing. She's crushing my chest a little, so I squirm, and she props herself up on one elbow. “You need to get involved in something. Maybe church. It'd be good for you.”

“What does everybody always mean, good for me?”

I know I'm starting to depend on her more, because she has the kind of pity where it makes me want to shoot down her advice so I can get more pity. The screensaver changes to blue, to red, to yellow, and makes flickery shadows of the porcelain figurines on the shelves—a lumberjack, a swan, a newsboy, an archer. Each figurine stands next to a sign displaying a suit of a playing card.

“Something good has to come from your situation,” she goes.

“Well, it won't,” I say.

She stands up and puts her hands on her hips.

“Whatever. You don't care,” I say.

“If I didn't care would I be—” she gestures broadly to the couch. “Never mind.”

Mindy Fale leads me up the stairs, which ascend more at the angle of a ladder than a staircase. Her bed is waist-high, bedspread woolly as cotton candy, dolls and teddy bears piled two or three deep on the bed and her dresser. She reaches forearm-deep into the pile of dolls, pulling out the smallest, most mangled one.

The doll has a green Girl Scouts-type dress, a picnic-tablecloth Raggedy Ann face, and loose hemming where its right arm meets her body.

“This is Patty,” she says. “I thought you should meet her.”

I lie down. She lies down. The sheets are clean and stiff, like they were broiled dry. Some cartilage pops in my chest when she lays on top of me. She turns off the reading light attached to the bed's headboard.

“Could be worse,” she pauses, thinking, which is also annoying. “You could be in Ethiopia.”

“Don't be stupid.”

She shakes her head. Her shoulders collapse and her brow crumples. “Well it seems like you're trying to sad your way into bed with me,” she says, voice coming from some future where nothing is ever a joke. She's taken her hand out of my hair, like how some girls can move themselves away from me without me noticing, in that way where they're always smarter than me in all the ways that count.

So I say, with the last shreds of Happy Rolodex I can gather, Happy Rolodex's Last Stand: “I don't know. It's different with every girl.”

“Different, like, with who, specifically?”

From her window, I see some light move. She knows I'm lying. “I—um, I, I—” Make something up. Give her a name she can't track. “Crystal-Lynn Mauer.”

Who I hope doesn't actually exist. Then I remember that Crystal-Lynn Mauer does, in fact, exist, because she worked at the Science Store in Eastview, where me and Necro asked if we could buy gravity.

“Don't get freaked out,” Mindy Fale says. “I just feel bad for you. You just seem like the unhappiest person I've ever met.”