Mr. Fahrenheit (19 page)

The audience clarified into individual shapes. It was a full house; people even stood at the back of the auditorium.
Middle-aged men wearing faded letterman jackets. Moms in cheerleading outfits that no longer quite fit. It hurt. Oh, it hurt so much to see them. And it occurred to Benji that he was once again in a haunted place, that in these days of homecoming, Bedford Falls became a harbor for people chasing phantoms of their better pasts. They sat in the auditorium, enchanted by this elevated moment, but the spell would wear off soon.

“
A mighty magic, why don't you give it a chance?
” sang the speakers. “
Tell me your secrets at the Homecoming Dance.
”

That was Benji's cue to let two decks of Bicycle cards eject from his sleeves. His pulse knocked behind his eyes. When he tried to speak, his throat clicked drily.

I went into the House, and that changed nothing
, he thought.
I got the pod, and it changed nothing. I've spent so long waiting. I keep thinking there's more time in the future for amazing things.

But so did everyone in here.

He could see the A.V. control table, halfway up the center aisle. . . .

“
Do you feel it? I know that you do,
” the song continued, and in front of a thousand people, Benji closed his eyes, trying to open his heart and nerves to the melody. “
Oh darling, let's make each other's dreams come true. . . .
”

He thought he felt something in his chest opening like a rose after rain. He was almost sure this was his moment. In this same room, so many years ago, he had screwed up the first time he and Ellie met. He felt an overpowering, panicked need to redeem his mistakes. And yes, this would be a dramatic gesture, but why was that bad? This had to be the moment.

What if it isn't?

He couldn't bear to think about that.

It
had
to be.

“Give us the chance and you'll see, a mighty magic is our destiny. . . .
”

The announcer tried to push on: “Uhh, ladies and gentlemen, once again, welcome your Bedford Falls Ma—”

Benji opened his eyes.

“Ellie Holmes,” he said, “I love you.”

H
is voice echoed.

Someone a world away gasped.

“I'm
in
love with you,” Benji said.

A girl said, “A
www.”
Not Ellie.

A silence spun out forever. He stopped just short of the footlights, at the edge of the stage.

“Ellie?” Pause. “Are you here?”

Soft reply, from the center aisle: “I'm here.”

The footlights and the spotlight created a starfield; he couldn't see her. Aware of a few people whispering, he hopped off the stage. Finally, he could almost-but-not-quite see her: Ellie, walking down the aisle, walking through a silence so profound that her footsteps echoed up up up to the high rafters of an auditorium where a little boy had met a girl with a smile that could remake the world, a boy who had melted down in his seat and understood, deep in his heart, why it was called
falling
in love.

Ellie stopped a few steps from him, and she looked . . . scared? He felt a moment's fear, too. This was something he'd
dreamed of for years.
Keep going
, he told himself.

Between Benji and Ellie there was only the silence and blinding light. The world didn't shift under his feet, like he'd dreamed it would.

“Ellie, please say something,” he said.

But she didn't, and the spotlight shifted and she was obscured by the beam, and Benji could not stand the silence. So he did the only thing he could think to do:

He stepped forward, took her face into his hands, and kissed her.

Kissed her.

Applause: a deafening Big Bang of applause.

Kissing her
, he thought, and all his nerve endings were amplified and alive and terrified and gorgeous. He closed his eyes. Her lips were warm, cinnamon-sweet on his, and he could feel her pulse quick beneath his fingers at the soft curve of her jaw.

She pulled back.

“Benji, no,” she whispered.

He blinked. The applause stopped.

She stepped away. “I just— I can't. You— Can we please leave?”

Benji stared. Couldn't move.

And then, suddenly, Ellie was grabbing him by the wrist, pulling him up the aisle with her as the infinitely awkward silence gave way to a few tentative laughs. She led him through the door, and they were in the hall, the antiseptically, cruelly fluorescent hall.

As the door shut behind them, the tentative laughter in the auditorium gave way to a full tsunami of it. Ellie leaned toward him, and there was a moment when he thought she was going to kiss him back. Instead, she grabbed the microphone from his
lapel. “Screw you, asshats,” she said into the mic. Her voice resounded over the speaker system, followed by a sound like a cannon as she threw the mic to the ground.

She just stood there staring at it, eyes down. Her hands went to her hair.

Talk to her. Just say the things you always wanted to say.

“I'm in love with you, Ellie,” he said. “I think maybe you already knew that, because I've loved you since the first time I saw you. Anyone who really sees you would.”

“Benji . . .”

He waited for her to go on. She didn't.

“But—but maybe you don't know
why
I love you. I love you because you change me. You make me feel excited to exist. There's this voice in my head, always telling me I missed out on something important a long time ago, something about being happy that everyone knows but me. I spend so much time trying to get that voice to stop. But the only time it ever stops is when I'm with you. I walked into the House for you, Ellie. You're real magic, you're the sky at night, you give me the future, and I love you.”

“I've known you forever. I care about you so much,” she said softly. “But I honestly have just no idea who the hell you are sometimes. Why do you always do this?”

“Always do what?” When she didn't respond, he went on, fighting to keep his voice calm. “I feel like I'm saying everything wrong? I—I know right now I don't deserve you—”

“THAT!” she said, looking up. He was struck again by how very sad she looked. “‘Deserve me'? Benji, I am going to tell you something I've wanted to tell you for a long time:
I am just a person
. I am not going to fix you, or make your life more special, or make you ‘better,' whatever
that
means.”

He recoiled. His face burned. A hole ached in the deep center of his stomach.

“Ellie, stop.”

“No. Why do you have to make everything A Very Special Moment? Why do you feel like everything has to be perfect and wonderful and pure? Nobody can live up to that, and it makes me feel like shit for not living up to it, and then I'm pissed at you for
wanting
me to. Do you think you're going to win me by being brave and believing in yourself?”

“
Shut up!
” he shouted. “Why are you making fun of me? Do you
want
to hurt me?”

Her face softened a bit. It just made him feel pathetic. “No. God, no. Never. I'm trying to understand why you're hurting yourself. Listen. You said I'm ‘the night sky.' I'm what you want, I give you the future. Except I'm not, and I don't. Don't you know the night sky isn't the future? The sky is a time machine that only goes in reverse. Everything you see up there, all the light from every last goddamn star, it's all the past.”

The black hole in his stomach was an expanding, relentless ache.

“And I think that's what you're really after, Benji. You're trying to go back and fix all these imperfect moments from when we were kids. Well, I can't do that for you.”

“Okay,” he said weakly, because it was the only word he could get out. He turned away from her, his vision swimming.

Ellie was wrong when she said he was trying to alter his inalterable childhood. He did not want to change the past . . . but it had changed anyway. Her reaction, coupled with everything else falling apart, hadn't just shattered his every hope and idea of his future: It had also destroyed how he'd imagined the pain of the past, as merely the darker prologue of a sunlit future. For the real terror is not that the past cannot be altered. The real terror is this: The past is so very fragile, and when it shatters, you do, too.

He walked into the cold air of outside and toward the bike rack. Somebody grabbed his sleeve. He threw the grasp off and spun. It was CR.

“Banjo, holy shit. I mean ho-lee
shit
, buddy. How you doing? Stupid question,” CR said, and before Benji could react, CR pulled him into a hug. And not a bro hug, either, but his first-ever full-on “it's going to be okay” hug. Benji's arms stayed locked at his sides, but he didn't move away. Partly from shock, mostly from gratitude.

“I'll tell you one thing, Banjo: This town might be dying, but if they ever want to get tourists to come, they can just put up a sign on the highway: ‘Welcome to Bedford Falls, Home of the World's Hugest Set of Testicles.' You're bulletproof, man.” CR finally let him go.

Benji looked away, setting his jaw as the horizon blurred. He wanted to get on his bike and pedal, just pound until his muscles shrieked and his mind went numb and he tipped over the rim of the world to someplace better and new.
See, honey, I'm the Voyager.

“I made a mistake,” Benji said. “Understatement. I can't breathe, man, I can't breathe.”

“You are.”

“I can't believe I did that. God! I'm an idiot, I looked like an idiot—”

“Banjo,
stop
!” CR said, suddenly stern and loud.

Benji looked at him. “Don't use your damn quarterback voice with me. I really can't take you trying to boss me into feeling better.”

“What? That's not what I'm doing, man. I'm just trying to help you calm down.”

“This is not a situation where you calm down, CR. You ‘calm
down' when things look bad but are going to be okay. This is
never
going to be okay, do you understand that? Can you imagine what it's like to not know things are going to work out for you? Can you please, for once, for one second, think about that for me? Because I don't think you can.”

CR glared at him. “
Stop. Calling. Me. Stupid.
”

“What?!”

“I swear to Christ,” CR said, seething, “I can break a lot more than your heart.”

For a moment, the two of them stood staring at each other, reality-as-it-had-once-been ripping away between them. Then Benji said, “Why don't you go back to your party?”

He unlocked his bike from the rack.

CR grabbed the bike and threw it to the ground.

“What the hell!”

“What happened back there changes nothing, Lightman. Nothing,” CR said, inches from Benji's face. “I don't care how bad or lost or whatever you feel. You are not keeping the pod.”

“I wasn't even thinking about that.”

Except, he realized, he had been.

He needed it. Now, more than ever.

“I think you were, Lightman.”

“It's safe. The alien isn't dangerous. I know. I can feel it, I can almost understand why it's here.”

“What makes you so special, Pod-Whisperer?”

Benji had thought about it a lot, and he wished there was some mystical reason. But he didn't think so anymore. “I don't know. Maybe because I touched it without gloves when we first found it. Nobody else had direct contact.”

CR smirked. “So I guess it's not because you were ‘the chosen one,' then, Benji Blazes?” he said mockingly. “Yeah, I didn't think so. You know what you are? You're a moon, Lightman.
You'll always follow people around and never shine on your own. It's pathetic. Maybe I should be used to it by now. Ellie sure seems to be.”

Benji's fist rocketed upward. CR caught the punch inches away from his cheek, his hand swallowing Benji's whole.

“If I let go, are you going to play nice?” CR said.

“I don't want you to let go,” Benji said coldly.

CR's eyes narrowed in confusion and in something approaching fear.

“Christopher Robin?”

“Yeah?”

“You're peaking early, asshole.”

Benji snapped his fingers.

The FireFingers flashed; the handheld fireball ignited. CR screamed, reeled backward, stumbling on his own feet and landing on his tailbone on the sidewalk. He gaped at his wounded hand with almost comically wide eyes, then plunged it into the snow beside him. “No no no no,” he was saying, “no no no no.” And he didn't even look angry.

He looked like a terrified little kid.

W
hen the adrenaline faded, Benji almost passed out. He'd biked Bedford Falls taking random roads with furied speed, sprinting standing up on the pedals, only vaguely aware of his surroundings: men on ladders hanging parade decorations on Main Street, cars he nearly sideswiped when he zoomed through stop signs.

And then it hit him, a direct shot dead-center in his gut, on a forest walking trail behind the town park. He squeezed his brakes, almost flipped over his handlebars, and stumbled off the bike. He put his hands on a tree to steady himself. Air whistled from his mouth but he couldn't get his breath. He closed his eyes.
Why did that happen?

He felt guilty; he felt innocent.

I shouldn't have done that
, one part of him said.

CR shouldn't have, either
, another part said.

What if I ruined his life?

Benji made himself suck several deep breaths. He could hear wind in the trees, and the sounds of the river gentle behind him, and little kids laughing in the park. He tried to focus on
those things. They were good things.

He opened his eyes.

There was a used condom between his feet.

And all at once, rage burst in Benji bitter and bright and he seized his bike and sprinted to the trash-strewn riverside and hurled the bike with all his strength like a shot-putter. The bike arced over the water, wheels revolving, spokes clicking and catching the sun, and for one moment it seemed to hover, enchanted, at the top of its arc. Then it crashed into the mud-brown water.

“I don't understand,” he said. “I just don't understand any of this.”

What is there to understand, Benji?
hissed a voice in his head.
You keep acting like all of this—the saucer, Ellie, even the freaking House—has to
mean
something. But what if it doesn't? What if you're just trying to believe those things because they're beautiful? What if it's smoke and mirrors?

What if you're just some asshole who won't. Grow. Up?

A feeling of freezing enveloped Benji. Above him, black branches sliced at the cruel white sky. He felt so small, but not like a kid: He was unimportant, stranded and abandoned, a dot marooned on an uncaring map. He felt a dark door opening deep inside himself, a creaking door that he'd tried to deny existed—and then had locked down—and then had nailed shut because something terrible had knocked on the other side of that door for his entire, pathetic life.

The monster was the world, the real world, and it wanted to swallow him whole, it wanted to take everything good and hopeful and pure inside of him away.

No!
Benji thought, and it was like he was throwing his weight against the door.
Mr. Fahrenheit is real, too, dammit! Life doesn't have to be so much
shit
! I don't care if nobody else
believes me. I still believe the pod is good. I
have
to believe something can be amazing.

Then look in the pod
, said a voice in his head.

He waited in the woods for a long time, and as afternoon faded to evening just before five p.m., he walked through the cold toward home.

Every time Benji turned a corner, he expected to be grabbed by a mob of Bedford Falls football fans and torched at the nearest stake for hijacking the homecoming rally and burning CR's hand. He took backstreets, hearing the crowd lined up along Main Street, imagining them ten-deep on the sidewalks, some of them waiting in lawn chairs for the parade to begin at five thirty, in twenty minutes or so.

Finally, he reached his street, and was once again surprised by what he saw: Zeeko was sitting on Benji's front steps.

“Benji!” Zeeko cried, springing up as soon as he saw him. “Good God, boy, where you
been
?” Dressed in dad jeans and the letterman jacket he'd gotten for being the football trainer, he jogged to meet Benji on the sidewalk.

“H-huh?”

“My brain's been going nuts here!” Zeeko looked a bit angry, but mostly relieved. “I thought maybe something was wrong. Where were you?”

“In the park,” Benji said, still confused.

“The park? While I've been worried sick about you?! Okay, I sound like a mom, deep breath, Zeeko,” Zeeko said. “But when you didn't show after school to get the pod, and Ellie wouldn't answer my texts . . .”

“Sorry, Zeek. I just assumed you wouldn't want to go with me, after what happened at the assembly.”

“The assembly? I wasn't in school today. Excused absence since I had to help Dad.” Zeeko motioned across the road. Parked in front of his house was the community health truck, a huge silver vehicle plastered with
BIOHAZARD
and
RADIATION
signs. Its back doors were open and Benji could see the inside, which resembled an ambulance. “What happened at the assembly?” Zeeko asked.

“You really don't know?” Zeeko shook his head. “You haven't talked with anyone today?”

“I talked to CR for about two seconds when I was waiting for you. He came over to see my dad.”

“Is CR okay?” Benji asked quickly.

“He was a little grumpy. Well, God's honest truth, he was actually a b-hole to me when I asked if he knew where you were. He said he had more important things to think about.”

“But physically he was okay?”

“He burned his wrist in home ec and Dad bandaged it. Why?”

Benji didn't answer. Too many emotions were warring in his head. So CR was fine and hadn't told anyone the truth about what Benji had done to him. Benji felt relieved, and if anything, now even guiltier about what had happened.

“Benji? Hello?”

“Sorry. Did you say something?”

“
Yes
, I said we have to hurry. We're going to miss the parade, but I don't want to miss the game, too.”

“Hurry to do what?”

“X-ray the pod! I went and got it after school. It's in the med truck.”

“Wait, you brought it
here
?”

“Yes, Benji, I did. We promised each other we'd do this
important thing together. That's serious, whether you take it seriously or not,” Zeeko said with uncharacteristic sternness. Then he looked closer at Benji and softened. “Whoa, hey, are you okay? Skipping out isn't like you, dude.”

“No, I'm not,” Benji said, too emotionally exhausted to lie. “Everything is falling apart. Nothing is how it's supposed to be.”

“How is it supposed to be?”

“I don't know. I'm just— All of this is going to be over soon, you know? And best-case scenario, it will have been the most and only amazing thing that ever happened to me. I'll be stuck in this town forever, and my life is going to suck—”

“Oh, hush yourself, please.” Zeeko laughed.

“What?”

“Listen to me. You, my dear buddy, have a tendency to be a
touch
overdramatic and a wee bit panicky if you don't know exactly what's going to happen. Things are effed up now, that's a fact, fair enough. Maybe you're not going to get everything you want. Maybe you can still get that apprenticeship at the Magic Lantern, or maybe that won't happen, either. But sometimes things turn out
better
than your plan. I think it's because of God's plan, but either way, I am absolutely sure you'll get through this. Your life is not going to suck. And you need to trust me on that, because I am so much smarter than you that it ain't even funny.”

Despite himself, Benji laughed. “Thanks, Zeeko.”

“Now let's get to work, huh, buddy? Let's find out what's behind Door Number Pod.”

“I'm gonna change out of my tux first, cool?”

“Sure. I'll get the machine warmed up.”

“You want to X-ray it here?”

Zeeko gestured at the empty street. “There is literally nobody else around.”

“It's Papaw's day off, though,” Benji said, his gaze flicking to the house.

“He's not home. When I was looking for you, I knocked for about twenty minutes straight.”

As Zeeko headed to the X-ray mobile, Benji felt a thread of disquiet stitch through him.

He went to his house, unlocked the front door, and opened it.

And everything changed.

He understood something was wrong the moment he crossed the threshold: When he took his first step into the house, it
splashed
.

Benji looked down, and lifted his foot. The ancient hardwood floor was splotched with a thin layer of red liquid. His gaze followed the erratic trail of water up the length of the dark hall. The liquid was leaking from beneath the door of Papaw's den.

No.

And then he was running down the hall, throwing open the door to the den. Papaw's orderly world had been thrown into chaos, his recliner flipped, his lamp shattered.

But Benji didn't see anyone.

“Papaw?”

Someone whispered, “
See . . .
”

Benji whirled, heels shrieking in the water. Papaw's jukebox lay facedown on the floor in a ring of broken glass. The piping that normally conveyed the bubbling water upward had been shattered. Its neon lights flickered and zapped, painting the room sporadically red.

“See, honey, I'm the Voyager—see, tramping the journey is my story, sir,
” the jukebox sang at the volume of a whisper. “
I prefer the horizon to a past. . . .
”

And in the time it took for that lyric to finish, Benji looked around the room again. There was no reason to feel relieved. The wallpaper was shredded from the walls, there was a revolver lying in the corner of the room, and
oh God oh God
, what had happened to Papaw?

Something stirred outside the den.

Benji stepped into the hall and heard the sound again, like the breath of someone in pain, from the kitchen.

“Papaw?”

No reply.

Some part of Benji understood that it could be dangerous to go into the kitchen, that he might well find McKedrick waiting there, but Benji could not
not
go. What if Papaw was in there, hurt or something worse?

Like the den, the kitchen was empty except for the wreckage. Chairs were reduced to shards of wood, the faces of cabinets torn off the hinges. Benji tried to turn on the lights; even the bulbs had been smashed. The windows had been, too, and when a breeze slipped in through one of the missing panes, he heard the sigh again, but understood it wasn't a sigh. It was only something softly fluttering behind him on the kitchen table.

“Mary and Joseph above,” he whispered.

The note lay on the table, held down by a block of kitchen knives. In the chaos of the kitchen, the neat square of Bedford Falls Sheriff's Desk Stationery looked surreal, like a smile in a nightmare of murder.

Benji picked up the note. The message on it was a violent scrawl, the paper ripped where the wild pen scratched through.
In the long history of notes from his grandfather, Benji had never received one as short as this. Just three letters. Just a single syllable. But the message screamed off the page like a siren so deafening that his sense of reality splintered, finally and irretrievably, like a looking glass tumbling from the imagined stars and shattering against the uncaring earth.

RUN