The Big Crunch (15 page)

Wes had not known that.

“You should send one to your girlfriend,” Paula said.

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I bet she’ll call you,” Paula said. She went back to eating her Froot Loops.

For the rest of the day, Wes kept hearing Paula’s words. There were times when he thought his little sister was psychic, the way she could pull words right out of his head. Because he’d caught himself thinking that, thinking the phone would ring and he would answer it, and June’s voice would come over the line into his ear. It was stupid, he knew. Stupid to think that way. But he thought it a lot, and every time the phone rang he imagined it was her. His heart would speed up, and he would listen when his mom or Paula answered it. Just in case. But it was never for him.

That night, after dinner, Wes retired to his room as usual,
muttering something about homework, but instead of doing his homework he spent the night reading old X-Men comics. The mutant telepath Emma Frost reminded him of June, especially her eyes. And the telepathy.

At ten o’clock, still without having looked at his homework, Wes was lying on his bed staring up at the faint brown splotch on his ceiling. It had been there for five years. He and Jerry had been in his room playing video games. They’d been sharing a bottle of Pepsi, and then — he couldn’t remember why — he’d shaken up the bottle, holding his thumb over the top, and had tried to spray Jerry. Jerry had knocked his arm up and the cola had squirted all over the ceiling.

He remembered his mother shaking her head and saying, “Well, you’re the one who’s going to have to look at it for the next seven years.” He looked at it all the time.

The telephone rang. Wes listened as his mother answered it from the kitchen.

A few seconds later, he heard her calling his name.

Wes allowed himself to imagine it was June, then he imagined it wasn’t. Probably one of his idiot friends. He rolled off the bed and walked down the stairs. The phone was sitting on the counter, face up. He put the phone to his ear.

“Hello?”

There was the sound of distance, a breath, and then he heard her voice.

“It’s me.”

“Wes! Your turn!”

Wes looked up from his phone and blinked at the three expectant faces: Calvin and the two Alans.

“We need a strike,” said Calvin. Wes and Calvin were teamed up against Alan Hurd and Alan Schwartz. They were on the seventh frame, ten dollars riding on the outcome. Wes pocketed his phone, picked up his bowling ball, and faced the pins. On either side of him, balls were rolling, pins were crashing, lights were blinking.

What am I doing?
he wondered.
How did I get here?
The sixteen-pound black, battered sphere felt utterly foreign, as if he had never held such a thing in his entire life.

He slipped his fingers into the holes.

“Don’t choke,” said Alan Hurd as he stuffed a pretzel into his mouth.

“Shut
up
!” Calvin said. Then, to Wes, “
Focus,
dude.”

Wes tried to focus. He held the ball up to his chin and stared past it down the narrow wooden lane at the ten pins. He imagined
the ball sliding into the pocket, the pins exploding, the satisfying clatter of a perfect strike.

“Choke!” Alan yelled.

Wes leaned toward the alley and let the momentum carry him forward. His right arm swung back, then swung forward, releasing the ball.

His thumb stuck in the hole. The ball came off with an audible pop, arced through the air, and landed hard about ten feet down the alley.

Calvin moaned.
“Dude!”

The ball rolled lazily toward the pins, curved to the left, dropped into the gutter.

Wes turned back to his friends. Alan Hurd was laughing, spraying pulverized pretzel all over the scoring screen. Alan Schwartz shoved him off his chair. Still laughing, Alan Hurd inhaled some pretzel and started coughing. Calvin handed him his Coke; Alan took a huge swig, then gasped and clutched his throat.

“What
is
that stuff?” he asked.

“Half whiskrumka, half Coke,” said Calvin. He had raided his dad’s liquor cabinet and brought a flask containing what he called a “medley of spirits”: whiskey, rum, and vodka. “Nectar of the gods,” he said.

“More like crotch sweat of the gods,” Alan Hurd said.

“Crotch nectar!” said Calvin.

Alan Schwartz wiped the spit and crumbs off the screen with his sleeve and said to Wes, “You need a spare.”

Wes regarded his friends curiously. The bright fluorescent lights made them look pale and two-dimensional. He wondered if
he looked the same to them. He picked up his ball and turned to the long, narrow lane. The ten pins, a toothy V-shaped smile, mocked him.
Oh, well,
he thought,
the sooner I get this over with, the sooner it will be over.

The ball left his hand and kissed the polished wood surface, describing a shallow, precise curve as it spun down the lane to cut into the sweet spot between the one and the three. Pins flew. For a moment he thought he’d knocked them all down, but the two corner pins — the seven and the ten — remained standing on opposite sides of the lane. After a couple of seconds, the metal arm clunked down and swept them both away.

Sometimes June pretended that Wes was her imaginary boyfriend. She would turn off her phone and put it in her purse, shut down her computer, and tell herself that she had lived her whole entire life in Omaha, and all the other places she remembered were dreams, or delusions from a psychotic past. Her dad might have called it “living in the present.” Except he would be more likely to tell her that the present was an illusion, and that only the future was real.

For Christmas her dad had given her a ceiling alarm clock, so she could lie in the dark, staring at the wiggly red numbers projected onto the textured ceiling.

10:16

10:17

10:18

It made for some long nights. But it perfectly suited her father’s philosophy:
The past is gone. Tempus fugit. Next!

She tried to imagine her imaginary boyfriend Wes in a bowling
alley. Were there girls there? Of course there were girls. It was a bowling alley — skank heaven. But, if there were girls, would her imaginary boyfriend have texted her?

10:22

She really needed to hear his voice. Too bad it would only be an imaginary voice. She’d maxed out the minutes on her cell, and only two-thirds of the way through the month. Good thing she had unlimited texting.

Good thing he’s “imaginary
,” said Sarcastic June. Or maybe that was Scornful June. Or some other June.

10:25

10:25

10:25

Some minutes lasted longer than others.

Wes shut off his cell and put it in the lower side pocket of his cargo pants, where it would knock against his knee with every step. He liked the reminder that it was there. He moved into the flow of students entering the school and made his way down the hall to Ms. Blum’s English class.

Ms. Blum was one of those teachers who liked everybody to sit in the same seat all the time. That was fine with Wes. It saved him having to make a decision every morning at ten minutes to eight, when he was hardly awake. But when June had gone to Omaha, that left an empty desk right in the middle of the room, and Ms. Blum had asked Phoebe Keller to move there.

Now, about ten times a day, Wes felt his eyes drawn to that desk, but instead of June, he found Phoebe. What made it worse was that sometimes she caught him looking at her, and since he had ignored her obvious flirting in the weeks following June’s move, she returned his confused glance with a haughty sneer. The first few times that had happened, he’d blushed, but after a while
they both got used to it. Her sneer became automatic, while Wes simply looked away and went back to his thoughts.

He had told no one at school that he was staying in touch with June. It was too complicated.

One day June had been talking in the hall with Trish and Tara and Tabitha when Tabitha turned to her and said, “You’re like the fourth musketeer.”

June said, “Huh?”

“We’re the Three Ts and you’re like the fourth one. What was his name?”

“D’Artagnan?” June said.

“Yeah, him.”

That was when it hit her that she had found a social circle that exactly duplicated the one she’d left behind in Minnesota. There was a guy named Cary who was a lot like Jerry Preuss — very serious and ambitious, and sort of into her. She’d made it clear to him that she already had a boyfriend, but she still noticed him looking at her a lot. There was even a geeky chatterbox named Jocelyn — a near clone of Naomi — who had glommed onto June her first week at Hills.

But no Wes clone. That would have been too incredibly weird.

“Did D’Artagnan have a first name?” Tara said.

“I’m not D’Artagnan,” said June.

“How about we call you Dart?” Tabitha said. “Dart and the Three Ts.”

“Sounds like an oldie rock band,” said Trish.

It didn’t stick. The nickname. Dart. It was stupid anyway. Back in Illinois, June had gone out a few times with an irritating
guy who’d called her Junebug. She preferred her real name. Even if it was the name of a month.

At Wellstone, getting caught texting — even at lunch or between classes — meant having your phone confiscated. June said it was even worse at her new school, where texting during class could get you kicked out for a week. That didn’t stop her from sending the occasional stealth text, but Wes decided to leave his phone off during school rather than chance it. In some ways it made the days go easier, but at the same time it drove him crazy. He would get a feeling, like ESP, that June was texting him at that moment, and it was all he could do to not turn on his cell and check.

The ban on cells was a huge deal for a lot of students. Even some parents, who felt they needed to be able to call their kid at any time for any reason, objected to it. There were school board meetings and articles in the student paper. A local radio station had devoted an hour to the topic, with callers from both sides of the issue. But the principal remained adamant. Absolutely No Cell Phone Use During School Hours.

Jerry Preuss had made it his number one campaign issue. He even devised a plan he called Civil Cell Disobedience. Half the students with a cell would call the other half at the exact same time, so that phones around the school would ring at once. He spent a week organizing the protest, but on the day of the event, most of the students chickened out, so only a small number of phones actually rang. Two dozen phones were confiscated.

The students who had lost their phones got mad at the gutless majority, while the gutless majority congratulated themselves on dodging a bullet. Wes would probably have lost his cell too, but
he’d forgotten all about the protest and hadn’t turned it on. It wasn’t as if Jerry had asked Wes personally. They didn’t talk much anymore.

Mostly, Wes hung out with the two Alans now, and sometimes Calvin and Robbie — as long as they were doing something that didn’t cost him any money, because after paying his phone bill, every dollar he was able to get his hands on went toward financing The Plan.

The Plan: Buy a motorcycle and head for Omaha the first day of summer break.

Wes had taken a part-time job at Jamba Juice. Seven-fifty an hour, sixteen hours a week. That came to about ninety bucks a week after taxes. He had savings of another $390. By the time school let out, he would have enough to buy Calvin’s cousin’s old dirt bike. It wasn’t really made for highway travel, but it was street legal. Gas wouldn’t cost much. He hadn’t checked into the insurance. He would have to learn to ride, but that shouldn’t take more than a day or two — he had already passed the written test.

The hardest part would be selling The Plan to his parents. A solo motorcycle trip was probably not what they had in mind for him this summer. And even if he could talk them into it, there was the parent problem at the other end — Mr. and Mrs. Edberg might not respond well to him showing up at their front door.

Also, he hadn’t yet told June what he planned to do.

His idea was to let her know on April first, when his cell minutes recharged. He would say, “I’m buying a motorcycle and driving it to Omaha.” Then she would say, “Great!”

Or maybe she would say, “Are you completely insane?” In that case, he would say “April Fool!”

But when April came, they talked about other things. Anything, just to hear her voice. Like what music they were listening to. Or moving to New York City or a tropical island. Or she would talk about her new friends in Omaha, and he would tell her about people she knew, like how Jerry had all of a sudden become popular after getting drunk at Alan’s party.

“How’s his campaign going?” June asked.