INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 11-12
Chapter 11: John
This girl who came out of the background while my idiot friends debated the shootings. After three days, I thought about Meredith McCandless’s stare, her limp blond hair framing her cheekbones and her beautiful, pitiful face. When her eyes hit mine, limitlessness and agelessness broke into me and something smoothed out for a second. An opening appeared. I took breaths. I believed that something important might be happening.
Then, between classes, she came up to me, and she was smiling.
She said something like, I was just telling Joan that you could help out on the bake sale?
I didn’t know what the bake sale was. I wanted to join, but the desire became fraught in all the old ways. Her radar was wildly off.
No, thanks, I said.
It came out how Adam called the drone.
Okay, she said. Then she was swallowed by the others.
I kicked my locker with my heel. Adam was suddenly beside me, the fat apparition that visits when I’m like this.
She’s trying to help you, you motherfucker, he said. So that you don’t shoot up the school.
I kicked the locker again. That’s bullshit.
It’s complete bullshit, Adam said. How’s she supposed to stop this motherfucker?
It’s bullshit, no, because she didn’t say it.
It’s sad and it’s true, Adam said. She wants to stop you from killing someone.
I kicked the locker harder, denting it this time, but it wasn’t a stress-reliever.
Jesus, Adam said. Or from killing everyone.
We’ll see, I said.
Chapter 12: Adam
The shit feeling when something new enters your friend’s life, but not your own. I find John in the hall. The Elmwood shooting and the Ohio man and his shittier body count remain news. John stares at nothing. I like the idea of me rubbing off on people, especially John.
“Meredith is trying to keep you from shooting up the school,” I tell him.
“Jealous bitch.”
Meredith appears by John’s locker. Meredith: She came out of nowhere, materialized in my Honors English class as a stranger, a junior with an expression of care and concern, of fairness. She wears shirts that are too long that she belts over her jeans, something like dresses over her jeans. Something like. Her hair is straight and thin, wispy as it falls in front of her eyes when she talks. She puts her hand in her hair to push it back like a star does. I’d seen her in the halls with her friend Joan, awkwardly bent over in their laughter. They tape rainforest things to their lockers, the part of Earth they want to save and will never see. Meredith will widen her circle of concern to include John. But she doesn’t know that like him, I’m sick. She doesn’t know what it is, even. Meredith puts on colorless lip gloss. I can see her speaking one day on behalf of shooting victims everywhere. Then, I remember. Soon, there won’t be a one day.
Her hand, her hair. John is frozen. Or maybe that’s me projecting, as that would describe what I’m always doing as I stand off and watch. I enjoy her anxiety and the possibility of John taking her down with him, one step at a time. Let her be nervous. It’s a way to learn who she is.
“I’ll text you my address,” she says.
“Okay.”
John, knowing the risk of looking like a freak is high right now, doesn’t want her around. The pretender doesn’t want her to see it.
John gives Meredith his number. She smiles and run-walks down the hall, to the east exit.
“Don’t worry, little brother,” John says. “She’s not my type.”
He calls me little brother with pity.
“I’m taking you to the decorating party,” he says. “You can talk to her this weekend.”
The Drano seeps down my arms again. Sweat drenches my armpits. There’s a pain in my left armpit. My glands are giving out.
“I just punched Tyler Max in the bathroom,” I say.
“What’d he do?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“Big man,” John says.
I’m going to be a tackle, or whatever Grady said. I start practice in two days. I’m going to be a jock. This idea makes me happy and makes beating Tyler down juicer.
“Big man,” I say.
I am a column of ghost meat, transparent and boneless. I am standing here, watching.