INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 15-16
Chapter 15: John
One day I looked over my cubicle in the special-ed trailer to find the fat kid I’d felt had been looking at me. My face had itself written all over it. We’ll get through this, his face seemed to say.
I stole a demagnetizer from behind a shop counter while a clerk helped someone unimaginably stupid. I put the magnetic block under my shirt, rubbed the video game boxes over my belly to de-whatever them, then sold them to sheeple kids. But when the story got to back to a mother, it had to end.
Never link more mothers together than you have to.
My mother drove me home after another talk with the new Mr. Mathis. She took a deep breath and used it to sigh all of this out.
I don’t need to ask you whether you think you’re Jesus again, do I?
No.
I’m mad at those doctors. It’s criminal.
Why?
This.
She made a sweeping gesture through the space between herself and me.
I’m not delusional, I said. I’m cash poor.
How do you know delusional?
The criminal is the one who does the crime, I said.
Who’s this criminal? Stay away from the weirdos, John. You have a whole leg stuck in this already.
Chapter 16: Adam
Principal Keen leans against my locker with his arms folded. He’s looking down. Sadness covers his face. He seems disappointed by his shoes.
“Hi,” I say.
This will be about punching Tyler Max. Keen looks up from his sad shoes and into my eyes, and there is no diff.
“We’ve got to have a little confab,” he says. “Tell me about what happened in the boys’ bathroom yesterday.”
“I don’t know.”
Keen does with me what he calls an “escort” to his office. He has his arm and hand out and sort of around my back, but he’s not holding my shoulder or my hand, he’s not touching me at all, of course, because.
I settle into a chair opposite his desk. There are three more Keens in his office: a bottle-blonde wife and two fat little kids in their threes or fours or fives scattered across photos matted in frames on his desk. One frame is digital. New images of the Keen family morph across its face every few seconds. I’m entranced. It’s like something out of a memorial, this Walmart item. I hear funeral music playing in the background as images blend together in a cinematic look at a life you would rather not live.
“Tyler Max was assaulted by a junior. According to him, a rather large junior ran into the bathroom and had a fit. Went absolutely berserk, and then punched Tyler in the face as he was trying to get out of there in one piece. It was a rather large junior who did it.”
“Wow,” I say.
I think of the essay. I will not ask for an extension as I ordinarily do. It has potential.
“So, you’re saying you weren’t in that boys’ bathroom during third period,” Keen says. His electronic photo frame has morphed into an image of Keen lifting a little kid, probably his. I don’t remember my dead dad, but I can imagine my way into the sentiment.
“I wasn’t in that bathroom,” I say. “That bathroom isn’t the closest one to my English class, and anyway, I didn’t see Tyler.”
“You’ve got to do something with yourself this year,” Keen says, as if that’s news. “I hear you’ve been tapped by Grady to be a linebacker.”
“Yes,” I say, straightening in my chair, which isn’t easy to do once my bulk has settled in one place for any period. The move involves rocking my hips back and forth as I try to get my back arched and my shoulders higher. I grab the tail of my shirt and pull it taut, so it doesn’t get caught in the folds of my stomach.
“Looking forward to it,” I say.
“Gonna knock some holes in their defensive lines?”
“Yes, sir.”
I wonder why I’m calling him sir. I theorize only that I have become a sheep during the meeting, afraid he’d nail me, as all sheeple are: afraid. Now that the interview is trending toward the good, I have nothing to say.
Keen looks like he’s waiting for something from me. A jock’s send-off comment, some kind of macho slogan.
“That’s all,” Keen says. He sounds tired. In the digital picture frame, he holds one of his kids on his lap. He looks tired in the photograph too. I wonder whether he has a body-wasting disease. Maybe Keen is just working during his last weeks on earth.
I stand up.
“I’ll win for us,” I say.