INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 19-21
Chapter 19: John
The experiment was my idea. We called it the Dead Pond. Between the grade-school parking lot and the high school, a deep puddle with one dead tree reaching across it. No fish, only brown water and tadpoles dying in the tall weeds. Back in that special class, and before we were friends, I wandered during lunch off grade-school grounds and into the high-school zone. Immediately a guy appeared, unreachable, an older paragon of cool. He carried a white plastic box the size of a shoebox.
For five dollars you get this, he said as he lifted the cover. A little, grey, shrivel-skinned thing lay on a piece of gauze. A miniature snout.
It’s a pig fetus, he said. Put it in your teacher’s desk or something like that.
I handed him five one-dollar bills, knowing what I was going to do. I took the stinking box out to the weeds by the Dead Pond. After school, I snuck back with a pair of scissors and trimmed off the fetus’s snout and ears. The pig’s face was mangled, but so was the whole thing, five inches long and already darker than when I bought it and decaying at its edges. I hid the fetus there in the weeds, then ran to take the bus home.
I would be as crazy as Adam and the rest of the class thought I was. I would triumph over their expectations, impressing them or striking shock and awe. Going further. So, the next day I convinced Adam and a tag-along half-girl, half-maniac, Marcy, to the Dead Pond.
Chapter 20: Adam
John’s parents have money, therefore it’s his football and we’re playing in his backyard with grass growing on it. I’m tossing the ball to him and he’s trying to throw it back, but John was born neither-handed. I’m looking for something ahead of my first football practice tomorrow. I spot a squirrel nosing the bushes to my left and turn the way you see quarterbacks on TV spin toward a surprise receiver and let the ball go. The squirrel flies into the air and runs up a tree. I laugh.
“Hey!” John shouts.
I give John a look like, who gives a fuck, it’s not his squirrel, it’s the world’s, so it is already fucked.
“My mom likes squirrels,” John says.
John’s close to his parents. That’s childish, but I can understand that weakness. Not everyone wants to find out what they did to us.
“Fuck your mom,” I tell him. “I’m defiantly anti-squirrel.”
“You have to get the ball.”
Out of breath, I run over to the football. The squirrel has disappeared into the treetops, so I throw John the ball. It bounces off his fingertips and he yells out in pain. Out of breath, I jog over to John.
“Help me practice blocking,” I say.
“You jammed my fingers.”
I get into a three-point stance, legs bent, leaning my weight on my right arm, ready to explode when the center snaps the ball. John serves as the offensive line, but he doesn’t know this.
“What’s your problem with Meredith?” John says.
“Isn’t she your girlfriend?” I say. “She asked you over this weekend.”
“With lots of other people.”
“She’s into you.”
Then I yell, “Hut! Hut! Hut!”
I burst out of my stance and charge John. His eyes go wide, and he throws up his hands but I’m already upon him, burrowing my shoulder into his ribs. He goes down, and I stumble over his body, stagger, and then I go down too.
John moans. I stand and go over to him. He’s lying in a ball on his side, cradling one hand in the other, like a six-foot two baby. I’m so out of breath I believe I have asthma.
“I have reduced you to tears,” I wheeze.
“What the fuck?”
“Let’s go inside.”
“Fuck you,” John says. “I was just standing there.”
“Big, tall, scary dude, John Teller. Look at you now. I have kicked your ass and I have kicked all the squirrels’ asses. I’m the last one standing.”
John uncurls his body and sits up. He studies his jammed fingers.
“It’s just a sign-painting party,” he says.
“Meredith wants to help you, or us, or something. You freak her out, but also she wants your penis.”
“You’re a psycho,” he says.
“No shit. But she can’t see me through you. You fit the profile. You even look like one of the Columbine guys.”
John looks up from his hands.
“Which one?”
“The one whose shotgun kicked back and broke his nose. That particular fucking loser.”
This satisfies John, so we go inside.
I’m sitting in his black leather recliner in his room, which he has painted black in streaks. You can see the old white paint through the black roller tracks. His room looks brooding and sick.
“Call her, nervous idiot,” I say.
His phone rings. On the third ring, John answers.
“Yeah.”
The drone.
“Yeah, okay,” John says. “Okay, okay.”
He ends the call.
“Meredith,” he says.
He smiles, a crack in his face.
“What did she say?”
“To make sure I am coming to paint signs, banners and such shit,” John says. “I’m going.”
“Are you going to stand around and watch people paint?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m the reason she asked you to go.”
John wears an expression of entitlement, and suddenly there is a great distance between us. A worthiness gap. I can feel it.
“Forget it,” I say. “You’re more vocal than me.”
“What the fuck does that mean? You’re vocal. Just not around other people.”
This is true. People who are vocal don’t understand what it’s like not to be vocal. Not to be vocal means you don’t get invited to painting parties while your vocal friend does. It means to be invisibly sick. It means there’s a lot more to be said.
I decide that the party is fuckwitted.
“Waste of time,” I say. “We can do another cat experiment Saturday.”
“Boring.”
“Or jihad your Geometry project,” I say.
We had to build shapes in the golden mean. John made two-foot-tall World Trade Towers. I have enough fireworks to blow it up. We were going to video it, in case we wanted to use it in a movie, or just watch it in slow-mo.
“Jihad!” I yell.
I do that trilling sound Islamic women make. I’m really good at it, that crazy Islam voice they make. Sometimes John tries to join in, but it only ever comes out like, “la-la-la-la-la.” I guess you have to be born with it.
“We are going to Meredith’s,” John says.
“Jihad!”
I do the crazy-ass Islam yell.
The jihad loop can go forever, it’s such a stress-reliever.
Chapter 21: John
It was deep winter, and we had our fists jammed in our coat pockets, where I found a pack of gum and unwrapped one but didn’t offer any to the other two. I was trying to be hard.
This is going to be sick, I said.
I don’t know, Marcy said.
He told you we had to wait, said Adam, already fat beyond bounds, puffing to keep up with us as we walked through ankle-deep snow toward the frozen-over dead pond. In a moment, we were off the faculty parking lot and walking across the grounds between the high school and our special classroom, as cold inside as we were outside in our coats, huffing it through the snow, our breath floating rags of filth in the air.
I don’t know, Marcy said.
Maybe she was talking to herself. Maybe that’s what landed her in our class, self-talking others into madness.
I don’t know.
Adam said, You don’t know anything.
You don’t know that.
I had only promised them something sick near the pond. But that was enough to get them to leave the grade-school grounds and the parking lot, which were the only places we were allowed to be during outdoor time, and then to cross an open snowfield, Adam and Marcy hating each other but very much in the same mold. I’d never known crazy people to make good couples. I thought it was kind of a bad idea, that maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to spawn, but sheeple make crazy all by themselves all the time without effort, so there will never be an end.
When we came to the weeds, I paused to generate some suspense.
What you’re about to see cannot be told to anyone ever in the world.
Okay, they said together. Never any problem with saying okay.
Adam went into the weeds, gravely focused.
I somehow know this is going to be sick, he said.
He looked at me as if I were his older brother dumping a box of Playboy magazines on his doorstep. He walked into the reeds, stepping up to his ankles in brittle ice. He returned to Marcy and me, with the fetal pig. He gently placed it on the snow.
There was talk of prayer. So, we formed a circle around the thing I had paid five dollars for, and Adam said that God wanted to take the baby before it could live, or something religious like that.
Marcy shivered and said, This is gross, where did you find this?
Right here, I said.
Did you bring it over here?
No.
Did you bring an abortion baby to the pond? Marcy said, beginning to sound panicked.
No, I said.
You’re so fucking fucked up.
Adam kicked snow over the fetus, but it didn’t cover the stump of its snout. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t see it for what it truly was, just a pig baby, but from then on it is the case that it is my fault. Adam loved me. I generated in him a taste for the sick.