INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 22-25
Chapter 22: Adam
I see him walking down the hall, eyes gazing up and into the middle distance. He has a distrusting expression, like someone’s about to pull a trick on him at any moment and he’s bracing himself for the fall. I’ve seen this in John before, and it’s usually like this just before he disappears, goes home, cursing the world, or ends up in the hospital.
I don’t want him to leave today, my first day of football practice. I need some continuity because last night I had a couple of dreams about failure on the practice field. I think I’m having an emotional moment. Not having John around could, I think, make those dreams come true.
“What’s wrong with me?” John says when he gets to my locker. He looks around at the tops of people’s heads, then he looks down at my feet, and his eyes settle there like they’ve finally found something less painful to look at. Maybe a hologram of Principal Keen’s shoes.
“You’re having one of your days,” I say.
“Fuck that,” he says. “What’s wrong with my face? Is there anything on it?”
I crouch and check out his downturned face and see nothing out of the ordinary: some morning puffiness around the eyes, this patchwork beard he’s been trying to grow in, sharp nose, weak chin.
“Everyone’s looking at me like I’ve got something on my face,” he says.
Everyone looks at him because he’s so tall and some might say good-looking and because he absolutely refuses to look back. He has this blank look that people can stare at without the fear that he will return a stare, challenging them. He’s like a blind man in that respect.
Maybe things would have turned out differently if he had stayed at school that day. There were so many moments when it all could have turned out differently. I wanted him to stay so I wouldn’t have to go through the rest of it friendless, then go to practice bored and shit-headed, so I lied and told him no one was looking at him, when most probably they were. He continued to look above my head like he couldn’t see me with these dead eyes that said everything you want mattered not a thing to him.
“No one’s staring at you right now,” I tell him, and I’m right. The halls are thinning as third period nears.
“That’s because there’s less fucking people around,” John says. “Statistics.”
He’s burning to pummel me, I can see that, and I guess the only reason he doesn’t try is that I brutalized him so easily at football.
“No one’s staring at you right now,” I say, level and even, the way I think a therapist would talk. Mr. Ferguson, our school psychologist, does not know a fraction of how to handle John’s jeebs. But I mimic Ferguson’s voice, maybe because I want to appear older and more an authority figure. I know Ferguson’s style. I’ve seen him pointlessly to talk about my bulk. This was at the suggestion of Mr. Lardner, a macrobiotic eater who’s as thin as John and has yellow-orange skin from all the carrots he eats.
No one here knows what they’re doing.
“Asshole,” he says. “People can read people’s minds.”
Then he says, “Come with me to my locker.”
I think he’s going to show me a new T-shirt. He opens his locker and takes out a piece of paper and hands it to me. It’s a map of the school, done in his handwriting, and it looks serious, shaky lines the word grenade over the trophy case area, just like in mine, but also bodies, little stick figures splayed on the ground with red ink coming out of their heads, scattered throughout the halls.
“It’s good,” I tell him. “I like how you did the blood. Very psychotic. Are you going to show it to Meredith? Showing it to me isn’t going to get you laid.”
I’m sure hundreds of kids across the country draw bloody maps of their schools. It’s a great stress reliever. But to John, this seems serious and like it’s original to him, like maybe he thinks he’s ready to do it.
“I’m going home,” he says. Then, in a sarcastic tone, “I’m taking a mental health day.”
“I’ve got practice today,” I say.
“So?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Go home and feel better.”
“Why, thanks,” John says.
I don’t know whether John fully gets it, but I’m the one who drew the first map. I’m the one who showed him how to do it, and my map is far more accurate. John’s just barely mimicked the school, with wavy lines making the square boxes of the classrooms. He didn’t get the number of exits right, a must for a map like this, and he didn’t get the hallways exactly right. There aren’t even any bathrooms, where sheeple hide. I think it’s something you have to be born with, being authentically sick.
“This needs more work.”
I hand him back the map. John laughs and throws it into his locker and slams it shut.
Chapter 23: John
One week after the shootings Meredith floated the halls, a ghost like us. Again Adam told me the real reason she was interested, and again I told him to go finger himself.
I’m calling it, I said.
It’s my first practice today, Adam said.
You need me around until the minute you try to become a jock?
Just kidding, he said.
Just kidding, I said.
Later, Meredith texted me. I’d been reading about the Ohio shooter online.
Did u actually go home?
Why not
Want me to come over at lunch?
K
A typhoon of shit-smell swirled around me. I got into the shower, carefully sniffed my fresh clothes before I put them on. With wet hair I shut my bedroom door and waited in the beige TV area downstairs, near the front door. When Meredith hit the bell I jumped up dizzy, blanking out along my edges. I opened the front door.
You look like a ghost, she said.
Are you another Sister from the Bleeding Heart? I said.
Huh?
That smells good, I said.
She squealed and held up a white bag: barbecue.
I took her into the kitchen, leaned against the white counter near the espresso machine, crossed my feet and my arms and listened.
Joan and I were thinking about reaching out to other people in the school, she said. You know, the idea where everyone should know everyone else’s deal, sort of reach across the aisle. It’s nothing. It’s not like we wrote it down or something. And I’m not even making sense.
Meredith had been rooting around in the bags of food, pulling out white Styrofoam containers with corners of greasy aluminum foil peeking from under the lids. I ripped one open and started on a wing. I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last. Other than coffee, maybe thirty-six hours. I was getting better.
What’s your favorite show? Meredith asked. Series, movies, whatever. Come on.
There are just so many, I said.
Meredith was eating ribs in my kitchen and babbling. I felt an unlocking, a release that slid from my neck to my hips. It’s always from something down.
I snapped to when she said the word gun.
What happened?
He just used a handgun to kill all of those people.
Not in Ohio. That guy had a shotgun.
Those are okay, Meredith said. But Glocks? What if we lived in a country where everyone had an Uzi or whatnot? It would be mass murder all the time.
She looked at me the way she had in the hall days before, with kindness, open to whatever I had to say, her yellow hair spilling simply over her shoulders. I got out my phone and shot a couple of pictures before she figured out what I was doing and covered her face and crouched like a hailstorm had just struck her side.
I won’t do it, I said.
Meredith unclenched at little.
You won’t do what, she said.
Chapter 24: Adam
The practice field lies hot beneath the sun. I’m the last one out, of course, because it took too long to get suited up. Coach Grady helped me with the straps that go under the shoulder pads. My gut hangs over the top of my pants in a great bulge. Everything feels like a costume, the whites pulled tight over bulging pads strapped around my chest and thighs like a tarp tied over an abandoned bus, new cleats that snag the grass. A snug, netted jock strap that cups my balls and forces me to point North.
The team has lined up on the 50-yard hatches, doing stretches. I’m already sucking water from a squeeze bottle. Grady calls out what stretches come next in a commanding tone, nothing like what I’m used to back in the school, where the teachers seem to need our permission to ask us to do anything.
I run in my new cleats, which each have a spiritual complaint ticket from when I tried them on at the store, but what fucking store has your size? This is the deal. Anything, everywhere, but nothing quite right. I hobble over to the center of the field and place myself at the end of a line of players. Everyone is wearing a helmet, and their face masks shadow their eyes in the glaring sun. I can’t tell who’s who in this year’s august list.
They start a stretch where you keep your legs straight, bend at the waist and twist your body to take your opposite hand down to your opposite foot. Contradictions. I try this, but my bulk doesn’t allow such movement, so I succeed in bending only a little as I reach my hand in the direction of my oppositional foot. I can feel the muscles all along my legs and back straining, but my back feels good bent like this, like I’d never bent it this way before, which I’m sure is true.
Now the stretch is switched over to the other side. The players around me have done this before. They flatten their palms on the ground and seem to stretch even further than last time. So, there’s another thing at which people are better than me.
When someone finally notices me, it’s Kyle Flood.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he says.
“I’m here to hit,” I say.
“Good deal,” he says, edging laugher.
Fuck all the Kyles of the world.
Fuck all the Kyles of the world means there’s always something behind what people are doing and saying to you, something beyond what you can see on their faces and always unknowable. This is what confuses me about John and Meredith. He should not listen to her, but he wants to go to her sign-painting party, which is not his way. He’s not in a non-zero game, but he’s razor-close, and that’s not his style. Or, I’m projecting. I’ve done my own research in either case.
We’ve switched to tucking one leg up under ourselves and extending the other leg straight out and then reaching for that leg. My back makes a small pop deep inside my body. It feels like the center of mass has loosened. I flash back to hitting John yesterday, and to the great victory dream. I’m sweating under my helmet, a free-flowing sluice that collects in my neck roll and navigates down my chest. We continue for what feels like a long time, Coach Grady shouting out names for the stretches as I try to imitate everyone, sheep-like. I find myself easing into this, sort of mushing into myself under all the padding and the helmet, generically dressed and in formation with the rest of the jocks. They’re joking around a little. A laugh will start among a group of them and spread through the rest and stop at me because I haven’t heard the joke through my helmet, or don’t I get the joke, or both. But I don’t care. I’m going to become a jock.
John thinks nothing of what’s going to be my new status in this school. He thinks nothing will change, which, again, may be me projecting my fears. He thinks my status will not change, that I’ll go on being a fatty-fat. He hasn’t said any of the above but I know he thinks it.
Now we’re supposed to jog around the rectangular edges of the field. Still, no one has noticed me, or very few have, or I was one of the jokes that went around that I wheezed at, the breeze muffling sense in my tight helmet. I’m heating like a little brick oven inside the gear. My back slicks with sweat. The players explode from their lines.
At first, I jog okay, moving myself along at the rear of the pack, but then something funny happens with my feet. I start running pigeon-toed, or whatever it is that is going wrong. My feet smack into my ankles with each stride. I make a conscious effort to run straight, but I’m bumbling and stuttering, heels cracking against opposite ankles. The heat is unbelievable and my weight is unbelievable. I have to stop for breath. By this point, the rest of the team has finished their two times around the field, lapping me, but not saying a word on their way. There’s only the march of their cleats as they pass. I theorize that Coach Grady has told the team to leave me alone.
There are sprints that I can take only at a jog, strange sideways crab-like runs that make me stumble and fall. Pain begins to be an issue in my lower back, weighted down every second by my fat, which feels more massive as the practice wears on. Then we’re running around the field again, a monotonous jog around the same dirt, and my feet start knocking into my ankles again. At this moment I realize I don’t know how to run. My feet knock against each other. Blood seeps through my socks.
Then, after a blur of awkward motion and knocked ankles and pain, we’re finally hitting.
Grady lines us up, one against the other on a white line. He tells us to crouch and get ready to hit, to move the other guy, to smash him, to roll over him, to best him at the line and push him away from the line. I’m thinking about exploding into John at my own makeshift line in his back yard, how he snapped like a twig. But now, I’m staring into the facemask of Navneen Singh, his long, ceremonial black hair tied up and stuffed into his helmet and pressuring his eyebrows down into a pleated crease on his forehead.
He’s sucking wind around his mouth guard like I am, and as we drop into our three point stances he says, “Big fat boy. Big fat man playing football now.” But Navneen’s accent makes it impossible for us—for John and me—to ever take him seriously. I don’t think he would have made it as a stick figure in John’s sketch.
Singh’s just too nice and unattached to any evil group that I can think of to merit John’s disapproval. Singh’s a loner like us, though we’d never be friends because he’s good, not sick. I doubt Navneen has ever stared at John. Everything’s being filtered through John this afternoon because he’ll be gone for who knows how long, and his absences give everything an eerie sheen, like he’s dead and only his thoughts have stayed behind. I’m gearing myself up for the hit, but I don’t know why I’m thinking things through John’s frame of mind, his anger at everyone, the way he’s so quick to dismiss everyone in his path. This is what I want for my first hit. At the whistle I fire forward and Navneen crumples under me. My knees compress his ribs. I fall over him and onto the ground behind him. I break over his smashed body and over the white line.