INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 26-28
Chapter 26: John
I thought you would’ve had lots of girls over before, Meredith said. Where’s the trash?
Leave it, I said.
Is this a house where you just leave it? Meredith said.
She wore me thin and strained my imagination. Girls didn’t lie. Girls didn’t cheat on tests. Girls weren’t duplicitous. Girls were faithful to their boyfriends. I had dug them up from the clay of the earth and placed them on such high pedestals that I had to crane my neck just to watch them fall.
In my bedroom Meredith said, You could finish painting the walls.
I ran out of paint, I said.
She turned from the streaked wall, came toward me, and kissed my cheek.
That’s European for hello, she said.
I didn’t know if this was crazy or not. I looked into Meredith’s eyes and found no clue.
Okay, but kiss American, I said.
Do you have anything to drink, she said. I’m not going back to school, and I want to hate everyone as much as you do.
My mom’s vodka is in the freezer. You’ll get some kind of mark on your record.
It’ll shatter my perfect attendance.
Good, I said.
Chapter 27: Adam
I text John after I get home from football practice.
What are u doing
John sends back a pic of a naked woman bent over at her waist and smiling beneath her beaver at the viewer. I’m relieved that he’s online and not staring blankly at his black-streaked walls.
I hit like a madman today
Now you’re a jock
I don’t know whether John’s being sincere or if he’s putting me in my place. His leaving the school today suddenly seems like it had more to do with me being in football than with his having the jeebs.
I don’t exactly get that, so I text, How are the jeebs
I get nothing. John’s not going to talk about it now. This is not sick behavior on my part, my asking how he’s doing. He puts the jeebs off to the side after one of his attacks, won’t talk about it, pretends they never happened. If we were in the Povitch or Oprah split-screen, he’d sneer as if I’d made it up, as if I was trying to pin something fucked up on him when all he was doing was minding his own business. I’m sure this is how he talks to his pediatrician. I’ve Googled his pills before, which I imagine is more than John’s ever done. With side effects, black-box warnings, risk of suicide, and what else on the market for less time than 98% of affordable practicians went to medical school, you’d call their little business numbers without any answer, just a nicely worded sentence implying I’ll give you the shit.
John sends me a music file. It’s some death metal, which I hate and he knows I hate, and I don’t know why I accepted a file from him. Half the time I expect him to send me a virus.
That’s some really cool music, I text back.
I know death metal is theater and I hate all theater except movies and what I’m doing with John. I’m helping John act out the sick person he has locked up inside his head.
What did you do today fucker
Meredith and I made posters
Drano sluices down my throat and into my stomach. I read the words on the screen. I have no response, so I stand up, painfully sore from football already, and lie down on my bed. The thing creaks and sags the way it always does, but this time it’s like a reproach and I’m ashamed again. I try to remind myself that I did well at football today, smashing through Navneen and several other guys before the humiliation of Coach Grady taping gauze to my bleeding ankles. I try to tell myself that though I don’t know how to run, I know how to hit. Have known, apparently, for some time. It’s like I’ve been practicing all my life, hitting imaginary fuckwits, putting my head down and exploding into them, rolling over them, using my mass.
I start the movie. The victory dream. The packed bleachers. The lights blinding out there in the dark of an October night game, my jersey stained with dirt and blood. I’m taking my helmet off, a weary soldier, and limping off the field after our win, and everyone is watching me and wondering about the blood and the gore of it all. Meredith is there, but the dream runs out and I land back in my straining bed, a fat, sore slob. She went over to John’s. They made posters together. I heave myself up off the bed with great difficulty and go back to my phone.
When did she come over
John’s reply comes immediately.
Lunch
Those five, joyful little letters of the word lunch. I want to know how. How did she know he was at home and sick in the head? How did she know where he lived? I can’t ask John because he’ll go sarcastic or dark.
How’s your shooter map coming
I want to break him from the happy subject and remind John of himself. I want to hurt him.
IDK
He’s worried about this conversation being opened end to end, I can feel it. John doesn’t want talk of his map going down for posterity. So, of course, I ask him again.
You’re a shooter
Whatever
He sends another file. It’s a scan of his map with bodies shakily drawn with a blue ballpoint pen scattered in the hallways, the word grenade over the trophy cases. So he isn’t afraid of our conversation being recorded. Again I think I don’t understand John acting like people watch him, acting suspicious around me about things he’s not suspicious of, ultimately. His way of being is something deeper than I imagined when I became his friend and he taught me to be sick. Now that seems to have paid off, with Meredith coming to see him on a day when he goes home with the jeebs. She doesn’t know what his times of crazy are like.
Did you tell Meredith about your jeebs
He takes a long while to respond. I switch over to search for images of the words tackle and hit and sack and get generic football images, not what I was looking for, exactly. I find nothing that could go along with my dream of limping off the field, the school witnessing me. Then my phone makes a sound and I switch over and read his response.
Of course I didn’t tell her asshat
I’m an asshat or more commonly, an asshole.
I’m expansive as I lie in bed, the day’s practice evaporating from my muscles and my bloody ankles in waves of exhaustion and relief and so, feeling expansive, I’m better able to understand myself. I want to keep Meredith around John, but I don’t want her to go to John’s house. I don’t want Meredith to sit next to John—on his bed, in class, in the bleachers watching the football game I’ll be playing in—but I want her to stay close to him so I can be near her.
I wonder, does John have it in him to do what the Texas kid did? Not that I would mind 99 percent of the school’s population reduced to mice running the hallways and attempting escape, piling on top of each other, crawling into their lockers to hide, John holding a gun in each hand. I’m free to imagine these things as long as they’re being done by him. Now I’m the jock, saved by athletics. I’m the one who doesn’t crack. I have an outlet. It’s an easy story to tell myself. But I don’t know what kind of story to tell about John, whether the map is a joke or something serious. He copied my map. The Ohio shooter came only a day after the Texas kid. Davonne Darcy Williams must have been thinking about it a little bit beforehand, but you have to wonder whether his timer would have gone off had Kelley Allen DuPliss not just done it. He just sort of laid it out there for Williams, doable right now. That’s why Meredith is taking time out with John, to show him that it’s not necessary to go in that direction. These are things I want to talk to John about, but there’s the issue of my trying to drag him back into thinking about and talking about his jeebs, which right now is not doable, wrapped up as he is in his own movie starring Meredith.
Chapter 28: John
I’d been kidding around with Meredith, tickling her, and suddenly she was shouting, so I put my hands over her lips and closed her mouth. I didn’t know what she was trying to say. I waited a moment, then I took my hands off her mouth.
Fucking let go of me.
I gripped her shoulders to help her steady herself against whatever storm was brewing in her.
Let go of me, John. Let go of me.
She yelled for help.
I grabbed her mouth and she tried to pull free, so I pushed her against the wall because I didn’t want my mom, who sometimes comes home early to remote, to be down there thinking anything.
I could see it all very clearly, the way Meredith slid down the wall to the floor to a crumple. I saw her psychology of feigned defeat even before she did.
Fuck you, she said.
Not this language, I said.
I dropped to my knees beside her. I had to grab her shoulder for balance, the vodka coming on.
Don’t touch me.
Don’t worry, I said. It’s not about you.
I was walking onto the stage in an elementary school play, so fucking nervous and looking for the people who’d come to see me, missing my marks and standing in front of the kid singing, the music teacher all the while waving at me: Get out of the way.
I put my hands over Meredith’s mouth again and pressed my knees down on her kicking legs.
You’ve got to calm it, I said.
Meredith, high-strung in the extreme, moving around under me, and this feeling of being in the movie. She stopped moving and her throat relaxed. Her bloodshot grey eyes, pretty ones, looked less panicked. I took my hands off her mouth and put them on my hips. Her mouth hung open like the mouth of a corpse lying open before an undertaker wires it closed. She sucked for air. I was less nervous, more afraid, or anxious, about what would come out of her mouth now that I’d let her loose again. My entire body, the iced-tonic feeling, mixed with the shots I’d been swigging, tensed for it.
I had to wait a while with my hands on my hips, staring down at her. Then she looked back into me, through me, into the back of my head, and watched the movie that projected onto the back of my skull.
You said you’d stop doing that, I said. You like to stare at people, Meredith. There’s the universal human right not to be ignored, but there’s another right, which is not to be stared at. You love to stare at people. What’s up with that? You said you’d never do it. I don’t care what you said. You love to stare.
I did not want to stop, couldn’t stop. Fuck Adam and his bullshit fake tackle in my backyard, fuck the way he pretends that I’m falling apart. I’ve got a beautiful girl in my room, and what’s he got? A computer and a bed dented in the middle by his fat ass.
You’re staring, I said. Do you know how that makes me feel?
My voice broke on the word feel, as in: feeling better? I was getting better, but not in any familiar way.
This is me, I said. This is my face. My eyes. My brain. You’re staring at them, so you’d better be ready. When you stare at someone you’d better be ready for them to stare right back at you.