INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 29-32
Chapter 29: Adam
It’s the morning after my first football practice. My ankles are a blood-encrusted pain zone. It’s agonizing to pull up fresh socks. I’m so sore I feel like an old man trying to get out of his bed, straining against his bulk and the curdling wet spot on his sheets, my tendons tight to the point taking down the corpus.
I go down to the kitchen and wedge myself into the breakfast nook to read yesterday’s paper, which my mother hasn’t cleared away. The Ohio man has left the front page. The Texas kid’s victim photos are lined up in a big matrix, with a tidbit below each picture about the kid, a retrospective, a ragged memory. I don’t read them. I just glance over their pictures, the weird collection of formal photos and snapshots of mostly ugly kids. It continues neatly with my theory that beautiful people don’t get sprayed with random tragedy. People like me, fat and average, kind of bland, we’re the real targets when someone decides to line people up against the wall.
My mom comes into the kitchen wearing her robe. She’s eating a breakfast bar and smoking a cigarette at the same time. I can tell by the way she’s walking that she’s been up all night again watching TV—this shuffling, head-down walk, her norm since she lost my dad two years ago. She went back to working part time at Dwayne’s, but she doesn’t sleep before her day shifts. I’m worried about her TV consumption, how during the days it’s the little TV they keep in the Dwayne’s office scaring her into delusions of worldwide collapse, and then while at night it’s fiction about the end of the world, or the off-world, I don’t know. I just see the stuff on my way through the TV room, a layer of cigarette smoke hovering around my shoulders.
“I’m not really reading the paper,” I say.
I stopped reading the newspaper a few months ago, but I still go down to the end of the drive to pick up a new paper, a chore from back when my dad still lived. I do it to impress her, and maybe she notices, I don’t know. I haven’t done it yet this morning, and I’m sure that she’d rather read the same paper twice than walk down the chilly drive under the oncoming of Fall, her own time of craziness.
“I did football practice yesterday,” I say. I want to draw her out of her morbidity and I find myself using the same voice I use when I talk John down from of his jeebs, the careful adult tone.
“That’s right,” she says. Already, her voice has trailed into the tunnel where her thoughts reside privately, hidden from me as a kind of protection. I’m sure they aren’t pleasant, the way she seems when she’s not looking directly at me and puts on a brave face. It’s like she thinks that if she doesn’t talk, nothing scary will come out of her mouth.
“I’m sore,” I tell her.
She drifts by me on her way to the coffee maker, smoke trailing, and says, “That’s pain leaving your body.”
I think I know what she means. The phrase goes something like, weakness leaving your body. I can see that she’s trying with me. Most mornings, she doesn’t make me breakfast, just shambles up to her room to get an hour’s sleep before Dwayne’s. But today, possibly because I’m the new football hero, she asks me how many eggs and how many slices of bacon I want.
She burns the breakfast, but that’s all right. I'll stop on my way to school at Daylight, a 24-hour Korean donut shop, as usual. I will order three crullers and an éclair and I will be taken care of.
Chapter 30: John
We still had our jeans on. There was nothing else to it. We had our jeans on and we were playing around when Meredith started screaming and everything was ruined. The jeebs were up, the vodka bore down. I didn’t feel like such a shitheel anymore. I had energy of spirit. I came back at her with my own stare, a look into the back of her head, but I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t find my way into her.
I don’t want to cover your mouth again, I said.
Good.
Why did you scream? Are you crazy?
Please, let me up, she said.
I wasn’t going to hurt you.
Please, let me up.
I lifted my weight off her, a difficult thing to do without pressing my weight harder with my knees on her legs. She yelled again. I got up and offered her my hand.
I’m reaching across the aisle, I said.
Fuck you, Meredith said.
That time, her language felt good. Being hated, like I actually had this person lying there and I was about to do what? Would she run out and call the police or her parents, or would she scratch out my eyes with her lacquered nails? It was like never knowing what a girl might say but knowing it would be the truth because they always said the truth, and I knew that if I waited for her, with my hand out, I would hear something real. Adam, sitting in his sadness at his computer, couldn’t know this lovely space between waiting for a girl to say something and then hearing it. The openness of Meredith’s grey, staring eyes and her ability, without being sick herself, to recognize it in others.
We were stuck with each other, me and Adam and her, I guess. Stuck at Lincoln in our little hometown with the highway’s cloverleaf abandoned for drugging and drinking and laughing at the derelicts I would join one day. I would most definitely not be leaving. And Meredith would have to understand that she wasn’t going anywhere today, either, at least in her head, and that I’d made an impression that was going to last beyond, through her disappearing into college-land and adulthood prep, while Adam and I remained here with our cat experiments and a bag of pennies to drop off the bridge.
Meredith stared into the back of my head and saw all this, and that was why she’d screamed, maybe, knowing that I had the jeebs and that she was stuck in the bedroom of one who’d been touched by the jeebs too many times and wasn’t going to change. I was beginning to learn to see myself through another’s eyes. That’s different than the make-believe of paranoia. I’d reached out and moved through that feeling and onto the overgrown path to the dead pond and into the brown-black water, which was shit, and I was swimming through it, wading myself along, with my feet touching the soft bottom of the shit-pond, the water up to my chest, the air in my lungs supporting my weight and my arms making motions to swim myself out to the middle, where no one had waded out before, and maybe she could see me going further, pushing myself out on a Sunday, with school out and no one between the old special school and the high-school building, the dead pond full of what made the jeebs feel so good. I turn back to see her staring at me from the shore of the dead pond. Good-bye, Meredith. I sink into some quicksand at the center of the dead pond and go under. That is the last she’d see of me, but how she’d remember me, now that she knows me, that was something else.
This is like a secret, I said. Keep it.
From her place on the floor, she took my hand. Her hand was cold and wet, sweating in my stuffy little bedroom. I hauled her up the way I’d seen football players out on the practice field pull each other up off the grass after they’d knocked each other down. We weren’t going to be like them, though. Not on the same team, clapping and breaking and turning to face the other side together, ready for the future.
Where’s my dress?
Her voice had been lost someplace. She wasn’t staring into my head. Her eyes were down low, searching the brown carpet around my feet for where I could have put the dress, as if I’d been the one to remove the dress, her blond hair spilling out of the neck hole as she stripped.
Take my t-shirt, I said.
I tossed her a yellow shirt with an animal spaceship raping a spacetime portal. Not funny. But I liked the idea that she could cover herself up with my stupidity. I could see it coming into her eyes. This fucked-up kid. She’d seen me. She’d kissed me European. She was putting on my clothes. And she had no excuse.
Chapter 31: Adam
On my way to English, Navneen stops me in the hall with an intense gaze, something like friendly anger.
“You hit hard yesterday,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You won’t run over me today.”
“Doubt it,” I hear myself saying. I don’t know where I get the words but saying them fills me with a heady feeling. We’re standing in the hall, Navneen and I, and we’re talking practice, we’re having a conversation. But next thing, he gives me a pitying smile and slaps my arm twice, then leaves me standing there, wondering what his smile means but knowing that I will hurt him harder the next chance I got.
John is standing by his locker, watching all this happen. When I approach him, he reaches out and slaps my shoulder just like Navneen did, only harder.
“What was that about?” he asks. “Something jock-related? Can we do some slip-dick later?”
“I destroyed him yesterday,” I say. “You should have seen it, it was excellent. It was fucking excellent. Slip-dick means nothing to me.”
“It’s not possible that you’re still into football,” John says.
“One practice.”
“It seems like you’ve been in it forever, the way you talk about it. And it feels like you’re going to quit soon,” John says.
“Crazy again,” I say. “What feels, for example? What rains? It does. It just does. What’s it? Don’t start talking like sheeple. It’s fucking raining. It just is. You make no sense, slip-dick.”
John looks hurt, like I’ve touched something raw. Calling him crazy has been something I’ve done for most of the time we’ve known each other, fifth grade to now. Crazy, crazy fucker, fucked-up crazy person and such stuff. And John always seemed to like it. He liked being the sick one. I have always been able to tell this. He looks to me to determine how crazy he is. He has no way of telling on his own, and I’m the only one who’s honest with him.
“I’ve never killed an Indian jock before,” John says.
“That’s because you’ve never been to India,” I tell him, but he doesn’t hear me because Meredith comes up at the same moment, talking, talking.
“Hey,” he says, somewhat warmly. Her visit to John yesterday afternoon balloons in my imagination, with images of Meredith perched on the edge of John’s bed and looking around at the weirdly-painted black walls and death-metal posters, thinking she can fix all of this as John sits at his computer, messing around with something or other, ignoring her and jerking his megadeath.
Meredith says, “But you came back.”
John nods. I don’t know what she means, but then I flash on it. John made it back to school after being gone for one day. That’s nothing. Meredith has me questioning myself. Should I now start celebrating that fact and let him bullshit me about football? I’m the one who knows how to handle John, so this is not acceptable.
“Did you write your essay?” Meredith says, not like it’s a question. “About the school shootings. Did you write it or not?”
“Turns out I’m not in Honors English,” John says. “Because I got fucking held back? Did you know that or not?”
She’s plainly shocked for a moment, then pulls a smile out of her bag of tricks. She’s radiant with forgiveness, with compassion, with a strange kind of love for John that I don’t understand.
“Okay, but I wrote an essay,” she says. “I’m turning it into Mr. Lardner and I’m making it into an editorial for the paper.”
“Oh,” John says.
He sounds disinterested. But he’s looking into her eyes, so she continues.
“I wrote about,” she says, then stops, a censored thought marring her perfect approach with him. She’d been doing so well. There must have been something in what she was going to say that could have alienated him. I can see that she’s learning him.
“What?” John says.
“I wrote about Tyler Max getting beat up in the bathroom,” she says.
“Huh,” says John.
At that moment I really want to read the essay, suddenly afraid that my essay might not be as good as hers. Mine doesn’t have a title. I forgot to add one. I make a mental note to call it Courage. I want to read what Meredith has to say about my pummeling of Max, to see whether she thinks it’s sick or not. Most likely she does, having chosen that for the topic, which Lardner was extremely clear about, and which Meredith took very seriously that day, excited as she was about helping sick people.
“Do you want to read it?” she asks John.
Yes, I whisper to him, but I don’t make a sound. I can see us laughing over it at lunch. But really, I don’t want to laugh at something Meredith’s written, so I don’t know why I just had that idea. I’m jealous that she wrote the paper at all, which is strange. But then I think I should be the only one with the insight into the paper’s topic, and no one else’s paper should exist.
I say, “You don’t have to turn it in.”
John doesn’t know the paper’s implications, that it could be about him even if it’s directly about Tyler, which is to say, absolutely directly about me. I’m the one who trashed the bathroom stalls and hit Tyler, but evidently John’s the one Tyler is telling his story about. Big junior can easily get jumbled into tall sophomore who’s a held-back junior, or that scary John Teller, so no one, not even Meredith, thinks this story is about me.
“I printed two copies,” Meredith says. She seems proud of having made such inroads with John. Proud, but not happy about it, if that makes sense. I decide that I will grill him about what they did together when she visited him at home yesterday, his mental health day. It couldn’t have been comfortable for him, having someone in the same room while he was on the jeebs, and so he must have a lot to complain to me about, and if only she’d stop talking, he’d have time to tell me about it before English starts. Meredith takes some stapled papers out of her purse, presses them into John’s hand.
“You don’t have to read it,” she says. Then she says, “Okay, don’t read it. Just forget it.”
She tries to grab the paper, but he’s already got it held above her head, three feet out of Meredith’s reach.
I say, “He wants to read it so bad.”
Meredith turns to me with a kind of wild-eyed surprise. Not appalled, not like the expressions I normally see, fat as I can look coming around a corner, fat kid sneaking up on people with my fat, but more like shock that I’ve spoken directly to her. The Drano feeling comes into my eyes and rolls back into my brain. And my voice isn’t my own again. It has that deadness to it, that same seriousness of the moment when I said I was sick and asked to go to the bathroom, then trashed both it and Tyler. I’m beginning to recognize this as my own kind of jeeb, or something else the matter with me, this inability to talk like myself when I’m around anyone other than John. She looks like she’s going to cry. I’m watching and waiting.
John takes the essay from her. He says to me, “Read it to me later.”
Chapter 31: John
From my bedroom window on the afternoon of my mental health day I watched Meredith leave. She was only in her car. I was the one driving her away. I paced my bedroom, drunk, high on the jeebs. I took another. I ripped down a poster of a sniper scope, tore it to pieces that I let scatter the floor. I’d loved that poster, but I was getting better, and I didn’t need reminders, like Kelley Allen DuPliss didn’t need to be told who he was.
When we turned back into friends a year ago I asked Adam, Do you ever look in the mirror?
Fuck you, he said, because he was obese.
After Meredith drove away, I looked into my mirror to see myself like she had. I shut my eyes and thought about how I looked with my eyes closed. I used my phone to take a picture. I was asleep or dead. It didn’t look like I had the jeebs. I flipped one picture into the past, back to the blurry shot of Meredith in my kitchen. She had been smiling and I’d needed to put a stop to that, to show her what she’d set herself up for.
Adam texted. I sent him my map. I wanted to go further. I added bodies so that Adam, if he wanted to think we’d get in trouble, would be satisfied in his own way. I wanted to draw him into it, and maybe I wanted to start making real plans.
Chapter 32: Adam
The essay ticks in my backpack like a movie bomb. I can’t wait to put a title to it and turn it in, can’t wait for this little drama to play itself out completely and absolutely, with us breaking up and heading to class, which is strange because I’m also happy to see Meredith this morning and I wish she’d seen me talking to Navneen. Lincoln’s first game is in two weeks, and because Meredith is in the pep club she’ll be in the crowd with the rest. A bolt of Drano fires down my spine, sends signals across my shoulders and into my sweating palms.
“What happened to Tyler Max?” I ask her.
“I guess you can read about it,” she says, exasperated, a touch embarrassed, maybe, but then she finds the strength to continue: “Some random hit him in the bathroom.”
I watch John carefully. He lowers his hand holding the paper and shoots a look at me that says that I’m going to pay.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What?” Meredith says. She’s nervous, but she doesn’t grab her paper from John.
“I don’t know,” I say. Weakly, I’m trying to put us, Meredith and me, on one side, together in our confusion about John’s apparently angry and entirely inappropriate reaction to us. John continues to stare at me, rage in his eyes. I believe that at that moment he’s finally figured it all out, the key to our standing there with Meredith, the key to Meredith visiting him at home yesterday, to all the goings-on between the two of us and this fucked girl who’s come out of nowhere to talk us out of our loneliness. Maybe he’s already gotten used to Meredith’s attention and he doesn’t want me to say another word. Maybe he knows she thinks he’s sick. Maybe he likes the fiction that he’s the one who hit Tyler. Maybe he believes me, now that Meredith is trying to help him only because she is afraid of him and not because she cares.
“Tyler doesn’t know who hit him,” she says.
An idea blossoms. I’m floating in anonymity, and I can hit Tyler all I want. I can pummel fuckers with impunity. I can move through the halls, light on my feet, and I can do anything. I am at the center of the school, and the school’s halls lie open and empty like they are at night, but the ghosts of the students silently slide by, backpacks over their shoulders, and no one’s talking bullshit. It’s complete quiet. I think of our maps and John’s bloody stick figures, his trembling hands and his grey skin, and I think of us walking invisibly through the halls together, marking every ghost with a red X as if Meredith had never come into the picture, had never tried to help John.
I’m the one who’s telling John what to do. It comes down to swift, invisible movements. We speak to each other in short, commando bursts. Grenade in the trophy cases. Meet up in the library. Remember the exits. I’m having the shared Columbine dream of ten hundred thousand kids across the country, a Texas shooter dream, an Ohio rampage dream. I think I might deserve and even expect a little of the sympathy and help Meredith is giving John, but it’s something I will never get.
John says, “So, you think I’m the one who hit him?”
“Well, didn’t you?” Meredith says. She’s nervous again. The halls clear as we near our time for English. I’m sweating across my fat brow and on my fat upper lip. I don’t want to scare her off in the same way I’ve scared off every person who’s come near enough to be called someone I know.
“I need to—it’s time for class,” Meredith says. She looks at me as if I’m someone who rushes to get somewhere on time. So, she wants to walk to class with me, which is what I’d been hoping her interest in John would produce and so I swell, thinking about the short walk down the hall and past the trophy cases to the room where, just the other day, we debated the necessity of helping people like John.
“Don’t let me keep you,” John says in this mock, high-society tone, British and rich.
He steps aside and gestures down the hall. I think about leaving John behind one day. I can imagine a time when John’s much older and he still has this attitude, this letting go, a watching of people passing him by. He can joke about it while he’s young, people disappearing, but maybe I’m projecting. It’s just a gesture in a hallway. As Meredith and I walk past him, I catch John smiling just like he smiled when he called me the Texas kid, with a non-smile, distant and dead inside.
Meredith and I walk to class together. We’re boy-girl, books in our arms, in the movie moment.
I can’t think of anything to say, so I say, “John is crazy.”
“Oh,” she says.
“But I don’t think he hit Tyler.”
Meredith. Her straight, long hair hangs. There’s fairness in everything she does, goodness baked right in. Her sign-painting party is tomorrow, and she hasn’t said anything to me about it. I don’t know how I would respond if she did. Sure, I’ll go. I’ll stand next to you standing next to John and together we’ll talk him out of killing us.
“Who do you think hit him?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, witless.
“Come on. You must have a theory.”
She sounds like a movie lawyer, going for more than I, playing the rat, am willing to give her. I feel that I would be betraying someone instead of myself if I told her the truth, like I hadn't done it myself. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want her attention. By keeping these things about John from her I feel safe, separated enough from myself to get out what I need to say next.
“What time is your party?”
“Eight,” she says. And then, mechanically: “Want to come?”
So, starting it can be as simple as asking the question. It isn’t the mice or Tyler Max or something else that I’m not talking about. It just falls into place, and I can breathe. Sometimes, I think I’m fat because there are so many things I keep to myself, inside, like a secret.