INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 49-54
Chapter 49: John
We stood in the hall, staring at each other as the students walked around us, Meredith’s house filled with juniors and seniors there to paint their signs for the first football game of the new year. She’d stopped when she saw me standing with some guys I didn’t know, bullshitting about something, Slayer, whatever, and we met eyes. Nothing happened with her face. She didn’t look crazy or mad or sad, she looked like she was happy and excited, then had lost most of it, and was waiting for something to happen. I broke from the crowd.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I said.
“What?”
I let my words sink in through what, the shock of seeing me in her own home, maybe. Maybe she’d dreamed of this moment, bringing me over for the party, showing me some real social life, picking me up and placing me in the sun where I would thrive.
“Come with me,” I said.
“Why?”
“Come on.”
“I don’t think I like you being in my house.”
“I can go outside, but come to the bathroom with me first.”
“What are you thinking, being here?”
“I came to tell you something.”
“What?”
“Tell you in the bathroom. Then I go outside. That’s the deal.”
“What’s so interesting that you can’t tell me here? Like what can you have to say?”
“When I was on top of you I had to put my hands on your mouth…”
“Wait. Okay, wait. Not here.”
She breathed in and closed her eyes. Her chest stopped moving under her white Lincoln Football T-shirt. I wanted to take out my phone and take a picture, but I also didn’t want to miss any of it. She opened her mouth and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling then exhaled and looked back down at me.
“Listen to me, John. I’ll fucking scream if you try to do anything. And those guys you were just talking to? Those motherfuckers right over there who are on the fucking football team? They’ll come in and beat your ass if you try to hurt me.”
“Those particular motherfuckers?”
“Yeah, them. Believe it.”
“I’ll follow you,” I said.
Chapter 50: Adam
I stare out, over the people kneeling on Meredith’s pale wood floors, trying only to look at the tops of their heads like they’re nothing, like I taught John at the mall. The girls are painting signs that say, “Go Knights!” and “Wolverines Sit Down!” I can certainly do well enough without friends. I’ve proved that again and again over my life. I don’t know how I was as a toddler, but I can reasonably say that for all my life, I’ve made do with no one around. No social circles, no cliques, John disappearing for weeks at a time, not even the group solidarity you sometimes see springing up between fat people, which actually looks like a living hell.
My mother is skinny and my dad, before he left, was skinny too. They just had a fat kid. I have the genes. There’s probably no time bomb waiting to go off that will make me suddenly turn skinny, the way there is one waiting for people born of fat parents to turn fat one day themselves. This is scientifically proven. I’ve done a lot of reading online about ways of telling whether you’re adopted, and I don’t pass the tests.
More fun than anyone else in the house, John has a lot of guts to pretend that he’s normal for just a little while. People walk away from talking to him amazed that here was this guy they never knew or wanted to know, and suddenly he’s someone you want to be friends with. He’s extending this promise that being friends with him will not be an awkward experience, and even that he’s mesmerized by what you’re saying.
“I’m seriously saying this,” he goes to one of the guys in letterman jackets. “She wrote an essay about me hitting Tyler Max in the bathroom. It was a sweet letter, it fell out of her locker, and she didn’t notice, so I picked it up. She was writing that she thought that I must be like a killer. She’s our age, but she thinks like an old woman. ‘I don’t know, but I think it’s the music people are listening to that’s causing all the shootings!’ It’s fucking hilarious. You dig Slayer, don’t you?”
I walk away. There’s nothing that can be done about this, it just has to run its course and when it’s over, and John doesn’t want to have anything to do with those friends because he has flipped out of his jeebs into a deep depression, they will see this switch as a betrayal. So maybe there is something to his thinking that people are staring at him in the halls. They’re probably trying to understand, by searching his face, the reason he stopped talking to them. What was wrong with them that this loser wouldn’t acknowledge them in the hallway or the football games? What is wrong with him?
I see a girl. She’s standing two people away from me and she’s directing the painting of one of the signs. She’s saying, “More green, more green,” and someone’s laughing because this girl, it’s obvious, isn’t the leadership type. She’s mousy and retiring, blushing at the laughter, and John has a gun in his pocket somewhere. This doesn’t bother me because I am in the presence of this girl I’ve never seen at school before, so relaxed but also so frightened of all the attention she’s getting. "Oh, no, you girl. She’s standing," says one of the other girls, waggling her green paintbrush in the air. "No green for you."
So, I see a girl, so what? This doesn’t mean anything to me, fat. I see them and they see me. It’s the way of the world, people seeing each other but then gazing into the middle distance. Just people going by each other.
She looks at me and says, “More green.”
I’m holding a green paint pen, so I say, “Yeah,” and try to hand it to her, but there are a few people between us, so a couple of them offer to take the pen from me and hand it to her. Now I’m not handing the pen to this shy-but-suddenly-acting-out girl anymore. These other people pass it to her in a line, and I’m watching her take the pen from them and laugh, then look again at me.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Please,” I say.
Why the fuck please? Why not? Why shouldn’t I say something as stupid as please to someone telling me thanks?
When she shakes the paint pen, her breasts shake under her T-shirt. I don’t take my eyes away because now she’s looking down at her sign and won’t see me. She's looking at the green of our school’s green-and-gold colors outlining a football player. I am one of them now, a passing-out, ankle-knocking player. Our first game is in less than two weeks. Plenty of time to get in shape and stop passing out. Maybe this girl, the green girl, will be in the stands cheering for me. She looks like a junior, although I don’t recognize her.
I have the warrior dream, the dream of passes blocked, tackles executed, the blood and the dirt. I am standing there in the middle of the room with nothing to say, so I go looking for John to grab him for a smoke outside on the porch. But, passing a window near the front door, I see him already standing out there, a jet of smoke coming out of his mouth, and he’s talking now with someone else I don’t recognize, and I realize that I’m out of options. I can’t go outside and talk with John and a stranger, and I can’t talk to this stranger girl or her friends, and Meredith is sitting right next to me, doing a design, and I cannot talk to her.
I am a monolith in the center of this room, a tower of flesh doing nothing other than referring to itself, collapsing inward, endlessly self-reflecting, and I want out. I want out of this body, out of this mind where I cannot abide John talking to other people like he’s normal. I want out of this body where I’m incapable of making a girl want me. I am not my mind, and I am not my body. I’m a third something, peeking out from behind the two of them, trying to get free. I want to tell all of this to the green girl, but I know I never will. Seeing this girl has made Meredith seem like my den mother, with her essay and her concern for John, and I wonder if she’s become that way for John, too, if he’s outside right now because he doesn’t want to be around her.
This is how quickly people can change their minds about you. I resolve never to think about Meredith in the old way any longer. I am going to think about the green girl in that way, that hopeless, dreaming way that leads me toward myself and thoughts about myself, fat, rather than outward, toward the girl. These thoughts are coming back today stronger than ever, here in Meredith’s house and far away from my couch and my laptop, but at least I do not have the jeebs.
Chapter 51: John
The bathroom was small with a dim light bulb overhead, a pyramid stack of new toilet-paper rolls on the toilet tank, magazines in a pile, no window, and a heavy scent of baby powder. I leaned against the sink while Meredith stood with her hand on the doorknob, readying her escape.
“When I grabbed you like that,” I said, “I wasn’t in control of myself.”
“What do you mean?” Meredith said. “Then who was in control of you?”
“I wasn’t in control of myself. Now I am.”
“You weren’t that drunk. You were doing things on purpose.”
“I was,” I said.
Meredith finally looked angry. I had to tell her the truth or she’d always be that way, stuck in anger, and I wanted to make her like me again. It hadn’t worked out. I couldn’t hate her, either.
“I was not myself. I have the insanes.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“Never mind. It’s just important that there’s something happening inside me, and I’m going to fix it. Make it stop.”
“You’re not making any sense. I’m going now.”
“You’re not leaving. Come on.”
“Then make sense.”
“I’m never doing that again,” I said. “I’m making sure of that, and soon you can check on it.”
“How can I do that? How can I know you’re not going to do that to someone else?”
“I’m writing a book. When it comes out, everyone will know about me. I’ll be thrown in jail, or something else will happen.” I shrugged and tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry about it, you’re not going to be in the book. And once I finish it, I’m going to self-publish and get it out there.”
“When are you going to do that?”
“I’ve started,” I said. “You’ll see.”
“What’s the book about?”
“People, mostly. It’s just about people and the things they do to each other. So, I’m asking for it.”
“Okay,” Meredith said. She turned the knob but didn’t open the door. “I’m going to go now, but when you publish your book…”
“Emails are set up to go automatically.”
“All right, okay. Good-bye, John.”
“You’re not telling anyone, right?”
“No.”
“Good-bye, Meredith.”
Chapter 52: Adam
I am standing by the snack table. If I hold up a cracker in one way of waving to John as he makes his way back into the living room, and if I hold up the same cracker in a different way when Meredith looks up from her poster to see me standing there, and if I’m seen holding up the cracker to the green girl, how many crackers will I have pointlessly held up by the time I’m old? It’s like a math problem, and we are trains leaving stations at different speeds, ready to crash into each other.
Chapter 53: John
I went outside and stood with the smokers. I finished two cigarettes while talking more bullshit with people I didn’t know, the jeebs hitting me with the elation over talking with Meredith about what I did to her. Getting it out there. Maybe she would write about me in another editorial. I would have to be gone by then, because everyone would assume I disappeared over whatever she wrote. Maybe I’d send her the book first, make her the insider she wanted to be, and she could write about it, stoke everyone in the school up to read it, all about this loser freak they never noticed who went beyond. Maybe they’d never get to find out, if they disappeared, if they became the red X’s on the map on TV, which, whether they recognized it in themselves or not, was the number-one fear of every kid at school.
Leonard was one peek of the administration’s eye at his drawings away from being expelled. There was a rumor that some freshman had written a short story for Fundamentals of English about a school shooting and was in the process of being expelled. Someone brought a toy gun painted black to lunch at the junior-high cafeteria and was suspended. The real thing was happening all around us, killings popping up here and there in the news, more, now that the TV news was paying attention. The coverage looked like that of little wars and disasters that pop up and flame out quickly, cell phone videos, emergency-call recordings, newscasters improvising during the gaps in information. A Searching for Davonne Darcy Williams documentary came out on CNN. The Texas kid moved into the past, but the fear stayed in the present.
I decided that I’d stayed outside long enough to honor our agreement. I stubbed out my third cigarette and went back in the house.
Chapter 54: Adam
John has come back to me and I’m still there, standing by the table, having painted nothing, like him. He sidles up to me and turns his back to the room and lifts his shirt so I can see the little silver pistol tucked in between his belly and the waistline of his jeans.
“Just in case this place gets out of control,” he says.
I don’t laugh. He notices my eyeline and beams right in on it.
“You like her?”
I say nothing.
“I’ll introduce you,” he says. I know he doesn’t know the green girl. It’s the jeebs talking again, this high that he’s on. Before I can say anything to stop him, he’s crossed the crowded room, stepping around the sign painters arrayed on the floor, and has crouched down next to the girl and is talking to her and pointing at me. She looks my direction, a question on her lips. I want a cigarette and then I want to shoot John.
She stands up, and they walk toward me. Revolver in the sock drawer. My thoughts flash toward what’s comfortable and the phrase calms me down the way trilling like a Middle Eastern does. She extends her hand and smiles.
“I’m Claudette,” she says.
“Adam,” I say. “What are you doing here?”
“Making signs.”
“Not me,” I say. I’m eating, I want to say, but I know that much is obvious to everyone in the room, to everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life. I’m eating.
“Why not?” Claudette asks.
She has a freckle on the left side of her chin, my left. It’s slightly raised from the surface of her face, like a mole but it’s not large enough to be called a mole. It’s sexy, I decide, and I stare at it as she asks me why not.
I say, “Because I don’t care about signs for the school.”
I’m not a helper, except with John, who’s now grinning and pulling out his flask and offering it to Claudette, who receives it gently, as if contains nitroglycerine, and takes a sip. She grimaces, making the freckle-mole vanish behind her frown. It must be John’s cheap vodka.
I want a sip too, so I hold my hand out, and she passes me the flask, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand like she’s in a Western. I want to tell her that John has a gun, so she knows the kind of person she’s just taken a drink from, just so she doesn’t start liking him instead of me, but there’s no time. I must drink.
It goes down hot and nasty, like all of John’s liquor, cheap stuff that he has to buy on his meager allowance. His parents could afford to give him more, but they don’t want him to get into trouble, I suppose, which only means that he gets into lower-grade trouble, and I don’t know whether they’re aware of the difference this makes, and the loser’s perspective John is adopting. He’s thinking of himself as some kind of bum-in-training, and the depressive jeebs, when they have him, convince him that he’ll be homeless after he graduates. I tell him he can come live with me wherever I am. But John just laughs, and his look says, I’m going to end up on the streets one day, anyway.
I take another drink to balance out my bulk’s need for greater volumes of alcohol and try to smile. Claudette watches me expectantly, and when I sputter, she laughs. It’s not a vicious laugh, a mocking laugh, but a laugh with no ill will behind it. I’m beginning to suspect a setup here, a practical joke someone’s playing on me and I’m eager to catch it before it goes on any longer. I will not allow Navneen or anyone else from football to get a girl to act like she likes me for a little while we’re at a pathetic sign-painting party, just for laughs. I look around the room, but everyone’s engaged as they were before, hunched over their butcher-block paper with their brushes and their paint pens. No one is suppressing laughter. No one is trying to look like they’re not looking in my direction, and I feel no Drano running down my left arm, so I don’t think I’m in for a heart attack this afternoon, despite the fact that John is playing with the gun under his shirt.