INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 55-60
Chapter 55: 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 56: 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.
Chapter 57: John
I didn’t care that I was breaking the deal by returning to Meredith’s house, or that she might see me. I felt the gun jammed between my waist and the jeans. It was electric against my skin, concealed, like me, like everything wrong was hidden from everyone but Meredith. I felt invisible, the jeebs higher. I was flying on the meds and my confession to Meredith.
I found Adam a girl. She wasn’t unattractive, and didn’t give Adam the fat look, so I opened my flask and toasted the occasion. It must have been the first time a girl showed Adam the beginnings of any kind of attention. I knew her generosity couldn’t last, and that soon his fat would crowd him from her mind. But for the time being, the world looked less unfair to him. Hope came into his eyes.
Then let me leave them with some of that, the pursuit of happiness we talked about at the cloverleaf before it turned into a homeless camp. I reflected on the disappeared things, the cloverleaf as our place, my nausea from looking at sick videos, Meredith’s interest in me. If she could give up so easily, then no one would ever stand up for me. My book would be the thing to take me out of invisibility, set me apart from the white-hat ramblings of the Texas kid and the silence of the Ohio church shooter. I held onto the two like they were my friends. You could see it in DuPliss’s class photo. Unhinged, probably unable to look in the mirror just like Adam and me, coming loose at the edges. Insides bright with secrets, his eyes tunneling into the camera, no smile around them even though DuPliss’s mouth held a frozen grin in all his yearbook photos, like he was a good boy.
People had forgotten about the shooters, painting their hopeful sheets of butcher block paper with images of football players, kids getting their portraits done as if they needed even more approval.
I’d have to paint my own portrait because Teachers’ Picks would never put a printout of my book in the trophy case for us to frag. They’d find my Facebook photo, eyes closed, and I would look weirdly at peace, since scary is found primarily in the eyes. So, finally, no one would be able to look in.
Chapter 58: Adam
“You really should help me with the grass on my poster,” says Claudette, “because I’ve got way too much uncolored space going on.”
I am on my knees at her terribly drawn football player. After we work on it for a few minutes I don’t think it’s so terrible, and I realize that I was being harsh because everyone else had their own posters and I was forced to piggyback on hers, so therefore it must be horrible as long as I was involved, even if I don’t have the jeebs.
John has wandered off, possibly to set up more couples, and now I’m alone with Claudette, or as alone as two people can be in a crowded room. There’s a feeling of warmth coming off her side; it feels like a small, gentle space radiator sitting next to me. We continue to paint, moving our way around each other’s hands, negotiating the work. We paint. When she looks at me, I can feel that she’s not noticing the extra chins. I don’t know how I know this, but it hits me that she’s blind, somehow, to my ugliness. I think this can’t possibly be it, suddenly a movie moment. The movie moment when I come across a woman who sees around my bulk, does not take into account how I look. She smiles. I attempt to smile back, but my smile is like nothing, like lukewarm tap water, and I’m forced to look back down at the paper.
“You’re from this school, I’m guessing,” she says.
What is this? This kind of question. There is something out-of-body about this.
“I’m from this school,” I say. “Are you a junior or something?”
“I am, but not here,” she says. “In Houston. I’m from Texas. I’m visiting Meredith and helping you guys out with your paintings. More green.”
She reaches out and snatches the green pen from my hand even as I’m using it, smiling into my eyes. I’m beginning to think that this girl has something strange going on about the green joke, that she’s using it too much, but then I remember that she’s shy and either her meds have kicked in or she’s putting a lot of effort into being vocal, telling the same joke as a way to get something out there. I remember that I myself don’t have any jokes in store, and finally I flash on what she has just said. She’s from another state. Just visiting.
“How long are you here for?” I say.
“I leave tomorrow morning.”
Chapter 59: John
Adam was silent as I drove him home, so I said, Hold the gun.
What for?
Adam with a loaded pistol. Look out, world.
I took the gun out of my waistband and waved it in the air between us. I said, This comes with three free shots.
Adam pressed the knob to lower his window and grabbed the Glock. He jabbed the gun out the open window and emptied it, three rounds, into the rainy air. The sunburst of the muzzle blast bounced off the raindrops, looking like a filmstrip burning up in a projector. Three times the blowout flash of white and red, then the gun went click, magazine empty, and he leaned back in his seat, exhausted, and stared at the gun in his hand.
Sergio Leone, I said.
Sick, Adam said.
Fun, right, I said, because he was frowning down at the gun, looking tight around the eyes, like he was about to cry.
So that didn’t snap you out of it, I said. You’ll find another blind girl someday.
Shut up, Adam said.
We could still go back to the cloverleaf, see if anyone’s stayed around or if we scared them off. Maybe we rid the cloverleaf from Skid Row.
I have to get home.
Tummy hurt again? You’re always trying to back out at the last second.
You’re the one. I was the one who drew a map of the school first. You’re just copying me.
Adam continued to stare at his hands, at the gun cradled in them, and his voice began to quiver.
You hate her anyway. So why do you care whether Meredith gives a shit about you? You know it’s about me. You wouldn’t be anything without me. This is all based around me, like a circus performer or something. I’m pulling all the strings. I’m the reason Meredith’s interested. You’re just the face.
I’m the face?
My Facebook picture, my eyes shutting everyone out.
I’m the brains, and you’re the face, Adam said.
Adam wouldn’t say anything else the rest of the way to his house, and it didn’t matter. I knew he meant I was the face of the operation, so he could pretend he was the Wizard of Oz. I could have asked him to tell me about the gun type and bullets, ask him about football and how he can hit hard, ask about jihad, smash someone’s car headlights, but I wasn’t going to engage him while I was on my way out. I knew he was sad over the girl he spent twenty minutes with, but at the same time he needed to have these experiences if he was going to make it outside the school. Yet I wasn’t going to root for him on graduation day from wherever I ended up. He was too much of a fucker, always at my mind, playing with it, making me paranoid about my head. We needed to be free of each other one day, rip off the Band-Aid, and it would be best if it came on the same day for each of us, a mutual disappearance.
Chapter 60: Adam
My bedroom door thrown open. It bangs against the wall and bounces back and nearly hits me. I slam it shut. I am on my bed and before I know what I’m doing, I am sobbing into a pillow. Of course, she’s going away. That makes the most sense. The only girl who wasn’t repulsed by me had to be from Houston and had to be leaving tomorrow.
Revolver in the sock drawer. This is all I can think. But that’s not me. I can think about Claudette and the way she handed me the green paint pen I’d given her, Claudette giving it back to me like we were close. She looked at me as though I wasn’t repulsive. It was something I’d never seen before.
The tears aren’t stopping. I’m afraid that my mom is going to hear me up here. I haven’t cried since I was a kid, maybe since fifth grade, when I first woke up to the fact that I was fat. I cried sitting on this same bed, with my mom putting her arms around my shoulders and trying to comfort me, and me, throughout my sadness and my weeping, thinking she must have known this day was coming, she must have been preparing herself for this moment, because I’d been huge throughout my childhood. And here she had waited for that branching out of my circle of concern to include what other people thought of me and was rewarded for all her patience by a kid hysterically crying, for the first time, over how fat he was. Truly, and for the first time, crying for himself, because some other kid made a mean remark on the playground.
That day, I had not been able to button my jeans and had collapsed into tears on the bed. I cried alone for a while until I noticed the minuscule weave in the fibers that held my jeans together, the stitching and the meeting together of the lines of fabric. They drew me in. They were made by someone, my jeans were made by someone, and I could almost picture the person who made them. She had white hair, slightly flyaway, a receding chin line and thick glasses, about sixty years old. It doesn’t matter how I imagined her. I remember the feeling, thinking I knew someone had spent time making the cloth that would become my jeans that I had, just a few minutes earlier, been cursing for not fitting, Fatty, and thinking about cutting to shreds. But now I could not tear the jeans apart because someone somewhere had made them. I felt sorry for her. I felt guilty over the jeans, and this started my crying again, which brought my mom into my room.
Fucking revolver in the sock drawer.
I am not going to cry like that now because I do not have the jeebs. I am going to pull myself up from the bed and become a human with some pride, and I will just say good-bye to the feelings that, for a few minutes, Claudette brought into my life. I’ll hold onto the memory of the feelings, and I resolve I will keep them secret. This experience will be the one that means someone likes—or liked—me. Whether or not it’s true.
But the tears come over me again and I’m thinking that this is not going to happen, this mode of thinking. I’m not built to think this way. This optimistic reframing of events goes against everything in me. I cannot push aside my feelings about what just happened, cannot toss out any possibility of happiness like garbage.
I’m thinking about John’s gun, silver and bright and small enough to be carried concealed to the party. How he could have changed the world back at the cloverleaf, reached out with his anger and plucked the string that would release the trap door that has always been beneath our feet waiting for us, the misadjusts. The gun could have completed that circuit, from kids unable to keep calm or, in my case, unable to relate to other kids in a normal way, to kids who shoot at homeless men under the cloverleaf before going to a sign-painting party at Meredith’s.
I picture myself owning a gun like the one John’s father has. I want to know what it’s like to point it at something. I want to know how John felt pointing it at the homeless guy. It doesn’t feel like something I’d ask myself, but as I’m asking it, my tears are stopping. My body quakes from the effort of crying. I feel weak in all the meanings of the word. Wrenched around by two days of football practice and the trip to the emergency room, so far from what I wanted to be. Now I’m a person crying over meeting a girl I’ll never see again.
I search for ways to feel sick, to eradicate the feeling of crying. I open my laptop and look for a gun like John’s. I find a beautiful Taurus Titanium .357 Magnum. Nine hundred and seven dollars, not including tax. I have around three thousand dollars saved from grandparents’ gifts and some jobs I’ve done, like cashier at a chicken place for half a summer. It’s supposed to be for college, but, looking at the sites, I can nearly forget that.
The guns are beautiful, photographed from many angles and shining in the studio light. They have no backgrounds. They just hover in the air. No imperfect hands hold their grips. They’re clean and look like they have never been used. They’re waiting for you to pull their triggers and take their first shots.