“The bubble black market?” I can’t help it. I’m laughing hard now.
“Hey!” My dad looks mildly offended. “Back when I was a kid, we didn’t have GameBoys and Nintendos and all this hightech stuff you do. We were lucky to have Mr. Bubble!” But he can’t help it: now he’s laughing too.
“But how could Grandpa Aaron not have known what was going on?” I ask my dad. “Didn’t you say that those, um, Mr. Bubble boxes were huge? You know, like, ginormous?”
“Gi-what?” He shrugs. “The Mr. Bubble boy probably just shoved it under his T-shirt as soon as your grandpa got busy filling prescriptions. Besides, back then—you know, in the dark ages of pre-civilization known as ‘my youth’—we didn’t have high-tech security systems either. No video cameras—my dad didn’t even have a security mirror until well into my teens.”
“But what did Grandpa Aaron think was happening to all that Mr. Bubble before he caught the kid?”
My dad shrugs. “I guess he just figured it was his biggest seller.” My dad slides another slice of pizza onto his plate, pauses to ponder something. “I wonder what ever happened to Bobby Parker?”
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“The Mr. Bubble boy. I just remembered, his name was Bobby Parker.” Then he shrugs again. “Who knows? Bobby’s probably in Sing Sing by now, doing time for grand theft auto . . . or worse. And yet for some reason, your Mr. Tristan reminds me of him.”
“He’s not my Mr. Tristan,” I say, while inside I’m thinking, But I think he wants to be. “And why does he remind you of the Mr. Bubble boy?”
“All those cheerful days of ‘Hi, Mr. Belle!’ that Bobby Parker gave my dad, when in reality he was committing crimes. I just get the feeling that Mr. Tristan does the same thing: smiles in people’s faces, when in reality he’s doing . . . who knows what?”
“I guess it’s a good thing he’s not the guy I like then, isn’t it?”
“There’s a guy you like?” My dad nearly drops his whole slice of pizza this time and not just the toppings.
Uh-oh. Now I’ve really put my foot in it.
I feel my cheeks reddening. “Not like like,” I insist, hoping my dad doesn’t call me on protesting too much. “But I do kind of like that Lucius Wolfe. I think he seems like he could be . . . really nice.”
“I’d be lying,” my dad says, instantly forgetting all about Jessup, “if I didn’t admit that there’s something about Lucius that scares me. There’s something that’s just so raw about him, like he’s lived in a jungle none of the rest of us can know.”
“Is that surprising?” I counter.
“No,” he admits with a sad look. “No, I suppose it’s not.” Then he smiles, leans across the table. “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he whispers. “I kind of like Lucius too. You’d think he’d be beaten down by whatever’s happened to him, and yet he isn’t. The boy’s got spunk.”
Lucius
Aurora may be my maybe-friend, but so far Nick Greek, Security Guard, is my only real friend here. I never seek him out, but every day when I am out in the nonsmokers’ lounge he ambles over to me, strikes up a discussion.
He always asks me how school is treating me and I always say “Fine,” even though it never is. I’m not much of a talker, at least not out loud, but that seems to be okay with Nick, since he is quite the talker.
Mostly he talks about his days playing football. I quickly get the sense that it was the best time of his life and that he anticipates none better. This makes me think about professional athletes and others who choose to let their passion be something with a predictably short shelf life, and what it must be like once their day in the sun has passed. Even if he hadn’t blown out his knee, how many years would he have played total? How many before he was forced to retire and would inevitably have to face, as he does now, the rest of his life without the thing he loves to do best?
Of course, I realize he would have made a lot of money, at least, if it had worked out that way, and he wouldn’t have had to resort to being a security guard at age twenty-two, so there would have been that.
Me, I know next to nothing about football, save that there is a ball involved and men running around on a large field. Sometimes it is snowing and yet still they play—I know this from watching my dad watch the games on TV. I suppose I could have asked my dad about football when I was younger, but I figured if he didn’t have time to play catch with me, why should I show an interest? Now, though, since football is all that Nick ever talk-talk-talks about, I resolve that I’d better learn something about it.
Even though I don’t really ever get to talk to my maybe-friend Aurora, I learn a lot by watching her. I learn a lot about friendship. For example, I see, maybe for the first time, that to have friends you have to be a friend. I start to see that the reason people gravitate so strongly to her isn’t just because she’s extraordinarily pretty, which she is, but rather because she listens closely to whoever is speaking to her as though she cares what he or she has to say, as though she finds the person’s interests interesting.
What a concept: being interested in other people.
But now that I’m thinking maybe this is a worthwhile thing to do, and now that I’m thinking that it would be useful for talking-to-Nick purposes to know at least something about football, I take myself to the library. I would like to be able to say something more useful about the topic to him other than my usual lame, halfhearted “Go, Mets.”
Tapping computer keys with hooks is not quite as challenging as jerking off with them, but it’s no picnic either. I was never a great typist—only used to use about five fingers total where others would use ten, but at least it beat the peck-peck-peck of one pincer on each side.
Time to stop complaining, to stop feeling sorry for yourself and just suck it up, Lucius.
First I Google football.
Wow. Who would have imagined it was anything more than a bunch of big guys doing something with a funny-shaped ball on an occasionally very wet field? In fact, it turns out that football is a complex game. There are rules. There are regulations. There are plays and strategies. Really, I am beginning to think that maybe a person might need a brain to play this game. It’s a little bit like chess, except people sweat a lot and there are hopefully more than just a couple figures left standing in the end.
I begin to think that maybe there are more things in life that seem simple, or even stupid, on the surface but turn out to have so much more, maybe an iceberg’s ninety percent more, lurking beneath.
Funny that this is the first time this has occurred to me given that I am, well, me.
From simple football I move on to Googling football + Nick Greek.
Wow again. It turns out my humble pal Nick was more of a big deal than I ever would have guessed. He won all kinds of awards in high school and college, some trophy thing that sounds self-important even though I’ve never heard of it. I don’t know much about what some of his records mean, but I do know that if he could run that many yards in so few seconds, Nick was once upon a time practically faster than a speeding bullet. And apparently some team in the NFL thought Nick was pretty impressive too, and offered him a lot of money to come play for them.
But then, before his first season started, Nick blew out his knee. Bye-bye, Nick. Bye-bye, Nick’s Dream.
The whole time I’ve been sitting here researching, something has been percolating in my mind: it’s the notion that maybe, some how, Nick can get his dream back. Maybe he could rehabilitate that knee, get in shape again?
Every player on a football team plays a specific position with a specific title. I look to see what Nick’s was.
Running back.
I shake my head. No. Whatever else Nick might ever be able to do with football, he will never be something with the word running in the title again.
Into the sound of the vacuum of silence created by my ceasing to tap-tap-tap on the keys, I hear a faster tap-tap-tapping.
I crane my head around the
wall of my carrel to see who the fast tapper is.
It’s Aurora.
I duck my head back before she sees me, stop, think.
Hey, if I’m in here researching Nick, what is she researching?
Aurora
Double amputees.
Okay, I know I told myself I wasn’t going to try to discover what happened to Lucius, and I won’t. I won’t even add his name into the search engine here, although it would be so easy to do so. But is it so wrong to want to get more of an idea of what his life must be like? I mean, it’s not exactly like I can ask him about it, and there are no other double amputees around to ask.
At first, what I read is the medical stuff, which is mainly disturbing, and I have to tell myself I’m reading on an intellectual level and not thinking in terms of someone I actually know.
It says that upper limb amputations are most often the result of trauma and that the amputee isn’t even aware of what’s been lost until waking after surgery.
I can’t help it: I imagine what it must have been like for Lucius, waking up to a world in which he no longer had hands.
I shake the picture from my mind.
It talks about the rehabilitation process, not just the pain and discomfort, but the actual process of learning new strategies for things most people take for granted: eating, dressing, bathing, even going to the toilet.
But the worst is when I start reading the individual stories.
“Obviously, I can’t wear a wedding ring anymore,” one man writes. “My wife says she doesn’t mind, that she won’t wear hers either, and we can just keep the world guessing. I love that she’s a good sport, but I hate the situation. I was always so proud to wear that ring. It told me who I was in the world.”
“Before I lost my arms,” one woman writes, “when my little girl would be upset about something, to comfort her I’d take her in my arms and stroke her hair. Well, I can still hold her well enough, but the stroking part’s gone right out the window. You want to know something? It sucks. It sucks not being able to comfort your own child in the way you most want to. It sucks knowing you’ll never again feel your child’s cheek against your hand. Not being able to really touch other people—that’s the hardest part.”
“In my dreams at night,” one boy writes, “I always have arms. And I can even do things in those dreams that I’ve never done in my life. I can throw a ball the full length of a football field. I can reach the top shelf in the kitchen without a stepstool—it’s like I’m a giant too! One time, I even used my arms to fly like a bird. The worst part for me? Waking up in the morning. Every morning when I wake up, I’m surprised all over again. If I could just stay asleep for the rest of my life, I think everything would be fine.”
I can’t read any more of this.
I push the keyboard away as though rejecting what I’ve just read. It is so hard to think about this. It is so hard because I can’t stop thinking about it in relation to Lucius.
Apparently I pushed the keyboard with too much force, because it kicks back against the monitor, the equal and opposite reaction to that action knocking the textbook I’d left to one side to the floor.
I bend over to pick it up, fingers trembling as I grasp the hard edges of the cover.
It’s when I’m down like that that I see feet beneath the carrel that’s backed up against mine.
I know those feet.
They’re Lucius’s feet.
Lucius
Another two weeks pass.
I settle into my new rhythm: wake up, sit alone on bus, school, home, homework, shoot some pool, go to bed.
I have an incredibly high IQ—I’ve been tested—but I never got very good grades before. In my old school, I was too busy being bored or doing other stuff to get done what my parents thought I needed to get done. And as for teachers, let’s just say that if I had a new upper limb for every time I heard one tell my parents “Lucius has so much potential, if only he’d apply himself,” I’d have as many arms as Medusa has snakes for hair. Now, with no friends and nothing else to distract me, I get the best grades of my life.
I even find a way to work Medusa into an English essay.
My parents, at least, are pleased.
One Wednesday near the end of the school day, I see a notice pinned up outside the metal doors of the auditorium. Tryouts will be starting soon for the fall play, something called Grease.
Perhaps in part because I don’t understand why anyone would want to write a play about grease, at first I do a homonym mixup and think it’s talking about Greece the country, and I idly think my uncannily strong Medusa knowledge will come in handy here too, but then I realize my mistake.
The thumbtack is barely pushed into the wall when I see Aurora put her name up at the very top of the list.
Suddenly, being in a school play becomes the coolest thing in the world to do, and a flurry of other names go up as I watch.
Right under Aurora’s goes Jessup Tristan’s.
I’m shocked—I’d bet my hooks that Jessup’s never tried out for a play in his life—and yet not shocked at the same time.
I think he’d do just about anything to get closer to Aurora. Hell, so would I.
Under Jessup’s name goes Celia Wentworth’s. Then Deanie Daily’s. Then a whole slew of other names. I’m wondering, How many roles are there in this Grease play? Maybe it’s like The Odyssey or The Iliad?
The page rapidly fills until there’s just one space left. At the very bottom of the page, one final name goes up:
Lucius Wolfe.
When I get home from school, I head right out again, go to the local library, ask for a copy of Grease. The librarian asks me if I want the play or the movie version of the play, and I say “movie,” figuring it’ll be an advantage to see it. You may read a play to rehearse or memorize lines, but plays are written to be seen. Even if they’re movies.
I still don’t understand the implications of the title. Grease is rendered animal fat. Would you name a play Rendered Animal Fat? Grease is oily matter. Would you name a play Oily Matter? And if you want to go with the verb instead of the noun, you wind up with grease meaning “to hasten the process or progress of.” Would you really want to—
You get the picture.
It’s a picture that makes no sense, a picture that says “Whoever titled this play wanted to come up with the most unappetizing—”
“Just don’t expect it to be exactly the same as the play,” she tells me, handing me the DVD.
I study the cover. Ah! I get it now! They have grease in their hair.
I hand the DVD back to the librarian and wait as she runs it under the red-eyed scanner, putting a due date card in the see-through plastic pocket on the front.
“In the original, the lead female part was not played by an Australian,” she adds, seeming very angry about this.
I wonder what she has against Australia.
Well, perhaps she was expecting Greece too.
I get the DVD home and my mom sees it before I get a chance to hide it away in my room.
“What’s this?” she asks.
I know she’s probably worried that I’ve signed out some how-to book on making a better bomb, so before she can go into full-fledged panic mode or call in the feds I show it to her.
“Oh my God!” she says, her eyes lighting up. “I saw this when it first came out! It must have been almost thirty years ago.”
“It’s that old, huh?”
“Watch it, buster,” she says playfully, which feels good. My mom is almost never playful anymore. Then: “But why would you want to see this?”
My dad walks in as I’m answering, as I tell her that I’ve signed up to be in the play at school.
To her credit, my mom doesn’t ask me what role I intend to try out for, but I know she must be wondering.
“You know you’re not supposed to be doing any extracurriculars,” my dad says gruffly, but then he takes the DVD out of Mom’s hands and a slow smile spreads across his
face as he looks at the woman on the cover. She’s standing in the arms of what is obviously a very young John Travolta. I don’t know much about popular culture, but occasionally I can’t help but see the covers of magazines in drugstores and doctors’ offices, so I know all about Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Scientology. People generally seem to be worked up about this. Man, Travolta’s hair looks geeky combed back like that—it’s like a bad Elvis. And those eyebrows! Could he have any more makeup on them? Those eyebrows look like they were painted on with, well, a grease pencil. The woman in his arms has a skintight off-the-shoulder black top on and she’s pretty hot, considering the badly teased dirty-blond hair and Vampirella eye makeup. Then, I think, maybe that’s the whole point.
“Olivia Newton-John,” my dad says fondly.
“Who?” Misty says, entering. She looks at the DVD cover. “Hey! I recognize her. Or at least I think I do. I think she was one of the guest judges on American Idol one time.”
“One of your father’s old crushes,” Mom says. My dad—my dad!—reddens. Then he hands the DVD back to me. “We’ll all watch it together tonight,” he says gruffly. “Then your mother and I will decide if we’ll let you be in this play or not.”
So that’s what we do.
No sooner is dinner over than the Wolfe family kicks back in the TV room to watch the DVD of Grease together. Mom even makes popcorn while Dad dims the lights.
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