The recitation of my tale is far longer than what she said about the loss of her mother, and yet Aurora’s reaction is an exact replica of mine, perhaps because some stories don’t allow for a lengthy response.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“I know,” I say, well versed in my lines and content to speak them.
I do note that she doesn’t ask me the one thing I think nearly every other person would ask me right now: Just what exactly was I trying to . . . make with those ten chemicals?—and I am grateful for this. Somehow, I sense that it is not a lack of curiosity or imagination; it is respect. And again I am grateful.
One thing she can’t possibly know: I’ve left one crucial fact out of the telling.
“So,” Aurora asks, shifting gears completely, just as I did earlier in their kitchen after Aurora told me her mother had died, “are you going to Jessup’s party a week from Friday?”
“I haven’t heard anything about any party,” I say, which is a lie. All week long, it’s been impossible to avoid hearing Jessup invite kids all around me.
Aurora’s pretty brow furrows in puzzlement. “That’s funny,” she says. “It’s supposed to be for the entire cast and crew. Jessup said so.”
I shrug, pretend I don’t care. “I must not be invited,” I say.
“But that’s impossible,” she says. “It’s supposed to be for everyone involved with the play.” She laughs, a wind-chime sound, as she adds, “Well, except for Mrs. Peepers.” Then quick, before I realize what she’s doing, she reaches out a hand and places it on my arm, not the plastic of my lower arm—no, not that—on my upper arm, where there is real skin beneath my shirt.
I feel as though my whole body could explode at her touch. Nobody ever touches me if it can be avoided. And, for the most part, I have been content to keep the world at this distance; at arm’s length, if you will. But not now. This is the first time that anyone outside of my family has touched me in a very long time, and my entire body feels it, enjoys it, fears it.
“Please come, Lucius,” she says, as if it really does matter to her: whether I’m at Jessup’s party or not.
I look at her: that dark-angel hair, those serene-ocean eyes. She is, I think, the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. And yet somehow, that doesn’t matter in the slightest. She could lose that physical beauty tomorrow and she would still be Aurora. Everything is who she is, what she is.
“Please,” she says again. “You deserve to have some fun. We both do.”
Gently, so as not to scare her, I extract my arm from her touch. I can’t bear to be touched by her any more because despite her intensity, I know she cannot possibly like me in that way, as people say.
Still, how can I say no to her?
Aurora
Well, of course I want to know. But he didn’t offer and I didn’t ask:
What was he trying to make with all those chemicals?
Lucius
“So how’s work on the play coming?” Nick Greek asks. “You enjoying it?”
“Yes,” I say, an automatic answer, just like saying “fine” whenever he asks me how school is going. But as soon as the word is out of my mouth, I realize it’s true: I am enjoying myself.
It gives me a new and rare feeling of competence, stage managing the play so well, even if it is just, you know, Grease.
But I can’t say that out loud to Nick—there would be an implied admission that so much of the time I don’t feel competent, not as a student in this school, not as anything else on this planet—so I seek to change the subject.
Besides, there’s something I’ve been percolating in my mind ever since I did research on Nick and football. And I’ve done yet more research on football since then. I’ve been growing an idea in my mind.
I open my mouth to speak, shut it again.
Do I really want to do this? For if I do, and if my idea is a success, it could ultimately take Nick away from me, and he’s the only person who has real conversations with me every day.
Then I decide I do want to do it. If he is my friend, and I believe he is, and if friendship means wanting what’s best for the other person and not simply what’s best for the other person in relation to you, then I have to do it. I am ethically bound.
“Have you ever thought,” I pose the question cautiously, “about doing something in football besides being a running back?”
Nick snorts. “What do you mean? Like being the water boy?”
“Nothing like that,” I say. And then I snort back for emphasis, just to show we’re on the same page. “But isn’t there, oh, I don’t know, some position, some playing position on a football team that doesn’t involve needing to run much?”
It takes a moment, a long moment, but then a light dawns in Nick’s eyes.
And that’s how it starts.
“I never thought about being a kicker before,” Nick says. “I never wanted to be a kicker before.”
“Yeah?” I say, my breath fogging the air as I speak the word. “Well, I never wanted to be without hands either. C’mon, let’s go.”
The mornings have turned cool as we’ve moved further into fall, meaning early mornings are a real bitch. I swear, if I still had hands, I’d need to blow on them right now to keep them warm. Still, I am happy to be out here on this football field, two hours before school starts.
It has been my master plan.
When I asked Nick if there was a position in football that didn’t require running, he answered what my research had already taught me: kicker.
“But I can’t run much anymore,” Nick said, “and I certainly can’t run well.”
“But you can run ten feet, can’t you?” I said.
“I guess.”
“Well, that’s all you need. No one expects speed from a kicker. And kickers are always in demand in the NFL, I know I read that somewhere,” I said, warming to my subject. “Kickers run hot and cold. Last year’s great kicker can be this year’s goat.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed.
“Why are you reading up on football?” he asked.
“I’m a polymath.” I shrugged.
Nick looked at me like I was talking Greek.
“A person who knows a little bit about everything,” I explained, “kind of like a walking encyclopedia.” I shrugged again. Suddenly I was shrug-happy. “I just like knowing things, I guess.”
And that’s how we end up out on a frosty playing field at the dawn of the morning. Well, first I had to talk my parents into letting me drive to school with Nick in the mornings, but that turned out to be easier than expected. Apparently, once my mother caved to my going somewhere in Mr. Belle’s car, it suddenly became okay for me to go anywhere so long as a school authority was driving me. And my dad was particularly tickled that what I wanted to do had something to do with sports, but I refused to go into specifics with him.
Nick does some warming-up exercises that look funny to me, but I have to assume he knows what he’s doing.
When he says he’s finally ready, I become his holder. If this were a real football game, I’d be catching the snap from the center before holding the ball in place so that Nick could try to kick it through the goalposts for a field goal. But this isn’t a real football game: there’s just the two of us, and I’m all Nick’s got.
We’re each all the other’s got.
I let him set the pace in the beginning. The first kick Nick takes is from fifteen yards from the goal line. He comes at the ball kind of slow, and when he gets close to it, he nails it at an angle with the foot on his good leg. It sails right through.
It doesn’t sail through every time.
But we keep practicing.
As the sky slowly brightens, I gradually move the ball farther and farther from those goalposts. I think of what a funny thing it is: the farther the goal, the more impressive.
I move the ball to the twenty-five-yard line, the thirty-five, the forty-five.
I don’t usually talk a lot, but as Nick practic
es, I become a regular chatterbox.
“Did you know,” I say, “that Tom Dempsey holds the record for the longest field goal ever?”
Nick just grunts as he kicks at the ball again, this time from the fifty-five-yard line. I must say, I’m awfully glad he hasn’t kicked my hooks off yet.
“And did you know,” I say, “that he scored that field goal—sixty-three yards!—in a game between New Orleans and Detroit?”
Nick grunts again. Sixty yards now.
As I say, Nick doesn’t sail it through every time, but he does so often enough. And when he misses, it’s always close. The man is a natural athlete. He must’ve been something else when he could still run.
In addition to blind singers, my parents have a thing for musicians who died in the sixties, whether singers or not. So they like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and they also like an early Rolling Stone who died in a swimming pool, Brian Jones. They always say he was the best Stone, that the band was never the same after he died, that he was a musician’s musician who could pick up a new instrument in the morning and have it mastered by sunset.
It seems to me that Nick is like that with sports.
I sure hope Nick doesn’t end up dead in a swimming pool.
“And did you know,” I say, from the sixty-three-yard line now, “that that record has stood since November 8, 1970? Most good kickers can only kick fifty-five yards . . . tops! No one has been able to beat that sixty-three-yard record in—”
“Give it a rest, kid,” Nick says. “I’m not going to beat Dempsey’s record today. You’ve really gotta stop with all that polymath stuff. Your head will explode.”
“Yeah, but did you also know that Dempsey set the record kicking with just half a foot?”
“Actually,” Nick says, “I did know that.”
Even though he hasn’t done any running, Nick is winded now. I guess all that kicking must take a lot out of a person.
“You’re good at this,” I tell him as he stands there, bent over at the waist, hands resting against slightly bent knees.
“Yeah, but it’s not running,” he says.
“Nothing ever will be again,” I say, recognizing the need to be honest. “But so what? It’s still football. It can still get you back on that field again.”
This is, I think, what it must mean to be human: to want something good for someone else.
So that’s what we do in the mornings out there on the playing field: we chase after the remainder of a dream.
During those mornings, I think of my own compromised dreams, my own situation: I’d love to be able to touch Aurora with the hands I used to have, but I’d give anything just to touch her at all.
Aurora
“Have you noticed how much time that Lucius guy spends with that security guard?” Deanie Daily asks me.
“Jessup says they even do stuff out on the playing fields in the mornings before school starts,” Celia Wentworth adds. “What’s up with that? I think maybe Mr. Hooks is gay.”
“Shut up, Celia,” I say without thinking about it first. “And so what if he is?”
Lucius
The first hurdle to getting to Jessup’s party is getting my parents to let me go to the party.
As expected, there is resistance.
“I don’t think this is such a good idea,” my mom says.
“I know this isn’t a good idea,” my dad says.
“Well, I think this is an excellent idea,” Misty says.
What’s going on? Since when is my little sister my biggest champion?
“You do?” my mom and dad and I all say to Misty at the same time.
“Of course,” Misty says, as though it must be obvious to one and all. “Lucius can’t spend his whole life in this house, can he?”
“I don’t know,” my dad says. “Can’t he?”
“Dad,” Misty says.
“Sorry.” My dad holds his hands up. “It was just a joke.”
“He does have the play,” my mom points out. “He gets out of the house for that. Plus the time he spends playing football in the morning with that security guard.”
“And that’s good,” Misty says, “but it’s not enough. Lucius needs to start living a normal life again. How can he ever be normal if he doesn’t?”
You would think my parents would have a whole list of arguments for this—and I myself, if it weren’t counterproductive to my goals, would just love to ask Misty to define normal or, better yet, tell us all why it is such a wonderful thing to be—but they surprise us, surprise even themselves, by caving to Misty’s greater wisdom on the subject of what kids need.
“Fine,” my dad relents. “But your mom will drop you off when the party starts, I’ll pick you up at eleven, and if I hear any reports of you misbehaving, this will be the last party you go to until you turn fifty.”
“Fine,” I agree to everything. Really, if they held a contract out to me right now, I would sign it.
But then, no sooner do I feel elation about going to the party—I, Lucius Wolfe, am going to a party!—than deflation sets in as I am faced with an unimaginable horror: What am I going to wear?
Ever since the explosion, my mom has gone out by herself to buy my clothes. And before that? Well, fashion wasn’t big on my mind back then—I was more into chemicals—so whatever I wore, Mom bought those things too. And it’s not like anything she’s ever bought has been really awful: no red plaid short-sleeved cotton shirts with one pocket at the chest, perfect for holding pocket protectors and a load of leaky pens; no polyester pants that hike up so high the belt fits under my neck, perfect for hanging myself because I look so geeky in the neck-high pants. But I know the clothes I wear are not quite the same as the clothes worn by the other guys at school, at least not the cool guys. Like I say, there’s nothing distinctly wrong about what I wear, but there’s nothing particularly right about it either. It’s like everything I own is just a little bit off.
So what do I do?
I go to the best fashion consultant I know.
“Misty?” I knock on my kid sister’s door Saturday morning.
Misty may be three years younger than I am, but I know she is already crushing on guys my age and that she pays a lot of attention to what everyone wears. She reads fashion magazines as though they were important books, and if there is a trend blowing in on the next wind, Misty will catch hold of it before any of her friends do. In fact, she’s reading a fashion magazine when I knock, lying on her stomach diagonally across her bed, headphones clapped down over her ears.
I approach the bed, hook one of the earphones away from her ear so I can say, “Misty?” again, louder this time.
She gives a little jump, flipping over on her side.
“Lucius.” She puts her hand to her chest. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” I say, “but . . .” Man, this is suddenly awkward. “I need your help.” I shuffle my feet, stare down at them. Should I wash my sneakers? “I don’t know what to wear to the party next Friday.”
She stares at me in stunned silence. Then a look of mild disgust takes over her face. “God, you people are hopeless. How did I end up in such a family?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer as she rolls off the bed. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she says, “you’re not going to find whatever you need in that closet of yours.” She grabs on to one of my hooks, a thing she’s never done before. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go find Mom.”
Oh, brother, I think.
We find Mom folding towels in the laundry room.
“Mom,” Misty says authoritatively, “Lucius and I need you to drive us to the mall. If Lucius is going to this party, he’s going to need some new clothes.”
My mom looks at me and then turns back to Misty. It’s as though I’m a character on TV they’re critiquing, as though they don’t realize I can hear them.
“What’s wrong with what he has on?” my mom asks.
“Are you kidding me?” Misty sounds disgusted.
“Everything’s wrong with it,” Misty informs my mom. “That shirt? Those jeans? Those sneakers?” Misty looks like she’s getting a headache just thinking about it. “He can’t go to a party in clothes like that.”
“Well, I still don’t see—” Mom starts to object.
“No, he really can’t,” Misty cuts her off. “I know it doesn’t really matter what Lucius looks like. But some of my friends have older brothers and sisters in his school. And they all know he’s my brother. If he goes to that party looking like the . . . dork he usually does, it’ll get back to my friends, and then my reputation will be ruined!”
Misty’s doing a good job, I think. She should really be a lawyer like on TV. But does she have to lay it on so thick? I mean, dork???
“I see your point,” my mom admits.
“Good,” Misty says, arms folded across her chest.
“So I’ll take Lucius to the stores and help him pick something out just as soon as I’m done here.”
“No, Mom.” Misty shakes her head vehemently. “That’s not going to work.”
“What do you mean?” Mom stops folding mid-towel.
Misty gives me and my outfit a lingering once-over, then turns back to Mom. “Do you really think, Mom,” she says scathingly, one eyebrow cocked, “that you’ve been doing such a good job so far?”
I kind of feel sorry for Mom; she looks so wounded.
“Just drive us to the mall.” Misty sighs as though she’s the oldest person in the world or at least this house. “Then leave us there with the credit card. I’ll take care of all the rest.”
God, sometimes I wish I had my little sister’s self-confidence.
Aurora
Saturday morning comes and I tell my dad I need to get some new clothes.
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