“I’m, um, here for your son’s party?” I ask-answer.
“Jess-up!” Mrs. Tristan bellows as she vacates the doorway and disappears into the house. “Another one of your friends is here!”
Across the hall from the door I’m standing outside of is a second door and I realize it must lead to the basement as it opens and a wall of music follows Jessup to the front door.
“Hooks!” he says, jovially enough, but puzzled too. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard there was a party for all the cast and crew,” I say, feeling like an idiot even as I say it. I never should have come.
Jessup digests this for a minute, then says, “Glad you could make it.” He holds open the screen door for me while he extends his other hand for a shake.
I just stare at his hand until he pulls it back.
You would think he would be embarrassed, but all he does is smile one of his annoying smiles. “Oops, sorry, Hooks. I forgot there for a second.”
I step inside the house, turning to make sure the screen is shut; I have the feeling Mrs. Tristan will hunt me down at home if I let bugs get into her house.
I’m turning back when someone else comes up the stairs.
“Lucius!” Aurora says, and it’s obvious she’s happy to see me.
I look at Aurora standing there as Jessup stands off to one side. She has on bright blue jeans and a pure white blouse, and the smile she’s directing at me is like a thousand-watt bulb turned on in the middle of a dark cave.
What can I say?
I melt.
I melt all over the floor.
Aurora
We go back down into the basement, Jessup entering the room first, then me, then Lucius. At home, my dad still has a turntable from his college days on which he sometimes plays old records—real vinyl records! If there’s a scratch on one of them, sometimes the needle skips, screeching to the innermost circle of the vinyl as the music halts. Lucius’s entrance has that same effect on the room now: like a screechy needle stopping music.
“Do you want something to drink?” I ask Lucius as conversation slowly resumes.
But he just shakes his head. He looks tired, as though it has taken all the energy he has just to get here, just to get to this room. He also looks handsome—or, as Deanie would say, hot hot hot—in his black shirt and boots. Somehow, his jeans look better on him than everyone else’s.
“Excuse me,” he says formally, as though he has someone he needs to go talk to. But then he just finds one of the vacant beanbag chairs and lowers his body into it. It’s like he’s on the bus or in the lunchroom: sitting alone, apart.
The music cranks up a notch, soaring louder, and people begin to dance. I figure they all have curfews, just like I do, and they’re trying to get in as much as they can as quickly as they can.
Actually, it’s just the girls dancing with each other at first. Celia and Deanie are bouncing around like two shiny silver pinballs released into the same machine at the same time. Deanie gestures for me to join them, but I just shake my head. Then Celia grabs hold of Jessup’s hand. I can’t hear what she’s whispering, but I’m sure she’s asking him to dance. He shakes his head too. Steve and Gary prove less reluctant to dance with the bouncing pinballs, however, and before long they join Celia and Deanie.
“Are you having fun?” The voice at my side is Jessup’s. “It’s a good party, right?”
“Yes,” I agree, “a good party.”
“Then why aren’t you dancing?” he asks.
Before I know it, he’s grabbing my hand, pulling me out to the middle of the floor. Between the cast and the crew, there must be thirty people dancing here now.
The music is fast, so I don’t mind at first—we are just two in a big crowd—but then a slow song comes on, and before I can walk away, Jessup puts his arms around me, pulling me toward him.
Onstage, when we’re rehearsing the play, there are scenes that call for Jessup to touch me—some of the dancing scenes and of course the big kissing scene at the end—but his hands on me now feel different from the way they do then.
I feel him pull me close enough so that my breasts are smushed up against his chest. This makes me uncomfortable. There’s not a teenage girl in the world who doesn’t know that teenage boys are gaga about breasts.
I try to pull away. “I think I need another soda,” I say, trying to sound cheerful, peppy.
“C’mon, Sandy,” he says, talking to me as though we’re running a scene from the play as his arms pull me in tighter still. Then he lowers his head toward mine until there’s hardly any space between our lips. “Kiss me,” he says.
I turn my face away and insert my arms between our bodies, struggling to break his hold on me, to free myself. If this weren’t so annoying, so disturbing, I would laugh: it’s like he’s the skunk from those old cartoons, Pepe Le Pew, and I’m the French cat, Penelope Pussycat, trying to get away from his amorous embraces. Le pant, le pew.
But Jessup is strong.
Over his shoulder, I see Lucius suddenly bolt out of his beanbag chair—a part of my mind marvels: I didn’t think it was physically possible to bolt out of a beanbag chair—but before he can get to us, I’m saved by, of all people, Jessup’s mother.
“Jessup!” she calls loudly from the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Tristan sounds angry. “I need to speak with you!”
“I’ll be back,” he says before letting me go and walking away.
I don’t watch him go. Instead, my eyes are on Lucius as he retreats back toward his beanbag.
I don’t want him to withdraw.
Suddenly I’m tired of being a leaf on the wind. I don’t care what Deanie thinks, what Celia thinks, or any of the others for that matter—if I ever did. The others are all wrong about Lucius. All I care about is that he is here now and I don’t want him to withdraw.
I place my hand on his upper arm to stop him.
“Dance with me?” I ask.
Lucius
Her hand on my arm is soft and strong at the same time.
Truth: I have never danced with a girl before.
Oh, there is so much I have never done with a girl!
The white color of Aurora’s shirt makes me suddenly intensely aware of her breasts. What teenage boy, if he prefers girls to boys, is not aware of breasts? You know, the eighth and ninth wonders of the world. And just as suddenly, it occurs to me that I will never get to touch Aurora’s breasts or any other girl’s breasts, hand against skin, not in the way that other people do.
I have to stop thinking these thoughts.
I feel the eyes of others watching us, like spiders from the corners, but I can’t refuse her. Pushing aside my own feelings of embarrassment and awkwardness, I allow Aurora to take hold of my hooks, pulling gently until my arms enclose her, as if I don’t know that this is how the dance is supposed to go.
She looks at me closely, then lets her head drop until it is resting lightly against my shoulder.
The room disappears around us.
To hell with breasts right now!
Because I swear I just died and went to heaven.
Aurora
There aren’t words to describe how good this feels: Lucius’s arms around me. This is where I want to be. And yet I can’t escape the feeling of being observed too closely by others, like a bug under glass.
I want to extend this moment and change it, all at the same time. But I can’t do that here. Jessup will be back any minute now, and I can’t help but think that will change everything.
I go up on tiptoes. I whisper in Lucius’s ear:
“Let’s go outside.”
Lucius
The music gradually fades as we go out the sliding-glass doors, shutting everyone and everything behind us, but somehow the silence is better, not just a relief from noise.
The air outside is brisk, and a wan moon hangs halfway up the night sky. There’s a wind kicking up, straining the trees in the backyard to one side.
Sti
ll, it feels good to be out of doors at night. It occurs to me that many people do this—go outside just for the sake of being outside—and perhaps I should try it sometime at home.
“Nice night,” I say, feeling stupid almost immediately—what a stupid thing to say—and yet feeling the need to say something, anything.
“Come on,” Aurora says, looking over her shoulder, making sure that I am following as she leads me away from the lights of the house.
Aurora
I just want to kiss him.
Is that so wrong?
I’ve never kissed any boy before, unless you count kissing Jessup during play rehearsals, which I don’t.
When your mom is dying for five years, there’s not really a whole lot of time left over in the day for kissing boys.
But now I want to erase those false first kisses with Jessup. A first kiss, I think, should be important, special. It should be with the person you want to kiss more than anybody in the world.
Lucius
Her lips—how can I describe them?
Yes, they taste like salt from the chips, sweet from the soda, but I hardly notice that as I drown in the sensation of soft welcome. It is my first kiss and it is like discovering a new country and kissing someone who knows me better than anyone, all at the same time.
After a minute, I pull back. I want to look at her so I can really believe that she is here. With me.
“I thought you might like Jessup,” I say, “once upon a time.”
“I think you might be nuts,” she says, smiles, “once upon a time.”
The strong wind whips a stray hair across the front of her face. I long to reach out with a hand, brush that hair out of the way for her, feel that hair, feel that cheek.
More than ever before right now, I wish that I had hands again.
What a glorious thing it would be to hold a girl’s hand, this girl’s hand, to feel her skin beneath my fingers.
I have a wild thought: If I knew her better, I could remove my arm in front of her, ask her to let me rub my stump against her cheek. But this is all still too new, like the creation of a universe. It is a crazy thought, the idea of touching her that way, I know this, but I can’t keep the vision from forming in my mind. Perhaps someday.
But that stray hair is still across her face now. Someone needs to do something about it, so I cautiously extend my hook and, using the pincer, gently brush it away for her.
A part of me expects her to recoil at this touch, but she doesn’t. Rather, she leans into it, grabbing on to my hook with one of her hands while she rests her cheek against the cold metal.
I cannot escape a simple truth: Against all odds, against all the odds of the universe, against every odd in my life, Aurora likes me.
Previously, I realize, she has always been the one to reach for me. She has always talked first, been friendly first, done everything first. Well, now it is my turn. I dislodge my hook from her hand, place my arms around her, pull her body close to mine. Between the twin layers of our shirts, I can feel her heart beat against my chest. I imagine that in the quiet of the night I can literally hear the sound of its pulse.
This moment: it is perfect. I realize that now I am free to like Aurora back, to express that liking. There’s just one problem. There’s a truth she doesn’t know but she should.
I put my lips against her ears, I’m just about to whisper that truth, when we are interrupted.
“God, I can’t believe you two!”
It’s Jessup.
He turns to glare at me. If more hate could be buried in a look, I’ve never seen it.
“I’m sorry I ever invited you!” He hurls the words at me before storming back toward the house.
I could almost laugh at this—of course, he didn’t invite me—but the look he gave me, the look he threw back at Aurora as he stormed away, it is too hate-filled to laugh at. It is dangerous to hate that much.
I know about that kind of hate.
Now I want to save the moment between Aurora and me, bring it back to what it was, but I can see it slipping away into the ugliness of Jessup’s outburst.
So what do I do?
I make the moment even worse by choosing to tell Aurora, right then, my truth.
“Remember what I told you about the accident in my basement?”
Her expression is puzzled, like I’ve begun speaking in a different language, and I realize she’s still caught within the spell of Jessup’s venom.
“About the day I blew off my hands,” I say, speaking almost impatiently. Now that I have decided to tell this, I’m in a hurry to get it out.
I don’t wait for her to catch up to me. We can’t be . . . whatever we are without her knowing the whole truth.
“It was no accident,” I say, “not really. I mean, it was an accident that it happened that day, that way. But there was nothing innocent about what I was doing. I was practicing to do harm, somewhere, some time, maybe.”
The look on her face: it’s as though I’ve graduated from speaking foreign languages to speaking in tongues as she tries to process the words. I almost wish this moment of her confusion would extend into eternity—if purgatory is in no way heaven, well, at least it is not hell—but then a look of horror overtakes her features.
I can see she gets it now:
I meant to blow up something else and it was only the fickle hand of Fate that prevented me from doing so by taking away my own hands.
I am the monster, the Frankenstein monster that everybody thinks I am.
It’s my turn to look on in horror and devastation as Aurora runs away from my story, away from me.
When eleven o’clock comes, I am waiting right outside the front door. I have been standing here for quite some time.
My dad pulls in to the driveway and I climb into the seat beside him.
“So, how was it?” he asks, backing out onto the street, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel as he begins to drive us home. “Was it good?”
“Yes,” I say.
I stare out the front windshield. A light rain has started to fall and I watch the wiper blades swish-swishing the drops away.
“Yes,” I say again. “It was good until it wasn’t.”
I did not get the chance to tell Aurora, although I wish I had, that I have become grateful to the universe that I blew off my own hands before I could hurt anybody else.
Perhaps it does not matter.
Aurora
I’m so confused.
Could the things that people like Deanie and Celia said about Lucius really be true? Is he crazy?
Lucius
On Saturday, on Sunday, I relive the events of Friday night as if it is a slow-motion dream turned into a nightmare that I can’t get out of. I remember realizing Aurora liked me, the feel of her lips against mine, the smell of her hair: like rain and cinnamon. I remember seeing the look of horror dawn in her eyes after I told her the truth about myself: she thought I was crazy.
It is like those phantom feelings I get about my hands sometimes, the sensation that I have limbs where I do not. Aurora is like one of those phantoms now. I keep feeling as though she must still be there, and yet I know that she isn’t.
Misty has no way of knowing what’s happened, although she does ask me about it. I refuse to talk, spending the weekend in a state of monklike silence. It doesn’t stop her, however. In an effort to snap me out of my funk, she insists on a marathon session of pool. She even lets me break. It doesn’t matter.
I lose every game.
Aurora
Monday morning comes and it’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed when the dog alarm goes off; it’s all I can do to get myself dressed for school. I don’t even bother with brushing my hair one hundred strokes.
“What’s wrong?” my dad asked me when he picked me up from Jessup’s party.
“What’s wrong?” he asks me now as we eat breakfast; or rather, he eats while I just sit.
But I don’t tell him, won’t tell him,
can’t tell him:
I was wrong about Lucius.
Lucius is just as crazy as everyone else said he was.
Lucius
The day begins terrible and then gets worse.
I wait for Aurora as she gets off the bus, but she won’t speak to me.
I want to tell her that it’s not quite as awful as it sounds—yes, I wanted to do some damage in the world. Yes, I was angry at life, frustrated, and yes, I knew too much about making explosives, or perhaps not enough, seeing that I blew my own hands off. But no, I had no specific target in mind, just general mayhem and carnage. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I like to think I wouldn’t. Certainly, I would not do the same thing now. I’m a different person now; in part, I think, because of her.
But she won’t listen to me.
Nor will she listen to me when I trail her to her locker, try to talk to her there.
“Let it go, Lucius,” she says to me, sounding both incredibly tired and sad all at once.
But I can’t let it go.
Still, I have no choice as Jessup strolls by and Aurora calls out, “Hey, Jessup! Wait up!”
Her words are like four daggers piercing my armor.
I go out to the nonsmokers’ lounge hoping to see Nick Greek.
He is nowhere to be seen.
Early last week he called off our morning football practice sessions, which is why I’m back to taking the bus, and now it occurs to me that I haven’t seen him since Thursday. I suppose I was so obsessed with going to that party, I hadn’t even thought much about him.
Now I wonder where he is.
I could ask one of the other security guards, but that’s really not my way. Plus, whenever Nick is here and talking to me, they always glare at me like I’m a bad influence on him.
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