by Jody Casella
This room is so hot I can’t stand it anymore. I yank off my T-shirt, ball it up in my fist.
“I think we have to. We have to get it out. Tell each other how we feel.” She sets the glass down. She bows her head in front of the sink. “Just let it out.”
I can’t breathe in this heat. I may have to take off my jeans. A thought slides through my head: What if.
What if I did just let it out. If I told my mother what I’ve really been up to lately. And why.
But I know I can never do it. Just like I know I’d never strip down to my underwear in the sweltering kitchen. I stand up. “Mom,” I say, and I’m happy to hear my voice comes out halfway normal. “I miss him too.”
Hug her, I tell myself, just hug her and get it over with.
So I do that. My mother and I rock together, and when it seems the appropriate number of seconds have passed, I step away.
10
Boots
Morning, I make a show of my boots. They’re my brother’s really. I found them in the back of his closet. I clomp down the stairs, the laces trailing on the steps. My father notices them right away. He’s in the hallway straightening his tie in the mirror.
“Good morning, Marshall.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but he nods instead.
I nod back and do a quick tromp through the kitchen so my mother can feel better about our lives too. She smiles when she hands me my lunch bag.
“See?” she says, sneaking a glance at my feet. “It was good that we talked yesterday.”
The wind burns my face when I open the front door. I brace myself for another gray November day. There’s a nice layer of snow plastered over everything. I trudge down the front steps. Looks like my father’s already shoveled. Once upon a time this would’ve been our chore. Why do you think I had two boys? he used to joke. Free manual labor.
Ha ha, Dad, my brother always said back.
These boots are heavy, like I’ve got rocks strapped to my feet. My mind’s numb today. I’m tired of thinking, feeling. My mother’s teetering on the edge of a breakdown. My father’s probably just flirted with a heart attack by shoveling. There’s no thin space in Mrs. Hansel’s house. I punched someone in the mouth yesterday. What else? Am I forgetting anything?
When I reach Mrs. Hansel’s house, I remember. Maddie. The thought makes my stomach cramp up. By now, she’s had enough time for the things we talked about yesterday to sink in. I picture her shivering upstairs in her bedroom questioning my sanity.
Her front door slams and someone whirls out, skids on the stoop, grabs the railing. Maddie’s mother. “Yoo-hoo!” she calls. “Madison’s friend!”
I twitch my head into some semblance of a nod.
“You don’t happen to have an extra shovel by any chance?” Her accent’s thicker than Maddie’s, so chance comes out like chay-unce. “We don’t own one. In Nashville we could make do without.”
I clear my throat. “I’ll go get it.”
“Aren’t you a peach,” she says.
Before I’m halfway back, I see Sam crunching across the yards to meet me. “Thanks,” he grunts. He grabs the shovel then stomps over to his driveway to dig out his mother’s car.
“The roads look bad,” she says to Sam. “I can’t believe they didn’t call school.”
“People here know how to drive in snow,” Sam says. He’s scraping the shovel back and forth, leaving a trail of snow clumps behind him.
“Well, it makes me nervous.”
Sam mutters something under his breath.
Maddie slips outside then. “Oh,” she says when she sees me.
“Madison, get over here,” her mother says. “I’ll let you clean off the back window for me.”
I’m already past the driveway when I turn to see Maddie dragging her arm across the glass. I don’t know what I’m thinking, but I stride back, step between her and the car, and swipe the snow off fast. I can see her out of the corner of my eye, shivering in her thin jacket, looking down at my boots.
She leans toward me, whispers, “Are you okay?”
Funny thing. I don’t remember anyone asking me that in a long time. Another funny thing: I have no idea what the answer is. Before I can say anything, a horn beeps and a car rolls up to the curb.
“Ride’s here,” Sam says, thunking down the shovel. “Madison, let’s go.” Apparently, he’s ignoring me.
Brad Silverman throws open the back door. His lips blubber out, fat and bluish. He’s not ignoring me. We lock eyes and I can tell he’s thinking about bailing out of the car and hurling himself at me. But Maddie’s mother totters between us, waving the shovel.
“What a lifesaver you are, honey,” she says to me. “I’ll just leave this on the side of the house. You can pick it up on your way home.” Then she turns toward the car. “Careful on these roads, y’all. My word, sweetie, what happened to your mouth?”
I don’t stick around to hear Brad’s response. I tromp off to the bus stop, still turning over my own answers.
Am I okay?
Now that I’m wearing something on my feet, I can’t figure out what the purpose of school is. All semester I shuffled around imagining being sucked out of this place. Yeah, it was always a long shot, I know that, but there it was. Something to shoot for.
Today I clunk around like I’ve never seen these hallways before. Spilling my guts was stupid. Maddie was humoring me. She couldn’t have believed me. I don’t believe me. The proof was in the slanted front room of Mrs. Hansel’s house. I can’t kid myself anymore. I can’t say that maybe I missed a spot or maybe the bed was pushed over or whatever. I’m still here. I slapped my feet over every freaking inch of that floor and I’m still here.
I move through the cafeteria, ignoring the buzz around me. I can sense the speculation in the air. Barefoot one day. Plastic clogs the next. Today, boots. What’ll be tomorrow? Rollerblades?
I pass the football table, where a couple guys salute me. Next table over, the lacrosse players put on a little show for my benefit. They rise up together, a wall, their arms crossed in front of their chests. Brad cradles his lacrosse stick, puckers out his swollen lips as I clop by. I notice some of the guys at the football table rising too. Chuck flashes me a grin, gives me a thumbs up.
Has there always been this animosity between football and lacrosse? I can’t remember. My brother and I played both sports in middle school. A lot of the guys did. In high school, though, it seemed like you had to pick one or the other. We joked about one of us going out for each team, so we wouldn’t have to choose. Take turns. Switch places. In the end, we didn’t bother, just stuck with football.
That kind of thing—switching—takes planning, energy. It’s one thing to joke about it, another to do it. Plus there’s the part about getting caught. We learned that the hard way in sixth grade when we tried going to each other’s classes. Man, we’re in trouble, says his voice in my head.
Trouble. Ha ha. He didn’t know what trouble was.
Back-corner table, I plunk into a chair, drop my bag, dump my food out. Peanut butter sandwich. Banana. Some kind of cheese crackers. An organic candy bar. A folded napkin. I flip it open, half expecting to see a little note. My mother used to do that. Put silly messages in our lunch bags. Riddles. Funny sayings. Sometimes she’d write out our names in mustard on our sandwiches. She never mixed us up. That’s one thing I can say about her, my father too. Our whole lives, they could always tell us apart.
“Marsh.” Maddie sets her tray down across from me.
“Huh,” I say. “You’re . . . uh . . . eating lunch with me?”
She’s sitting straight in her chair, not hiding today. “I talked to Sam this morning, to Brad and the other guys too. I told them I can I eat with who I want to.” She bites her lip. “I mean if that’s okay with you.”
I glance over her shoulder, catch Sam’s eye. His face is on fire. I turn back to Maddie and shrug. “Yeah, uh, sure.”
I don’t really know what else to say, so I
start peeling my banana. It’s got a black strip of rot running down one side. I pluck that part out and tear the rest of the peel off. I don’t understand this girl. She’s parked across from me like we’re old friends, like I’m just a regular guy and not the madman skiing across her floorboards. I flex my feet, remember the clunky boots, and let out a sigh.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says.
I bite into my banana.
“About thin spaces.”
I cough, almost choking on a banana chunk.
She doesn’t seem to notice. “You know how it’s kind of hard to make a thin space because the same person has to come through and go out in the same spot?” She’s talking faster now, waving her hands. “I started thinking about how you’ve been walking around barefoot hoping to find one.”
I feel my mouth fall open. Luckily, I’ve already swallowed my food.
“But that would be almost impossible, right? I mean there could be a thin space anywhere. What are you going to do? Walk around every square inch of solid surface in the entire world? It just seems like you need a starting point, you know? So I did a little research.”
I clear my throat. “Research?”
“Yeah, on thin spaces in general. There’s really not much out there. But it gave me an idea. Did you know that a person died in the supermarket parking lot last week? That Goodfoods place off Main Street? A man had a stroke walking into the store.”
I shake my head, not sure where she’s going with this.
“So, I was thinking, why not start there? Instead of just stepping all over town with your bare feet randomly, or whatever you’ve been doing, why not check out some specific places where you know for sure that a person died? At least you’ve got half the equation right.”
“Half the equation?”
She sighs. “You know for a fact a guy’s soul left the world there. Maybe he came through there too.”
“In front of the supermarket?”
“Why not?” She looks offended. “His mother could’ve gone shopping when she was pregnant. The store’s been there for like fifty years. I looked that up too. The guy was only forty-three when he died, so it’s possible.”
“Possible.” I shrug. What she’s talking about, at least what I think she’s talking about—finding these spots around town where people died—makes me feel a flicker of hope.
But I quickly tamp it down. I’ve been down that road before. Barefoot. I can’t do it anymore.
She’s still talking, fluttering her hands. “I found this obituary site online, for Andover and the county. And I realized that a lot of people die in the hospital. So maybe you could try there too. You don’t know when or where those people came through, of course, but it’s another possibility, right?”
“I already tried that.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t find anything. I took a bus out there last Saturday. I couldn’t get into most of the rooms, but I walked around the hallways. It was stupid.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, it hits me how true that is. Everything I’ve been doing has been stupid.
“What’s the matter?” Maddie says.
“I don’t know.” I look down at my sandwich. I notice my mother’s cut the crusts off the bread. The gesture makes me feel sorry for her and hate her at the same time.
“Are you okay?”
There’s that question again. But now I know the answer.
It’s no. It’s always been no. Since I woke up in the bright hospital room. Since I drove through the intersection, my head pulsing with what happened with Kate and Logan. With what he did to me. And what I did to him. Since I wished for that one second that he—
“Marsh,” Maddie says.
My knuckles throb against my sandwich, and I try to concentrate on that. I have a flash of myself lurching down a hospital hallway, holding the cheap flowers. How did I ever believe that would work?
“Are you going to try it?” Maddie says. “Go to the supermarket? Walk around the parking lot?”
The answer to this question is clear too. “No. I’m done with it. The hospital, walking around barefoot, in school, outside—all that was kind of my Plan B.” This feels like a confession, and I can’t help sighing.
“What was Plan A?” She’s got her chin jutted out, and I figure she must know what I’m going to say.
“Look,” I tell her, louder than I mean to, “I thought the thin space was in Mrs. Hansel’s—in your house. Everything else was just a way to pass the time until I could get inside—get into your front room.”
“Oh,” she says. The color spreads across her cheeks. She shoves her lunch tray toward me and stands up. Like she’s mad at me.
I don’t know why. What does she care about my crazy plans?
“You wanted to get into my house,” she says. Her voice is loud too.
Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about? “Well, yeah,” I say, and the ludicrous picture of myself kicking at the locked doors, staggering around in the dark basement, pacing the driveway plotting my break-in—all my scheming these past few months rolls out in front of my eyes. Could I have been a bigger idiot?
“Is that what this is about?” she says. “Is that what you—” But she doesn’t finish the sentence. She snatches up her tray, whirls around, and dumps her uneaten lunch in the trash.
I watch her stride across the cafeteria, that perky blond ponytail swinging. When she reaches the lacrosse table, Sam’s standing. He’s probably been watching the whole time, witnessed what happened. Whatever that is. I have no idea. He grabs her arm, but she shakes him away and keeps on striding right out the door.
He turns back to glare at me. Talk about people dropping dead from coronary embolisms. The guy’s head is about to blow off.
I rearrange my expression into something that I hope says, Look, buddy, I didn’t do anything to your precious sister. Then I settle back into my seat. Any minute now, he’ll probably come charging at me. Maybe Brad will join him and they’ll both kick the crap out of me.
I deserve it. I roll through that scenario for a minute. The lacrosse players brandishing their sticks. The football players rising up to help. Other people throwing themselves into the fight. The ensuing chaos erupting in the cafeteria. And me, back in Mrs. Golden’s office. Yet again.
I imagine her shaking her yellow head at me. What are you doing, Marsh? Marsh? Marsh!
And all I can hear myself answer is: Nothing. I give up, okay? I give up.
11
Something like Normal Life
The bell rings. I stand, looking quickly toward the lacrosse table, but no one seems like they’re planning to jump me.
I’m getting that feeling again, that feeling that I’m waking up, that I’m figuring something out. It must be the boots. Wearing them makes me feel halfway like a person. I’m no longer looking for a thin space. That’s what it is. My brilliant plan failed.
You’re just a student, I remind myself, just a regular person heading down the hallway. Going to your locker. Carrying your books. You’re never going to be sucked out of this life. Accept it. Go to class. Talk to people.
These are things I used to do. I could do them again. Participate in the world. Be Marsh Windsor. What the hell else am I going to do?
“Hey,” someone says, tapping my shoulder.
Awesome. It’s Logan. I consider ducking away, but my boots hold me to the ground. This is reality. Another thing I’m going to have to face.
Logan’s got a book pressed against her chest. An English book, I notice. We are standing in the doorway of the English class, after all. Logan is in my class, as she has been all semester—a fact that hasn’t registered until this moment.
“I saw what happened at lunch,” she says.
“Really?” I try joking with her. “Then maybe you can explain it to me.”
She rolls her eyes. “So what’s with her?”
“Her?” I know she means Maddie, but I’m stalling because of course I have no idea
what the answer is.
“Her, Marsh, the girl you ate lunch with, the girl you’ve been eating lunch with for like, three days now. You want to explain that to me?”
“Explain?” I’m looking over Logan’s head, at the people bunching up behind us in the doorway. “Come on,” I say, touching her elbow. “We’re causing a traffic jam.”
“I don’t care,” she says. Her voice is very high and breathy. For some reason, I’ve forgotten this. “You keep avoiding me. I’ve been trying to understand. Trying to let you . . . I don’t know, do whatever you have to do.” She grabs her book, waves it. For a second I think she’s going to whack me on the head with it. Instead, she points it at my boots. “I get we’ve had some issues, but last time I checked you were my boyfriend.”
People press closer, some of them not bothering to hide their interest in our little conversation. Halfway down the hall the English teacher pushes through the crowd. “What’s the hold up here?” she calls out.
Logan doesn’t budge. She’s blinking back tears. I’ve seen this look on her face before, and at this moment, I’ve got the same response: intense nausea.
I clutch my side. “Logan, I, uh, I mean, that girl and I—we—”
“Whatever about the girl. I want to talk about you—about us.” She grabs my arm, jerks it. “After school. Okay? Will you talk to me after school?”
“Move it, people,” the teacher says. Someone elbows me in the back. I’m getting shoved through the doorway.
Logan’s fingernails dig into my forearm. “Okay?” she says. “Okay, Marsh?”
Her high voice makes my head throb. “Right. Later. I will.” I tug away from her, almost trip over my bootlaces.
I go through the motions in class. Everything feels rusty to me—opening up my notebook, flipping the pages in my English book. I notice we’re on page 156. Apparently, it’s a story we were supposed to have read for today. I didn’t read it. I didn’t read any of the other pages before it. I rub my fingers over my notebook. The thing looks brand new. I haven’t even written my name on the cover. I scrawl out Marsh Windsor now and grit my teeth as a wave of self-loathing crashes over me.