“I mean, there was the other night . . . and I was going to go over to her place tonight.”
“How old is she?”
“Who cares? I think she’s maybe seven years older than we are. So, like, twenty-five, I guess.”
I exhale, watching my breath condense on the air-conditioned passenger-side window. “Do whatever you want.”
“Cole—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
He looks at me, then turns back to the road and switches on the radio. “Fine. I’m used to you not talking.”
Neither one of us says another word until we’re pulling up to the Central Jersey Fairgrounds ten minutes later. I’m sweating, and my heart is beating too fast. Eddie’s truck is actually there; part of me hadn’t really expected it to be. Eddie Deangelo never seemed like the earliest riser.
The fairgrounds are huge. They have carnivals here, and horse shows and all kinds of things. Eddie’s truck is parked in a big field, tucked off to the side, surrounded by trees, and we drive through the parking lot and up onto the grass until we’re alongside it. The sun still isn’t all the way up and it’s not very hot yet, but I can feel that it will be, the ground underneath my feet bracing to absorb another day’s onslaught of sunlight. We get out, and the truck door opens. Eddie slides out and comes around to where we’re standing.
“Bro.” He swings his hand around, and I manage to catch it cleanly for once, clasp it hard, and then let go without any weird flipping around that I don’t understand. He pounds me on the shoulder with his free hand, then turns to Matt and executes the same maneuver. “So. Let’s see it.”
I hand Eddie my backpack. He unceremoniously opens it and begins arranging the contents on the hood of Matt’s truck. Brown plastic pill containers, plus two glass medicine bottles and a bag full of weed that I thought looked pretty substantial but that Eddie tosses down with a contemptuous snort. “This isn’t everything, is it?”
“It isn’t everything.” Matt has come up alongside us with a duffel. He reaches inside and begins to arrange medicine containers and plastic bags of pills alongside the stuff I’ve brought. I peer at one of the bottles. It’s a prescription for Percocet, made out to him. It must be for his arm. It looks full.
Eddie picks up one of the unmarked bags and squints at the contents. “This is good shit. Where did you get it?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“This stuff is hard to get.”
“Yeah.”
“They prescribe it for, like, hardcore neurological shit. This one’s a muscle relaxant.”
“You should be a doctor.”
“This pays better.” Eddie produces a gym bag of his own and carefully places everything on the hood inside, even the pot that he seemed so disdainful of. “So, this is half?”
“This is half,” Matt says.
“Good. Let’s get to work.”
I take a deep breath, partly out of relief and partly to steady myself as I realize that we’re actually going to do this. Eddie goes around to the back and whistles between his teeth for us to join him. It’s an old U-Haul, and as I walk around, I notice that there’s still a faded cowboy on a bucking horse painted on the side that says TEXAS WELCOMES YOU. Over that slogan, there’s a sign saying DEANGELO OUTDOOR ADVENTURES. Eddie slides the big door open, and there it all is.
“Let’s get this mother set up.”
Eddie surprises me for the second time this morning. Not only is he an early riser; he also knows what he’s doing. This is the family business, I suppose. He’s probably been doing it all his life. Matt and I follow his instructions as we carry various bits of gear out into the field, shoulder big bags, and then spread out a massive balloon. I catch Matt wincing several times as he lifts something heavy. He probably should have been taking the Percocet.
“We usually have a bigger crew,” Eddie says, wiping his face and drinking from a dirty plastic bottle with the label peeled off. “But that wasn’t bad. It’ll go faster next time. I’ll bring a guy when we do it for real.”
My heart is pounding, and it’s not from the exertion of setting it up. It’s that I can’t believe I’m about to get into this thing. I’m also worried that we’ve taken too long, worried that there’s too much daylight. “Do we need a permit for this?” I ask.
Eddie shrugs. “We’ve got all the permits. We come out here all the time to test balloons or train new staff. No one’s gonna give us a hard time.” He takes a thick rope that’s attached to the basket and ties it to the front fender of the truck. “This ain’t necessarily proper, but we’ll be okay.”
“What’s proper?” I ask.
He steps back and examines his knot. “Six of these lines and a four-man crew.”
“Really?”
“Don’t worry about it; there’s not much wind, and we’re pretty far from those trees.”
“What if the conditions are different on the actual day?”
He shrugs and grins, glancing at me through a lock of hair hanging over his eyes. “Can’t control the wind, brother. Let’s do this.”
And the next thing I know, we’re all in the basket, and I think I might actually throw up. Eddie’s talking, pointing to different features, and he sees that I’m barely paying attention.
“Hey, you want to write some of this down? Mattie and I aren’t going to be here on the big day.”
I pull my notebook out and start taking notes, and it helps to settle me down a little bit. Everything here is basic physics, hot air rising over cold, stuff we learned in the tenth grade, though it took humanity most of its history to figure it out. There’s really not very much to it, and Eddie is a surprisingly good teacher, showing me each step and then checking in: “Got it?” and I nod and make a note and then he takes me to the next step. Simple sequence. “It’s just a tethered flight,” he says. “Just going up and down. You’re not actually going anywhere. There’s a lot more to that, you know?”
I frown and nod. I cannot imagine.
“Okay, so let’s make it happen,” Eddie says.
And with that, I cram the notebook and the pencil into my back pocket and take hold of the edge of the basket in both hands. I give very serious thought to vaulting out, getting firm green grass under my feet, heading to the car, and driving home. I can surrender the drugs and the weed and let Eddie and any of his friends he chooses to tell know that I’m a coward.
But this is for Viola. It’s a crazy plan, and that makes it the best plan I’ve come up with. To be honest, it’s the only one I’ve come up with.
So I hold on to the edge of the basket but let go just long enough to give Eddie a thumbs-up. I observe carefully as he squeezes what I’ve just learned is called a blast valve, firing the propane burner.
When I was a little kid, I remember lying on my back outside, looking up at the sky. It was terrifying. All that space and nothing to stop me once the ground let go and I went hurtling off. I felt like I would literally fall up forever, and that’s when I first got my head around the concept of eternity. That was probably what scared me more than anything else; I didn’t really think the earth would let go of just me and me alone, that it would hold on to everyone else, all the cars and rocks and trees and animals, but select me to send plunging into the atmosphere. Even at a very young age, I could see that didn’t make any sense. It was the idea that a fall upward would never end: the concept of never; the idea of forever. That was what sent me running inside, where my mom would find me and be convinced that I had hay fever and that was why I didn’t feel well after going out to play.
And now here I am, eighteen years old, and the ground really is letting go. There’s this huge thing over my head and this inexorable pull lifting me up, and I squeeze my eyes closed for a moment. When I open them, I’m looking over the treetops as we pass them by, the periodic breath of the blast valve and nothing else in the quiet morning, my knuckles white on the edge of the basket.
“Dude,” Eddie says, observing my expression, “s
he must be some hell of a girl.”
That’s all I’ve told him, that I want to take a girl for a ride. He doesn’t know who it is, and he hasn’t been particularly curious, but he’s right: she is a hell of a girl. This summer would be unbearable without her. It would be me and Mom and the empty hospital bed and the baking heat. It would be everybody else getting ready to go, and me staying behind.
The line runs out, and the balloon jerks to a stop. There’s a sickening moment when I can feel the rope straining against the pull of the balloon, and then the forces equilibrate, and Matt and Eddie Deangelo and I are hanging there in the sky all together, far above the treetops, the trucks looking like Matchbox cars in the field far below. I straighten my back and relax my grip on the basket. The sun is coming up now, and there’s a hawk circling over the forest below us, and some mist is rising off toward the lake.
It’s beautiful, and I’m not thinking about the earth letting go. I’m not thinking about falling forever. I’m thinking about Viola’s face when she sees the balloon, the look in her eyes when we get into the basket and begin to rise, the way she’ll listen when we reach this topmost point and can look out at a scene like this one and I read her the poem I’ve been preparing. Her whole life is predictable, she said. I’ve made her laugh, but I’ve never seen her really, truly surprised. I’m not sure she ever has been.
That’s what this is: something she could never imagine, could never expect. It’s a surprise.
“Christ,” Matt says.
“Pretty fucking awesome, huh?” Eddie asks beside me.
It is. It is very fucking awesome. We stand and look at it for five full minutes, my terror burning off with the morning mist, and then Eddie brings us back down to earth.
Taking the balloon down and disassembling it, folding the fabric and getting the components back into the truck takes even longer than setting it up. I’m soaked with sweat and dew by the time we’re done. I thank Eddie, and we finalize our plan. I kind of want to write the date and time down for him, but he smiles and taps his temple in a way that I don’t totally find reassuring but that does make me think I’ll offend him if I insist that he take a note. Matt and I get back in the Explorer, turn in a wide arc across the field, and pull back onto asphalt, heading toward town.
“That was great,” Matt says after a moment. “That was so great. What an idea, Cole. What an insane idea. You are one creative motherfucker.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Glad you liked it, but . . . half? That was just half?”
“Huh?”
“Because I have maybe at most a third of that back at home. How many more pain meds do you have?”
“Well, that was all of it . . .”
“All of it?”
He slaps the steering wheel with both hands. “Jesus Christ, Cole. Jesus Christ, would you listen to yourself? We just did something amazing, and all you can do is worry. You have a great plan, and it’s gonna work, and all you can see are the problems. We’ll come up with what we need.”
“And if we don’t?”
“If we don’t? If we don’t?” he says in a high-pitched, whiny voice. “We will. Just . . . we will.”
When I look over, he’s rubbing his elbow. “You’ve been saving your Percocet?” I ask him.
“Don’t really need it. I don’t like how it makes me feel.”
“Pain free?”
He snorts. “Nauseous.”
“Nauseated.”
“Whatever. And it makes me think slow.”
“Definitely can’t have that.” I glance back over, but he’s not looking at me. “Sorry. Hey, I’m sorry for being a dick. I’m just . . . I don’t know. I’m nervous. This summer is fucking with me a little.”
It’s fucking with both of us. I’m thinking about Matt sitting in that black-draped chair, Matt punching Ponytail in the woods, Matt running around with Paul Gerber and Sarah Jessup.
When Matt breaks into my thoughts, his voice is far quieter than I’m used to from him. “Cole, can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“It’s about the shooting.” I don’t say anything, and after a moment, he glances over at me. “Can I ask you?”
“I guess.”
“Do you remember where Kendra was sitting?” There’s silence for a moment, and then he continues. “Because I heard her mom was going around and talking to all the survivors, and it got me thinking, and I was just wondering. She always sat at the front of the room . . .”
“Then that’s probably where she was.”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s no big deal. Just, for some reason I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
It’s been years since Matt asked me about the shooting. Years and years. There was a time, when we were a lot younger, when he asked a lot. He’d kind of sidle up to it, ask a few questions, trying to get at exactly what happened. He always wanted to know about Andy: what happened to him, what my last memory of him was, stuff like that. Things I couldn’t tell him, because I didn’t know. And then, when we were ten years old, I told him that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I forget what he asked me that time, some question about afterward, when the police came in and took us out, I think, and I just told him I didn’t know and couldn’t remember a thing and never wanted to talk about it again. And we haven’t.
It was very unlike me to stand up to Matt. It’s not like he was a bully or anything; it’s just that he always tended to be in charge. He’d decide what we would play, and I would follow along. But I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand talking about it, and so that one time, I spoke up for myself.
The road is humming under the tires, and there are no other cars, even though the sun is fully up now. I take a deep breath, feeling like I took a big pill and it didn’t go down all the way. I can’t talk about this. There’s a place inside me, deep inside, that is totally private. It’s alone, and it is still. It’s old, older than my father’s death, older than my mother’s grief, older than my love for Viola. Almost older than I can remember. Lonely, that’s the best word for it. Not in a bad way. Just in a way that has to be. It’s where my poetry comes from. And this is trespassing, this question. Matt seeing Officer Jessup’s daughter, that’s a trespass, and this question is another. It’s like he’s trying to find his way into my story.
But how do you explain something like that?
How do you explain something like that to someone like Matt, who barely knows what’s going on inside his own head, let alone somebody else’s?
“I don’t remember, Matt. You know I don’t remember anything about that day.”
“Yeah, but I just thought there might be a scrap. Like, when the police interviewed you or the counselors or something, they might have mentioned it.”
“I think they were careful not to feed me information. Okay?”
“Okay, dude. You don’t have to talk about it. It’s just—”
“Just what?”
“I know it’s fucked up, Cole. I know it is. It’s just, you don’t know. You don’t know what it was like to not be there. I know it was terrible to be there, but it was terrible not to be, too. I feel like I left school the day before, and I never got to go back. I feel like every day since then, I’ve been an outsider looking in. I feel like I’m a ghost.”
“I’d tell you if I could, Matt. I’d tell you anything if I could. I’ve got nothing. I never have.”
I know it’s hard for him. I want to sympathize. I try. It’s just that when I look at Matt, all I can see is gold. All I can see is a guy who has the whole world at his feet. Girls love him; coaches love him; his family is rich. He’s got diabetes, but that never seems to hold him back. And the one day when the worst thing in the world happened, he was lucky enough to stay home.
We don’t speak again until he stops at the bottom of my driveway. He leaves the engine running, and we both sit, drained.
“Thanks for driving.”
“No problem,” he says.
“And thanks for th
e meds.”
“No problem.”
I open the door.
“You coming tomorrow?” he asks.
“Maybe. I guess.” Matt’s having some people over to his pool.
“I messaged Viola. I think she’s going to come.”
“Okay. I’ll try.”
“You should come, Cole.”
I know I should. She’s leaving for her service trip soon.
“Okay. I will.”
“Nice. Great.”
I slide out of the truck onto the gravel on the side of the road.
“Yo, Cole . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry to ask.”
I nod. “I know.” I close the door and walk up the driveway, hands in my pockets. After a moment, I hear his engine roar as he cuts a K-turn and drives back up my street, off toward the big houses and clean pools on the nice side of town. I kick at the overgrown grass alongside the driveway and tell myself that I’ll mow today, even though I know it’s a lie.
As soon I open the front door, I’m hit by the smell of egg and warm vanilla. I warily step inside and make my way to the kitchen. Mom’s up, cooking, singing along to the radio. She’s wearing a clean apron, and it looks like she’s showered. Evidently, this is a good day.
“I knew you’d turn up eventually!” she says with a smile. “Where have you been, early bird?”
“Uh, I went for a walk.” I thought she’d be panicked if she woke to find me gone.
“I thought I heard a car.”
“Matt gave me a ride home.”
“He should have come in! We have enough here to feed a small army.” She piles three pieces of French toast on a plate, smothers them with powdered sugar and maple syrup just the way I like, and slides it across the counter. I’m starving. She watches me eat, stuffing the food into my mouth without bothering to take it to the table.
“You need a shower, baby.”
“I know. I’ll take one. It’s hot out already.”
“Where did you go?”
“Just around. I couldn’t sleep.” I finish the plate and take the glass of milk she hands me, draining it in one long gulp.
“Are you all right, Cole?”
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