by Aaron Gansky
She laughed. “Wow, what a line. You should save it for Erica.”
Erica. He thought of her dark eyes and her black, black hair. “Somehow, I don’t think Erica would appreciate it the way you do.” Snow melted on his blue sweater. A minute later, the flakes froze to the cotton and made it stiff with an icy crust. Ice streaked her wavy blonde hair. “We’re going to freeze out here. Let’s go in.”
“I’m tired of being a nobody.”
Lauren wasn’t a nobody. She was his best friend, and God loved her very deeply. Still, he’d told her all that before, and she shrugged it off. She didn’t like hearing how valuable, how loved she was, how much God loved her, how she was a child of God. She wanted only what she couldn’t have—the approval of shallow teenagers. Instead of basing her self-worth on what God thought of her, she depended on the opinions of too-skinny students. He wanted to tell her again, but it’d do no good. She’d only argue with him and refuse to go in until he’d agreed how worthless she was. So, instead of repeating the old debate, he simply held her tighter. “Let’s talk inside. It’s cold.”
She laughed. “I can’t feel my feet. I can’t walk.”
He took her laughter as a good sign, though he failed to see the humor of numb feet. Sighing, he turned around and knelt in the snow.
“What are you doing?”
“Piggyback ride. Come on.”
She laughed again, a high staccato sound like the chirping of a bird. “I’ll crush you, Oliver.”
“No chance. I’m as strong as a bull.”
“You’re a toothpick is what you are. Put you and Sarah the Skeleton together and you might weigh a hundred pounds.”
“I’m Vicmorn, the mystic monk, m’lady, and I’ll carry you with the power of Adonai to your castle in Alrujah.”
She put her hands on his shoulders, wrapped her legs around his sides. With her chin on his head, she mumbled, “Whatever, crazy monk. Now, giddyup, horsey.”
Oliver complied. He stood up, careful not to lose his balance or grunt. She’d take either as a condemnation of her weight. Instead, on his back, she felt the way he saw her—a thin girl, a heavy heart. His legs, now numb with cold, pushed forward. Each step pressed his ankles further into the snow. He wouldn’t wobble, wouldn’t even breathe heavy. He wanted her to feel weightless. It would only be a matter of time before the doctors found a balance of medication that would slim her down to the weight she should be, her real weight. Maybe she’d be happy when she was thin again. Had her happiness simply gone into hibernation, or had it quietly died for good?
When they got to her porch, Oliver wiped his feet. He set her down, took her slippers off, now wet and hard with ice, and set them next to the door. She leaned her forehead on his shoulder and said, “I don’t want to go back to school tomorrow.”
“You and about ninety percent of the school population.” He hugged her. Not a romantic hug—a comforting embrace, one that told her that—even though they loved other people, and even though those people didn’t love them back—they at least had each other. “Including me.”
* * *
As always, dinner started quietly. Oliver sat next to Lauren, which had become the norm over the last few weeks. Lauren was thankful he stuck around more. It made her family a little more tolerable.
Lauren hardly touched her chicken and stuffing. She stared more than ate, using her fork to pick the chicken apart. Good as it smelled, she wasn’t hungry. Anything she put in her mouth would end up on her hips anyway. Safer not to eat.
“Excellent dinner, Ms. Knowles,” Oliver said. He shoveled the last bit of stuffing into his gaping maw, wiped his mouth, and sat up straight. He folded his hands in his lap like some kind of reform school student. Sometimes, she really hated how perfectly polite he was, how kindly he treated her family. Maybe because they treated him so nicely in return. At times, she believed her mother would trade her for Oliver, no questions asked. What parent wouldn’t want a thin, well-mannered, straight-A genius?
Her mom’s bangs slipped from behind her ear and swished across her face. She readjusted them. Smiling, she said, “Thank you, Oliver.” Then, without the smile, “Eat your food, Lauren.”
“Not hungry.”
Her mother, shoulders slumped and eyes heavy, sat at the head of the table, the place their father used to sit. Instead of the stiff-backed oak chairs everyone else sat in, she sat in a black leather computer chair. She’d hardly taken off her gray suit jacket before she served dinner from the crock pot. “Don’t make me go through all this again, please, Lauren. Hungry or not, you have to eat.”
Bailey Renee, in all her perfectly slim beauty, sat at the foot of the table, opposite their mother. Oliver talked a lot about God, but Lauren couldn’t understand why God would make Bailey Renee so beautiful and Lauren so ugly. Talk about unfair. Bailey ate twice as much as Lauren and stayed twig thin. She played varsity basketball for North Chester High and maintained a 4.28 GPA. Academically, she could give Oliver a run for his money. She’d pulled her light brown hair into a ponytail. Wisps of bangs tugged themselves free and framed her face like a portrait. Nose deep in a calculus book, she went out of her way to ignore Lauren.
Beautiful, smart, athletic, loved. Perfect. The exact opposite of Lauren. It’s like they didn’t even share a gene pool. And it all came so easily to Bailey. She hardly had to work at any of it.
Freshmen weren’t even allowed in calculus, but the counselors made an exception for Bailey Renee. Didn’t everyone? Wasn’t she the standout exception to humanity? Nothing could be more irritating than having a sister who excelled at absolutely everything.
The only thing Lauren could do that Bailey Renee couldn’t was drive. And even when Lauren picked her up from practice after school, the other girls on the team looked at Lauren funny. They’d stare at Bailey Renee, then at Lauren, as if to say, “You’re related to that?”
“How was your day, sweetie?” her mother asked Bailey Renee. Bailey was “sweetie.” Lauren was “Lauren.”
“Good,” Bailey said.
Lauren pushed her stuffing around. Her fork scraped the ceramic plate.
Her mom sighed and dropped her fork. The steel rattled as it bounced off the table. “You know what? I give up. I don’t even know what to do with you, Lauren.”
Oliver fidgeted in his chair. The fingers of his folded hands tightened as he stared at his plate.
“What?” Lauren asked, as if she didn’t know which lecture was coming next.
“Every day it’s the same thing. I have to scream at you just to get you to eat. I have to threaten to take away your stupid video games to get you to do your homework. I have to put passwords on every computer in this house so you don’t waste all your time on that dumb game. Your grades are slipping, and you don’t even care.”
“I have a 4.2, mom. My grades aren’t slipping.”
“You had a 4.4 last year.”
“I can’t believe you’re even saying this right now.”
Her mom pressed on. “And you don’t eat, either, no matter how many times I tell you to. Honestly, do we need to put you in counseling? Seriously?”
Bailey Renee glanced up from her book. She grinned at Lauren.
Lauren dry swallowed. Her words came out as a whisper. “Are you saying I’m crazy?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just worried, and I’m tired, and I can’t do this anymore. I work hard to make sure I can put food on our plates, and you don’t even touch it. Do you know how frustrating that is?”
“Maybe you should quit,” Lauren muttered.
“Excuse me, young lady?”
Bailey Renee said, “Settle down, Lauren. You’re such a drama queen.”
Oliver could help. Why didn’t he defend her? Instead, he stared at his hands in his lap, then pushed himself from the table. “I should go.”
“No, you can totally stay,” Bailey Renee said. She stared at him with a wide grin. “You can show me that scripting language and phy
sics engine you designed.”
“Sit down, Oliver,” Lauren’s mom said. She pushed her hair behind her ear and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.
Embarrassment and outrage heated Lauren’s throat, burned the back of her eyes. She wanted to throw the plate at her mother; she wanted to kick the chair. It was bad enough being the ugly duckling, and now her mom thought she was crazy? She took a deep breath, dug deep in the pit of her stomach, and found the worst thing she could say. She pointed a finger at her mother, poking the air in front of her. “No wonder Dad left you.”
“Lauren,” Oliver said quickly.
“Whoa,” Bailey Renee whispered. “Harsh.”
Too late. Her mother’s face turned from irritation to absolute despair. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. Her jaw hung half-open like an unhinged door.
Lauren stood up fast, dropped her fork, and stormed out of the room.
* * *
The last time Oliver had knocked on Lauren’s door, they were in third grade. At some point in their friendship, which stretched back to kindergarten, knocking had become superfluous. But he knocked now, a gentle knock, a modest supplication for permission, not just to enter, but to speak.
“Go away,” she said.
“It’s just me.”
“I know.”
He opened the door anyway. She sat on her bed, legs crossed, Xbox on. The shelves lining her walls—something her father had installed for her before he left the family ten years ago—had once been filled with stuffed animals. They’d long since been replaced by books. She may not get straight A’s, but few people on the planet read more than her. And, impossibly, she’d somehow filled as many journals as books she’d read. Most had to do with Alrujah—the world that formed in her mind, that took its roots in her journals, in her sketchbooks. It’d taken Oliver the better part of a year to compile all her notes, all her sketches, into the master file for the game. But he hadn’t minded. She’d conceptualized a real, breathing world.
The 32-inch LCD TV on her desk provided the only light in her room. He’d grown accustomed to her sulking in the dark. And, as always, she took her anger out on her Xbox. She played some button-mashing brawler, though she’d beaten it several times. She wasn’t in the mood for a challenge now. She wanted to use the avatar she’d designed, some ridiculous female ninja, to slice through competitors with graceful ease. Right now, she wanted to see something bleed. “So how long am I grounded?”
“You’re not,” Oliver said. He sat on her chair and rolled back over the wood flooring so he could better see the television, then put his feet up on her bed.
“How long do I have before she wants me to move out? Do I get to pack my things first?”
Oliver tried to suppress his frustration with Lauren. She hadn’t always played the victim like this. But in middle school, when other students started shedding baby fat, hers clung to her bones relentlessly. Sure, she’d lost friends over it, the plight of the unpopular, but he’d lost just as many, maybe more, just for sticking by her side. How often had she thanked him for that?
He understood how hard it was to be unpopular. Truth be told, he was every bit as physically unattractive as her. What with his loppy arms and too-thin waist, his patchy beard and uncontrollable hair. But he didn’t care, didn’t let others get him down.
Maybe, he thought, it stemmed from her father leaving. It must. Oliver, at least, had two parents at home who reminded him how much they loved him. They sacrificed for him, supported him. Poor Ms. Knowles just seemed too tired to be as supportive as she wanted to be.
But Lauren didn’t have the patience to see that. She’d been hurt enough by words to know how to use them as a weapon. And so she erected her vocabulary as a defense strategy. She’d hurt those who hurt her. He sighed. “You made her cry. Did you know that? She left the room right after you, but I heard her crying through her door.”
Lauren paused the game. She set the controller on her pillow and lay down. “She called me fat and crazy. What was I supposed to do? I’m tired of being fat and stupid and unlovable. For once, it would be nice for someone to look at me without cringing. You have no idea what it’s like.” Her voice got softer as she spoke.
But he did have an idea, a very good one, in fact. He’d tried to tell her that on several occasions, but she’d have none of it. No room for Oliver in Lauren’s pity party. So he pushed on, determined to be the strong one, determined to be the encourager. Isn’t that what God had called Christians to do? To love and encourage?
He stood up and stretched his legs, tired of the constant battle he fought to combat the damage done by insecure, selfish teenagers. He’d done what he could with Lauren. Tonight, whatever seeds of love and encouragement he tried to sow would end up in the gravel beside the road. Crows would snatch them up, eat them before they had a chance to put roots in Lauren’s hard heart.
His phone beeped, and he checked it. Coming home soon? It’s a school night. “Mom wants me home. But before I go, I want to say a couple things. I want you to listen, okay?” He spoke with the gentleness he’d learned from his father, spoke with patience and perseverance. “First of all, you’re not fat. I’ll say that every time you say you are. Secondly, you need to apologize to your mother. I don’t think you understand how deeply you hurt her tonight.”
“Serves her right,” Lauren whispered.
“Please, Lauren. You really have to stop. I know your mom hurt you, but she at least meant well. What you said—” he paused. “It was mean and vengeful. That kind of attitude is only going to make you feel worse.” He pulled his jacket on and fixed the sleeves of his sweater. “Good news, though. We’re close to a Beta. I’ll have one ready by the end of the week. Two days, if I can get some time to focus on it.”
Lauren sat up. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Playable? Really really?”
“Really really playable.”
She grinned. “Well, go home and get to work.” She pulled her journal from under her pillow. The worn leather torn near the front corners, the binding creased and worn. She tossed it to him. “I came up with more stuff if you can work it in.”
He went to catch it but fumbled it instead. It collapsed to the floor and pages spilled out. Ah, awkward adolescence. He had no idea how athletes kept their feet straight. He could hammer out thousands of lines of code in a couple hours, so why should simple hand-eye coordination give him such grief? “I’ll get right on it, Princess.”
She laughed like the caw of birds. “Good. Now get going, you crazy monk.”
* * *
When Oliver got home, he stayed in his car. He turned the engine off and pulled his phone from the center console. Snow collected on the edges of the windshield. He waited for a few minutes, letting the warmth from the heater dissipate until the air inside the car took on a chill. He composed a new text message to Erica, as he did nearly every night. This time, though, he decided to actually send it. What r u doing Tues after school?
The air cooled rapidly. His finger felt stiff, almost numb. He swallowed his unease like a pill. His breath came out in tendrils of mist. He put his jacket on. His phone beeped. Who is this?
He should have known better. He wasn’t even supposed to have her number. A week ago, as he walked down the science hall of North Chester High School, he’d overheard her giving it to a friend, and he memorized it.
He should have introduced himself, maybe said something witty, something funny and memorable. But Oliver wasn’t known for his wit.
He put the phone in his pocket, buried his hands in the folds of his jacket, and closed his eyes. He started the car and let the engine heat up again. His parents would hear him. His ’82 Honda was neither a classic nor quiet. But he couldn’t go inside until he’d said his piece. If he went inside, his parents would want to talk. They’d want the full run-down of his day, and he’d give it to them. Then, he’d lock himself in his room and get lost in the coding of Alrujah. He woul
dn’t text Erica until two AM, likely. Too many distractions within the walls of his house. His car was quiet, peaceful, cold. Here, he could concentrate on not making a fool of himself.
Of course, he hadn’t done too good of a job so far. But he was tired of loving and never daring to say anything about it. If Lauren wasn’t brave enough to talk to Aiden, the North Chester High School football all-star, then Oliver would be the brave one. He pulled the phone out again and texted, Oliver from Bio. He put his hands in front of the heater.
How did u get my ###?
He knew she would ask this eventually, and he’d devised an answer. On Facebook. He had, the day he heard Erica give her number to the friend. Wanted to double check to make sure it was legit. Plus, Facebook seemed much less stalkerish than the full truth.
A beep. Whats up Tues?
The snow melted away when it hit the pewter gray hood, still warm from the drive from Lauren’s. Want 2 show u something in the comp lab. A game I made.
Talk 2 me 2moro
Oliver grinned and closed his phone.
Chapter Two
They will come like a thief in the night, the four fingers of Adonai, and then the thumb. They will hold strange mysteries, and cause Alrujah to stumble. They will be a burr in the boot of kingdoms and cities. Mighty will be their powers, and all Alrujah will tremble before them.
—The Book of Things to Come
LAUREN HATED THE CAFETERIA. She much preferred eating in the computer lab, something Mr. Benson let her and Oliver do, but no one else. Mr. Benson was out sick today, though, and the sub left for lunch. Besides, for whatever reason, Oliver insisted on sitting here today, which was weird, because he hated this place as much as she did.
They put their lunch trays on the table in the far back. Lauren faced the back wall so she wouldn’t see all the popular, thin kids staring at her and giggling. No one else sat at the table, and likely, no one would. The one advantage of not being popular—for the most part people left you alone. Even her too cool younger sister.