The Big Crunch

by Pete Hautman

  “I don’t … start over. What?” He needed time to wake up. “Where are you?”

  “In freaking Omaha! Where do you think?”

  Wes cleared his throat. “Uh, what’s going on?” He looked at his clock: 12:04.

  “What do you care? You’re in stupid Minnesota.”

  Stupid Minnesota? Wes tried to come up with something to say, but not quickly enough.

  “I don’t know why I bothered to call,” June said. “You’re obviously, like, half asleep.”

  “I’m not asleep.”

  “Good for you.”

  Wes’s grogginess was turning to irritation.

  “Look,” he said, some edge to his voice, “why don’t you just tell me what’s going on.”

  “I was at this club,” she said. “The Drood?”

  Like he was supposed to know what she was talking about.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was with this guy.”

  “What guy?” he said quickly.

  “It doesn’t matter. Just a guy. His name is Kel.”

  Wes’s heart started doing this thrum-thrum-thrum thing. His stomach felt as if it was melting and flowing into his bowels. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.

  June said, “We were dancing, and he was supposed to give me a ride home, but he just took off and left me there, and you weren’t anywhere, and stupid Tabitha and them were trying to drink blue champagne and this guy grabbed me in the bathroom and dragged me outside and just left me and it just really, really sucked. I could’ve got robbed or raped or something and you’re all the way in stupid Minnesota and … and I hate you.”

  Her words were claws; Wes felt as if he’d been shredded. Part of him was listening, hearing her words, interpreting them, filing them in his memory, while another part wanted to throw himself through the phone line, to pop out of her cell like a genie from a bottle and hold her tight until everything was okay again. Still another piece of him wanted to slap her, to make her stop. And, from deep in the most ancient part of his brain came a powerful desire to beat this guy Kel to death with the thigh bone of an antelope.

  And then there was the part of him that was in charge of his mouth.

  “Why were you dancing with that guy?” he asked.

  It took her a few seconds to reply.

  “Because he was there,” she said. “And you weren’t.”

  June knew she was being completely unreasonable and illogical and ridiculous. She knew she would regret everything she said, and that she was hurting Wes with her words as surely as if she were stabbing him with a knife. She wanted to hurt him, to make him feel what she was feeling. Why else would she have mentioned Kel? Why else yell at Wes for something he had nothing to do with?

  Wes wasn’t saying anything.

  “Are you there?” She heard the scrape of the phone against his cheek, then the softest of clicks, a hollow sound that was not a sound, and she was alone.

  From one surviving corner of his mind — a tiny citadel that had managed to withstand the onslaught — Wes observed himself lying rigid on his bed in the dark and wondered if he would ever move again. He knew what was happening, but he could not make it stop. Anger, pain, and helplessness combined to paralytic effect.

  The body will survive, he told himself. I will be okay.

  Or maybe not. He focused on one body part: the index finger of his right hand, and tried to move it. The finger twitched. He made an effort to expand his rib cage, to draw air into his lungs, with only partial success.

  What had just happened? He couldn’t think about it, but he couldn’t think about anything else, either. The thought of June with some guy, dancing, was unbearable, but he kept going back to that image, touching it to feel the pain.

  Sleep? He would never sleep again.

  After a time, he was able to turn his head to the side. The clock read 12:23. Less than twenty minutes had passed since June’s call, yet it felt like hours. Daylight was still six hours away. How was he supposed to get through this night? Did he even want to make it to dawn? Spontaneous Human Combustion — that was the answer. He willed himself to burst into flames. He felt a spot of warmth in the vicinity of his liver, but it didn’t last. That was the problem with SHC. It never happened when you needed it most. He forced the coherent part of his brain to think about other things. School. Eating apples. The garage floor, all stained and gritty from winter. Now that it was spring, his mom could park her car outside again. His breathing slowed and became deeper. He had to do something, now.

  Something completely insane.

  June had cried a normal amount when she was a kid. Cried because she skinned her knee, cried because of a sandbox fight with another child, cried because her tummy hurt, cried because she didn’t get her way — the list of reasons to cry was long.

  She no longer cried about those things. One day when she was twelve she had burned her hand while making French toast. That had hurt as much as anything had ever hurt her, but instead of crying she simply bit her lip and ran cold water over it until the pain became bearable, thinking, at the time, I didn’t cry! It made her feel grown up and brave, and after that she cried less often, and when she did cry it was about different things — often things that made no sense. Like watching a really stupid movie. Or reading something in a book. Or sometimes it was about nothing at all, just a vast empty feeling that could only be soothed by a solitary bout of tears and snuff ling.

  That was different too. A little kid crying demanded an audience. Grown-up crying was best done alone.

  Why was she crying now? Was it the empty feeling? No, it was more a feeling of helplessness, powerlessness, knowing what she wanted and needed but having no way to get it.

  She wanted Wes. And she couldn’t have him.

  It was that simple.

  12:42

  12:43

  12:44

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  From: JKE

  Pls don’t hate me.

  Apr 24 00:46

  Wes opened the garage door as slowly and quietly as he could, so as not to waken his parents. He put his mom’s Toyota in neutral and positioned himself between the front of the car and the workbench at the back of the garage. He put his back against the bench and his feet on the car bumper and pushed. The car slowly moved toward the open door. He pushed harder. The back tires rolled over the lip of the garage onto the sloped driveway. Wes fell to the floor. He jumped up and ran after the car as it picked up speed, yanked open the driver’s side door, jumped in, and hit the brake, stopping the car just before it rolled onto the street. He put the car in park and walked back into the garage.

  Two hours later, Wes heard a sound and looked up to see his father standing in the open garage door wearing powder blue pajamas and his Sorels, holding a baseball bat in both hands.

  “Wes, what the hell?” his dad said.

  Wes said, “I couldn’t sleep.” He dunked the mop in the bucket of soapy water and wrung it out.

  “You’re cleaning the garage at three o’clock in the morning?”

  “I’m almost done.” Wes looked around the garage, at the clean floor, the orderly tool bench, the neatly arranged shelves. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “You scared me half to death! I thought we were being robbed!”

  “Sorry.”

  His mother’s voice came from the house. “Frank? Is everything all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Wes’s dad said, raising his voice slightly. “It’s your obsessive-compulsive neat-freak son!”

  A few seconds later, Wes’s mom came shuffling out to the garage in her bathrobe and slippers. “What on earth? Wes? What happened here?”

  Wes sighed. “I just couldn’t stand it,” he said.

  The three A.M. garage incident was not mentioned the next day, although his mom kept giving him worried looks. That afternoon, Wes went downstairs to the laundry room and folded all the clean clothes and linens that had been piling up in the hamper ne
xt to the dryer. His mom came down to see what he was doing.

  “I’m trying to help out more,” he told her.

  “That’s nice,” she said, giving him another worried look.

  Wes finished folding, then went to his room and called Alan Hurd.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Can I come over?”

  “Bring food,” Alan said.

  Alan Hurd shoved a handful of chips into his mouth and chewed, slowly and deliberately. Wes waited, knowing that to rush Alan at that point would only make him say no.

  Alan swallowed, never taking his eyes off Wes.

  “No,” he said, reaching back into the bag for another handful of chips.

  “Why not?”

  “Because my parents won’t let me drive it till school’s out.” Spitting potato chip fragments.

  “Look, it’s just sitting out behind your garage. It’s not good to let a car sit for that long.”

  “My dad would kill me.”

  “He won’t even notice it’s gone. You can’t see it from the house.”

  “It’s not insured.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Wes could see he wasn’t getting anywhere. “And I’ll owe you forever. This is really important to me. Seriously.”

  “I didn’t even know you were still talking to her,” Alan said.

  “I didn’t want to tell anybody.”

  “Not even me?” Alan said, looking peeved.

  “Not even anybody. I just — I didn’t want you guys to think I was pathetic.”

  “You are pathetic. Secret long-distance girlfriend? That’s as bad as Schwartz and his used Penthouse.”

  “It would just be for a couple days.”

  Alan sat back in his seat, refilled his mouth with chips, washed them down with a glug of orange soda, belched loudly.

  “No,” he said. He was enjoying this. The begging.

  “I’ll bring it back with a full tank. I’ll pay you. I’ll, like, rent it.”

  Alan considered.

  “How much?” he said.

  Wes called June that night and they talked, but neither of them brought up June’s midnight phone call from the night before. They talked about music, people, TV shows, whether it would be better to live on a tropical island or on top of a mountain, Nebraska hamburgers versus Minnesota burgers — they never had trouble finding things to talk about. But they didn’t talk about the Drood, or Kel, or how Wes had hung up on her. It was there, a dark scary cloud, but neither of them wanted to bring it up.

  Monday after school, Wes washed his mom’s car. After dinner, he called the other Alan, Alan Schwartz, and asked him to host a forty-eight-hour poker game the coming weekend.

  “I don’t think so,” said Alan. “My mom barely tolerates the Saturday afternoon game.”

  “She won’t have to know,” Wes said.

  “Oh, she’d know. My mom’s practically telepathic, especially with six or seven of us in her basement.”

  “It’ll be an imaginary game,” Wes said.

  Alan said, “Explain.”

  Later, just before dinner, Wes mentioned the big game to his mom.

  She said, “Forty-eight hours? Good Lord, Wes! Mrs. Schwartz is okay with that?”

  “Sure. We never leave the basement. It’s self-contained. She’ll hardly know we’re there.”

  “Seven teenage boys in her basement? She’ll know you’re there, all right.”

  “She likes it. She says she’d just as soon know where her son is all weekend.”

  “What about sleeping? How will you sleep?”

  “No sleep,” Wes said. “That’s the idea. It’s like an endurance contest.”

  “How much money do you boys play for, anyway?”

  “Just nickels and dimes,” Wes said. He was surprised by how easily the lies came out of his mouth. “I’ll be a couple miles away. And you can call me on my cell anytime.”

  She frowned, not liking it. “When will you be home?”

  “Forty-eight hours, like I said. Four o’clock Friday to four o’clock Sunday.”

  Her frown eased somewhat. “Let me talk to your father when he gets home from work.”

  The next morning, before leaving for school, Wes washed the breakfast dishes. His mother, sipping her coffee, watched him suspiciously.

  “Wes, you are scaring me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  It was simple. He was building up points. Because there was a good chance that something would go wrong, that his parents would find out what he was doing, that everything would go wrong. So for the next few days, he would be the best, most responsible son anyone could possibly want.

  Just in case.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THEY WERE TALKING ON THE PHONE — never mind that it was costing her twenty-five cents a minute — and June was telling Wes about Trish getting in trouble, when she heard beeping.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Um … I’m playing this game?”

  “You’re playing a computer game while I’m talking to you?”

  “I’m listening!” Wes said. “You were telling me about Trish, uh, writing something on the school wall —”

  “She wrote it on Tabitha’s locker!”

  “That’s what I meant.”

  “And she got caught.”

  “Oh yeah?” Beep.

  She hung up.

  He called back five seconds later.

  “Sorry,” he said when she picked up. “I turned it off.”

  “I should feel honored?”

  “June …”

  “At least you got my name right.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Okay, sure. Hang on a sec while I boot up World of Warcraft.” She didn’t actually have World of Warcraft, but it was the only game she could think of.

  “Yeah, right,” he said.

  She disconnected.

  What was happening? Why was she so mad at him all the time? And why was he playing a computer game instead of listening to her?

  Her phone went bee-boop, the incoming text message sound. She glared at the phone, then picked it up.

  From: Wes

  What r u up to Friday nite?

  Apr 27 6:29

  June puzzled over the message. What was she up to Friday night? Why would he care? It was none of his business. Or maybe he was thinking about her and just asking, in a good way, not in a suspicious, nosy way. Was he jealous? If there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was jealousy. She’d had a jealous boyfriend once. It was creepy.

  What was happening?

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  The next morning, June woke up, brushed her teeth, and was halfway dressed before she even thought about Wes. When she did, it was as if a six-hundred-pound thing had settled onto her shoulders. She let out a little squeak, not quite a scream, then clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Junie? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she yelled down the stairs to her mom. “It’s nothing.”

  She finished dressing, then checked her cell for new messages. There weren’t any. She turned off the phone and put it in her top dresser drawer and went down to the kitchen, where her mom was making oatmeal, part of her new healthy eating routine. June poured herself half a cup of coffee, filled it to the top with milk, added a spoonful of honey, and gave it thirty seconds in the microwave.

  “Usually when people scream,” her mother said, “it’s something.”

  “I thought I saw a mouse,” June said.

  “In your bedroom?”

  “It was a crazed dust bunny.”

  “Time to sweep under your bed.”

  June shrugged.

  “How’s Wes?”

  June did not reply.

  “Since you seem determined to stay in contact with the boy, I should at least get the occasional progress report.”

&n
bsp; “He plays computer games while we’re talking.”

  Her mom laughed and put a bowl of oatmeal in front of her. June doctored it with a thick slab of butter and a heaping tablespoon of sugar.

  Her mother said, “Sort of defeats the healthy lifestyle initiative.”

  “Your initiative,” June said. “I have no lifestyle.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  The Drood

  wuz rood.

  “Thursdays suck,” said Tara.

  “Wednesdays suck worse,” said Trish. She pushed her half-eaten taco aside. “I was here until almost five yesterday cleaning lockers.”

  “You’re right,” Tabitha said. “Yesterday was Wednesday.”

  “And besides, it’s not like I defaced fifty lockers. I just wrote on yours.”

  “It’s nice and clean now,” Tabitha said. “Thank you.”

  “I think it should be illegal to force students to be janitors.”

  “What did you write, anyway?” Tara asked.

  “Nothing. It was stupid.”

  “Something horrible and filthy,” Tabitha said.

  Trish flicked a shred of lettuce at Tabitha.

  “Hey!”

  “It was a poem about the rude Drood,” Trish said.

  “Why didn’t you write it on your locker?”

  “I was sharing.”

  June, who had said nothing all through lunch, followed the conversation the way she might watch a movie in Chinese with no subtitles. It was just about batting sounds back and forth, passing the time, getting somebody to look at you, to acknowledge your existence. The meanings of the words didn’t matter. If she said something, would any of them actually hear her?

  She said, quietly, “I think I might be breaking up with my boyfriend.”

  The three Ts looked at her uncomprehendingly for a second, then Tara said, “I hate Mondays most.”

  “Every day sucks except Saturday,” said Trish. She forced open the remains of her taco with a fork and picked at the shreds of white cheese.

  June said, “He plays on his computer while we’re talking.”

  “We should do a poll,” Tabitha said. “Vote on which day of the week is the suckiest.”