The Boys of Summer

by Richard Cox

  “Not fair, huh?”

  “They invited me to service the next morning. I figured it would be interesting to see what it was like, so I went. I hope you’re not mad at me.”

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “‘Cause we don’t go. You and Mom probably don’t like it or think it’s stupid.”

  “I don’t think it’s stupid, Alicia. Some people go to church and some don’t.”

  “It seems like most people do.”

  “Around here that may be true,” her dad agreed. “Do you feel left out because we don’t go?”

  “I guess. It makes me different than everyone else and I think sometimes people look at me funny. A lot of my friends know you almost died in the tornado, and I guess most of them think you’re kind of, um, weird.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Alicia wished she could have them back. She hadn’t meant to imply that she found him weird. He was anything but weird to her. She loved him desperately.

  “When you get older, Pumpkin, you’re probably going to enjoy being different than other people. But I remember being in junior high, and that’s not the best time to stand out in a crowd. I’m sorry for that.”

  “So how come you and Mom don’t believe in God when most people do?”

  Her dad smiled at this. “That’s not the easiest question to answer. It’s not that your mom and I don’t believe in God. There could be a god, sure. We just don’t believe much of what the Bible has to say. Or any of the religions people made up.”

  “But how do you know they’re made up? Aren’t you afraid, if you die, you won’t go to Heaven?”

  “The thing with the Bible is that we know what people understood about the world at the time it was written. And they didn’t know very much, Pumpkin. People will tell you God helped write the Bible, but if He did, you would think He would have known how old the universe is, and how the Earth is not the center of it, and how the night sky isn’t some black curtain where He painted pretty white dots.”

  Alicia had never imagined her dad would know so much about the Bible. He had never mentioned the book to her before. Like ever.

  “Okay,” she said, “but if the Bible isn’t real, if God isn’t real, then what happens when we die? Doesn’t that make you afraid?”

  “What makes me afraid is the idea of leaving you and your mom alone. I’m extremely careful now when I chase storms. That day in 1979 I was very stupid. I felt guilty for a long time about that, and I’m sure Brandi’s parents think I’m a big dummy for doing what I do. But we chasers don’t follow storms just for the adrenaline rush. When I see tornadoes, I call them into local towns or TV stations so people know to take shelter. Tornado chasing and spotting helps keep people safe.”

  She was feeling better now, and maybe a little angry at Brandi’s parents for talking about her dad like he was some kind of jerky idiot. But questions remained.

  “I just don’t understand where everything came from, then. It seems like someone had to have made it.”

  “Yeah, whoever made it, where did he come from?”

  “Maybe God just is,” she suggested.

  “Maybe so. But the difference between Brandi’s parents and me is I’m willing to accept that as a possibility. Whereas most religious people are very certain about the things they believe. And that can be dangerous, because if you’re very certain about something, you don’t leave open the chance to learn new ideas. Do you still believe in Santa Claus?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Well, people used to believe the Sun revolved around the Earth. When Galileo tried to tell them differently, the Church found him guilty of contradicting the Bible. And he discovered many amazing things, including the moons of Jupiter we saw a few minutes ago. Imagine being so excited to discover new stuff and then being told you were wrong by people who didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  “That would suck.”

  “Yes,” her father said, laughing. “It would suck. You know what else would suck?”

  “What?”

  “Some people think the whole world might not even be real. Like it might be some kind of game and we are just characters in the game.”

  “What? How would that even work?”

  “Well, if you were a player in a video game, everything inside the game would look like the whole world to you. Maybe it’s like that for us, too, but way bigger and more complex.”

  “That sounds impossible.”

  “Maybe it is. But if you were in the game, and everything looked real to you, how would you know? Maybe on the outside of this world, the actual world looks completely different. Maybe the sky is purple and space is white and all the stars are black.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Alicia said, and rolled her eyes.

  “I’m not! You should ask that friend of yours, the one who writes stories, if he ever heard of Philip K. Dick. He writes stories about fake worlds and I bet your friend would be impressed that you know of him.”

  Her dad was talking about Jonathan, a boy she had spoken to a few weeks before school let out for the summer. Alicia had never met someone who enjoyed reading as much as her, let alone a boy who actually wrote his own stories. So a few days later, when their P. E. class had drawn names to select partners for the year-end assembly project, and she had selected from the red wicker basket a piece of paper on which the words Jonathan Crane were scrawled, Alicia saw the coincidence as a clear message from the universe.

  “I would, but now that school is over I’ve got no way to talk to him.”

  “Does he have your phone number?”

  “He asked me for it before the school year ended, but he hasn’t called.”

  “I bet you he’s probably nervous,” her dad said. “For a boy his age, calling a girl on the phone can feel like the scariest thing in the world.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you don’t know if she really wants to talk to you.”

  “Then why in the heck would I give him my phone number?”

  “Sometimes a thing that seems really obvious to one person isn’t very obvious to the next. Especially when your self-confidence is shaky.”

  “Oh.”

  “Give him time,” her dad said. “I bet he’ll come around.”

  17

  The phone was in the kitchen, mounted to the wall in the space between the cabinets and the countertop. It was almond-colored, and you could dial numbers on the handset, and the cord was a mile long. But it still wasn’t long enough. If Jonathan called Alicia from here, he would never be able to have a conversation without his mother knowing about it. Her room was directly around the corner from the kitchen. He could hear the rhythmic ticking of her rocking chair as she sat there doing nothing.

  Jonathan missed his father in many ways. He missed running through the yard, catching footballs. He missed proudly showing off his straight A’s report card every six weeks. He missed playing chess with him, missed watching Roger Staubach and the rest of the Dallas Cowboys on television, missed lying in bed while his dad told him a new story every night. He missed him for all these reasons, the right reasons, the stuff that sometimes still made him cry when he was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. But he also missed his dad because now the checks and balances of the Crane democracy were gone. In their place, an unmerciful dictator had seized control of the household.

  His mother had turned into a predator since the tornado. She sat in her rocking chair all morning, all afternoon, coiling her legs, ready to pounce the moment Jonathan walked in the door from school. And she would yell at him about anything. One day she might think he was home late from school and another day she would decide he was home too early . . . even though the bus dropped him off at pretty much the same time every day. If he went to get a drink of water she would yell at him for being too loud and if she didn’t see him for a few hours she would yell at him for being too quiet. She would call his name from across the house, like a pterodactyl,
and whenever she did this his arms broke out in gooseflesh.

  Which is why he loved school, loved those gorgeous hours of freedom. It was a miracle when female teachers complimented him on his well-written papers and studious extra credit. He also loved bedtime, when he was finally allowed to close the door against his mother and dreamily recharge his batteries before the next day’s battles. And, despite the ignorance and vulgarity and beer drinking, he actually grew to appreciate Kenny Steele.

  This wasn’t easy to admit, since there was no way the man could ever replace Jonathan’s father. And yet after the storm, before the government trailers arrived, Kenny had been the only one to offer them shelter. Sure, the old house smelled funny, and the two boys were forced to sleep in the same bed together, and Jonathan knew his father was never coming back. But having a real place to stay, not being stuck in some weird trailer, was part of the reason Jonathan managed to survive the pain of his father’s death. Nine months later they moved into the new house in Tanglewood, which was huge and smelled of new wood and fresh paint, and his mother always left him alone when Kenny came to visit.

  At the moment Jonathan had stretched the phone cord as far away from her room as he could manage. Kenny and Bobby weren’t here tonight. Presently Jonathan was weighing the chances of his mother overhearing this phone conversation against the likelihood of Alicia Ulbrecht saying “yes” through the telephone handset, a calculation that strained the limits of his seventh-grade math skills. Even so, the fear of his mother was leading Alicia’s agreement by a two-to-one margin.

  So he just sat there and stared at the phone.

  And stared.

  And stared some more.

  He couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone because the question he wanted to ask was emotionally significant but logistically absurd.

  Will you go with me?

  The natural response to such a question was to ask, Go where? But the question wasn’t meant literally. It was the invitation to a relationship, like the junior high version of asking someone to marry you.

  Jonathan imagined how such a phone call might transpire. He could call and ask how Alicia’s summer was going, like had she read any good books or had she gone to see the movie War Games yet? He could admit that he’d finally taken her advice and tried his first Stephen King novel, The Dead Zone, and it was the best book he’d ever read in his life. He could talk about anything, for hours he could, but he could not picture himself believably uttering the phrase, Hey Alicia, will you go with me?

  A couple of minutes went by and finally he let go of the plastic button on the handset. Then pressed it down again. Stared at it for a while. Imagined the musical sound of Alicia’s voice through the little speaker, the sunny pitch of her vowels, her crisp consonants, her bright laughter.

  Jonathan allowed himself to be distracted by other thoughts, like the new story he wanted to write about Pitfall. Pitfall was a video game where this dude ran from screen to screen trying to find bags of gold and silver, and the other night Jonathan had wondered how the little pixel guy would feel if he one day realized he was living inside the television. Imagine if he would, just once, stop paying attention to things inside the game and instead look at the screen. Would he see a giant kid looking back at him? Would he care?

  He let go of the hook button again. Tried to stretch the cord a little farther, see if he could make it into the hallway. The handset buttons glowed green. He could hear the dial tone. He waited too long to enter a number, and the phone buzzed angrily at him.

  Now he tapped the hook button once more and this time dialed. Alicia’s number had been committed to memory long ago. 5-5-5-1-2-0—

  Jonathan punched down the hook button and this time held it firmly. He couldn’t call her. Even if he could fool himself into asking the absurd question, there was a nonzero chance she would say no. He could take the math that far at least.

  But he couldn’t stand here forever, because his mother would eventually march around the corner and see him talking to no one. Her bulldog curiosity would compel her to attack him with questions until she worked out what he was doing, and then she would ridicule the idea that a girl might actually like him, might want to hold his hand or (God forbid) kiss him. If that happened Jonathan would be crushed for life.

  The dial tone again. 5-5-5-1-2-0 . . .

  Eight. He couldn’t press the number eight.

  The hook button beneath his thumb again.

  The dial tone again.

  He tried to fortify his confidence by recalling Todd’s assertion that being turned down was like a badge of honor. And, you know, there was something strange about that kid. He was really smart when, after being asleep for four years, he should have been sort of stupid. And—

  And he was stalling. At this rate he would never get Alicia on the phone. Surely he would rather be turned down instead of never asking at all?

  He hastily punched in the numbers again. 5-5-5-1-2-0 . . . 8.

  It was ringing. The phone was ringing.

  Once.

  Twice.

  “Hello?”

  It was a woman. Not Alicia. Jonathan had never considered someone else might pick up the phone. What a moron! He had no strategy for this!

  “Hello?” she said again.

  “Um . . . is Alicia there?”

  “No, I’m sorry. May I take a message?”

  “I . . . uh . . . will she be back soon?”

  “She’s out with her father. I think they’ll be pretty late. Can I get your name and ask her to call you back tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow? Jonathan wanted to scream. I have the nerve now! RIGHT NOW!

  “Uh . . . okay. I’m Jonathan. I know Alicia from school? Can you tell her I called?”

  “No problem,” the woman said.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Hey, Jonathan?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Does she have your number?”

  “Oh. Good point. I don’t think so.” He recited his phone number. The woman thanked him and said goodbye.

  Jonathan hung up the phone. Made a beeline for his bedroom. Closed the door, turned on his radio, and crawled into bed, giddy with the knowledge that Alicia would soon know he had called, that she would likely call him back the next day . . . and of course knowing that made him fear for his life. But even the fear was a good thing, really. It was a fear borne from action, from progress, from having stepped into a place from which there was no looking back. He fell into sleep, and dreamed the two of them were on a couch, sitting close together, so close he could smell her, so close he could feel her, and then they leaned together and kissed. In the dream Alicia was an adult but he recognized her anyway. She was so kind and sweet, she held his hand and pressed her warm lips to his mouth, then pressed them to his ear, her voice lighter than air, whispering softly, how he was a handsome young man, how he was such a good writer, whispering over and over and over that she loved him.

  18

  Adam didn’t care very much for Todd.

  In the span of a week, the guy had wormed his way into their group, first with an endorsement from Bobby and Jonathan, and later winning over David with his wry observations and witty sense of humor. But Adam disliked showoffs. He deplored people who wouldn’t conform to social norms. When you were the new person in a group, you were obligated to take a backseat during conversation and debate, you were supposed to sit back and watch the group dynamic and keep your stupid mouth shut.

  Then there was the notion of Todd’s medical condition. You could call it catatonic schizophrenia or walking coma or whatever you felt like, but in the end the idea boiled down to the kid having sleepwalked for four years. He couldn’t believe anyone would take the idea seriously, especially Jonathan and David, who were skeptical about everything. Instead, the two of them were fascinated with Todd, and only Bobby seemed unconvinced about the coma. Adam didn’t relish the idea of solidarity with Bobby. It was difficult enough to stay right with Jesus without i
nviting a connection to the biggest sinner in the entire group.

  Presently the five of them were at Jonathan’s house, hanging out in the game room on a Saturday afternoon. Todd was on the sofa attempting to reproduce a vaguely familiar melody on his Casio keyboard. Bobby was in front of the television trying to beat his high score on Kaboom!, swearing at the Atari every time he missed one of the falling bombs. Jonathan and David were at the card table hoping to organize a Dungeons and Dragons adventure, rolling dice to build new characters for everyone, and they were cheating as usual.

  “What’s this guy’s name again?” David said. He tossed the six-sided die three times and recorded the total. “Glorfindel Cremlock? He’s rolled a six for strength—”

  “He can’t have a six,” Jonathan shot back.

  David kept rolling the die and recorded another total.

  “Intelligence is nine. Looking like another dumb thief.”

  “David, come on. I need a Magic-User.”

  “Wisdom is seven.”

  “David!”

  “All right, all right. So what do you want him to have?”

  “We used to make eleven the minimum for any character trait.”

  “Isn’t that cheating?” Todd asked, looking up from his keyboard.

  Adam rolled his eyes. As much as he despised Dungeons & Dragons (all the black magic seemed too much like Satan’s work) he hated even more that Todd had just stuck his nose in the middle of it.

  “It’s not cheating,” Jonathan explained. “We just tilt the tables in our favor a little bit. Because otherwise it’s not that fun.”

  “But it isn’t real if all your characters are Superman,” Todd countered, and then set the keyboard aside to address the room. “Actually, none of this is real. Bobby’s pretending to catch bombs on the Atari, and you guys are pretending to be warriors in a fantasy world, and I’m here writing songs on an artificial piano. Do you realize these are all counterfeit versions of real things? Shouldn’t we be outside doing something of our own creation?”

  “We do real stuff,” Bobby said. “We play football, we swim. Sometimes we hike up the river and camp.”