Glass Boys

by Nicole Lundrigan

  “What is it, Tobe?” Adamant, now. “I need to know. This could be serious.”

  But as Melvin curled into a ball on the bed making tiger noises, Toby shook his head and pressed the tiny slit in the flesh of his thumb. Thought of the matching slit on Melvin’s thumb. He looked at his feet, neat hole in his tube sock, talon of a toenail poking through. Don’t try to make me, Dad. I can’t. I just can’t tell.

  MELVIN GRADUALLY IMPROVED, sat upright in bed, and vomited less often. He was able to watch the small black and white television perched on the dresser for about an hour before the wavering images made him nauseous. His sense of taste and smell had vanished, and the doctor explained it might return at any time. “And what about the aggression?” Father. “Be patient. He’ll be back to himself in no time. Be like it never happened.”

  Six days later, while his fingers padded gingerly over his scalp, Melvin found a lump. “Toad! What the fuck?” Toby, rooting around, discovered a rock still lodged in Melvin’s skull. Skin grown up around it.

  “Fucking doctor. Should slit his throat.”

  “Do you want me to get it?”

  “Just leave it. Fuck. Just leave it.”

  “We can wait for Mrs. Verge.”

  “Fuck.” He paced, weaving left and right. Fists like hammers. Ready. “Go on, then. Dig the shit out, man. Dig the shit out.”

  As Melvin lay on his side, Toby angled the neck of a light towards the injury, found the scab and scraped it away with his fingernails. Pressed until a pea-sized pus-covered stone burst out. He dribbled peroxide into the hole, a raw little mouth, waited until the bubbling stopped, then held a patch of gauze over the cut.

  While Toby picked and prodded, Melvin was silent, stared at the wall without blinking. Toby wanted to say something, something that might fix it all, but he couldn’t manage a word, and just knelt on the mattress, brown bottle of peroxide pinched between his thighs. He thought of the Mercurochrome designs Mrs. Verge would draw on their bloodied knees when they were younger. Bright red spiders. Snakes. Tree of Life. How easy it was to distract them, urge a smile out from underneath damp salty cheeks.

  But there were no smiles, now. Toby was afraid to move, held the patch of cloth in place, his brother’s greasy hair sticking out through his fingers. Lifting it for a moment, he peeped underneath, saw the hole where the shard of rock had been lodged. Even though the cut appeared clean, the edges were swollen, skin hot and shiny, Toby couldn’t stop dread from making a nest inside his heart. Something was still there. No doubt about it. Something dark and sad and destructive. And no matter how hard Toby cleaned, Melvin’s flesh would heal around it, sealing it, pulling it inwards. Not wanting to let it go.

  22

  OVER THE MONTHS, Melvin’s brain still did not connect the dots, and the details around his head injury remained stashed away in an unreachable corner. Their father didn’t ask again, and Toby held the secret inside, kept his tongue still. The only other person who knew what had happened was Garrett Glass. And for some time, Toby jumped every time the phone rang, every time the hinges on the door squeaked. Was nervous trekking along the roads whenever a car crept up behind him. He imagined Garrett spewing half-truths to everyone. How the brothers had spied on his little sister as she readied for an honest day’s work selling vegetables from the back of a dusty pickup truck. How Melvin went berserk when Garrett confronted the boys shortly afterwards. But Garrett never came, and gradually Toby relearned how to breathe without air hitching in his throat.

  He decided it was better that way, to forget about it. Anyway, maybe it had simply been one mistake after the other. He and Melvin just happened to be in the woods, wandering. Hadn’t someone mentioned checking snares? Just happened to be climbing that tree. No sinful intentions whatsoever. They hadn’t realized they were so close to the Fagan household. Swear to God. And maybe Garrett was not doing what they thought. Maybe his zipper had snagged his parts and he was really only asking for help. Or maybe his hand was gripping something altogether different. Maybe Toby had misunderstood because his body was still confused and aching over the sight of Garrett’s naked sister. Maybe.

  Garrett was strange and scary, sure, and his lowered gaze made Toby’s cheeks burn just a little. But Toby couldn’t think of any real evidence that Garrett liked boys. When a man was queer like that, it was pretty obvious, and everyone knew about it. Like Eldon Fleck who ran the convenience store opposite the school. He always wore clean white canvas sneakers, and no one’s white canvas sneakers ever stayed clean. And no one kept their jean shorts unbuttoned, shirt spread just so that every kid could see a nest of black hair spiraling a cavernous belly button. Buy your chips or bottles of pop, they knew, but don’t touch the loose penny candy. Gum balls. He liked to rub himself and then run his fingers through them, until the candy got so sticky he’d just toss it out for the dogs. Someone saw him do it. They really did. One time some girl found a coarse black hair in her bag of jujubes, and it wasn’t from Mr. Fleck’s scalp. She stuck her fingers straight down her throat while hanging upside down on the monkey bars.

  Those sorts of things were solid clues that a kid could hold on to. Trust in. There were no solid clues with Garrett. Only Toby’s shaky memory, and the truth was shifting in a gentler direction each time Toby conjured it up. Softening, melting away, a piece of cold gelatin on his tongue. Toby and Melvin’s part morphing into an unfortunate misadventure, and Garrett’s part nothing more than a man in a slowed car asking for directions.

  MUSIC BLARED, and the beat slid up through the rubber soles of Toby’s shoes, made his legs unsteady. He leaned against the curved wall of the stadium, searched the bobbing crowd, finding faces in the shadows and pumping fists. Only a month ago, the cement had been covered with ice, and now it was cleared, dark and smoky and full of an energy that made Toby’s muscles twitch. This was his first stadium dance, and he was nervous, wondered if she might finally notice him with his stiff new jean jacket, banana yellow T-shirt. For good luck, he was wearing the braided leather necklace with the silver eagle pendant that Melvin had given him. Melvin gave him a lot of things these days.

  Toby hadn’t intended for that hard kernel of awareness to burst inside him, a crush to swell and bloom. At the start of the school year they’d shared the same classroom, and he began to stare at her and wonder what her life was like, living in that particular home. Did she sit in front of a television, like any normal family, and spoon up macaroni and cheese from her bowl? Did she brush her teeth while someone else was banging at the door? Soon he began to think about her after school too, and then he began to dream about her. Sitting by a stream, laughing, blue water running over her bare feet. Over a few months, he went from passive observer to an eager boy who couldn’t wait to catch a single glimpse of her in the hallway or at the lunch tables, or climbing onto the bus after school. Toby never conjured an image of the girl’s sister, or contemplated the reality of the brother. He only thought of her in terms of herself, quiet and strong. Something pretty stuck in a dirty place. Like a perfect purple lupine, growing out of a ditch filled with rusty cans and soggy cardboard and dozens of squashed cigarette butts.

  “I don’t think she’s here,” Toby said to his best friend, Ween. Ween scored his nickname due to his tubular body and limbs so short they were on the verge of deformity. To make matters worse, he nearly always wore a knapsack, and instead of just removing it, he’d attempt to access his medical books with the pack still strapped to his back. More than once he was witnessed struggling to reach the zipper with his double jointed arms, as he ran around in a tight circle as though chasing an imaginary tail.

  “Do you got a tapetum lucidum?” Ween yelled. He was crouched down, heavy encyclopedia open on his lap, penlight poised in his hand.

  “What?” Toby sat on his heels, watched the blur of legs and sneakers, counted the number of times someone stepped on a discarded wad of pink bubblegum.

  “You needs those for night vision. And if you don’t got them, whi
ch I suspect you don’t, you won’t see her unless she’s right in front of your face.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Want to walk around?”

  “What if she’s walking too? And we walks at the same speed?”

  “Two bodies traveling at equivalent velocities on a closed circuit.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “You’ll never meet. We can wait.”

  “What if she’s waiting?”

  “Two bodies at rest.” Ween scratched his head. “Shit, Tobe. I don’t know everything.”

  “Yeah, right. That’s the first lie out of your mouth tonight.” Toby scraped the dirt out from underneath his fingernail, swallowed. He’d told Ween everything about the girl, some days talking nonstop, and Ween never snorted or scowled, only replied, “That’s perfectly reasonable at this stage in your development.” And Toby didn’t mind that assessment either, because Ween wanted to be a special doctor when he grew up, and spent most of the time with his thin nose poked into a book.

  “Tobe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you wants to kiss her, make sure you gets a good look at her tongue first.”

  “Her tongue?”

  “Yeah. That’s contagious.” Ween held up his book, shone his penlight over an image. “Black hairy tongue.”

  Toby squinted, read. “That’s gross, Ween. No one grows hair out of their tongue.”

  “Well, some poor person did. How else did they get the photo?”

  “I idn’t going to kiss her anyways.”

  “Well, you might.”

  “Nope.”

  “Someday?”

  “Well, if I does, I’ll be sure to make sure she idn’t got a frigging carpet coming up out of her throat.”

  “Good,” Ween said, and he gently closed the book. “That’s good to be careful. Like my nan always says, ounce of prevention, Tobe.”

  Toby laughed, nudged Ween in the upper arm. He stood up, shook out his legs, numbed from the tightness of his jeans. Then he saw her, circling around with a gaggle of arm-locked girls.

  She was wearing a short plaid jumper and her dirty blond hair was no longer in a ponytail, but combed out straight, parted sharply in the middle. Perhaps the combination of darkness, the thumping music, and the half bottle of beer he had shared with Ween up in the woods spurred him on, and when she moved past him, he stared without blinking.

  Tempo slowed, and Robert Plant’s voice wove a slender stream through the air, droning, “There’s a laaady who kno-oh-ohs...”

  Ween reached behind himself, somehow eased his massive book back into his pack, and was zipping it up. “She looking at you, Tobe.”

  “Shit,” he said, and his fingers crept up his chest, sought out the eagle. “Should I ask her?”

  “Why not?”

  “What if she laughs.”

  “Laugh back.”

  “What if she says yes?”

  “You’re stuck, then.”

  “What do I do when the song speeds up? Fast dance? Keep slow? God, it goes on forever.”

  Ween pushed up his glasses, stared up at taller Toby. “You really asking me this stuff? Man, I don’t do dances. You just dragged me here.”

  “Oh God.”

  But she was beside Toby now, and she leaned in, her candy breath on his ear. Smell of strawberries and sugar. “You want to, you know?”

  Shock stopped Toby’s natural functions, and he froze. Ween struck him in the head, and finally, Toby squeaked, “Um, yeah. Yeah, sure. Cool.”

  Jamming his hands in his pockets, Toby walked beside her into the clump of swaying bodies, and before he knew it they were standing before one another, rapidly assessing where hands went and feet went and if a cheek might brush against a cheek. Toby felt her flared hips just below the belt on her jumper, and her bent arms touched him, palms burning into his shoulder blades. Beat ignored, he moved his feet side to side to side, shuffle, shuffle, like an arthritic man, turning her in contained rounds. He did not shift his hands or face even though he noticed all the boys surrounding him were freely groping backsides and making fox bites on their partners’ necks.

  The song marched forward, word by word, painfully slowly, and Toby at once wished it would carry on into eternity and that it would be instantly over. He knew he would enjoy the dance much more not in creating the memory, but reflecting on it. All during the dance, he spoke to her nonstop inside his head, told her he thought she was really good-looking and that he didn’t care if the other boys were always calling her a carpenter’s dream and that he would love to know her middle name. And if she wanted to be something important when she grew up, like Ween did, or if she was more like him, and had no idea and didn’t really care. And he mentioned, in silence, that he hoped she didn’t like vinegar on her chips.

  As soon as the last note faded, Toby dropped his arms, wouldn’t look her in the eye. She mumbled something he didn’t hear, and Toby said, “Yeah, cool,” then turned on his heel and searched the sideboard for Ween. Ween was up in the bleachers, book once again open in his lap, bluish penlight glowing in the crowd.

  “I wants to leave,” Toby said. “I feels funny.”

  Ween snapped the book closed, held it in his arms. “I idn’t surprised. I bet ’tis the hormones is making you sick,” he said. “Page two hundred and sixteen. Really doesn’t mean anything, you know. Chemicals from your hypothalamus driving you crazy.”

  “I think ’tis more than that.”

  “That’s what your brain wants you to think,” Ween said, nodding. “You can’t trust your brain no more. Or your other parts, for that matter.”

  “What can you trust?” Toby thought about Melvin, then. Thought about how his brother seemed to be running so fast and hard from invisible ghosts, he barely even noticed Toby anymore.

  “Me, Tobe. I can be your voice of reason. So far nothing or no one got a hold of me.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  As Toby and Ween came down off the bleachers, Clayton Gibbon struck Toby’s shoulder, knocked him into the barrier surrounding the rink.

  “Hey, dickwad.”

  “Watch it,” Toby said. “Watch where you’re going.”

  Clayton gripped Toby’s arm. “Who you telling to watch it, quiff?” Swung Toby around. “And where the fuck did you get that.” Two fingers hooked around Toby’s eagle necklace, pulling.

  Toby gulped, felt his heart beating, just as rapidly as when he’d been dancing, but with fear now controlling the pump.

  “Get what?”

  “Don’t be a spaz, dickhead.”

  Something in Toby’s gut told him to lie about the necklace.

  “Found it.”

  “Yeah, like shit. How the fuck did you find it in my fucking room?”

  “On the side of the road is where.”

  Clayton yanked, and the leather stretched, burned a line in Toby’s neck, and burst.

  “You can’t do that,” Ween piped up. “That’s his. I seen his bro—”

  Toby stomped on Ween’s foot, said, “That’s okay. Just a piece of shit anyways.” And though he felt instant guilt for insulting the gift Melvin had offered up, Toby sensed it was smarter to let it go. “Let’s blow this place, Ween.” Besides, he just wanted to get home, slip into the dark and the quiet of his bedroom, think about every tiny detail of his first slow dance with a girl. And he tried to choke out any image of his father’s eyebrows, tangled and low over those eyes, forbidding Toby from ever touching Angie Fagan again.

  “NO. NO, HE’s in bed. Do you want me to rouse him?”

  “Do you think he seen Melvin?”

  “I don’t expect. Young feller’s been in all night.” Throat cleared. “And, to be honest, Lew, I don’t see your boy around much these days. Not like he used to be.”

  “Ah.” Lewis wrapped the phone cord around his wrist, pulled. “Awful sorry to wake you like this.”

  “Don’t even mention it. I’m sure he’ll turn up any minute.

  Nothing we d
idn’t do to our folks, hey what? Torturing ’em.”

  “Sure, sure,” Lewis replied with an empty laugh, and placed the phone in its cradle. As he left the kitchen, he gently clicked the back door closed. He slid into the driver’s seat of his car, still warm, and twisted the key, engine cutting through the silence of a still spring night. Lewis checked the house, waited for a snap of light. Toby had been asleep since he’d come home from the dance, and the last thing Lewis needed right now was the boy waking up. Insisting on coming along. Perched on the edge of the car seat, hands pressed together between his knees. Dread making him stiff.

  Lewis drove slowly around Knife’s Point. Back roads and main roads. Watching the forest, checking ditches for any sort of unusual hillock. The curled body of his son. Nothing. He made his way towards the water. Parked on a cliff, and got out. Scanned the length of the beach, bright and vast and empty in the moonlight. How many nights had he made this trek? Searching, searching for Melvin. A thick knot of fear clogged his throat, and he rubbed his neck.

  Deep inside, Lewis knew Melvin would turn up by morning, his body unscathed, teenaged attitude oozing from his sneering mouth. Though these days, even when Lewis saw his son, face to face, his heart wouldn’t stop saying Your boy is missing. Your boy is lost. His noisy heart tormenting Lewis until aggravation took over, and he clenched that beating muscle, muzzled it.

  MAYBE SOMEONE stole them.

  Maybe somebody did.

  Maybe.

  In the brightness of a full moon, Melvin could make out every blade of young grass covering the backyard. He could see the bumps of new buds on the row of trees between the properties and the glimmer of dampness on the fence posts. But that night, he had no interest in simply seeing the youthful signs of springtime. He only wanted to smell them. Two o’clock in the morning, and Melvin was outside the home of his math teacher. Out there, without an invitation. He crept around the corner, scraped his body behind the naked branches of a dogwood, and passed a blackened hibachi perched on the back stoop. Bending close to the grease-caked grills, he sniffed, drew a deep breath in through his nostrils. Nothing. No rank stench of old burnt meat. No whiff of squirted lighter fluid. The part of his brain that announced odors remained silent. Told him he’d just inhaled dead air.