At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “Calvin? I know you’re in here.” I checked under the stall doors for feet. A pair rested on the floor at the end in the disabled-access stall. “Come on, don’t be a dick. Talk to me, all right?”

  But Calvin didn’t answer, and I’d had enough of his games. I was going to force Calvin to tell me what he did or didn’t know about Tommy, even if I had to stuff his head into the toilet until he spilled everything he knew.

  I didn’t want to catch Calvin with his jeans bunched around his ankles, squeezing out a load, so I shielded my eyes before pulling the unlocked stall door open. I expected him to yell at me, but . . . nothing. No frantic scrambling. No embarrassed shouting. I peeked through my fingers.

  Calvin was fully dressed, sitting on the edge of the toilet, staring at his bare arm. He’d pushed back his sleeve to expose the pale underside, and it rested on his thigh. He held a razor in his left hand, lightly between his thumb and forefinger. Slowly he drew the blade across his arm from one side to the other, opening a thin two-inch gash. Tiny glossy red beads welled from the nearly imperceptible line, and from where I stood, it looked like his skin was weeping.

  “Jesus Christ!” I rushed forward, smacked the razor from his hand, and grabbed his right wrist. More cuts—some scabbed over, some little more than faded pink slashes—decorated his arm like hash marks carved into a prison cell wall.

  Calvin didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away. He simply looked at me. His face was pasty and pale, but his feverish eyes shone bright electric blue. With his free hand he brushed back his hood, revealing his mop of wavy blond hair, and tugged earbuds out of his ears. I hadn’t noticed the black wires snaking up through the neck of his hoodie before, and his teachers probably hadn’t either.

  “May I have my arm back?” Calvin spoke quietly and calmly, like people caught him mutilating himself every day.

  I released his wrist, and he pulled his sleeve down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

  “Inducing endorphin release and inhibiting amygdala activation.”

  “What the—?”

  The outer door slammed open; footsteps echoed against the tile. I caught Trent Williams’s reflection in the mirror at the same time as he saw me and Calvin. He was absolutely the last person I wanted to deal with. He lived for making others’ lives miserable, and now, after warning me about Calvin, he’d caught us together in a restroom stall. Dad once told me most bullies lash out because they hate themselves, but I was willing to bet Trent loved nobody more than himself.

  “Don’t you boys look cute?” he said after a nervous pause.

  “This isn’t what it looks like.” Between Calvin cutting himself and Trent busting in, I counted myself lucky I’d made word sounds at all.

  Trent craned his neck.

  “There’s room for one more,” Calvin said. Then he snapped his fingers. “Oh, that’s right, you only do that when you’re drunk.”

  Calvin’s voice was sharper than his razor. Unlike most sensible people, he seemed completely unafraid of Trent.

  Trent’s face paled—dropping three shades in less than a second—and I worried he was going to kill Calvin and then me for sport. But he said, “That’s fucked up. Even for you, Frye,” and stomped off.

  Calvin stood. He was shorter than me, but not by much. “How about we meet up tomorrow after school?”

  “No way,” I said. “We’re talking about this now.”

  “I’m not sure the restroom is the most suitable location to discuss our project.”

  I was shaking, and my voice trembled. “Not the project! Tommy!” I didn’t care if anyone heard me yelling. “You brought him up Friday night and then ran, and now you’re going to tell me what you know.”

  In the few short moments since I’d followed him into the boys’ room, Calvin had added a slew of new questions to the list of things I wanted to ask him. Why was he cutting himself? What had he meant about Trent only doing that when he was drunk? And what the hell did his amygdala have to do with anything? But the only question I cared about at that moment involved Tommy.

  “The restroom’s not the best place to talk about that, either.” Calvin stood and moved toward me, but I was blocking his exit and refused to step aside. “Look,” he said. “Tomorrow. We can meet after school.”

  I’d waited the entire weekend to interrogate Calvin, and now he wanted me to wait another day. I was so sick of waiting, but short of binding his hands with my shoelaces and torturing him until he talked, I didn’t see that I had much choice. The tension fled my body, and I let out a frustrated sigh.

  “I work tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  “We can still meet, though,” I said. “Do you know where Petridis Books and More is?”

  Calvin nodded.

  “Be there at three.”

  “Cool.” Calvin smiled like everything had turned out exactly the way he’d planned.

  I stepped aside to let him out of the stall. “You better show up or I’ll hunt you down wherever you go.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “Promise.” Calvin brushed past me and left the restroom.

  • • •

  I drove Lua home before my appointment with my future ex-therapist. I hadn’t told Lua about Calvin invading a/s/l on Friday night or our encounter in the restroom during lunch. Normally, Lua would have been the first person I told, but I’d felt distance growing between us since Tommy had vanished. It’d started as a small, not-insurmountable fissure in our relationship, but had widened with each passing day into a bottomless crevasse I didn’t know how to bridge, and I was tired of shouting across it and her not hearing me. Instead of telling Lua why I’d really been late to lunch, I’d made up a story about eating bad sushi the night before. I’m not sure Lua believed me, but she hadn’t pressed the issue, because no one wanted gory diarrhea details.

  But I did want to tell her.

  “Your music selection sucks, Ozzie.” Lua scrolled through my phone, mocking every band listed, even though she’d loaded most of them. Her musical tastes evolved rapidly, and bands she loved today frequently became bands she’d ridicule tomorrow. She’d styled her hair messy and chaotic—the cool air through the open windows had blown it wilder—and she wore a corset dress that squeezed her breasts so tightly I worried one speed bump might cause them to burst free.

  “Can I ask you something, Lu?”

  “If you want to go to prom with me, you’ll have to wear the dress.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I would so rock one of those tight black numbers with a thigh slit. Anyway, you’ll probably wind up juggling more than one date, and I refuse to be one of your balls.”

  “But you’re such a cute ball.”

  “I know,” I said. “Now back to my question.”

  Lua turned toward me. She wiped her hand down her face, replacing her smile with her most mock-solemn expression. “You may ask your question, Oswald Pinkerton of the Cloud Lake Pinkertons.”

  I almost changed my mind, because Lua clearly wasn’t in a serious mood. “What do you know about Calvin Frye?”

  “Not much,” Lua said. “Smart kid, good at wrestling, had a nervous breakdown over the summer.” She shrugged. “Rumor is he’s even less likely to graduate than me if he doesn’t get his shit together. Why? Do you like him or something?”

  “No!”

  A grin spread across her face. “Sure.”

  “It’s just . . .” It’d been a mistake to bring up Calvin, so I tried to change the subject. “Fuentes forcing us to partner up made me start thinking about college. Like whether I even want to go. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You still planning not to go to college?”

  “Shit, Oz, all I want to do is make music.” She held up her fingers. “These callouses are more than layers of dead skin. They’re hours spent practicing. They’re my grades; the only ones I care about. Music is my school and my life.” Lua dropped her hand to her lap. “But I feel like
I’m waiting for someone to give me permission. For them to see my callouses and hear my songs, and tell me it’s okay to chase my dreams.”

  I turned down Lua’s street and parked in front of her house. The front lawn had grown wilder than Lua’s hair, and the driveway was stained with Rorschach inkblots of oil and mildew. But between Lua’s hectic schedule and Ms. Novak’s two jobs, neither made home maintenance a priority.

  “Since when has the Great Lua Novak ever asked permission to do anything?”

  “I’m scared, Ozzie,” she said. “If I fail, what will I have left?”

  “Uh, everything?”

  Lua rolled her eyes.

  Tommy went through a phase in tenth grade where he read nothing but biographies about great men and women. “You know what’s funny?” he’d said to me one night we’d stayed up late talking on the phone. “People like Hillary Clinton and Medgar Evers and Josephine Baker and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s like God mixed in something extra when he cooked them up, and the folks around them couldn’t help but see it. Like, if people shined, some would shine brighter.”

  People like Lua.

  Lua shone like the sun.

  “I envy you sometimes.” I said.

  “Don’t patronize me, Ozzie.”

  “I’m not!” I needed to leave soon to avoid being late for therapy, but I honestly didn’t care. “At least you know what you want to do with your life. You’ve always known.”

  Lua frowned, her disapproval searing. “Are we throwing a pity party? Should I run inside and find some balloons?”

  “Whatever. Just forget it.”

  Lua and I squared off, staring each other down. I waited for her to get out of the car, but she remained fixed in her seat. “Yeah, fine, I’m a talented musician. I’m good at exactly one thing. But you, you’re good at everything.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I should get to my doctor’s appointment.”

  Lua got out of the car and grabbed her stuff from the back. She leaned in through the open window and said, “You worry too much, Ozzie. You’ll figure it out.”

  “Thanks,” I said. And I meant it, even though I didn’t believe her. The sun would never understand. We couldn’t all shine as brightly as Lua.

  7,956,000,000 LY

  THE ONLY SCARY MOVIE THAT had ever truly terrified me was IT. And it wasn’t even the movie itself, it was Pennywise the Clown who’d clawed into my nightmares and liked them so much he’d decided to stay forever. If I thought about that creepy-ass clown even for a second, I couldn’t shower for hours.

  Dr. Andrea Echolls reminded me of Pennywise.

  It was her smile.

  Or rather, that she never stopped smiling.

  She’d walked into the waiting room and called my name, wearing this crazy rictus she must’ve thought put patients at ease but definitely did not. I’d hoped once I plopped down in the overstuffed microfiber chair opposite the couch she occupied that her grin would fade, but it didn’t. It hadn’t. Not as she went over my history. Not as she asked me the same basic questions my other therapists asked—How was my mood? Did I get along with my parents? Was I doing well in school?—and not even when she’d asked me why I thought I was there and I replied with my stock answer about being the next name on the list of insurance-approved therapists, which wasn’t exactly true since I’d skipped Dr. Norman Dewey.

  No matter what, Dr. Echolls kept smiling.

  Only weirdos are happy all the time.

  “Now that we’ve gotten the boring stuff out of the way,” Dr. Echolls said. “What would you like to discuss, Ozzie?” She said my name so often, I wondered if she thought I’d forgotten it.

  “Don’t you have questions for me or something?”

  Dr. Echolls settled into her couch like we were a couple of old pals catching up. She didn’t even have a notepad or tablet. “I prefer letting my patients guide our discussions, Ozzie.”

  “But isn’t that your job?”

  “You’re a comedian, aren’t you, Ozzie?”

  “No.”

  “We can chat about whatever you like, Ozzie.”

  “There’s this guy at school,” I said. “Calvin.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Echolls said, like this was the most interesting conversation she’d had in months, which was either sad or a lie.

  I tried to think of how to phrase what I wanted to say without bringing up Tommy, because I wasn’t in the mood to see that look on her face. The pitying one everyone wore when I brought him up. “He has information about something—information I need—but I’m not sure I can trust him. I might’ve been able to last year, but he’s different now.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m not sure I can trust him.”

  “Why?”

  Another question I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know why Calvin had changed. Honestly, I hadn’t known him well enough before, and maybe he’d always been this way and no one had ever noticed. But after catching him cutting himself, I figured there was probably more to it than that.

  “Orange juice,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Orange juice.”

  “What about it?” Dr. Echolls said.

  “You’ve eaten an orange, right?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “But I bet there are people out there who have never tasted an actual orange.”

  Dr. Echolls kept smiling. She didn’t interrupt me even though she must’ve been wondering what the hell I was talking about.

  “So the thing is, all the orange juice you drink is artificially flavored. Even the stuff that says it’s not from concentrate. It’s a lie.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” Dr. Echolls said.

  Neither was I, not really, but I marched forward regardless. “In order to store OJ for long periods, manufacturers suck the oxygen out of the juice, which also removes the flavor. Then they add these flavor packets when they’re ready to bottle and ship it. Many companies base the flavor profile of their packets off the Valencia orange, which is why OJ has such a consistent taste, but at the end of the day, it’s all fake.”

  Dr. Echolls nodded. “That’s very interesting, Ozzie.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said. “But it’s messed up, too. I mean, what if the OJ companies slowly changed the profile of their juice so that eventually the flavor no longer resembled actual oranges? Someone who’d never tasted a real orange wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “Okay, Ozzie,” Dr. Echolls said. “But I’m not sure what it has to do with this other boy. What was his name again?”

  Tommy was the one who’d told me about the orange juice. He loved useless trivia like that. He had this whole conspiracy theory about how the government could replace the text of e-books without us knowing, the same way companies could replace the flavor in OJ. But I wasn’t planning to tell Dr. Echolls about that.

  “Calvin,” I said. “And he’s like the juice because somewhere over the summer I think someone sucked all the flavor out of him and replaced it with something different. Similar to him, but not really.”

  Dr. Echolls leaned forward. “People don’t really work like that, Ozzie.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Okay, Ozzie,” she said, her smile wider that I thought possible. “I think that’s enough for today. Why don’t we pick this up again next week?”

  I stood and smiled right back at Dr. Echolls. “Yeah, sure. Next week.”

  6,089,050,000 LY

  MRS. PETRIDIS LOOKED ONE ANNOYING CUSTOMER away from taking up a machete and hacking us all into quivering bloody chunks.

  “Thank God you’re here, Ozzie,” she said when I walked into the bookstore and tossed my backpack behind the register. “A hundred times today someone’s asked me for this cookbook they saw on TV, but no one remembers what it’s called and they yell at me because I can’t read their minds. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Eat Like I
t’s the End of the World,” I said. “We’ve got a box of them in the back.”

  Mrs. Petridis stood with her hands on her hips. “Eat like what?”

  “Eat Like It’s the End of the World,” I said again. “It’s based off the Apocalypse Diet. Dr. Ness recommended it last week. It supposedly teaches people to maintain a healthy weight by eating and exercising based on the type of diet and activity they’d be forced to adhere to during a zombie apocalypse. I ordered a bunch; we just need to put them out.”

  Three different pens were sticking out of Mrs. Petridis’s messy gray hair. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in my life, and that includes leg makeup.”

  I nodded, though I had no clue what leg makeup was, nor did I want to know. “Yeah, but I order every book Dr. Ness recommends, and we always sell out.”

  “Idiots will buy anything.” Mrs. Petridis breathed in and out, her tension fading with each exhalation. “I should sell you the bookstore.”

  “I’ve got about three hundred bucks. Think that’s enough?”

  “After the day I’ve had, Ozzie, I might give it to you for free.”

  Mrs. Petridis helped me bring out the new books, including the box of Eat Like It’s the End of the World, and helped me stack them on the front display. As I worked, I noticed Mrs. Ross sitting in the corner, reading.

  “How long’s she been here?” I motioned at Mrs. Ross, keeping my voice low.

  “How should I know? Do you expect me to keep track of every customer who walks into this godforsaken store?” Mrs. Petridis broke down the last empty box, added it to the stack, and picked them all up. “I’ll be in the back. I found a squirrel that’s going to make a perfect Scottie Ferguson.”

  She disappeared into her studio, which meant I wouldn’t see her until she got hungry, frustrated, or the store closed, and I busied myself shelving books. My impending meeting with Calvin at three had amplified my anxiety to nearly unmanageable levels, and working helped keep me from bursting into flames.

  I’d barely paid attention to my teachers during class, because I couldn’t stop thinking about Calvin cutting himself and Trent catching us together in the boys’ room and wondering what he knew about Tommy. He’d ignored me when I’d tried to talk to him during physics, but I was going to make him talk when he showed up later, even if I had to take him into the back and stuff him like one of Mrs. Petridis’s taxidermy animals.