“Come on, Lu. Talk to me. Don’t shut down.”
“What do you want from me, Ozzie? What do you expect?”
“I don’t know. Honesty?”
“Fine,” Lua said. “You want the truth? Here goes: This was supposed to be our year. You and me, Oz. But you wasted the first half pining for an imaginary boy, and now, regardless of what you say, you’re going to lose yourself for the rest of it in Calvin, and then you’re going to go off to college and I’m never going to see you again. Isn’t it easier to just end our friendship now?”
Lua wasn’t pulling her punches, and I didn’t know whether that was better or worse. “How many times do I have to tell you Calvin and I are just friends?”
“Are you going to take Calvin to prom?” she asked. “Because we were supposed to go together. Remember?”
Honestly, I didn’t. I remembered me and Tommy sitting at the edge of the ocean talking about prom, discussing how we were going to rent a limo and wear matching tuxes and dance all night long. I’d assumed Lua and Dustin would join us, but in my memories, it was always me and Tommy.
“I’m not taking Calvin to prom.”
“Sure.”
Every time I thought I was drawing Lua out, she slipped back into silence and one-word replies. “What do you want me to say? That we’ll go to prom together? Done. You and me. Prom. No one else. Is that what you want?”
“It’s not just prom.”
“College? I haven’t gotten in yet, and I’m probably not even going. You can’t be pissed about something that hasn’t happened yet.” I slammed my palm against the steering wheel. “Anyway, you’re the one who’s leaving. You’re the one who skips classes to rehearse with the band and is going on tour at the end of the summer.”
Lua rolled her eyes. “Maybe I won’t go. Maybe the universe will shrink so much that there won’t be anywhere to go on tour.”
“Fuck you, Lua.” My confusion and hurt turned to indignation. “I know I sound crazy, but you’re supposed to be my best friend. You’re supposed to be the one person who believes me. Have you considered that the only reason I’ve been spending time with Cal is because, of all my friends, he’s the only person who doesn’t treat me like I’ve lost my mind?”
“Everything’s not about you, Ozzie!” Lua fumbled to unbuckle her seat belt and shifted around to face me. Only, where I expected to see fight, I saw something worse: fear. “Do you get that? The whole fucking universe doesn’t revolve around you and your problems. Some of us have our own shit to deal with, but you wouldn’t know that, would you? No. Because Tommy’s gone and the universe is shrinking. You care more about some boy who doesn’t exist than the people in your life who are here and trying not to drown.” She clenched her fists and her jaw, and her body shook like she was crying but had turned her tears inward.
Her words smacked me so hard that I almost wished she’d stayed quiet and angry. “Lua, I—”
“I’m drowning, Ozzie!” she shouted. “I’m drowning.”
I got out of the car and walked around to her side. I opened the door and crouched in front of Lua. I took her hand and held it to my chest and waited for her to look at me.
“I’m sorry, Lua. I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know because you didn’t ask.”
“What can I do? Just tell me what to do.”
Lua sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her free hand. “Stop being such a shitty friend, for one.”
“Done.”
“And be here. Be present. Stop living in a past that never existed.”
Give up Tommy. That’s what she was really saying. That I should stop looking for Tommy, stop missing him, stop loving him. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to. And it wasn’t fair of her to ask me to, but at the same time, it wasn’t fair of me to expect her to care about someone she couldn’t remember.
“I’ll try,” I said. It was the best I could offer. Sometimes I wished I could forget Tommy the way everyone else had. It would have been easier. “And, if you want, I won’t bring Calvin to lunch anymore.”
Lua slapped my arm. “That’s not what I’m saying. Of course you can bring him to lunch. Just don’t forget that we’re there too.”
“I won’t.” I reached into the car and hugged Lua like I was trying to squeeze the last breath from her lungs. I never wanted to let go. Fighting with Lua was like fighting with myself.
When I let go, Lua said, “Come on, I’ve got rehearsal in an hour.”
I nodded and got back into the car. As we neared Lua’s house, she said, “I’m glad you put yourself out there, Oz. But Calvin Frye? Really? I didn’t think you’d go for someone like him.”
I laughed a little. “He certainly wasn’t at the top of my list of guys I expected to hook up with. But, seriously, for the last time: We’re just friends.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Lua said. “Is he a good kisser at least?”
“Not nearly as good as you.”
“That happened one time.”
“And you loved it,” I said. “The memory of my awesome kiss will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“Whatever.”
I parked in front of her house. Before she got out, I said, “You know, Calvin told me that he thought he was drowning once, but he realized he could breathe underwater. Who knows? Maybe you can breathe underwater too.”
Lua paused with her hand on the door. “No one can breathe underwater, Oz.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said, but I hoped she was wrong.
231,507 AU
MRS. ROSS SAT HUNCHED OVER A legal pad, writing furiously. Despite what she’d said about never returning, she’d been sitting at her usual table by the window when I showed up for work, and I ignored her so she wouldn’t run off again.
The evening passed slowly. Ana had volunteered to shelve the new arrivals—she was quiet, but getting the hang of the job—so I killed time pretending to reorder the science books while I actually read through some of them hoping to come up with a new theory about why Tommy had vanished. Calvin had floated an interesting idea that there was no single true reality, that we each created our own realities. He’d tried to explain it as each of us living in a bubble, and sometimes those bubbles overlapped and interacted, but that they still remained sovereign. He said it explained how two people could know each other but still view the world in radically different ways. The theory made as much sense as anything else I’d come up with, though I wasn’t sure it explained why Tommy had disappeared. If I was shaping my own reality, then it seemed unlikely I would have crafted one in which Tommy didn’t exist.
My favorite theory so far, though also unlikely, was that all of this was an experiment. Scientists from the future had discovered how to move people between alternate universes, and had accidentally thrown me into an unstable one—one where Tommy had been stillborn—and while the scientists, back in their own universe, couldn’t communicate with me directly, all the weird things that had happened, like being partnered with Calvin and Flight 1184 crashing, were their warped way of influencing my actions and helping me figure out how to get home. I wished they could have sent me a text with clear, easy-to-follow instructions because, really, I had no idea how anything they’d done was going to lead me back to Tommy, but I guessed it didn’t work that way. Assuming this theory was even correct, which it probably wasn’t.
My head was swimming with possibilities, and I didn’t notice Mrs. Ross approach until she cleared her throat.
“Good book?”
I looked down at the book I was holding—Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality—and shrugged, trying to remain nonchalant.
Mrs. Ross held out her legal pad. The pages were filled with wide, loopy cursive. “I was wondering if you were still willing to help,” she said. “I’m no good at essay writing.”
I allowed a cautious smile to emerge. “Sure,” I said. I told Ana I was taking a quick break and sat with Mrs. Ross at her table. She che
wed on the end of her nails while I read her essay. The practice topic had asked her to describe the happiest moment in her life. Mrs. Ross wrote in straightforward but sincere style about the day she found out she was pregnant. She’d been sixteen and had already taken a couple of home pregnancy tests but had needed to know for sure, so a friend drove her to Planned Parenthood. She described sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for the results. How her friend had tried to comfort her by stealing a latex glove and blowing it up like a balloon. The mixture of panic and joy when the doctor confirmed her pregnancy. She was too young to have a baby, and she knew her parents would disown her, but it was still the happiest day of her life.
I wondered if Tommy had known this story. If he’d known how much his mother had wanted to bring him into the world. I made myself a promise to tell him when I found him.
I reached the end and set the legal pad down. “It’s good,” I said. “A little muddled in the middle, but good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“How can I make it better?”
A piece of advice Tommy had given me when we’d taken speech together popped into my head. I think he would have liked the idea of me passing it along to his mom. “The simplest way to structure an essay like this is: Tell ’em you’re gonna tell ’em. Tell ’em. Tell ’em you told ’em.”
Mrs. Ross pursed her lips dubiously. “Say again?”
“In the first part of your essay, you state the essay topic and briefly describe your argument—tell ’em you’re gonna tell ’em. The happiest day of your life was the day you found out you were pregnant. In the second part, you dive into the details that support your argument. The happiest day of your life was the day you found out you were pregnant because . . . Tell ’em. Then in the third part of your essay, you reiterate your argument and briefly list the supporting reasons from your second part. Tell ’em you told ’em.”
Mrs. Ross pulled her pad toward her and wrote down what I’d said. “I like that.”
“Just something I learned from a guy who was on the debate team at school.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Your spelling’s good, and you’ve got a great vocabulary.”
Mrs. Ross blushed. “I won the spelling bee in middle school. Beat Monique Heston by spelling ‘vertigo’ correctly. My mother kept the ribbon on the fridge at home until it was frayed and falling apart.”
I wanted to know more—to ask her about her life without Tommy—but after scaring her off the last time, I thought it best not to push.
“Well, I bet you’re going to ace the GED,” I said.
“The math part’s still tripping me up.”
“I’ll be glad when I never have to take another math class again.”
“You going to college?” she asked.
The question surprised me. It was the first Mrs. Ross had asked me about myself. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Mrs. Ross stared down her nose at me, the same way she used to when Tommy and I would show up at the trailer covered in mud from running around in the woods, playing at being superheroes. But she’d never yelled. Just laughed and made us wash up outside under the hose.
“If you have the opportunity to go, you best take it.” She paused, looking over my shoulder out the windows, before returning her focus to me.
“My dad teaches at the community college, and I was thinking about going there for a couple of years.” I shrugged. “It’s just that I don’t know what I want to do with my life.”
“Isn’t that why folks go to college in the first place?”
“Yeah, but—”
Mrs. Ross waved her hand and cut me off. “Don’t ‘but’ me. I grew up north of here, a place called Winter Garden, but these little towns are all the same. They’re parasites that’ll devour your potential. You stick around a place like this and you’ll wake up one fine morning realizing you wasted your life.”
“But what if I’m waiting for someone?” I asked. “What if I leave and he comes back, and I miss him?”
I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Ross had guessed I was referring to Tommy. “So what if you do? If he’s important, you’ll find each other again.”
“It’s more than that. Every decision I make narrows the choices I can make after. It’s like, if I decide to study literature, I close the door on becoming a lawyer or a doctor.”
Mrs. Ross snorted. “Says who?”
“Everyone?”
“Look at me,” Mrs. Ross said. “I’m thirty-three years old, getting my GED. The only thing I’ve ever known is being a wife and flipping burgers at McDonald’s, but that’s going to change. I’m going to change it. The only thing in life that’s forever is death. You can change your mind about everything else.”
“I just don’t know how to decide.”
“You ever eat at Sunrise Buffet?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t mention the only time I’d gone was when she’d taken me and Tommy to celebrate Tommy winning his first debate tournament.
“You don’t load your plate with just one thing on the first go-around, do you? You have to sample a little of everything. And if you do decide to eat a whole plate of whatever, and you get halfway through and change your mind, you simply push your plate to the side and grab a new one.”
I also didn’t mention that the food at Sunrise had given me food poisoning, or that I’d spent two days suffering from cramps and couldn’t go anywhere that was more than a few feet from a toilet. “I guess,” I said. “But life’s not really that easy.”
Mrs. Ross laughed. “You’re young, white, and male. Life doesn’t get any easier.”
Ana called me to the register to help her handle a return. Before I stood up, I said, “Thanks, Mrs. Ross.”
She smiled. “Just remember: If it isn’t too late for an old lady like me to change, it certainly isn’t too late for you.”
224,618 AU
CALVIN HADN’T SHOWN UP TO school on tuesday, and he wasn’t answering my texts. I thought about driving to his house after school to check on him, but I wasn’t sure he’d appreciate me just showing up.
Dad was walking out the door when I got home, and we narrowly avoided colliding.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Your mom’s working late and I probably won’t be home for dinner.”
“Whatever.”
Dad stopped in the doorway to the garage. “I know you’re mad at me, Ozzie, but what happened is between me and your mother.”
“You let me blame her,” I said. “But this whole thing is your fault.”
“Look, I’m not defending what I did—”
“Because you can’t. You cheated; end of story.”
“But,” Dad said, “our marriage would have ended whether or not I cheated on your mom.”
“Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”
Dad gritted his teeth, but his anger flickered and faded. His shoulders fell. He walked out the door and shut it behind him.
I could accept that my parents weren’t going to reconcile. They’d fallen out of love and their divorce was as good as final. I’d even seen the official papers sitting on the counter, waiting for them to sell the house so they could sign them and dissolve our family. But my father had been the one man in my life I’d looked up to, and he’d let me go on thinking it was all my mom’s fault, when he was the one who’d cheated. I didn’t know if I could ever forgive him.
I ate a sandwich and then walked to the mailboxes at the end of the street. It was still early for college acceptance letters to begin arriving, so I was surprised when I shuffled through the stack of bills and other junk and found an envelope from Amherst. The crest stood out, bold and burgundy on the upper left-hand corner, emblazoned with the school’s motto: Terras Irradient. Standing there in front of the bank of mailboxes and the notice board covered with pleas for dog owners to pick up their pets’ poop, and invitations to the next homeowners’ meeting, my heart sped up. It beat so rapidly my ribs rattled like the storm sh
utters covering the windows during a hurricane. And then it stopped. Just like that. It’d been beating so hard I could feel my pulse throbbing in my neck, and then nothing.
Is this what death feels like?
No, I wasn’t dead. I was still standing. If I’d died, my legs would’ve buckled and I would have fallen and remained on the ground until some minivan-driving neighbor found my cooling corpse in the middle of the road.
I was still breathing. And then my heart began beating again. It sputtered to life and I lurched to the side, my vision dimming and then everything becoming too bright. I needed to sit. I stumbled to the grass behind the mailboxes and plopped down right beside the begonia bushes everyone in the neighborhood hated but refused to spend the money to dig up and replace. The grass cooled my bare legs, and I held the Amherst letter in my trembling hands and just stared at it.
The letter held my future. My decision to stay or leave was purely hypothetical until I found out whether any of the colleges I’d applied to accepted me. If they all rejected me, it wouldn’t matter whether I wanted to stick around Cloud Lake or leave. If I decided to wait for Tommy, I needed to know it was because I’d committed myself to that path and not because it was the only path available.
It didn’t matter how big or small the universe was right then; that slender envelope contained the entirety of my universe.
I lacked the courage to open the letter. I needed Lua, but Lua and the band were working on their demo. I didn’t want to call Dustin, because if I’d gotten in, it would only remind him that he was stuck going to a state school. I would’ve even settled for Renny.
But the only person I could count on was Calvin. I needed to see Calvin.
• • •
I drove straight to Calvin’s house without calling or texting first, hoping he was home and would answer the door. The Amherst envelope lay on the passenger seat, and I kept glancing at it as I drove, expecting it to disappear or explode, blowing me and the car to flaming bits and leaving a crater in the middle of Calvin’s subdevelopment. I held the letter like it was radioactive as I walked to the front door. I barely remembered the drive over. Had I run a red light? Maybe. The minutes between leaving my house and arriving at Calvin’s existed as a dreamlike blur.
At the Edge of the Universe Page 16