At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Mr. Frye opened the door a moment after I knocked, almost like he’d been waiting for me. He wore dark blue pants and a Cloud Lake Fire Department T-shirt that revealed his hairy, tanned arms.

  “Hi, sir,” I said, surprised I remembered how to form words. “Is Calvin home?”

  “Ozzie, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Enough with the ‘sir.’ Call me Pete.” He opened the door all the way to let me in. The house was the cleanest I’d ever seen it, and the smell of bleach lingered in the air. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad you’re here, Ozzie.”

  All I wanted to do was climb the stairs to Calvin’s room and show him the envelope. He’d know what to do. He’d know what to say. “You are?”

  Mr. Frye nodded. “Come on and sit for a second.”

  I didn’t want to sit and talk to Mr. Frye, but I sat in the recliner perpendicular to the couch anyway, still clutching my envelope. “What’s up, Pete?” I felt weird calling him by his first name. He probably wouldn’t have been so nice to me if he’d known what his son and I had done in my car in front of his house on New Year’s Eve.

  Mr. Frye sank into the couch. He held his hands together like he was praying. I waited for him to speak, because I had no idea what all this was about. What if he did know what we’d done? Oh God, please tell me he wasn’t about to give me some kind of sex talk. I couldn’t handle that right now.

  “I need to ask you something, Ozzie, and I need you to answer honestly. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  Mr. Frye took a moment, sighing and scrunching his face. I saw little pieces of Calvin in him. His hair and eyes and the way the space between his eyebrows wrinkled when he was thinking hard.

  “Have you noticed anything odd about Cal lately?” he asked when he was ready.

  “Like what?”

  “Strange behavior? Him doing or saying things out of the ordinary?”

  “Honestly, sir,” I said, “I haven’t known Calvin that long. To me, he’s always been odd.”

  Mr. Frye chuckled, but it came out forced. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s Cal.” He paused, then said, “But I’m talking about more specific stuff. Like, has he seemed angrier or more withdrawn? Has he tried to hurt himself that you know of?”

  I didn’t think Calvin had cut himself since we’d begun working together—I hadn’t noticed any fresh scabs—and I’d believed Calvin when he’d told me he hadn’t been trying to kill himself. The cutting was a pressure release valve, nothing more. If I told Mr. Frye the truth, I didn’t know what would happen to Calvin, but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. I’d pieced together that Calvin’s change in behavior over the summer probably had something to do with the teacher he’d been having sex with, and maybe that was something Mr. Frye ought to know, but it’d mean betraying Cal. He’d probably hate me, and he’d definitely never speak to me again, and I needed him too much to risk it.

  “No, sir,” I said. “Nothing.”

  Mr. Frye stared into my eyes for so long he made me nervous, and I nearly forgot why I’d come over in the first place. Then he blinked. “Good. That’s good, Ozzie. Just, if you notice anything like that, you let me know, all right?”

  “I will.” I felt weird agreeing to spy on Calvin for his father.

  Mr. Frye stood and clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re a good kid, Ozzie.” He motioned toward the stairs. “Cal’s in his room. He was a little under the weather today, but I have a hunch he’s well enough for a visit from you. I have to head to work. There’s some money on the fridge if you boys get hungry.”

  “Thank you, sir. I mean, Pete.” I stood, anxious to get away from Mr. Frye and his intrusive questions, and bounded up the stairs. Calvin’s door was shut, so I knocked.

  No answer.

  “Calvin?” I called through the door. “It’s me, Ozzie.” I knocked again. “Cal?”

  “What?” His voice sounded muffled and irritated.

  I assumed his “what” was an invitation to enter, and I opened the door a crack to peek through.

  Calvin was huddled in bed, his black comforter pulled up to his ears. The only part of him sticking out was his blond hair. I opened the door wider. He’d drawn the curtains closed and it was almost too dark. The air was still and stale, the way Warren’s bedroom had felt since he left for basic training, and it felt oppressively claustrophobic.

  “You sleeping?”

  “No,” he said, but didn’t sit up or throw back the covers. He was a lump on the bed, unmoving.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Yeah.” His voice, that one word, sounded like a long, exasperated sigh.

  “I got my letter from Amherst,” I said. “I’m too afraid to open it.” I stood inside the doorway, waiting for Calvin to say something. To sit up and brush back his wild hair and smile while I opened the letter. “You don’t mind if I open it here, do you?” Nothing, not even a grunt. “All right then.”

  My heart revved into overdrive again, and I forced myself to breathe slowly. It didn’t help.

  I read the motto one last time. “Let them light up the world.” That’s what it translated to. Would I light up the world like Lua, or dim and fade away like the universe? Did I even want to know?

  Yes. Yes, I wanted to know. I needed to know.

  I flipped the envelope over and slipped my index finger under the flap. I tore it open slowly, neatly, afraid of ripping the letter inside. There was only one sheet of paper. I pulled it out and unfolded it.

  “Dear Mr. Pinkerton: Thank you for your interest in Amherst College. After careful consideration of your application, I am sorry to inform you . . .” I read the rest silently, though those twenty-three words were the only ones that mattered.

  The letter fell from my hand.

  I looked up. Calvin had raised an arm and pulled back the comforter. I crawled into bed beside him and he wrapped his arm around my chest, and we lay there without a word between us until dark finally fell.

  TOMMY

  THE WALLS BREATHE. THE WINDOWS, hidden behind hastily hung plywood, creak and bow from the pressure. Beyond the walls, Hurricane Rita howls and spits, and she hasn’t even reached the apex of her fury.

  “You think Big Apple will deliver?” Tommy asks.

  I shake my head. “All signs point to no.”

  We lie in my living room, under the sheets we hung like a tent over our heads. I wanted to sleep in my room, but Mom and Dad scuttled that plan. They were fine with Tommy spending the night, because his parents had to leave the trailer to stay with his aunt, who didn’t have enough room for him, but they sure as hell weren’t going to allow us to sleep unsupervised in my bedroom. We built a blanket fort instead, and had spent the early part of the evening repelling Renny’s attempts to destroy it.

  “How long do you think this storm’s going to blow?”

  I try to pull up the weather on my phone, but our Internet is dead and I can’t get a cell signal. “Most of the night, last I heard.”

  “No way I’m getting any sleep.”

  I wink at Tommy. “There’s lots of ways we can kill time in here.”

  Tommy throws me this frown that reminds me of the faces his mother makes to tell us that whatever shit we’re selling, she ain’t buying. “Like I can think about that knowing Renny or your folks could pop in any second and catch us. You’re crazy, Ozzie.”

  Kissing him, touching him, feeling his hands on my skin is all I can think about. I can’t be this near to him and not. When it comes to Tommy, I’m a junkie. “Well, if we’re not going to fool around, we have to do something. I’m bored.”

  “We could play cards,” he says, though not enthusiastically.

  “Strip poker?” I grin and nudge him with my shoulder.

  “Is sex the only thing you think about?”

  I pretend to ponder his question, then nod emphatically. “How can I not when you’re so damned irresistible?”

  Tommy rolls his eyes, and we lie silently for a whi
le, listening to the wind blow.

  “Tommy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How much do you love me?”

  His stomach tenses. He skips a breath. “A lot.”

  “You ever think about kissing anyone else?”

  He hesitates, which scares me a little. “Do you?”

  “I kissed Lua, does that count?”

  “No,” he says. “Unless you liked it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Tommy drums my chest with his fingers. “Why are you asking, Oz?”

  “Bored,” I say. “Curious, I guess.”

  “Truthfully,” Tommy says. “I have thought about it.”

  It’s not the answer I want. I know he’s never been with anyone else, but it hurts that he’s considered it. And, as if he can read my thoughts, he says, “There are billions of folks in the world, and, yeah, sometimes I think about kissing some of them. But you’re the only one I do kiss.”

  “I just thought . . . I guess if you loved me a lot like you said, you wouldn’t want to kiss anyone else. But I guess that’s dumb.”

  Tommy doesn’t speak for the longest time. I know he didn’t fall asleep, because I can hear his jagged breathing and feel him flinch every time thunder cracks. All around us, Rita wails. She’s supposed to make landfall as a Category Two—these are just the feeder bands passing over us—but meteorologists had predicted she could stall off the coast to suck up some of our warm Atlantic water before crashing into us as a Cat. Three or Four. Mom wanted to evacuate, but Dad talked her out of it. She was sixteen and living in Homestead when Hurricane Andrew tore across Florida. I doubt she’s sleeping much tonight either.

  Without warning, Tommy squirms out from under me and crawls toward the fort exit. I follow. I poke my head through the sheets, and he’s already pulled his shirt over his head and is working on his belt buckle.

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

  But he doesn’t answer. He drops his jeans and then his boxers so he’s standing stark naked in the living room. The only light beams from the camping lantern inside the fort, and it’s barely bright enough to make out more than the dim outline of Tommy, but my imagination fills in the details.

  “My parents!” I whisper, praying they don’t choose this moment to check on us or grab something to drink.

  Tommy marches toward the front door, opens it, and dashes into the storm. I scramble after him. The wind blows the door in and I catch it before it slams into the wall. With no barriers between us, Rita’s yowls stab through me like forked lightning. If these are just the bands, I’m not sure the house will survive the eyewall.

  “Get in here!” I holler. I shut the door behind me to keep from waking Renny or my parents, but I huddle under the awning where it’s dry. Palm fronds ripped from the trees pinwheel across the yard. An empty garbage can tumbles down the road until a nasty gust of wind catches it like a sail and lifts it into the air, tossing it a dozen feet. The driveway is already flooded; our street’s a river. And in the middle of it is Tommy, naked. Water past his ankles. His arms raised over his head. He sways like a reed as the wind blows.

  “This!” shouts Tommy. “This is how much I love you, Oswald Pinkerton! This much!”

  Enough to stand in the middle of a hurricane. That’s how much Tommy loves me. There are no units of measurement for love. No yards or kilograms or degrees Kelvin. No way to compare the love of one person to that of another. Love defies quantification. Maybe it doesn’t matter that he sometimes thinks about kissing other people. He loves me.

  I step off the patio to retrieve my idiot boyfriend, and he collapses. I sprint across the grass. My foot sinks into mud, and I twist my ankle, but I ignore it because I’m thinking what if Tommy fell face forward and is drowning. It’ll be my fault if he dies trying to prove how much he loves me.

  Tommy’s already starting to sit up when I reach him. He’s holding the side of his head. Rita yanks the trellis on the side of the house out of the ground and flings it across the yard.

  “Come on,” I say. “We need to get inside.” I pull his arm around my shoulders.

  But Tommy doesn’t move. “Do you get it?” he yells. “This is only a fraction of how much I love you.”

  “I get it! Let’s go!” I haul him to his feet and half drag him inside. I have to lean all my weight against the door to shut it. It’s a wonder no one’s come to investigate.

  Inside, I grab the lantern and Tommy’s clothes and lead him into the kitchen. When he’s got his boxers and shirt back on, I check him over. He’s bleeding from a cut on the side of his head. It probably needs stitches, but butterfly bandages will have to do.

  “Are you stupid or what?” I clean the cut, which is as long as my thumb, with iodine, ignoring Tommy’s winces.

  “Stupid for you, Ozzie.”

  “You could’ve been killed!”

  Tommy catches my wrist and pulls my hands into his lap. He looks me right in the eyes. Tommy’s brown eyes are evening sunlight. “There are exactly two people in my life worth dying for: my mom and you.”

  “That’s sweet, but idiotic. And just because you’re willing to die for me doesn’t mean I want you to.”

  “I’m not looking to die either,” he says. “I just want you to know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. That’s how much I love you. Don’t ever forget it.”

  219,764 AU

  I PICKED UP CALVIN FOR school on friday so we could bring in what we’d completed of our roller coaster for Ms. Fuentes to evaluate. We hadn’t talked about my rejection from Amherst or why he’d skipped school and spent the entire day in bed. And I hadn’t told him that his father had asked me to spy on him. Sometimes it seemed the list of things we didn’t talk about was longer than the list of things we did.

  When Calvin walked outside, carrying the half-finished track, I barely recognized him. He’d shaved his unruly blond curls, leaving behind pale stubble on his scalp. My first thought was that at least he had a nicely shaped skull.

  “Did you get into a fight with an electric razor?” I asked when I got out of the car to open the trunk. I was trying to make a joke, but Calvin didn’t laugh.

  “I needed a change,” Calvin said. And it was all he said. He didn’t speak on the drive to school, and we parted ways in the parking lot. I wondered if this was the type of behavior Mr. Frye had asked me to watch for. The hair on its own wasn’t a big deal—Lua changed hairstyles and colors more frequently than most people changed their underwear—but I couldn’t help wondering if the drastic transformation was a sign of a larger problem. I’d always felt guilty for not telling someone about Mr. Ross beating on Tommy, and I wondered if I was letting Calvin down the same way by keeping his secret. But I’d already lost Tommy, and I was scared I’d lose Calvin too if I ratted him out.

  When Calvin arrived at physics with our project, the other students whispered.

  I nudged him with my elbow when he sat down. “Is everything all right?”

  Before he could answer, Dustin waltzed in. “Nice cut, Frye.” He nodded at me. “What’s up, Pinks? That your project?” He set his own roller coaster, which was a little further along than ours, on our table. “Damn. Pretty good. Not as good as mine, of course.”

  “It was mostly Calvin’s idea,” I said. “But I bought the wood.”

  Dustin rolled his eyes. “Why does that not surprise me?”

  I gave him the finger, and caught Ms. Fuentes frowning.

  The bell rang, and while Ms. Fuentes walked around to each team, I tried to get Calvin to talk to me. I was the one who should have been sullen and mopey. Yeah, I’d applied to other colleges, and I held out hope that at least one would accept me, but that first rejection had wounded me more than I wanted to admit. It stood as proof that some choices were beyond my control, and that, despite my best efforts, my life might not turn out the way I wanted.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  Calvin tinkered with the track, working on a
section of the corkscrew that we hadn’t gotten quite right. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, you know?”

  “It’s nothing, Ozzie. I promise.”

  Ms. Fuentes chose that moment to approach our lab table. She tilted her head to the side and circled our roller coaster, viewing it from different angles. “How do you intend to move your roller coaster up this first incline?” she asked.

  As far as I knew, we hadn’t figured out that part yet. Calvin’s simulations just shot it up the slope, but I hadn’t devoted much thought to how we were going to implement it on the model.

  Apparently, Calvin had. “I’ve been working on a spring-loaded propulsion system,” he said. “With a latch and release mechanism.”

  “And have you calculated the strength of the spring required to launch the cars?”

  “I think so,” Calvin said.

  Ms. Fuentes nodded. “Interesting. Are you confident it will provide the necessary momentum required to maintain speed through these loops?”

  “We ran some simulations,” I said, because I didn’t want Fuentes to think I hadn’t helped with the assignment.

  Calvin pulled his laptop out of his backpack to show Ms. Fuentes the program. For a moment—talking g-forces and momentum with Fuentes—Calvin returned to life. I understood physics conceptually, and I could do the math well enough to pass the exams, but Calvin lived and breathed the stuff. He understood it like a language he’d grown up speaking. It reminded me of the way Tommy had understood . . . well, everything.

  “Interesting,” Ms. Fuentes said again. “It seems like you boys have a great start here. But your entire ride hinges on your ability to launch the cars up that first incline. Simulations are well and good, but I’d suggest not waiting much longer to design that feature. If you can’t make it work, you’ll want to have enough time before the due date to figure out an alternative.”