At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  We thanked Ms. Fuentes, and she moved on to Dustin’s table. Jake Ortiz was absent, again, and the first thing Dustin did was complain about how he’d done all the work.

  “I don’t think I can do lunch today, Ozzie.” Calvin examined the track, conspicuously not looking at me.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not you.” Until he’d said it, I hadn’t thought it was. But now I did.

  I didn’t know how to help Calvin. Something was obviously wrong, but he wouldn’t give me a hint as to what it might be. Tommy had always been happy. Even after his dad beat the crap out of him, Tommy would keep smiling, looking for the shiny sliver of gold in the muddy pile of shit. Sometimes his eternal optimism annoyed the hell out of me, but I could’ve used some of it right then.

  “Wanna ditch?” I asked. I only had one class after lunch—Latin—and in my four years of high school, I’d only skipped once. With Tommy.

  Calvin shrugged. “Where would we go?”

  It was a good question, and one I hadn’t considered. “We could catch a movie. Or go to this coffee shop Lua and I like.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve missed enough classes already.”

  Calvin’s words felt inert. I struggled to think of a place I could take him that would cheer him up, and then the perfect place sprang into my mind. “I know where we can go.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s a surprise, but it’s not too far.”

  Calvin glanced at me, his chary eyes heavy lidded, his lips pursed on one side like he was trying to figure out a way to shoot me down without hitting any vital organs.

  “Come on,” I said. “Trust me, all right?”

  “I guess.”

  It wasn’t the enthusiastic affirmation I’d hoped for, but it was better than nothing.

  212,933 AU

  SNEAKING OFF CAMPUS WAS BOTH too easy and a letdown. I’d expected Calvin and I would need to go all Mission Impossible to escape, but we carried our roller coaster to the admin building and told Mrs. Niven we were going to put it in my car. She was busy on the phone and waved us past without even asking our names. The security officer had opened the gates to let the students on work program leave, and we drove off campus without a single challenge. Like I said: total letdown.

  Calvin didn’t ask where I was taking him, and I wouldn’t have said anyway. He scrolled through my phone while I drove, looking first at my music, then at my pictures. Normally, etiquette says you don’t go through another guy’s photo album, but all of my embarrassing pictures of me and Tommy had vanished with him, and it’s not like I spent my free time snapping dick pics for no one to see.

  “Is this your brother?” Calvin turned my phone toward me. A shot of Warren mid-cannonball, about to splash into our pool, filled the screen.

  “Yeah. That’s Renny.”

  I hadn’t told Calvin much about Warren. There were still so many things about each other we didn’t know. It used to bother me when I read books where the main characters fell in love or became best friends after only knowing each other a short time. I’d complained about it to Tommy once, and he’d said that’s how it happens in real life. Everyone we meet begins as a stranger, so we project onto them who we need them to be until we get to know them. He said we have to fall in love with the idea of a person before we can fall in love with the actual person.

  It sounded like bullshit to me.

  Tommy and I had known nearly everything there was to know about each other, because we’d grown up together, while Calvin remained a mystery to me, and I to him. We could change that, but it would require talking about all those things we kept not talking about.

  “Do you guys get along?” Calvin asked.

  I snorted. “Depends on your definition.” Before Renny left, I thought I’d had him all figured out. I thought he was just my jerk older brother whose sole mission in life was to torture me. But then he’d given me that drawing of Tommy, and I had to admit he knew me better than I’d thought, and I didn’t really know him at all.

  “Sometimes I wish I had an older brother or sister,” Calvin said. “Someone to scout ahead into the future and report back to me.”

  We were driving down a long, empty stretch of highway toward my secret destination. The ocean on our right, Florida scrub brush on the left. It felt like we were driving through a wasteland, without a soul around for miles to spoil the serenity.

  “When I started high school, I was terrified of gym class.” I cleared my throat, not sure whether I wanted to tell the story and subject myself to potential embarrassment, but this was how people got to know each other, and I wanted to know Calvin. I wanted him to know me. “I hadn’t really developed.”

  “Developed?” Calvin said.

  “No hair under my arms or on my balls.”

  Calvin cracked a smile. The first I’d seen all week. “Got it.”

  “Tommy was the only person who’d ever seen me naked, but we’d grown up together and I didn’t think of him the way I thought of other people. He never made me feel weird.” I kept my eyes on the road, but every once in a while I glanced at Calvin to gauge his reaction. “Renny had told me horror stories about gym. That I’d have to shower and change in front of other guys, and how they picked on kids who were different. So the night before the first day of school, I asked him if it was normal not to have hair on my balls. He told me every guy had hair on his balls by the time he started high school.”

  “That’s an odd thing to worry about,” Calvin said.

  “You never thought about that stuff?”

  Calvin shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Well, I did.” Just thinking about it again gave me anxiety like I was right back in that moment. Anyone who says time travel is impossible has never had to relive the memories of past traumas or mistakes. “So the night before the first day of school, I dug the wig and mustache I’d worn for Halloween out of the attic. I’d dressed up as Sirius Black.”

  “From Harry Potter?” Calvin asked. I nodded. “Interesting choice.”

  “Yeah. Warren went as Bellatrix Lestrange and spent the entire night fake killing me.” It had actually been an awesome night, but I decided to save that story for another time. “Anyway, I cut up the wig and superglued the hair under my arms and all over my junk.”

  Calvin covered his mouth his with hand. “You didn’t.”

  “I did. And Warren assured me that real guys didn’t just grow hair on their balls, but all up and down their dicks.” Calvin was laughing so hard his ears had turned radish red. “There I was in the locker room, believing that not only did I not have to worry about being made fun of for being as smooth as a sand puppy, but that I’d have more hair than any other guy and they’d all think I was super grown-up.”

  “God. Dear God, I’m sorry for laughing but . . .”

  I remembered how mortified I’d been after I’d dropped my pants to change—all proud of my long, lustrous fake pubic hair—and everyone had pointed at me and laughed.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Enjoy my humiliation. I understand.” I grinned at Calvin to let him know I was kidding. “So, yeah, needless to say, Coach Canuso dragged me into his office to explain puberty and anatomy, which fanned the flames of my embarrassment into an inferno of shame. Especially when he pulled out the illustrated pamphlets.”

  Calvin’s whole body was shaking. “I can’t believe you superglued wig hair to your balls.” I loved seeing him laugh, even if it was at my expense. “We used to prank each other on the wrestling team all the time. Like, once, Trent greased the inside of my singlet with Icy Hot before a preseason match. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed that loud in my entire life.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said, even though I was laughing. Thinking about Calvin wrestling made me curious about something I hadn’t worked up the courage to ask before. “You dated Jaya Winslow, right?”

  Calvin nodded.

  “Are you into girls and guys, or did you just not know you liked guys yet?
”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I still don’t. Girls are hot, and I didn’t hate fooling around with Jaya, but I’ve always liked guys too.”

  “So you’re bi?”

  “Maybe. I’m honestly just not sure yet.”

  “Was it weird wrestling with guys you might’ve been attracted to?” We were nearing our destination, and I slowed so I didn’t miss the entrance. “I mean, the whole wrestling thing is pretty homoerotic to begin with, but how’d you keep from—you know?—getting excited?”

  Calvin’s cheeks were still red from laughing, but his expression grew serious. “It’s not like that. I get how two guys with nothing but spandex between them rolling around sounds like it’d be a gay fantasy, but when I stepped onto the mat, the guy I squared off against became my opponent rather than a person. I focused on winning and not what he was hiding in his jock.”

  “But you have to admit, it’s kind of hot.”

  “You took anatomy, right?” I nodded. “Remember dissecting the cats?”

  I shivered at the memory. The stink of formaldehyde still turned my stomach. “Yeah.”

  “There’s a point where you stopped seeing it as an animal and learned to view it as merely a collection of skin and muscle and organs.”

  “You thought about dissecting your wrestling opponents?”

  Calvin shook his head. “No, but I stopped thinking about them as people and viewed them as arms and legs and angles to exploit.”

  “Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

  I turned into the entrance for Jonathan Dickinson State Park and pulled up to the guard booth. It cost six dollars, most of which I paid in quarters. Calvin watched me curiously but kept quiet until I parked the car.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  “This was your big plan?” He didn’t sound impressed.

  “Not the parking lot. We’ve still got a ways to hike.”

  Neither of us was dressed for hiking, but most of Florida is pretty flat, so it’s not like we had to scale mountains. And a welcome cool front had temporarily chased away the heat, though no sane person would call it winter.

  Lua and I had visited the park often during her photography phase. We’d spent hours wandering the sandy trails while she snapped hundreds of photos of woodpeckers and scrub brush and palm fronds. The most beautiful picture she’d taken was of a heart someone had drawn in the dirt in the middle of a path, footprints trampling its soft lines. She’d promised to make me a copy, but never had.

  Calvin and I walked through the underbrush, while I kept an eye out for snakes—water moccasins and kingsnakes and rat snakes and black racers. The trails held a million places for those beady-eyed death noodles to hide. I couldn’t tell if Calvin was enjoying himself. I hadn’t brought him to the park to hike, but it was necessary to reach our real destination.

  “Can I ask you another question?” I asked, mostly to fill the silence.

  “Could I stop you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then go for it.”

  “The guy you told me about, the older one. Was it serious? Was he your boyfriend?”

  Calvin sighed like he wished he’d never told me in the first place. “We were friends at first; he was there for me after my mom left. He took me fishing on his boat, and sometimes I helped him work around his house.”

  “How’d . . . you know? When did things change?”

  Calvin dragged his feet, his footsteps heavy and plodding. “We were on his boat. He’d brought beer. I was pretty drunk, lying on the deck getting some sun, and he sat down beside me and started rubbing suntan lotion on my back and . . .” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “You know what? I really don’t want to talk about this.”

  “He took advantage of you, Cal.”

  Calvin clenched his fists. “I knew what I was doing.”

  “He was an adult—a teacher!”

  “Drop it, all right?”

  I didn’t want to drop it. But I worried he’d shut down if I kept pushing.

  We walked in silence until the trail ended and we broke out of the woods. Ahead of us, at the top of a man-made hill, stood a five-story wooden tower. It was the tallest object around; taller than the trees.

  “Come on,” I said, leading the way. I was winded by the time we climbed the stairs. Halfway, Calvin had stripped off his hoodie, revealing a white tank top underneath, and tied it around his waist. I walked to the edge and looked out over the park.

  “This is what I wanted to show you,” I said. “You can see the whole world from up here.”

  I’d visited the Grand Canyon and seen the Flatirons in Colorado, but the view from the top of that platform was the most beautiful. We couldn’t actually see the whole world—we couldn’t even see the ocean—but I imagined we could. Standing there, I could forget the universe had collapsed to less than 1 percent of its original size. Standing at the top of the world, everything I saw was everything, and maybe that was enough.

  “I come here to think,” I said. “I look toward the horizon and imagine Tommy’s out there looking back at me.”

  “What’s it like?” Calvin asked. “Being in love, I mean.”

  I leaned against the railing. “We’ve all got secrets, you know? We’ve all got things about ourselves we hate and these dark places inside of us we’re terrified to show people. We live in constant fear that someone is going to discover the rotting corpses we keep buried in those dark places, and that when they do, they’ll despise us for them.” I glanced at Calvin. He was leaning with his back against the railing, his arms folded across his chest. “Being in love with someone is knowing that no matter what you show them, no matter what you’ve done, they’ll never reject you.”

  Calvin didn’t respond right away, and that was fine. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on in his mind, but I sensed he needed space to figure it out.

  After a few minutes he said, “If you love Tommy so much, and you’re sure he loves you, why are you spending time with me?” He shifted from one foot to the other. “I know you said we’re just friends, but you can’t tell me there’s nothing going on between us.”

  Calvin’s boldness caught me off guard. “I love Tommy, and he loves me. And that confuses the hell out of me—you confuse the hell out of me, Cal, because you’re here and he’s not, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “What if Tommy comes back, Ozzie? What happens to me?”

  “You’re still my friend. You’ll always be my friend.”

  “But nothing more.”

  “I don’t know.”

  As much as it must’ve hurt, I owed Calvin the truth. The laughter I’d mined from him earlier had disappeared. I leaned against the railing next to him. So close we were nearly touching.

  “Listen, Calvin. I like spending time with you. But I can’t tell you what’s going to happen next. You might learn something about me you don’t like, or school will end and we’ll go to different colleges and never see each other again, or the universe may collapse and swallow both our lives. I just don’t know.”

  Calvin turned and looked out over the park. “The guy—the teacher—I thought he loved me.”

  “People are assholes.”

  “You’re not an asshole, Ozzie.”

  “Neither are you, Cal.”

  201,833 AU

  DR. DIXIE MCCRANEY LOOKED LIKE SHE’D spent the morning making out with Pennywise the clown. She nursed a thirty-ounce iced coffee like it was a baby bottle, and she was literally the first therapist I’d seen who sat behind a desk. I sat on the other side in an uncomfortable modern pleather chair.

  She was reading my file—she’d been reading my file for the last five minutes. Nodding occasionally, her lips moving silently. She finally set it down and said, “You sure have plowed through a lot of doctors, Oswald Pinkerton.” Then she had the nerve to smile like she’d made a hilarious joke.

  “What can I say? I’m indecisive.”

  “How about you start by tel
ling me a little about why you’re here?”

  Why didn’t they ever know? I thought the whole point of seeing a therapist was to get answers, not waste my time providing them with obvious ones.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “My boyfriend vanished, and I’m the only one who remembers him; I tried to run away to find him, and the plane I was on crashed only minutes after a cop pulled me off of it; the universe is shrinking; and I gave a blowjob to a guy who cuts himself, had a fling with a teacher, and who I may like but can’t date because I’m definitely still in love with my ‘imaginary’ boyfriend.” I snapped my fingers. “Also, my parents are getting divorced and my idiotic older brother joined the army and will probably shoot himself in the foot.”

  Dr. McCraney’s mouth formed an O. “Heavens!” she said. “Your life is heaps more interesting than mine. All I’ve got is a cat with six toes.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “But I think we should set those issues aside for the time being.”

  “We should?”

  McCraney nodded. She slurped her iced coffee. She actually slurped it. The sound made me want to stab her with her straw. “I want you to tell me about the future, Oswald.”

  “I’m psycho, not psychic.”

  “Oh, Oswald,” she said. “You’re a comedian, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  Dr. McCraney bulldozed ahead. “What does the future look like for Oswald Pinkerton—great name, by the way. Do you have any plans for college? Anything you’re passionate about? Tell me where you see yourself in ten years.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m going to college. I don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m not even sure the universe is going to survive long enough for me to graduate.” I clenched my fists. I couldn’t stop fidgeting. “The only thing I know for certain is that I need to find Tommy.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  Dr. McCraney was the first doctor to refer to Tommy as my boyfriend and not my imaginary boyfriend.

  “My future was Tommy. My future is Tommy.”