At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “You have to tell someone,” I said. “Your dad or a guidance counselor. Anyone.”

  “He called me to his office last week.” Calvin kept talking like he hadn’t heard me. No one, it seemed, was listening to me today. “Told me he was sorry. That he could help me get into college if I . . .”

  “If you what? Did he do something to you again?”

  Calvin’s voice cracked. He buried his face in his hands. “The pills he gave me, he said they’d relax me. But then he’d do things to me, and I couldn’t stop him. My brain would scream at me to fight back, but my body just couldn’t.”

  “My brother’s hurt, and he might die. Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because you deserve to know.”

  “Listen, Cal. What Coach Reevey did to you isn’t your fault. We can tell someone and they’ll fire him or arrest him or something. But it’s not your fault.”

  “The funny thing is,” Calvin said, “I thought I’d been breathing underwater this whole time, but I guess I’ve been drowning.”

  I stood and brushed the sand off the back of my shorts. “I can’t do this, Calvin. I can’t. Not with my brother . . . not with Renny hurt.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. You deserve better than me.”

  “Better than you? Who’s better than you, Cal?”

  Calvin shrugged. “Everyone.”

  TOMMY

  MY PHONE RINGS. ITS DISTANT chimes bore through my dreams and manifest as thunderous peals from the stars. Each one a different note in the heavens that flares when it sounds. I reach out, try to touch them, but they’re so distant. And then they fall silent.

  My phone rings again, and this time I pull the stars from the sky. My hands ignite and burn sapphire blue. My skin melts and drips to the sand, my bones char and turn to ash. But I hold on to the sound. I unspool it and follow it out of the dream.

  “Hello?” My voice is groggy.

  “Ozzie?”

  Tommy’s voice clears the sleepy fog, and I check my hands to make sure they’re not burned. I still remember the pain. I sit up in bed, glance at my alarm clock; it’s 3:03 a.m.

  “Tommy? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I just needed to hear your voice.” He’s lying, I always know when Tommy’s lying, but I also hear other voices in the background. Yelling.

  “Your dad?”

  Tommy grunts. “They shut off our water. Pops blew the bill money on booze.”

  “Can you get out of your house? I’ll pick you up.” I only have my learner’s permit, but I know how to drive well enough to steal Dad’s car and get to Tommy.

  “I’m fine,” he says. “I’m in my room. Blocked the door with my dresser.” Tommy’s “door” is a sliding accordion divider, barely thicker than a sheet of cardboard, and definitely not enough to keep his father out. “Just talk to me, all right?”

  “What about?”

  “Tell me where we’d go if we ran away.”

  I whisper to avoid waking Renny or my parents. My dream of the stars is already fading, but their clear notes linger longest. “I think we’d run to Colorado. Somewhere in the mountains. Or maybe the desert. Either way, we steal a car and drive west. It takes hours to get out of Florida, but we shed our troubles at the border, and at night we sleep under the open sky.” I stop when I hear something crash on the other end of the phone. “Call the police, Tommy.”

  “Ignore it. Do we stop anywhere on the way?”

  “Sure.” It’s difficult to dream up a story about running away when I’m worried Mr. Ross is going to break through Tommy’s door and kill him. But I try anyway. “We don’t take the interstate because the cops are looking for us. We drive the back roads instead, and we pull over at every little stand that sells boiled peanuts.”

  “I love boiled peanuts,” Tommy says. “Then what?”

  “We reach Boulder and stop in this cute café for breakfast. There’s a woman working who keeps looking at us like she recognizes us. Before we leave, she asks if we know where we’re going. We tell her we don’t. She says the only way to figure it out is to stop searching.”

  I don’t hear anything on the other end of the phone, so I say, “Tommy? You still there?”

  Nothing for a moment. Then, “I’m here. Keep talking.”

  “So we head into the mountains with no destination. We drive until we run out of gas. We abandon the car and keep walking. It’s winter, and we’re cold, but we keep walking. And then, when we’re too tired to take another step, we find a log cabin hidden in the trees. Smoke’s rising out of the chimney, and there’s a mat at the front door that says ‘Welcome Home,’ and we know we are home. We stay there and no one ever finds us.”

  “Is it real?” Tommy asks.

  “It’s real,” I tell him. “As real as you and me.”

  Mr. Ross bellows in the background, and I hear something heavy break. “I gotta go, Ozzie.”

  “Tommy, wait—”

  “Ozzie, I can’t—”

  “We’ll get out of here, Tommy. I love you.”

  I wait for him to say it back, the way he always does, but the line goes dead.

  337,902 KM

  RENNY LOOKED LIKE SHIT. HIS image on the screen kept freezing, and his voice cut out because the Wi-Fi at Lua’s house sucked. But I could see him, which made me both feel better because he was alive, but worse because half his head was shaved completely to the skin revealing a squiggly line of staples, puckered and raw, and his face was a mass of cuts and bruises.

  But his injuries couldn’t account for all the changes in my brother. Renny was leaner, his cheekbones more prominent, his eyes deep and hollow. He didn’t smile, didn’t call me names, didn’t joke around. He looked like someone who’d nearly died and wished he hadn’t survived.

  “You look good, Renny.”

  “So everyone keeps saying,” he says. “You’re all liars, of course.”

  Warren had waited until Mom and Dad had gone to their hotel to catch some sleep before calling me. They’d refused to leave his side since they’d arrived and were getting on his nerves, so he’d yelled at them until they agreed to give him some space.

  “What happened?” I asked. “All Mom and Dad would tell me is that you fell.” They’d also informed me the fall had partially severed Renny’s spinal cord at the T6 vertebra, and that he would probably never walk again, but I wasn’t sure how to bring that up.

  Renny shut his eyes. I didn’t know what kind of drugs the doctors were pumping into him, so it was possible he’d fallen asleep. But then he said, “There was this guy—Lucas Prieto—everyone called him Fapper. Don’t ask why.”

  “Gross. I won’t.”

  “Yeah.” Renny frowned. “Me and Fapper didn’t get along. He thought I was a suck-up because I was good at being a soldier.” He looked directly at the camera. At me. “Ozzie, I was really good.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. Another lie.

  “Anyway,” Warren said. “We were running the obstacle course, and Fapper hated me because he could never beat me.” A small smile crept onto Renny’s face. “So we’re running the course, and we get to the Skyscraper, which is this tall wood tower we had to scale one side of and rappel down the other, and I’m kicking ass, right? I’m probably going to beat my own best time. But Fapper’s right on my tail. I’m hauling myself over the top, Fapper’s beside me, and he kicks out, like he’s trying to use my face to boost himself over the ledge. Only, he kicks too hard, and I lose my grip.”

  Renny touches the staples on the side of his head. “I don’t remember the actual fall, but Lindley said I cracked my skull on one of the beams on my way down and landed on a log at the bottom.” He blinked back tears. “I won’t ever walk again.”

  I wished I hadn’t called him. It hurt to see Renny so broken. Not his body, but his spirit. “Mom and Dad said your doctors are waiting for the swelling to go down. That the damage might not be as severe—”

  “Don’t,” Renny said. “Mo
m and Dad and the doctors keep trying to feed me that bullshit, but I can’t take it from you.”

  Mom told me Dad spent every second he wasn’t with Warren in the hospital chapel praying. I doubted he’d do that if he had faith in the doctors’ abilities to fix my brother. And Mom hadn’t even tried to give me hope Renny would recover the use of his legs. I guess she’d spent so much time sugarcoating the situation for Renny she had nothing left for me.

  “Fine,” I said. “So maybe you’re paralyzed, but I researched these stem cell treatments that are showing a lot of promise. And they have exoskeletons now that could help you walk. You could have bionic freaking legs.”

  “Do they make bionic dicks, Ozzie? Because I don’t give a fuck about my legs.”

  Renny was hurting, and I wanted to help him. I wanted to get in my car, drive to Georgia, and sleep on his floor. But none of that would fix him.

  “That’s the worst part, you know?” Warren said.

  “What is?”

  “Knowing I won’t ever have sex.”

  “You don’t know that. I read a bunch of articles about how paralyzed men can have sex.” My browser history would’ve looked so weird if anyone had snooped, but what I’d said was true. I just didn’t mention he’d probably have to use pills or inject this stuff into his dick to get an erection because the descriptions had sounded horrible.

  Warren shook his head. “Why bother? Even if I could get it up, I wouldn’t feel it. And what girl’s going to want me now?”

  “There are specialists. I bet Mom and Dad could find a doctor who—”

  “There’s nothing they can do! Shut up about it already!”

  I thought maybe the video had frozen because Warren had stopped moving—he didn’t even blink—but a light continued flashing on one of the hospital monitors behind him.

  I wanted to say something to make Renny feel better, but I could hardly begin to imagine how my brother was suffering. I wondered how I would feel if I woke up one day and couldn’t walk, couldn’t control my bladder or take a dump without help. Whatever I imagined was nothing compared to Renny’s reality. He wasn’t ready to think about how to move on from his accident, so I gave up trying to force-feed him hope.

  “Mom and Dad driving you crazy yet?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Warren mumbled. “I wish they’d go home.”

  I shrugged. “At least they’re getting along. I think this is the most time they’ve spent together in a year.”

  “Great. All it took was one of their kids suffering a nearly fatal accident.” Renny’s chin fell to his chest and we sat there together, not speaking for a while. I didn’t know whether he was trying to indicate he wanted me to cut the connection and leave him alone or if he simply needed me there even if we didn’t talk.

  Just when the silence began to veer into uncomfortable territory, Warren said, “I lied when I said I didn’t care about sex. I’m going to die a loser virgin.”

  “You’re not a loser.”

  Renny ignored me. “You’ve done it, right?”

  I wanted to tell him I’d never had sex either so he didn’t have to be the guy whose little brother had done it before him. And the funny thing was that technically, with Tommy gone, I hadn’t actually gone all the way with anyone, but I remembered sleeping with Tommy, so I figured it had to count.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Renny . . .”

  “Come on,” he said. “At least tell me what I’m never going to have. You owe me that.”

  I sat quietly for a moment, wishing the Wi-Fi would cut out so I wouldn’t have to explain sex to my older brother. Aside from being totally mortifying, I wasn’t sure my experiences were common. Lua had told me sex with Jaime had felt like an endless battle in a war she could never win, Dustin was still a virgin, and I didn’t want to think about how Calvin would have explained sex. I didn’t know if he’d slept with any of the girls he’d dated, and he’d said Coach Reevey was the only guy he’d done it with other than me, but Reevey had drugged him, so for Calvin, sex had probably felt like an ambush.

  “For me,” I said, “sex was like reading an epic story. Kind of confusing at first, but when everything began to make sense, the world disappeared—I lost myself in something bigger than me—and when it was over, all I could think about was going back to the beginning and doing it again.”

  “Only you could make sex sound boring.”

  But it wasn’t. It hadn’t been. Sex with Tommy had been the single most beautiful experience of my life.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You’re not missing much.”

  This time the connection really did stutter, and Warren and I spent a minute calling back and forth to each other. When the video cleared up, Renny said, “Can I tell you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “I’m not sure I can live like this. I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Don’t you even think about hurting yourself, Renny,” I said. “There’s more to life than sex.”

  “Says the guy who can stick his dick anywhere he wants to the guy who can’t feel his.” Warren clenched his jaw, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the pain of his injuries or from thinking about what he’d lost. “You were right. I should have told Emilia how I felt before I left.”

  “You still can.”

  Renny scoffed. “I can hardly sleep. Not even the drugs help. And when I lie awake in the middle of the night in this stupid fucking hospital, all I can think about is how I wish the fall had killed me.”

  My parents shouldn’t have left him alone. I touched my phone in my pocket, reminding myself to call them when I was done with Renny and tell them to never leave him alone again.

  “Please don’t say that, Warren. I need you.”

  Renny fired off a bitter laugh. “Don’t bullshit me, brother. You don’t need me. You never needed me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is, and you know it.” He closed his eyes and I thought he was going to fall asleep, but then he opened them again. “I’ve always kinda hated you, Oz.”

  “Tell me how you really feel,” I said with a halfhearted smile.

  “I’m serious,” Renny said. “Everything comes so easily to you. Whenever you want to do something, you go out and do it. And the worst part is that you barely have to try. Do you know how great you could be if you put in the tiniest bit of effort?”

  I’d thought Warren hated me the way older brothers always hate their little brothers, but I never considered that he actually hated me.

  “Everything’s not easy for me.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Remember in third grade when you were in that musical? You’d never sung before, but they gave you a solo anyway. There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience by the time you were done. And then you never sang again. I finally found the one thing I was good at, and now it’s gone. You’re good at everything. You could be great at anything.”

  “I’d cut off a couple of toes to have someone tell me what to do with my life, Renny,” I said. “Look at Lua. She’s knows what she’s passionate about, and she pursues it with this tireless determination that blows my mind. You say I can do anything, but no matter what I choose, there will always be a hundred other things I’ll miss out on.”

  “Boo-fucking-hoo.” Warren gave his head a little shake and flinched. “Mom and Dad told me they don’t want you going away to college.” I started to reply, but he cut me off. “I told them to stop being assholes.”

  “I’m sure that went over well.”

  “You’d be surprised at the shit you can get away with when people feel sorry for you.”

  “Maybe you could guilt them into not getting divorced.”

  I waited, hoping the joke would elicit at least a wan smile, but Warren’s face remained blank.

  “Renny—”

  “Look, if you don’t go away to college, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “And how am I supposed to pay for it with
out Mom and Dad’s help?”

  “You can have my college fund,” Renny said. “I’m never going to use it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not taking your college fund, but if it’ll make you happy, I already accepted my spot at UC Boulder. I’ll figure something out. Just don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I wasn’t lying to Renny, but even if my parents changed their minds, I still wasn’t sure I’d go. And it wasn’t just because Tommy might return or Lua might not go on tour. Renny needed me. I had a hundred reasons to stay in Cloud Lake, but I didn’t want to argue with my brother while he was in so much pain.

  “Good,” Renny said. “Go to school, Ozzie. Study something ridiculous. Join a frat and bang a ton of dumb hot guys. Become one of those conceited college kids nobody likes, who bores everyone by spouting pedantic nonsense. Go to grad school because your degree is worthless in the real world. Fuck the real world. The real world took my legs and my dick, Ozzie. The real world took my future. Don’t let it take yours.”

  Warren rendered me speechless. For someone who hated me, he sure seemed to love me. I wanted to tell him he could have all the things he wanted me to have—that I’d take out soul-crushing loans for my own education so he could have any future he wanted—but I didn’t. Because, in a way, he was right. I knew his life wasn’t over because he couldn’t walk, it just wouldn’t be the life he wanted.

  “I promise, Renny.”

  “Good.” He sighed and his eyelids fluttered. “Look, I’m getting tired, kid.”

  “Okay,” I said, not wanting to let him go. “When you get home, we’ll have wheelchair races on the roads in front of Dad’s new place.”

  “Sounds good.” Renny’s voice drifted farther away.

  “And don’t expect me to feel sorry for you either,” I told him. “I’m not ceding my chance to call you ‘numb nuts’ to spare your feelings.”

  “Shit, Oz, if ‘numb nuts’ is the best you can come up with, you’re not as smart as I thought.”

  “I love you, Renny.”

  There it was. A smile. Fragile and newborn, but still a smile. “Ugh, you’re such a wuss.”