At the Edge of the Universe

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Thea tapped a clipboard with her pen. “We’re supposed to keep a list.” She had the decency to look embarrassed to be sharing breathing space with D’Arcy. We hadn’t been friends in geometry, but we’d laughed together over Mrs. Musser’s military buzz cut and persistent elbow warts.

  I held the cash in my hands. The bills hung limply between us, and I just wanted them to take my money and give me the tickets so I could slink back to my table. “Calvin Frye,” I said.

  D’Arcy’s eyes grew wide, and she feigned shock. “Oh! I thought he was taking Coach Reevey.”

  Thea flashed D’Arcy a scowl. “Rude.”

  “What?” D’Arcy said. “I’m only repeating what I heard.”

  Buying the tickets had been a terrible idea. I should’ve waited, or asked Lua or Dustin to buy them for me, but now I was stuck standing there, waiting for D’Arcy or Thea to take my goddamn money.

  To my surprise—and for which I was deeply grateful—Thea said to D’Arcy, “Are you still, like, taking that college guy you’ve been dating to prom? Or did he finally realize you’re a shady bitch and rethink his life choices?”

  D’Arcy’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. While she was trying to reply, Thea took my money and handed me my change and two prom tickets.

  “Hey,” Thea said as I turned to leave. “Tell Calvin I hope he’s doing okay.”

  “You know Cal?”

  “We had world history together last year. I would have flunked without his help.”

  “I’ll tell him. Thanks.”

  • • •

  I wanted to throw up. By purchasing the tickets, I’d committed to seeing Calvin, whether Lua or anyone else thought it a good idea.

  After Latin I sat in my car in the parking lot until most of the other seniors had cut out, rehearsing what I would to say to Cal, trying to find the right words. Tommy once told me a person doesn’t have to be good with words to tell the truth, because the truth is beautiful all on its own. The truth in this situation was that I hadn’t known when I told Dr. Sayegh that she’d go to the cops, that everything I’d said to her wasn’t going to remain confidential. But those were excuses, ways to shift the blame, and I doubted they’d win me points with Calvin. I’d upended his life, spilled his secrets to the school and everyone in Cloud Lake. No excuse could change that.

  When I finally worked up the nerve to drive to Calvin’s house, Mr. Frye met me at the front door. I hadn’t considered what I’d say to him if he answered; I was used to him rarely being around, but of course he probably hadn’t left Calvin alone since the day it all came out.

  “Hey, Pete.”

  “Ozzie.” He stood in the doorway. I didn’t know what I’d do if he refused to let me in.

  “Is Cal around?”

  “He’s not up for visitors today.”

  “I get that,” I said. “But it’ll only take a minute. I just want to give him something.”

  Mr. Frye seemed to think about it for a moment before he stood aside. I rushed toward the stairs before he changed his mind, but when I started up, he said, “Did you know?”

  “Some.” When I turned around to look him in the eyes, all I saw was disappointment. He’d trusted me to look after Cal, and I’d let him down. No. I hadn’t let Mr. Frye down; I’d let Calvin down, and that was the worst part.

  “Don’t stay long,” he said.

  I nodded and ran up the stairs. Calvin’s door, usually closed, stood wide open. Calvin was sitting at his desk in front of his laptop, wearing plaid pajama bottoms with a hole in the knee and no shirt. He looked terrible. His skin was pasty and his eyes sunken and bruised. His hair had begun to grow back unevenly.

  “Cal?” I said, and waited for him to look up.

  “I don’t want to talk to you.” His normally spartan room was trashed—papers and books and clothes everywhere.

  “Will you at least let me explain?”

  “Did you tell someone?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then there’s nothing to explain.” Calvin’s voice was liquid nitrogen. His words froze and boiled and burned. “They made me go to a doctor and found the cuts. Now Dad won’t let me wear a shirt in the house or shut my door. When he’s at work, he pays a nurse to watch me so I can’t hurt myself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and then stopped. “No. I’m not sorry.” I stayed in the hallway because I didn’t feel welcome in Calvin’s room. I figured Mr. Frye was probably at the bottom of the stairs listening, but I didn’t care. “Listen, Cal, I was worried. When I told my therapist what happened to you, I didn’t know she was going to call the police, but I’m glad she did. Coach Reevey hurt you, and you’ve been hurting yourself. You need help. If you hate me for telling, I can live with that so long as you’re alive.”

  Calvin kept staring at his laptop, moving his mouse around, though it didn’t look like he was actually doing anything. “You know what Will used to tell me?”

  Will was Coach Reevey. Calvin had never used his first name around me, but I guess it was silly to think he’d called him Coach Reevey when they’d been alone.

  “He said I’d meet a lot of people in my life, but that none would truly understand me the way he did.” Calvin glanced at me, his stare ruthless. “How fucked up is it that he was right?”

  All the things I’d thought about saying while I sat in my car after school—all the millions of ways to apologize I’d tried to think up since Vice Principal Grady had pulled Calvin from class—vanished, and I was left speechless. Not because what Cal said had hurt, though it had, but because of the possibility he was right. Maybe I didn’t understand Calvin. Maybe I never would.

  I pulled the prom tickets from my pocket and set them on the floor in front of his door before leaving. Just in case.

  168,111 KM

  I DODGED A PAIR OF flying pliers as I walked into the bookstore stockroom. They hit the wall and skittered across the floor.

  Mrs. Petridis swore. She was standing at her worktable over a tiny dead mouse. “Sorry, Ozzie.” She clenched her fists and slumped onto her stool.

  “At least you didn’t throw the mouse.” I grabbed an unopened box of books that needed shelving. “Why do you do this, anyway?” I’d never asked before, unsure I wanted to know.

  “Because I take these dead things that would repulse most people, and I transform them into something beautiful.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d call her dioramas beautiful, but I couldn’t deny they were interesting. The intricate details and the care she put into them astounded me. Her current project was a scene from North by Northwest.

  “But they’re still just the hollowed-out husks of things that used to be alive.”

  “To you. To me, they’re art.” She motioned at the pliers on the floor. “Kick those on over to me.”

  I left Mrs. Petridis to work on her dead animals, and manned the store. Ana showed up later, and I took a break from shelving books to help Mrs. Ross with her essay again, but I had trouble even focusing on that. My mind kept wandering while I read.

  “That bad?” she asked. There was something different about Mrs. Ross. She sat with her back a little straighter, and she hadn’t worn her sunglasses into the store. It’d been a couple of weeks since I’d seen her, but that was mostly because Ana had taken a lot of my shifts.

  “No,” I said. “Your essay is great; I’m just worried about this guy I’ve been seeing.”

  Mrs. Ross chuckled. “Boys are the root of most problems.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well?” she asked. “What’d he do?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not what he did.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  I felt weird discussing a guy who wasn’t Tommy with Mrs. Ross, but I needed someone to talk to, and I wasn’t about to return to Dr. Sayegh and have her blab everything I told her to the police.

  “He trusted me with a secret and I told someone else and then everyone found out about it.” I raked my hair ba
ck with my fingers. “But I’m not sorry, because someone had done something bad to him and it really messed him up.”

  Mrs. Ross nodded along as I spoke. When I finished, she said, “You know what faith is?”

  “I guess.”

  “If you’ve got to guess, you don’t know.” She smiled tentatively. “Faith is believing in something even when every other soul in the world tells you you’re wrong. Even when all the evidence says you’re a fool. No matter what people say or how much they hurt you, faith means you keep believing.”

  “How’s that supposed to help me?”

  Mrs. Ross shrugged. “You have to believe you did right by this boy, even if you’re the only one. And you never know. Maybe he’ll come around. Sometimes what’s in people’s heads and hearts is too big for words.”

  I mumbled at the table. She said, “What?” and I said, “You told me that same thing about Tommy once. After we’d had a fight.”

  I waited for Mrs. Ross to gather her things and run off like she had when I’d last mentioned Tommy, but she didn’t. She folded her hands in front of her and stared at me for a long time.

  Then she said, “Tell me about him.”

  I was so surprised that I looked up at her, and the shock must’ve shone from my eyes, because she said, “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “Well,” I began, “Tommy was amazing.” I hadn’t talked about Tommy, really talked about him, in so long that the stories poured out of me. I told Mrs. Ross about the time Tommy and I ran away from home and spent two hours—which had seemed like forever when we were eight—living in a tree. How he could argue with anyone about anything and always win, and how infuriating that was. About the time he stole twenty dollars from our fifth-grade teacher’s desk so he could buy Mrs. Ross new paintbrushes. I wanted to tell her everything I remembered—and I remembered everything—but that would take more time than we had, so I gave her the highlights and left out the sexy bits.

  And she listened. She didn’t interrupt. She laughed at some of the stories, looked like she might cry during others, but she never said a word.

  “We talked about leaving Cloud Lake after high school,” I said, “but he was worried about you. He was scared of what Mr. Ross would do to you. More than anything, though, he wanted to know you were safe. I think that was the best thing about Tommy. He’d throw himself in front of a train to keep the people he loved from harm.”

  Ana was tossing me dirty looks because she wanted to close up, but I didn’t care, because I felt lighter. I hadn’t realized how heavy Tommy’s memories were and how difficult it had been to carry them alone for so long. It’s not like I’d shed them, but now I had Mrs. Ross to help me bear the load.

  “I left Carl,” Mrs. Ross said after a moment of quiet.

  “You did?”

  She nodded. “Got a second job at Target and met a cashier who was looking for a roommate. It isn’t much, but it’s something.”

  I couldn’t believe she’d left her husband. Tommy had always hoped she would, but he never thought she’d go through with it. “How’d he react?” I asked.

  “Carl?” Mrs. Ross chuckled. “He threw some things around and threatened to kill me, but that man doesn’t scare me anymore. He told me if I walked out the door, I couldn’t ever come back. So I marched outside and slammed the door to that trailer shut for the last time.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “Tommy would’ve been proud.”

  “I wish I could’ve known him.”

  “Me too.”

  Maybe some doors that slam shut behind you and can’t ever be opened again aren’t the scariest things in the world after all. Maybe some doors are better off closed. That way we can focus on the ones still open in front of us.

  155,081 KM

  THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS sucked. Calvin returned to school, but he refused to speak to me, and he wouldn’t sit with me at lunch. He showed up to physics, ignored me, and ran out at the bell. I tried to follow to see where he was eating, but I couldn’t keep up. We hadn’t worked on our roller coaster project in a while, but all I wanted was for Calvin to talk to me again.

  I couldn’t count on much lately other than Tommy still being gone and the universe continuing to collapse, so I threw myself back into trying to figure out why. I’d spent so much time wrapped up in Calvin’s life that I’d nearly let go of Tommy, and I wondered if maybe all the things that had gone wrong were the universe’s way of punishing me for it.

  The only good thing that had happened was that Renny was being transferred to a hospital in Miami the next day. I was supposed to pick my parents up at the airport and we were going to drive over there together to see him, which scared me a little. I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with seeing Renny broken, but, like with Cal, broken was better than dead.

  “Are you going to sit on your computer all night?” Lua asked. He was dressed in ripped jeans and a tight white T-shirt that lay flat across his chest.

  I looked up. I’d been working at the dining room table for so long that I hadn’t even realized it was night. I rubbed my burning eyes. “This is important.”

  Lua pulled out a chair and sat beside me. “Look, I’ve let you mope long enough. I get that you’re upset about Calvin, but if he’s going to forgive you, he’ll do it in his own time.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Then fuck him, all right? I’m not your goddamn therapist.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.”

  “Whatever what?”

  I glanced at Lua’s crooked finger.

  “Oh,” Lua said. “Well, for your information, I agreed to let Trent’s parents pay for the surgery.”

  That got my attention. “You did? What changed your mind?”

  Lua shrugged. “I talked to Trent.”

  “And?”

  “And, it’s none of your business.” Lua sighed and shook his head. “Let’s just say that after hearing what he had to say, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Does this mean I’ll have to find a new date to the prom?”

  “Ugh, no. He’s still a creep.” Lua smiled a little, and I kind of got the feeling that he wasn’t being entirely honest. “But it does mean the tour’s back on. There’ll be some physical therapy, and I’ll probably need to rework some of the songs so I can play them on my keyboard until I’m one hundred percent, but I’ll be killing it again before you know it.”

  That was the first piece of great news I’d heard in ages.

  Then he said, “Anyway, I’m going to a/s/l tonight, and you’re coming.”

  “Lua . . .”

  “No excuses, Ozzie. Even my mom’s got a date. I’m not letting you sit here and sulk.”

  Lua bullied me into the shower and fussed over my hair and outfit until he was happy. I suspected the main reason Lua wanted me to go was so I could drive, but I didn’t care. We danced until we were both soaked with sweat, and I allowed myself to forget my troubles for a while. Occasionally I caught someone out of the corner of my eye who looked like Calvin, but it was never him. I kept hoping he’d realize I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, that he’d forgive my betrayal, but as the days stretched on without a word from him, I began to think he might never absolve me.

  But a night out with Lua turned out to be exactly what I needed. A cute guy with long dark bangs even hit on me. I tried to tell him I wasn’t interested, but Lua butted in and wrote my number on the back of his hand. I didn’t know whether the guy would call, or if I’d answer if he did, but it was nice to feel wanted.

  I checked the time and swam through the crowd to find Lua. “Come on!” I shouted into his ear. “We gotta go.”

  Lua frowned but let me drag him off the dance floor. When we were clear of the noise, he said, “What’s your problem?”

  “I have to be up early in the morning.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday, Oz. You can sleep in.”

  I screwed up my face. “My parents are flying back tomorrow. I’m driv
ing to Miami to meet them at Renny’s new hospital. I told you all this yesterday.”

  Lua’s brow creased. “What are you talking about, Oz?”

  I thought it was the music, that the bass had rendered Lua deaf or something, so I led him out to the patio. “Come on, Lu. You remember. Renny’s doctors released him to a VA hospital in Miami? They’ll be here tomorrow morning?”

  “Listen,” Lua said. “I let the whole Tommy thing slide, but now you’re taking it too far.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Parents, Oz? And who’s Renny?”

  No. No, no, no, no, no. “My parents, Lua. Katherine and Daniel. And my brother, Warren? Fell during an army training exercise and wound up paralyzed? He’s been at a VA hospital in Georgia for the last few weeks?”

  Lua shook his head. “Okay, now you’re just making up words. What’s a Georgia?”

  “The state directly north of Florida!” I shouted. Other people on the patio were staring, but I didn’t care.

  “Calm down,” Lua said. “I know you’re upset about Calvin, but this isn’t funny.”

  I sat on a bench along the wall and buried my face in my hands. “What the hell is going on, Lua?”

  “You tell me.” He sat beside me but kept his distance.

  “Are you saying my parents are gone?”

  Lua grabbed his phone out of his pocket. “I’m calling Dinah.”

  I caught his wrist. “Lua. Tell me what happened to my parents.”

  “I don’t know! Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not doing anything. Just tell me about my parents.”

  “You were left at a fire station the day you were born, Ozzie. All you had was a note with your name. My mom adopted you. You’ve been my brother since we were babies.” I’d never seen Lua so worried. “Look, you know Dinah’s always encouraged you to find your birth parents. If you have, just say so.”

  Lua and I? Siblings? Ms. Novak had adopted me? My entire history had been rewritten while I’d danced. My parents and Renny edited out of my life. I grabbed Lua’s phone and pulled up a map of the world. It had shrunk to a sphere with a circumference of only 1,508 miles. Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, 98 percent of the United States: gone. Florida existed as the only landmass on the entire tiny planet. When the universe had shrunk before, all I’d lost were hypothetical planets with theoretical people, but the people who had vanished from Earth had been real. They’d had real families and real histories and had lived real lives. I’d hoped the universe would stop shrinking once it reached Earth, but it was going to continue collapsing until nothing remained but me, leaving me alone in Cloud Lake forever.