This Might Hurt a Bit

by Doogie Horner

  I step out of the bathroom into my bedroom and look at the cardboard boxes stacked all over the room. How have I been living like this for so long? I tear the duct tape off the nearest box and start unpacking it.

  — — —

  An hour or so later I hear the garage door rumble up, a sound that makes my stomach flip.

  Dad’s home.

  I know he’s going to be upset about the fight. He will definitely want to call Mark’s parents and the school and probably the president of the United States too. I hear him and Mom talking in the kitchen for a long time—Dad raises his voice a few times—but Mom must do a pretty good job calming him down, because when he knocks on my door, he seems relatively chill.

  He’s still wearing his navy suit from work, but his green striped tie is loosened. He knocks on my door with one knuckle as he enters and asks, “Can I come in?”

  I place a stack of books on the shelf. “I think you’re already in.”

  Dad looks around like he must be in the wrong room. I don’t know what he’s more surprised by, my beat-up face or the fact that I’m standing in the midst of a couple of unpacked boxes, putting things away.

  He stands, shocked, for a moment before saying, “Oh my God . . . did you accidentally unpack a box of whoop ass?”

  We both laugh, but laughing makes my face hurt, and I have to stop and hold my hand up against my jaw. “Ow! Ow, ow, ow.”

  Dad suddenly gets serious. “Hey, I’m sorry.” He walks over and puts his hand on my shoulder, then examines my face. “Oof. Are you all right, bud?”

  I tell him the truth. “I wasn’t doing so good. But I’m doing better now.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  Dad sits down on the edge of my bed. He doesn’t say anything, but it doesn’t feel awkward. I love that about him, that he doesn’t feel the need to say something just to fill the silence. Sometimes he just sits there and enjoys being in the same room together. His dress pants are hiked up above his high blue socks and shiny brown loafers.

  “Hey,” he says, like the thought just occurred to him. “Hey, uh . . . about your . . .”

  “Notebook,” I say.

  He shakes his head with finality, a friend saying, No way. I can’t let you pay for dinner. “Look, you’ve had a bad day. I know we said we’d talk about it today, but we don’t have to.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Dad is surprised. “What?”

  “Yes, we do. We have to talk about it today. We have to talk about it right now, because . . .” Geez, this is hard. It’s getting harder every second, which is why I have to keep going. “We have to talk about the notebook now, because if we don’t, I’ll change my mind.”

  — — —

  Mom makes herself a cup of herbal tea, Dad changes out of his suit into a blue chamois shirt and jeans, and the three of us sit around the kitchen table in the breakfast nook. Beside the breakfast nook, outside the sliding-glass door, our never-ending backyard is dark. The house is quiet.

  Mom places my notebook in the middle of the table, spotlighted dramatically by the stained-glass light hanging overhead. We all look at it like it’s the Ark of the Covenant, although of course it’s just a red spiral-bound notebook with a rubber band around it, the date 11/7/18 written on the weathered cover in black Sharpie.

  Even though this is exactly what Mom and Dad wanted, they seem more scared than I am. Mom’s face is set, hard and grave. Dad seems a little embarrassed. For my part, I am energized by a grim determination.

  I slide the journal toward Mom. “Go ahead and read it.”

  Mom takes her hands off the table and puts them into her lap, like I just pushed a mousetrap toward her. She can’t have heard me right. This must be a trick. “Just . . . read it?”

  I don’t mean to be a jerk, but I can’t help feeling impatient. I roll my eyes as I pick up the journal. “Here, I’ll do it.” I open the notebook, flip to a random page, and start reading. I start at the top of the page, but it’s in the middle of a sentence.

  “ ‘So then I rode my bike down to the park, but nobody was there. I guess because it’s too cold out. I parked my bike anyhow and sat on a swing for a little bit, but I felt silly. Swings are for kids, and also it really was cold, so I just biked back home. . . .’ Huh,” I say, riffling through the pages. “I don’t remember writing that.” I’ve never gone back and reread any of the things I’ve written in here, so, like my parents, I’m almost hearing this for the first time.

  I flip forward in the notebook and choose another section at random. “ ‘I like the part where John first meets Takagi at the party, when they’re making awkward small talk. Takagi makes a joke about Pearl Harbor, and nobody laughs, of course; it’s just so perfectly awkward and exactly the type of thing you see in real life but rarely in movies—’ ” I laugh humorlessly. “Ah, yes, the Die Hard notes; they begin. I started to get pretty obsessed around the time we moved. I think because I had run out of things to say. Also, I don’t know why, but it sometimes made writing easier, when I focused on that. Frankly, I think I ran out of things to say a while ago.”

  Mom and Dad share a look with each other, baffled and a little concerned.

  I take a deep breath as I flip back closer to the beginning of the notebook. I don’t have the guts to go back to the first page, but I stop somewhere in the first quarter. I steel myself like I’m preparing to take a punch, and as I read my familiar handwriting in black ballpoint on the blue ruled pages, it does feel like someone hits me, right in the heart.

  It takes me a minute to find my voice, and when I do, I can’t speak above a whisper. “ ‘Hopefully you’ll be better in time for us to go to the beach again this summer. This time I promise to swim all the way out with you. I know it’s dumb, but I’m afraid of sharks. I know there are no sharks at the Jersey Shore, but it’s not being able to see what’s under my feet that makes me nervous. Remember the old station wagon we used to have? Remember how much you liked it? I said it made me carsick, but really it made me afraid, not being able to see what was coming. But I promise that when you’re better this summer, when we go to the beach, I’ll swim out as far as you want to.’ ”

  I’m embarrassed, but I also feel strangely light. Like I’m naked, but only because I took off a heavy suit of armor that’s been weighing me down.

  I’m relieved to see that Mom and Dad look nothing like how I dreaded they would when I imagined this happening. Mom doesn’t give me a sad look of pity. Dad doesn’t give me a long, boring lecture. Mom looks straight at me, her wary look gone. She looks at me like I’m an adult. Dad stares at the table, but not because he’s embarrassed. He’s just thinking.

  A tear falls on the page, and I blot it off with my sleeve, smearing the ballpoint ink a little. I take a shaky breath, close the journal, and toss it back into the middle of the table. I realize—and the thought both shocks and delights me—that I’m never going to write in that notebook again.

  “I was telling you the truth when I said it wasn’t a diary,” I tell Mom, pointing at the notebook. “Or at least, that’s not how I thought of it. I always thought of it like a—and this is going to sound crazy—but like a time machine. A way to go back to Melanie’s hospital room that Wednesday, the last time I visited her, and relive our conversation. At first I thought I was trying to do a better job, make our final conversation count, but since we moved, I think I was using it more as a way to . . . I don’t know. Spend more time in the past? Keep her alive, sort of.”

  I expected Mom and Dad to look happy or victorious at this moment, but they don’t. They look a lot more like they did the night they came home together and told me Melanie was gone. They look tired. And I realize that all this time I was ignoring them, putting my thoughts into this goddamn journal and living in the past, they were here in the present, walking the same hard path that I was.

  “You thought we wouldn’t understand this?” Mom asks.

  I shrug, embarrassed.

  “H
oney, we’re in this together.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And Melanie is gone,” Dad says.

  That hurts. But I have to admit it. “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

  “But we’re not,” Mom says. “We’re still here.”

  She’s right. It’s true.

  We’re here together.

  — — —

  The next morning is Saturday, and it’s such a nice day that Dad and I decide to fly to the Kutztown Airport and get some pie at the diner there.

  I step out the garage’s side door and zip up my sweatshirt. The morning is crisp and chilly. Clear skies overhead, which means no turbulence. I look left, at the Blue Mountain, not so blue anymore, the leaves on the trees confetti orange, yellow, and red, nature’s last hurrah before that party pooper winter covers the landscape in a blanket of white.

  Dad has already opened up the front of the hangar and pulled the ultralight out. He’s standing on a stepladder, pouring gasoline into the wing tanks as I walk up.

  “Morning, bud,” Dad says.

  I give him a lazy salute, like I’m a veteran pilot who’s flown many missions and has a cavalier disregard for regulations.

  Dad squints up at the light-blue sky. “Good day for flying, huh?”

  “Yessir,” I agree.

  Dad and I zip up our warm leather flight jackets, put on our helmets, and climb into the ultralight. We taxi to the end of the property, to the fence that runs along the edge of the horse farm behind us. Then Dad turns the plane around, pointing us back toward the house, and guns the two-stroke engine.

  The prop becomes a blur.

  We bounce along over the bumpy field, engine roaring, and then all of a sudden we’re weightless; we’re a leaf. We float up and over the house as the world drops away.

  As we fly low above the big gray barn across the street, the horse dogs chase our shadow over the field. They gallop gracefully, loping across the brown hill, keeping pace with the silhouette of our wings as they ripple across the parallel lines of plowed rows, their beautiful geometry tracing the shape of the land.

  We swoop around and circle the house, then bank right and follow the Blue Mountain range east, the whole world spread out beneath us like a lovingly detailed miniature. The sun is fat and orange and bathes everything in a warm glow.

  Dad pushes the stick right, then left, making the plane do lazy wingovers, sliding down sideways one way and then climbing back up the other, before we climb to a stable altitude and level out.

  Flying toward the sun, we throttle back and cruise. I look out the plexiglass cockpit on my left and count the trees below us, fiery autumn confetti. Tiny cars drive along the winding roads that snake between the bright trees and the green fields. I look forward, at the back of Dad’s helmet in the seat in front of me, and am overcome by a surge of gratitude. Dad was right; it’s a good day for flying. And I bet tomorrow will be too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Jason Rekulak, Dan Lazar, Jim Thomas, Liesa Abrams, Valerie Shea, Elizabeth Mims, Sarah Creech, Adams Carvalho, Rebecca Vitkus, Matt Ditty, OJ, Nick, and Jen. Also, and especially, thanks to my mom and dad for being such wonderful parents. You’re the best.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Doogie Horner is the author of Some Very Interesting Cats Perhaps You Weren’t Aware Of, A Die Hard Christmas, Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, and other books. His comedy album A Delicate Man was an AV Club staff pick. You can follow him online @doogiehorner or learn more at doogiehorner.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  First Simon Pulse hardcover edition June 2019

  Text copyright © 2019 by Doogie Horner

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by Adams Carvalho

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  Jacket designed by Sarah Creech

  Interior designed by Tom Daly

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Horner, Doogie, author.

  Title: This might hurt a bit / by Doogie Horner.

  Description: New York : Simon Pulse, [2019] | Summary: Relates a seriously bad day in the life of Pennsylvania teenager Kirby Burns, in which he faces dangerous classmates, discovers that a friend is hiding a terrible secret, and grapples with the one-year anniversary of his sister’s death.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018027694 (print) | LCCN 2018033577 (eBook) | ISBN 9781534427198 (eBook) | ISBN 9781534427174 (hc)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Grief—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Bullying—Fiction. | Pennsylvania—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.H6643 (eBook) | LCC PZ7.1.H6643 Th 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027694