“Hey. I’m so sorry.” Jenni slides onto the bench across from me and fills up everything, my whole vision, like a human snowflake blooming from nothing. Her blond hair peeks out from a white fluffy hat, and her coat is light blue with white fur. Her cheeks are pink and her eyes are bright. It’s like she injected the air with extra oxygen. I can breathe again. I picture all the molecules, floating around on their backs, fat and happy. She smiles, and I realize she’s actually smiling back at me because I’m grinning at her like a nut job. “My brother’s afraid of his boots,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s why we’re late! My mom told my brother to get his boots on, and he threw a hissy fit because he said they try to eat his feet.”
I laugh. I can’t believe she’s here, across from me. I can’t believe this second is so opposite from the last one. From the last billion. I want to touch her sleeve, just to make sure I’m seeing it right, but I’m also trying very, very hard to be cool. “How old is he?”
“Two. Do you have a little brother? Or sister?”
“Nope. Just an older brother.”
“Lucky. I’m starving. Did you order?” I shake my head. “Do you like pepperoni?” I nod. The waitress comes, and Jenni orders a pepperoni pizza and a Mountain Dew, which she sucks through the straw for as long as she can. Then she sits back and catches her breath. “My mom hates this stuff!” she says.
“Yeah?”
She nods. “But I love it. It’s like you can feel it going right into your bloodstream.”
“Yeah.” Say something besides “yeah.” “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t take you to the dance.”
Jenni shrugs. “It was kind of lame. And it was so loud that I still had this, like, buzzing in my head when I fell asleep. I literally dreamed I was a bee in a hive all night. And I wasn’t even the queen, so that sucked.” I laugh. “So this is way better,” Jenni says, sucking up more Mountain Dew. “ ’Cause we can talk.”
And she does. And her voice turns the color up around us, like adjusting that button on the TV to fix green faces and pale streets. The bench is crimson now. The lights are gold. The snow glitters outside. Jenni’s hands dance with her stories, and she makes a million faces, and once I laugh so hard Sprite comes out my nose.
“Hey,” I interrupt her, before I chicken out. “You’re really cool.”
She tucks her hair behind her ears. “Thanks. You’re really cool too.”
“But I don’t mean, like, you’re just cool. You’re like…Being with you is like…Being with you is like being inside of sunlight. Like the sparkliest kind of sunlight.”
Jenni blushes, and I do too. Then she says, “Oh! I almost forgot. I brought you something.” She digs in her bag and hands me a book called Animal Farm. “It’s our last book club book for the year. Discussion starts April first. I got you a copy. Just in case.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I mean, you know, my mom did.”
“I can pay her for it.”
Jenni rolls her eyes. “Earth to Justin. Hello? It’s a gift? I haven’t started it yet, but it looks pretty weird.”
“Perfect.”
Jenni laughs. “Yeah. Exactly.”
* * *
The one good thing about math is unassigned seats, so I can sit next to Phuc, who explains everything in a language I understand. Unlike Mr. Lindberg, who speaks in a foreign language that only Phuc understands. Phuc is my translator.
“Here’s what I want to know,” I say to Phuc.
He raises his eyebrows.
“Say there are different versions of us in the different dimensions.”
“What about the function of x?”
“Screw the function of x. As far as I can tell, x has no function.”
“Justin,” Mr. Lindberg says. “Language.” That man has radar for “language.”
“Sorry,” I tell him, then turn back to Phuc. “So different versions of us in ten dimensions. Can they communicate with each other?”
“I doubt it.”
“But it’s possible.”
Phuc smiles at me. “That’s what’s so freaking amazing about physics, Justin. We don’t even know what’s possible!”
“Yeah, yeah, okay. So obviously, we don’t know how to communicate with the other dimensions. You and me, I mean. But what if ourselves, or other people, in the other dimensions are communicating with us?”
Phuc nods. “Like I said, anything’s possible. You know what my mom says?”
“What?”
“Venture all. See what fate brings. She says it’s a Vietnamese proverb, but I think she got it off a Hallmark card.” Phuc tips his head to the right. “But you know what? Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
* * *
I’m sitting on the couch after school but the TV’s off, so I just see my own reflection blurred on the screen, which freaks me out (it doesn’t take much), so I move down a cushion to Murphy’s spot. But I can still see myself, so I close my eyes and focus on what I’m doing. Which I will never tell anyone about as long as I live. Which is listening. For Dad. In some other dimension. I don’t know what I think I’ll hear. A message? A pulse in the atmosphere? Dad’s ghost, the old-fashioned way, rattling some chains around?
It doesn’t last long because I start to fall asleep. I feel the drift, like rocking on a small boat under sun lowering down, waiting on the crappies to bite. Then it’s more like a pull, and I’m underwater. But it’s not sleep, it’s memory. I look up and see the sun, greenish through the lake. Then a black shadow. I’m sinking but I can’t yell. The water throbs, once. I’m still going down. My arms fight but they’re heavy. Then everything turns white. I’m lying in the bottom of the boat and I spread my fingers out like a frog. Sound comes back but I didn’t know it was missing. I can hear the water lap against the boat and a man choking. Or crying? Dad picks me up. We are both shivering and dripping. Only us. It’s only us in the boat. Dad sets me on his lap facing his chest, the way you do spider on the swing, the way you hold a baby. But I’m not a baby, I think, and start to cry because I remember now, leaning too far. Maybe I am a baby. Dad wraps his arms around me and puts his forehead right on mine, and we stay like that for a very long time. Then Dad starts the motor. The sun is touching the treetops, and the water looks magical under the orange light. Dad holds me with one arm and drives with the other, all the way back to the dock.
Real sleep is pulling me now. I’ve never seen that memory before. I must have been terrified in the water, but the feel of it—what’s the word? Tenor. The tenor of the memory is love. The world darkens to charcoal, and right before I go under, I think, So that’s something.
I can see Benny H.’s top hat from two blocks away, and I start running, like when I saw Jenni alone in the hall. It’s a bad idea, since I’m still trying to be invisible in Wicapi, but some people are just worth running for. He startles when I catch up to him, then takes his pipe out of his mouth and says, “Oh. Hello. I thought I might see you today. I had a hunch. And I always believe my hunches.”
“Me too,” I say. But I don’t tell him about the hunch I had the night Dad died. We didn’t play Scrabble because I was studying for a math final. It was three days until Christmas break. Mom called to tell Dad to defrost the chicken. So he did. And I looked up at him, at his back, as he watched the raw chicken turn under the yellow light, and the microwave counting down. Four, three, two, one. It beeped and he took the plate out and set it on the counter. Then he tipped his head toward the door and lifted two fingers to his mouth to tell me he was going out for smokes, and went to get his coat. When he opened the door to leave, I looked up, even though I was in the middle of multiplying a fraction and would lose my place and have to start over. And I knew it was the last time I’d see him alive.
Mom came home and started cooking the chicken. She wasn’t
worried. Sometimes Dad got his smokes and walked around the lake. Mom asked me, “Broccoli or squash?” and I said “Neither,” and she stuck her tongue out at me. Then the phone rang. And I knew. It could’ve been anyone calling about anything, but I knew. Mom picked up the phone and tucked it against her shoulder since her hands were wet. Then she gasped and the phone slid out. It swung down on its curly cord and smashed against the kitchen floor, and that’s the last thing I remember until the hospital. That plastic smash. Like I said, that night goes in and out.
Benny H. is watching me through the smoke between us. And I realize for the first time that he might know who I am. That I’m that kid. “Want to sit on the bench?” I ask.
“I’d like nothing more,” he says, and we walk toward it together. He puffs on his pipe, and I suck the smoke into my lungs. It’s a comfortable smell. Like butter in a frying pan or a Pop-Tart in the toaster. We get to the bench and sit. The houses are off the lake because the ice is getting thinner, and the surface is an empty white sheet, pulled tight.
“Tell me more about the lake,” I say. “And the Indians.”
“Well, the lake was full of fish, of course. You got your pike, paddlefish, sturgeon, bass, sunnies of course, bullheads. But also wild rice, which was a staple of the Indian diet.” He turns and looks at me. “You know, it’s better to use their real name. Let’s say ‘Dakota.’ Okay with you?” I nod. “So at the end of the summer, early September, let’s say, the Dakota would take their canoes into the shallows of the lake in the very early morning and harvest the rice.”
“Wait. How do you know all this?”
“What do you mean, how do I know it? I read books. Don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do. I’m in book club at school. Or, I was.”
Benny H. nods. “Good. I spend most of my time at the library.”
I almost say, I know that about you, but I don’t want him to say what he knows about me. “Is there any left?” I ask.
“Dakota? Or wild rice?”
“Either.”
Benny H. puffs on his pipe. “Not on this lake.”
I look out at the blank lake and think of riding Murphy’s friend’s snowmobile, smelling diesel and cutting fresh tracks in the snow and feeling the moonlight on my shoulders. I shiver for no reason, which Grandma always said means someone just walked across your grave, but I think it’s the opposite. I think I just walked across the Dakota’s graves. I think we’re all walking across the Dakota’s graves all the time and don’t even realize it. I squint at the lake but it stays silent, like it knows too but won’t say anything. Benny H.’s smoke keeps blowing toward it, sometimes in clouds and sometimes rings, disappearing before it gets there.
* * *
I’m trying to get to the library before first period so I’m walking fast but I’m also trying not to draw attention to myself, which is extremely hard to do. I pass the special ed class where Brandon’s dropping his sister off. I knew he had a sister in that class, but I never really thought about them together. They don’t seem like they’re part of the same universe.
“You don’t have to walk me every day. I can do it myself,” she tells him. She’s only a year younger, but she’s small and he’s huge, so when she talks to him, she has to look up.
“I know you can,” Brandon says. “I’m just making sure you don’t skip school and spend the whole day at Dairy Queen.”
She laughs in a loud burst, like confetti. “I wouldn’t do that!” she says.
Brandon shakes his head like he’s not sure. “I don’t know…”
“I like the Oreo Blizzards,” she says.
“I know you do.”
“I love you, big bro!” his sister says, and throws her arms around his waist.
“Jeez, you’re strong. You been lifting weights?”
She confetti-laughs again and lets go. “Study hard!” she tells him.
Brandon turns to go. “I always do,” he says.
“Yeah, right!” she yells at his back, giggling.
Brandon shakes his head. “See what I go through?” he asks the special ed teacher, and she grins at him.
Mr. Sorenson says history is like a prism, because you see different things depending on which side you look through. The trick, he told us, is to look through as many sides as you can. Watching Brandon, I think people must be like that too.
“Hey, Cease-Fire.”
I’m standing in the middle of the hall with kids moving around me, like a rock in a river, and also my mouth is open like a frog. I close it. Then I open it again and say, “Hey.”
“You going my way?” Brandon asks.
“Huh?”
He points up the hallway. “Are you going this way?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
So we walk together, and I picture everyone as prisms, bouncing their rainbow lights all over the hall. It’s the opposite of using faraway points, and for the first time since Dad died, I can see everything I’ve been missing. Plus, almost everyone says hey to Brandon or yells some nickname at him or at least nods. It’s like I slipped into some other dimension of junior high. Like I’m seeing one of the little dimensions Phuc says are tucked into the big one.
“Where you headed?” Brandon asks.
“The library.”
“Figures.” He knocks his shoulder into me and I almost fall, but the wall catches me. “You know what books I like?” he asks. I shake my head. “Those ones by that guy with all the crazy made-up words and the drawings. You know? He wrote The Twits. That’s my favorite.”
“Roald Dahl?”
“Yeah, that’s him! I guess that’s kids’ stuff to you.”
“No. I like those books too.”
Brandon smiles at me, then turns in to his English class. “See ya, Cease-Fire.”
“See ya.”
* * *
Murphy’s got a migraine, which sucks, but it means he’s in bed at the same time as me, which never, ever happens. He’s lying on his back in the gray shadows, with a towel over his eyes. “You need some medicine?” I ask.
“I took some.”
“Water?”
“Nope.”
“Okay.” We lie there, quiet. “We’re learning about Vietnam in history,” I say for no reason.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” I can’t think of anything else to say. I try to figure out if the dark feels cozy or prickly, but it’s hard to tell.
“Mom told me once that no one really welcomed the soldiers home from Vietnam,” Murphy says. I turn my head to face him, even though I can only see his outline. “People were so against the war they didn’t say thank you or even ask what it was like over there. So the soldiers had to just, like, try to walk back into normal life again, you know? After all they’d been through. With no one wanting to talk about it, Mom said.”
He takes the towel off and stares straight up, at the ceiling.
“I told Dad once, I said, ‘Dad, I’m sorry nobody gave you the respect you deserved when you came home from Vietnam. I’m sorry you didn’t get a parade.’ ” My eyes go wide in the dark, like an alley cat. I can’t imagine ever saying those words to Dad. Bringing the war up on purpose. To his face. But Murphy was always braver than me.
“You know what he said?” Murphy asks. “ ‘Nothing I did deserved a parade.’ ”
* * *
Mr. Sorenson is calling us to his desk one by one, in alphabetical order, and I’m watching the black hand of the clock tick closer to the two. He’s on “Nelson” and there’s still “Norberg” before me, so I might get out of here before I have to tell him I don’t have a formulated idea for my National History Project. Or an idea at all. He calls Norberg. Two more minutes. No way he’ll get to— “Mr. Olson,” he says.
I sit on the folding chair next to his desk and tuck my feet under
it. “So,” he says. “Tell me about your idea.”
“Um, well. I don’t really…I’m not totally sure. Yet.”
Mr. Sorenson taps his pen on his open notebook. I can see the list of ideas next to all the names up to mine. Israel-Palestine. The Berlin Wall. Apartheid. “Well, tell me some of the contenders.”
“I was thinking about doing something on the war.”
“Which war?”
“Desert Storm.”
Mr. Sorenson tips his head from side to side, thinking about it. “What about doing a previous war? You’d find more material. You could do the cold war, or just the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was a turning point. Or Vietnam.”
The word lights up like a flare between us and hangs there, waiting for me to do something. Mr. Sorenson’s face is blank. He hasn’t heard the whispers in the hall? Is that possible?
“I don’t think so,” I tell him. “I actually…I changed my mind. I want to do…” I look at the clock. One minute left. “Wicapi.”
“Wicapi? The town?”
“Yeah. It’s my hometown, so…”
Mr. Sorenson tips his head to one side again, but doesn’t tip it back this time. So I guess he’s not considering this one. “Right, but the assignment is about conflict. I just don’t know how you would do that.”
I smile. “I do.”
* * *
Every time I try to wave to Murphy, Mom bats my hand down, like she does to Axl Rose when she tries to knock ornaments off the Christmas tree.
“Mom! Seriously! Why do you think I’ve been begging you to bring me to KFC?”
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