Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  “Let’s try it my way,” I said.

  They both immediately looked all pissed off.

  “Donnie’s drillin’,” Nick said. “This’ll work. You just relax.”

  “Look, you and Donnie have been dicking around with this damn thing for days. Give me an hour.”

  Donnie huffed.

  “Fine,” he said and tossed his drill to the floor.

  Nick sighed. I got him to help me lay the safe down face up. Then he held the wedge in the top right corner of the opening while I tapped it in enough that it would stay put on its own. Now the sledging commenced. I bashed at it a while, with the wedge progressing slowly and steadily. Weirdly, my forehead seemed to sweat more than anywhere else. I paused to wipe it and Nick pried at the door a little.

  “It’s got a little give to it,” he said. “A little.”

  “Just wait,” I said.

  We put another wedge in the bottom right corner and repeated the process. I swung the hammer until my arms felt dead, but by then Nick was asking to take a turn. He seemed to have grown more optimistic. Even Donnie had a hopeful look about him.

  Forty-seven minutes after we started, the door busted off the hinges. Actually, the hinges busted off the frame, and the door sort of fell into the safe a little. Some kind of weird white powder came out of the holes into the innards of the safe wall. Silica or something, I guess.

  Donnie and Nick jumped up and down like kids. And nobody moved to pull the door free. It was weird. I think somehow we all wanted to delay the process of revealing what was inside. Just for a moment.

  “How did you know that would work?” Donnie said.

  “I don’t know. It was a crappy safe. This probably wouldn’t have worked with a good one.”

  “Nah, dude,” Donnie said. “You’re bein’ modest. That was the shit.”

  * * *

  Nick peeled the door out from the hinge side, wiggled it to loosen it up and pried it open about six inches. Donnie skittered over to peek inside. They just hovered over it for a moment, so I moved closer.

  “What is it?” I said.

  Inside was a gigantic double-sided dildo rippled with veins.

  Chapter 19

  I HAD A DREAM LAST night that I trudged through this endless marsh. Ankle-deep water. Lily pads everywhere. Algae and stuff. Some of those mangrove trees or whatever popped up here and there, with the mess of exposed roots at the bottom and thick wads of moss hanging down from the branches.

  Fog misted in all directions, so I could only see 15 or 20 feet in front of me. Everything seemed to have a blue tint to it, too. Even the air.

  I was running from something. I don’t know what it was. I couldn’t see anything behind me, but I was scared. My feet kicked through the sludgy water. My chest heaved hot, fighting to not lose my breath.

  The water got deeper, almost to my knees. I was slowing down. And then a clear spot appeared before me, a break in the mist, and I could see a figure face down in the bog.

  A girl.

  Long blond hair swirled on the rippling surface of the water around her submerged head. I turned her over, and it was Beth, and she immediately coughed up a bunch of water. Brown water. Projectile style.

  So I gathered her in my arms to carry her, but her face went white with fear. Her eyes bugged out. She was scared of me. Hysterically so. Her tiny fists pounded at my chest as I ran. She spoke no words, but she screeched periodically and thrashed in my arms, though I was too strong for her, thankfully.

  It hurt. Not the fists. Just her being scared of me hurt. Like my feelings or whatever. Somehow I wasn’t mad at her, though, ’cause I knew she was just confused. I knew she would forgive me once she understood that I was protecting her.

  We splashed on, and she started to relax. The water grew shallower and shallower. The lily pads thinned out. Soon, I could see a rocky shore sloping up in front of me. I stomped onto the land, the water still squishing inside of my shoes.

  As I topped the hill of the shoreline, a field of tall grass spread out in front of me. I could see a rock wall in the distance, and the mouth of a cave dead ahead. I knew we would be safe there somehow.

  My pace quickened. The grass brushed at my legs. Fire and sand paper ripped at my lungs, but I didn’t care anymore. I sprinted the last fifty feet.

  I laid her down on a bed of pine needles in the half-light of the cave. She was really peaceful now. Actually, I thought she might be asleep. She sat up, though, to kiss me on the cheek, and I knew she forgave me, and I knew she loved me. Whatever was out there couldn’t get us now.

  * * *

  In the locker room before gym, I saw Chad Walters talking to Robert. He’s this wrestler kid that’s all short with big tree trunk legs and teeth that look like kernels of corn. I didn’t think much of it until I saw all of Chad’s friends crowded behind him laughing.

  I moved closer.

  “You don’t know whether you’ve jerked off or not?” Chad said. He flashed his corn cob smile.

  “What’s that?” Robert said.

  “Shut up, Chad,” I said.

  He didn’t acknowledge my presence.

  “Well, you take your hand like this and—”

  He pantomimed a jerking off motion in the air.

  “—stroke it up and down the shaft of—”

  At that point his words cut off into a series of gurgled choking noises, because I had punched him in the throat as hard I could. He tottered forward slightly, so I gave him a shove on the back of the shoulder that helped him belly flop down onto the tiled floor. I kicked him in the ribs so he would stay down a while.

  He did.

  One of his friends, Steve Smallwood, took half a step toward me, but I just glared at him, and he left it at that.

  When I looked back at Robert, though, he looked really scared of me. He wouldn’t say anything.

  * * *

  I went straight to Nick’s after school today. Rain squirted down on me, so I had to run the last two blocks. Nick was home alone, sitting on the recliner and staring out the window at the wet street. He looked agitated.

  “You know how there’s all that shit out there tryin’ to make everyone feel guilty for downloadin’ music and movies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And they talk about how much it hurts the artists and all that?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it’s hilarious that the corporations try to pull that shit. Really hilarious. Because they rip off the artists all the goddamn time.”

  He scratched his nose.

  “Remember how successful those Lord of the Rings movies were?”

  “Yes.”

  “New Line Cinema gave the J.R.R. Tolkien estate $62,500 for the rights to make the Lord of the Rings movies, and they were supposed to give 7.5% of whatever the movies made. The movies have made $6 billion and the company never paid the Tolkien estate another cent. They had to sue. Same with the guy that wrote the book Forrest Gump. It made $700 million at the box office and who knows how much in DVD sales and merchandise, and they told him it didn’t profit and paid him zero royalties, so he refused to sell them the rights to the sequel.”

  Nick shook his head, frowning slightly.

  “It happens in music, too. Might be worse, even. The point is, it’s the same as everything else. They want one set of rules for the idiot masses — no stealing — and another set of rules for the people at the top — steal as much as you can get away with.”

  He didn’t quite seem to be talking to me so much as at me, so I didn’t say anything. Just sat there and let him go on.

  “It’s like that in every industry, in every facet of life now. The agribusiness corporations fix the scales to rip off the farmers and soak the grain with water to run up the prices before they sell it. Factories and plants keep fake injury logs to show to OSHA inspectors. And don’t even get me started on the Wall Street banks and all the shit they’ve pulled.”

  He paused and rubbed at the stubble on his chin.r />
  “When you boil it all down, there are no real rules. Just don’t get caught. That’s the only rule.”

  We fell silent, with only the sounds of cars sludging through mud puddles outside surrounding us. My eyes fell on a drinking glass on the coffee table. It was crusted with what appeared to be the mummified remains of a green monster smoothie. I was pretty sure it was the glass I’d used the day Donnie was trying to open the safe with the stethoscope. That was like over a week ago. Gross.

  “Where’s Tammie?” I said.

  Nick’s gaze fell to the floor.

  “She wound up movin’ away,” he said.

  “Really? Just like that?”

  “Yeah. Moved to Ohio with her Aunt or something.”

  Chapter 20

  IT’S WEIRD HOW, ON THEIR own, each side of the brain seems pretty dumb. I was thinking about this phenomenon of the left brain overdoing the order thing. I mean, that is its role. It organizes the information. It learns from the pattern of events that have happened and applies what it learns to predicting the future. But sometimes it oversimplifies things.

  Like when the football team at school wins, everyone gets overconfident and assumes they will win the next game and all of the remaining games. People start talking about “going to state.”(I mean, like, the playoffs or whatever.) When they lose, everyone panics and assumes they will lose the next game and all of the rest, too.

  It’s like this weird oversimplified order that our left brain tries to impose upon everything. It can’t comprehend the unknown. It hates the idea of not knowing what will happen next. It won’t acknowledge that there is a randomness — a chaos — to football games. Sports are unpredictable, and that’s why there are so many upsets and so forth. The left brain wants to believe that all history can do is repeat the same results over and over, because recognizing patterns is how it understands the world.

  The right brain, on the other hand, is more likely to be responsible for completely irrational behavior, which is equally dumb, I suppose. Like when people commit crimes on a whim. They’ve done studies with brain scans that show criminals get these spikes of activity in their right brain frequently. We’re talking like an off-the-charts type spike. So they get this tidal wave of an impulse and wind up stealing a car or whatever. The irrational urge takes over their behavior and lands them in prison eventually. If they would just weigh the consequences, they wouldn’t do it, but the irrational right brain wins out.

  I don’t know. Together the two sides of the brain can work pretty well at times, but separately they are pretty screwy, I think. They are incomplete.

  * * *

  I walked home with Beth after school. She asked me to. The plan was not to actually hang out at her house or anything, though. She had to get ready to go to some play with her mom right after school, I guess. So the actual walk — moving from point A to point B — was the thing we would be doing together. She said she wanted to talk. The old fashioned walk and talk, you know?

  I met her in the parking lot behind the school. She was wearing a light blue shirt with puff sleeves. (Did I already mention that her boobs are huge? I think I did.) She seemed to be in a pretty good mood.

  We headed due West... or maybe a different direction. I’m not like a cartographer or something.

  We walked along this bike-slash-nature trail. It’s an asphalt path that’s really only like fifteen feet from the road most of the way, but it’s surrounded by woods and everything. You feel like you have a little more privacy, I guess. On the downside, you periodically get whiffs of like a pond scum smell. But other than that, it’s pretty relaxing. After we exchanged the “How was your day?” type crap, we got down to business.

  “So you remember the other day,” she said. “When I was all upset?”

  “I do.”

  “And I told you I would tell you some other time what was the matter?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I wanted to tell you about it today.”

  I waited for her to spill it, but she didn’t say anything. After a while she sniffled.

  “Are you OK?” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, in some ways.”

  Just then a bell rang and a voice called out from behind us.

  “On your left!”

  A guy on a bike whizzed past on our left. I guess that was his warning call, but there was something too obnoxious about it. I mean, I get that ultimately he was being helpful, but I still got a powerful urge to throw a rock at him or something.

  Besides, what’s the deal with how like every douche on a bike these days has to dress up in a full Lance Armstrong costume? Is it seriously necessary for everyone to wear a brightly colored spandex unitard or whatever just to ride around town on a goddamn bicycle?

  “I’m bulimic,” she said.

  This caught me off guard, although there were probably things I should have picked up on. Like the long bathroom break at the movies and everything. Yep. A cycle of binging and purging, dude. Pretty gross.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Really. I have been for three years.”

  “Doesn’t that, like, erode the hell out of your esophagus and teeth and stuff?”

  (Not to mention the constant puke breath.)

  “It can. It can cause all kinds of problems.”

  (Puke breath. Among other ailments.)

  I had no goddamn idea what to say. Do you say “sorry” or what? I mean, you could say “Well, please stop being bulimic and anorexic and stuff. Chew. Swallow. Don’t vomit. ’K, thanks.” It probably wouldn’t help anything, though.

  “For a long time, I didn’t want to admit it, but I guess at some point you have to.”

  “Right. Well, that’s the first step, you know. Admitting you have a problem.”

  Nerdy. Such a nerdy thing to say. Dr. Phil would know just what to say, and he would deliver it with an authoritative twang. Meanwhile Dr. Oz would use a big papier-mâché colon to show us how bulimia affects our poop.

  She grabbed my arm and hugged it against her.

  “I know you’ll help me get through it.”

  And I will. It’s weird. Here in this journal I kind of detach from things. When I am there with her, I feel differently. Reading through this, you might even think that I don’t like her or whatever, ’cause I’m sarcastic and everything, but I do. I really do.

  I don’t know. It’s complicated.

  “Have you told your mom and dad?” I said.

  Her brow furrowed.

  “Not yet. Maybe I never will.”

  “Well, are you talking to, like, a professional about it?”

  “Yeah. I’m in therapy.”

  “That’s good.”

  We walked past a guy on rollerblades walking a couple of dogs. (Do you still call it walking a dog if the human is on rollerblades? And what if the dogs are on rollerblades? Additionally, who the hell rollerblades these days? Christ.)

  One dog was a pug, who mainly seemed interested in pushing his face into the leaves along the side of the trail. The other looked like a pit bull boxer mix that expressed less interest in the plant life and more interested in ripping my damn face off. For real.

  He locked eyes with me from far away, and his head perked up. As we passed, he did a lurch and growl at me, but the rollerblader managed to hold him back, which seemed impressive considering the neon green wheels on his feet.

  Dogs hate me. I don’t get it, but a lot of them want to bite and/or maim me for some reason. The big ones, especially. I told Nick about it once, and he laughed.

  “Well, dogs are great judges of character,” he said. “Nah, seriously. They can pick up on your nature, and they’re threatened for some reason. They think you’re dangerous.”

  He kept a fairly straight face, but he had to be messing with me, right? Who says “You’re dangerous!” and means it? It’s too silly.

  Beth and I went back to talking about normal things after that. She said she got an A on her biology test and that
her cousin was going to Germany as an exchange student for a semester, but, honestly, all I could think about the whole time was her puking up a bunch of veal chunks and yogurt and blue Powerade and egg salad and stuff.

  * * *

  So I’ve been reading about the psychology of bulimia and other eating disorders. I bet you can’t guess what it’s all about. Stumped, right? Control. Every goddamn thing is about control, I think. Sheesh.

  People with eating disorders feel out of control of their own lives for various reasons — lack of connection, feeling betrayed, fear of life, anger, self hatred, etc. — and so they start to gain a sense of power over themselves by getting super controlling over what they eat. Most are hung up on looks and skinniness, of course, so not eating (or barfing it all up) becomes the goal. Not just the goal, actually, it becomes the obsession.

  A lot of them have controlling parents who sort of deny their identity. I’ll admit that Beth’s mom did seem like a huge cuntburger, too. About the ice cream, I mean. (Is cuntburger a real term, or did I just make it up? Can I get a confirmation on this?)

  Anyway, that’s pretty sad. I mean, think about how they feel so strongly that their parent is denying their identity that they make themselves vomit almost as a way of claiming that they deserve to exist at all. It’s proof that they’re an individual, and they have control over at least one thing in the universe. Puking is the way they stand up for themselves. On some level, that is the underlying psychological state of the thing. Very odd.

  And what is it inside of us that is perpetually drawn to extremes like that? These people with these issues never say, “I’m going to take control of my life by eating a well-balanced diet and slowly but surely reaching my ideal weight by doing this the right way.” They say, “I’m going to pig out and then jam my finger down my throat in a little bit.” We’re just so quick to have this air of desperation to so many of the things we do.

  Maybe it’s all connected. Like the people lining up for the iPads are desperately looking for a meaning in their lives. Maybe it’s the same with the bulimics and anorexics. Maybe looking for a meaning that’s not there is the desperation that drives us all, and we all have different ways of showing it and dealing with it.