Wake

by Abria Mattina

  “Elise told me you saw the photos,” he says. “You’re crazy to want to join this circus.”

  “I’ve been crazy for a long time.”

  There’s an awkward silence where neither of us knows what to say. Eventually Eric apologizes for calling so late. “I’ll let you sleep.”

  “You should too.”

  He doesn’t say he will one way or the other. “Good night.”

  “G’night.”

  *

  Paige finally found a date for the grad dance. She’s taking some junior from the track team because her options among the seniors have been exhausted and apparently this guy is fairly good looking. That’s all it takes to qualify with Paige. But if she’s happy, I’m happy, even if it means she’s more chatty than usual at lunch. It’s mostly girls at the table today, since Cody is still sick and Joe has come down with the flu too. Diane is over her cold, which means she is no longer the center of attention, and that fact grates on her while the rest of the girls discuss prom.

  “I don’t know why you’re so interested,” she says to me in her usual tone of condescension. “You’re not even going.”

  “I’m not sure why you are going, except to punish everyone else.”

  Diane glares at me like she’s trying to melt my face off with sheer force of will. Paige feigns obliviousness rather than feed Diane’s ill temper, and asks me if I think it’s cheesy for prom dates to match clothing.

  Uh, always. “It depends.”

  “My dress is mauve. I could probably find a matching tie for him.”

  “Trying to make the poor guy look whipped?” I give her a wink to show I’m (sort of) joking.

  “Maybe a complementary color,” she says thoughtfully. “I placed the corsage order in white—that goes with everything.”

  I nod along while she lists ideas for how she’s going to do her hair. Apparently up-dos are overdone, and she’s determined to be different. I am so bored of prom and it hasn’t even happened yet.

  “Or you could put it up to be ironic.”

  “What?”

  I hate having to explain jokes. “Nothing. You should wear your hair down.”

  Paige seems to realize that I’m losing interest in the subject. “So how are things with you and Jem?” she asks, as if by afterthought. Whatever I say, I’m sure she’s going to relate it back to her own interests.

  “It’s good. We haven’t killed each other yet.” Paige laughs like she isn’t sure if I’m joking. Or maybe relating Jem to death makes her uncomfortable because he looks so ill.

  “Isn’t it a little…weird, though?” she asks lowly. I’m pretty sure everyone at the table still heard her.

  “Why would it be weird?”

  “I dunno.” Paige shrugs. “I mean, when you’re kissing him, isn’t it odd to…well you can’t, like, run your hands through his hair or anything, you know?” Figures she would care about that instead of something genuinely important, like the possibility of relapse and death.

  I just chuckle. “Yes, Paige, I do know. That’s a small sacrifice to make.”

  “But, like, isn’t it weird that he’s bald and stuff?”

  “Not really. I’ve never actually seen his head. He keeps his hat on all the time.”

  “All the time? Like, he never takes it off in front of you?”

  “Nope.”

  Paige’s questions suddenly desist, and I look over my shoulder to see Jem enter the cafeteria. Paige is good at timing her gossip. I wonder if she’s ever been caught by her subject.

  Jem looks like he hasn’t slept and his dog ran away from home. He’s fifteen minutes late for lunch, but he doesn’t have any food with him and he doesn’t buy any. All he has is the half-empty water bottle that he used to take his noon medication with. It’s as if a little cloud of gloom follows him to the table.

  Jem leans around to kiss my cheek before taking the empty seat between Elwood and me. I give him a hug and he whispers in my ear that he’s fine, even though I didn’t ask—a sure sign that he’s not. Today was practically guaranteed to be a lousy day for him, what with the death of his friend, but he doesn’t have to hide it.

  Chris leans forward to talk to me around Jem. “Really, Willa, never?”

  I give Chris my best shut-up-or-I’ll-bury-you look. He’s tried to joke with or about Jem before, but now is not the moment for a jab in good fun. Paige looks away, trying not to involve herself.

  “What never?” Jem asks me. He’s trying to be personable and participate in the conversation, but I can tell that it costs him a great amount of effort. He’s in a fragile mood and doesn’t need to know that people were gossiping about him.

  “I was predicting that Elwood would never get laid.” Jem snorts with amusement and Chris scowls. Maybe I should have just dismissed the whole thing instead of being a smartass. I’ll have to be nice to Chris at work tonight to make up for it.

  Chris reaches up. By the time I realize that he’s making a move to pull Jem’s hat off, it’s too late to get out of the way. Jem shifts his chair sharply towards mine to avoid Chris’s hand and I get bumper-carred onto the floor. Jem stands up so fast our chairs fall like dominos and hit me in the shoulder. There’s the crack of bone-on-bone and Paige shrieks. I push the fallen chair away in time to see Elwood hit the floor face first.

  “Hey!” The lunch monitors descend on our table like flies to a corpse. Chris’s face is bleeding. I think that asshat might actually be crying. Jesus Christ, Jem actually hit him.

  “Get to the office,” the monitor barks at Jem. One of the lunch monitors grabs his arm, even though he gave no indication that he was going to make a break for it. They help Chris up and practically carry him out of the lunchroom. The twit clutches his split lip like it’s a damn war wound.

  Hannah kindly helps me off the floor and asks if I’m hurt.

  “I’m fine.” Diane is shaking her head in disgust, but everyone else at the table looks unaccountably excited. Lunchroom fights aren’t that common here.

  “Holy shit,” Paige hisses. “He’s not like that around you, is he, Willa?”

  “What?”

  She lowers her voice and asks me very seriously if Jem has ever tried to hit me. For a second I think she’s hoping I’ll say yes to further the dramatic intrigue. The question takes me so off guard that I laugh, which freaks her out.

  “I have to go.” There are too many people here and I can’t think straight. On my way to my car I pass by the front office. I see Elise through the glass wall, arguing with the secretary. I guess she’s demanding information, and not having much luck at it.

  *

  Jem’s parents are quick to ground him. They’ve barely set that punishment when they make an exception to it. He’s not going anywhere, but they won’t stop me from coming over. Elise calls me after school to tell me this and rant about injustice.

  “He was provoked, so they only suspended him for three days instead of four.”

  “What about Chris?”

  “Technically he didn’t do anything except try to humiliate Jem, so he got off with a detention for provoking another student. It’s so unfair.” I can’t agree with her. I would have probably set the same punishments if I’d been an objective third party. And besides, a three-day suspension looks a hell of a lot better on his permanent record than an assault charge.

  “How is he now?”

  Elise sighs into the phone. “He’s locked in his room, blasting music.” I can hear it in the background but I can’t tell what song or even what band it is.

  “He’s not playing Tchaikovsky, is he?” An alarming number of the tracks in Jem’s ‘To Hell With Everything’ playlist are by that composer.

  “It sounds like Radiohead from here—I’m on the porch. He has such bad taste in music.” Elise sighs again like her brother’s musical preferences are a personal hardship. “So when are you coming over?”

  *

  Elise wasn’t kidding when she said Jem was blasting music. It’s s
o loud I can hear every word of “Creep” from the front yard. When I go upstairs I find Dr. Harper and Eric trying to dismantle the handle on his door.

  “He locked it.” Eric has to yell his explanation over the music. He stops taking the door apart to let me knock and tell Jem that it’s me through the door, but I don’t think he can hear me. So I take an egg around back and throw it at his window. That gets his attention. Ivy isn’t too pleased, though.

  “So, I guess the silver lining in this is that you get a long weekend?” I say when he lets me into his room. Jem just sits down heavily on the closest piece of furniture—his desk chair—and shakes his head. “Don’t try to cheer me up.”

  “Okay.” I step around Jem and take a seat on his desk. I rest my feet on either side of his legs, just on the edges of the chair. He takes this odd pose as an excuse to wrap his arms around my hips and burrow his face into my stomach.

  “It was kind of my fault, you know,” I say.

  “What?” He looks up at me but keeps his pale cheek pressed to my body.

  “Remember when you came in for lunch and Chris asked me, ‘really, never?’ He said that because a minute earlier Paige was asking about us.” He gives me a look like he can’t see where I’m going with this. “She asked if I thought it was weird, about your hair and stuff. I said I’d never seen you without your hat on, and that’s where Chris got the idea to…” I gesture to his hat.

  “To try to rip it off me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jem bows his head back against my front. “It’s not your fault. Elwood has been a dick to me before.”

  “He has?”

  He nods against me. I put my arms around him and rub the stretch of back between his shoulder blades.

  “Last fall, I was out of the hospital but still highly susceptible to infection. I’d missed a lot of school, so I needed to go. But I was in such rough shape I had to wear one of those blue surgical masks around people.” Jem snorts self-deprecatingly at the memory. “You remember how Michael Jackson used to walk around in those masks sometimes? Elwood started a joke that I was hiding a botched nose job.”

  “No one would be dumb enough to buy that.”

  “They didn’t believe it, they just thought the notion was funny. It was one big joke.”

  “Could have been worse, I guess.” I stroke the nape of his neck. “Remember when Britney Spears shaved her head? You could have got saddled with that comparison.”

  “Not funny, Willa.”

  “Well when it comes down to it, it’s just Chris Elwood, and who the hell gives a shit about him anyway?” The corner of his mouth twitches up in a sort of smile. It always does cheer him up to listen to me bash Elwood.

  “I still feel bad, though. I shouldn’t have been talking about our business with Paige. Elwood would have never got the idea.”

  “Why was Paige asking?”

  “She wanted to know if I feel deprived because I can’t run my hands through your hair,” I say with a laugh. It’s such a frivolous notion. Only someone like Paige would take it so seriously.

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s growing back,” he says shyly.

  “Can I see?” I know he’s going to say no, but I guess I’m a sucker for rejection.

  “Does it bug you that I insist on keeping my hat on around you?”

  “No. It makes you comfortable. You don’t have to take it off.”

  “What did Paige think when you’d told her you’d never seen me without it?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I think she was surprised that I’ve never seen your head.”

  Jem reaches up and grabs the top of his toque. He pulls it off slowly, staring at the ground, and sets the hat on his knee. “Now you have.”

  At first it’s shocking. The pale skin of his forehead just keeps going where I’m used to seeing the color and texture of a toque. I can see the bones of his skull and the veins beneath the skin. He doesn’t have a defined hairline yet, but what hair he does have exists in patches. The hairs are matted by his hat and stick to his head, a quarter of an inch long and spaced randomly. They’re baby fine and deep red, like the color of sweet potato skin.

  “Huh.” I pull off a glove and run my hand over the smooth skin, feeling the slight tickle of his fine hairs.

  “What do you think?” His eyes are still on the floor and his tone is laced with something resembling dread.

  “Do you really want to know?” For a split second his face shows absolute pain, and then goes stony blank as he pulls his hat back on. Jem buries his face in my front and wraps his arms tight around my hips and waist.

  “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” he says softly. That almost makes me laugh. How could I leave, held in a vice grip like this? Or maybe he means that I should leave him altogether.

  “You can’t get rid of me that easily.” I pet the wool around his scalp. When I push his hat back again, Jem flinches and presses his face tighter against my front, hiding.

  “Do you really want to know?” I ask again.

  Jem shakes his head. The hairs under my hand feel as fine as a newborn’s. I pet his head against the grain and the slightly damp strands stick up like feathers. I shape a little Mohawk with what’s there and giggle at my fun.

  “Don’t laugh at me.”

  “I’m not. Let me have my fun, damn it.” I bend my face down to the top of his head and nuzzle him. His hair tickles my lips and nose. “You feel like a kitten.”

  Jem snorts. “A freaking kitten.”

  “Was it always this dark?” I remember it being brighter red in the picture downstairs, but it could have been the lighting.

  “Yeah.”

  I slide my butt off the edge of the desk and step down onto the floor. Jem lets go immediately, like I’m trying to leave. I’m only moving from the desk to sit on his lap facing him. I fold him into another hug and he rests his head on my shoulder with a sigh.

  “I know you don’t really want to know, but I think this change in you is beautiful. You’re really getting better.”

  “It’s gross,” he whispers.

  “It’s cute.” I like the feel of his hair, all soft and fluffy with newness. I run my hand over the bare patch at his crown and find that it isn’t actually bald—the hair there is just shorter than the rest and very pale blond. It’s the first growth. Those hairs will fall out eventually and grow back in with color. The other bald patch—which really is a bald patch—is behind his left ear. I wonder if that’s a radiation burn or just a cluster of follicles that are slow to wake up.

  “Maybe Paige was right,” I say as I play with his wisps. “This is pretty fun.”

  “Oh shut up,” he scolds me softly.

  “Will you leave the hat off more often?”

  “Not here,” he says, and shifts his shoulders uncomfortably. “It bugs Mom. And I don’t want anyone else to see.” His own admission troubles him and he frowns. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” I give him a kiss. “It’ll be our thing.”

  The bedroom door opens suddenly and Dr. Harper walks in, already speaking. He stops mid-sentence and stares at us while we stare back, each of us dumbfounded and unsure of what to do or say. Can we write this compromising position off as he-tripped-and-I-fell?

  Finally, without saying anything, Dr. Harper turns and closes the door behind him.

  “Crap,” Jem mutters. He pulls away a little and reaches for his hat. “We should go downstairs.”

  “I didn’t get you in more trouble, did I?”

  “No, I think it just surprised him. He’s used to this kind of thing from Eric, not from me.” Jem smiles shyly at that, and takes my hand for the walk downstairs.

  *

  “Do you want food?” It’s only four-thirty and I don’t have to be at work until six. Jem accepts and Elise scurries in from the living room. “Me too?” she pleads.

  Jem goes to his cello, which is a much healthier method for venti
ng, and Elise and is start peeling apples from the bag in the fridge. We’re making applesauce—with a side of frozen yogurt, if the mood strikes. I use honey instead of sugar for Jem’s sake, and try to teach Elise how to taste-test over heat without being a wimp about the temperature.

  “Roll it on your tongue.”

  “That just burns more of the tongue,” she whines.

  “Wuss.” Her brothers must have conditioned her to that word, because she takes it as a challenge and tastes the next stage of the sauce without even making a face.

  “Good girl.”

  As soon as the smell of cooking apples becomes obvious, Eric appears. He tells us it smells good and hovers obnoxiously close to the stove, trying to sneak a taste.

  “Go away,” Elise shoos him. “We’ll call you when it’s ready.” The idea bulb flashes over Eric’s face and he announces that he’s running out to the store to buy Oreos. Apparently they go with applesauce.

  The food conversation draws Jem away from the front room, probably out of paranoia that Eric will hog whatever Elise and I make. He wraps his arms around my waist from behind and asks what’s on the menu.

  “Applesauce.” I take a potato masher out of the drawer and start pulverizing the cooked apple chunks.

  “Applesauce?” I can’t quite measure his tone. I look over my shoulder in time to see him swallow and clamp a hand around his mouth and nose. He bolts down the hall toward the downstairs bathroom.

  “Shit.” I cover the pot with a lid and open the kitchen window to vent the smell of cooked apples. I didn’t know it would nauseate him.

  “Aw, crap,” Elise mutters, and smacks her palm to her forehead. “Applesauce.” She looks genuinely worried.

  “What’s with applesauce?”

  “There was a…thing, with Meira and applesauce. I’d forgot all about it.” Elise looks over her shoulder toward the bathroom. “Otherwise I’d have suggested something else.”

  I sigh and pull out the kettle to start mint tea for when Jem gets out of the bathroom. I owe him an apology and something to settle his stomach.