The Great Jeff

by Tony Abbott

  How stupid of me, not even wondering why his father had been doing yard work on a weekday. Two and two, numbskull. “I saw him, raking, in the middle of the day. I didn’t get it.…” Then I started to add Sorry, but I couldn’t make the sound, not to him.

  He scanned around suddenly as if he’d just woken up. “Hey, where are we? Is this, like, the abandoned-warehouse district? Do you even know? I think we took the wrong street or something.”

  It took me a second. “No. One more block, I think, then right. We’ll circle the parking lots to keep off the sidewalks so we don’t get picked up for wandering the streets or whatever. Pay attention. If your dad loses his job altogether, you might end up doing this someday. Learn from the master.”

  “And you had a problem with me being funny. You should do stand-up on TV.”

  “I can’t stand up on the TV,” I said. “My mom sold it.”

  “You’re killing me.”

  “I’m trying.”

  I realized by the stinging in my nose what I’d lost when Tom and I stopped hanging out together. He was the only one who had anything going on. I’d been a jerk about lots of things. So had he. Or maybe he hadn’t. I don’t even know. He was a pain in the eye sometimes, but maybe not as much of a jerk as I was. As I am. Stuck here.

  “You and that girl,” I said.

  He turned his face to me, his eyes half-hidden under his soaked fleece hat. “Courtney? We’re just friends.”

  “No. The other one. Jessica Feeney.”

  He burrowed into his jacket. “I don’t want to talk about her. Not with you.”

  “Have you seen her since she left St. Catherine’s?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Have you talked to her at least?” He didn’t answer. “You have.”

  “Is that the way or not?” He pointed left at a street of flickering lampposts.

  I looked in both directions, then over my shoulder. A car was coming slowly down the street and I was suddenly afraid. We were too visible, a couple of kids alone. “Keep walking to the stoplight. Like we know exactly where we’re going.”

  “You mean we don’t?”

  The car passed, rolled to the corner, then turned without stopping. Bad driver. Or just lost. Hard to tell. We went on. And on.

  Then Tom scraped to a stop behind me. “Are you humming?”

  I half turned. “It’s a gift.”

  “No, listen. What’s that noise?”

  I lowered my hood and heard a high-pitched electrical whining. “A herd of dragons?”

  “That was my guess, but why in Bridgeport?”

  I shrugged. “The apocalypse starts here.”

  “Oh, right. My dad said it might.”

  How was it possible to talk this way? How could I talk this way? As if we were still best pals. As if he hadn’t dumped me last year. Except I already knew that was wrong. I dumped him just as fast because he was friends with Jessica Feeney, and I thought he lied to me and liked being with her more than with me. I don’t know. A lot happens. Parents lose jobs, they drink booze, things fall apart. Now I’m on the street with him at night in the cold rain and I’m still falling to the bottom, so whatever.

  He stopped dead.

  “Why do you keep stopping?” I said. “Stop stopping!”

  “Jessica,” he said, and didn’t say anything else.

  I looked at him. His face was dripping. “Look. Whatever. I don’t need to know.”

  “She’s not better,” he said. “I saw her. I went to Boston with my mom. I mean she’s the same, not better, not worse. She still has problems with her lungs. All the smoke and chemicals in the car when it burned.” He paused. “You were so mean to her.”

  I took a breath, couldn’t answer. Because of all the water on his cheeks, I didn’t know if he was crying. I remembered her scarred face. I’d tried to forget it all these months, the whole past year, but her face had never left me and here it was again, the opposite of Hannah’s face.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “Well… I hated when you lied to me.”

  “You were mean to her,” he said, “but that’s not even the thing. We were all mean. Me too.”

  “What?”

  “The way we stared at her, thought things about her, were scared of her. It was just… we were so lame. Or worse, we treated her like she shouldn’t be there.”

  “Well, you talked to her,” I said. “You were her friend.…”

  “I didn’t do anything. I barely said anything to her. But she knew people didn’t want to be with her. She expected it, to be alone all the time. Isn’t that just so nuts?”

  “Well, but you went to her house.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Big deal. I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m saying—”

  I stared down the blurry street. “We should keep going.”

  He didn’t move. “I was actually trying to say something before. Things sort of ended with you and me because, I don’t know…”

  “Because you lied to me? I get it. It doesn’t matter—”

  “We all lied!” he said. “And it was like I tricked myself into thinking you were the jerk. That was so easy, right? Being mad at you. Jessica told me this later, when I saw her. She said I did to you what you did to her.”

  “What?”

  “The same thing.”

  “The same thing what?”

  “You were mad at her because she was easy to be mad at, coming into our class all burned and ugly. Just like it was easy for me to be mad at you because I was so good to her and you weren’t.”

  My chest had a weight on it. “I don’t know what you mean. We should walk.” And I tried to walk, but he kept talking and I kept listening.

  “I only saw the junk you did, not the junk you had to live with. So I thought it was okay to not do stuff with you. It was only okay for me. Not for you. I dropped you like stones off a cliff. I cut you out of my life.”

  “Whatever. I moved on. You moved on. It was what it was.”

  He jammed his eyes shut. “I can’t stand it. You. On the streets. This… this is real… a horror story. I mean, it’s not your fault, or anybody’s, but it’s so stinking lousy—”

  “It’s actually your fault,” I said as a joke, but my throat choked me, and he started blubbering into his hands.

  “C-come on,” I said. “I screwed up. I was a jerk. I keep being one. You had your stuff. We were both… you know… just never mind. I don’t get any of it. We’re here now, so let’s just go.”

  “No, you go. You go. I’ll stay here.”

  “You’ll stay here? Here?” I looked at the rain and the cars and the shadows and I shivered. “Without me you’ll be dead by—what time is it?”

  He checked his phone. “Nine thirteen.”

  “By quarter after nine you’ll be dead. Two minutes. You’re just not that smart. It’s an hour or more to the hospital. We need to keep going.”

  The air turned icy. The streetlights made the wet streets and sidewalks swim beneath our feet. It was raining needles on our faces. He wiped his. I wiped mine. That was it. Tom Bender and me on the streets.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE COLD AND THE PAIN

  An hour is an hour is an hour except in the rain. Then it’s two hours.

  “Either that hospital keeps moving,” Tom said, “or we zigged so much we zagged ourselves lost.”

  I gave him a look. “Uh-huh. Or we don’t want to get where we’re going.”

  “Or all of the above. Plus, did you notice, the rain is turning. My father talked about snow. It’ll be falling full blast in about… there. A flake. Another one. Is snow better or worse for us? It can snow above the freezing point, did you know that—”

  “How can your brain keep bouncing around like this? Are you ADHD?”

  “It’s true. It’s been known to snow as high as forty-nine deg—”

  “You go from crying your eyes out—”

  “I wasn’t crying, that was rain on my fa
ce.”

  “—to joking dumb facts about science—”

  “Science isn’t dumb.”

  “I’m gonna scream!”

  “Psychologists say—”

  Someone yelled. A guy on the next corner waved his arms, I don’t know at who or what. Something was going on. A car shooshed fast down the sloppy street. Then a quick rush of other cars, like a gang was chasing somebody. Downtown Bridgeport. Maybe this is what Mom meant. Everything was icy jagged black and the snow was coming wet and big and splattering the sidewalk. Gunning engines, then the cutting whoop-whoop of a police siren from a few blocks away. A van was suddenly racing, or maybe skidding, I turned and slipped off the sidewalk into the street, landing on my hand, while my cheek and ear smacked the curb and I screamed. The van veered away. Tom yanked me up by the arm I was trying to hold my head together with.

  “Oww! My ear! Let me go!”

  The sidewalk seemed all of a sudden pitched at a weird angle. I tried to palm snow onto my face with my scraped hand. Bloody water dripped down my neck. It felt like someone was jamming a chopstick into my head and my ear shrieked like a real herd of dragons. I tried to get my balance but fell to my knees and threw up instead. It was nothing but tomatoes, but must have looked like guts to Tom.

  “Holy gross! Who did you eat?”

  He tugged me to the end of the block and into a kind of alley between some apartment buildings where it was his turn to slip in the mush. He fell on his elbow and screamed and cursed. I laughed. “You too!” Cars screeched around corners. Bass thundered from sound systems. It felt like we were in a war zone. I threw open the lid of a giant trash bin to make a kind of tent behind the bin, and pulled Tom under it, tripping over my own feet and accidentally stepping on his hurt arm.

  He groaned. “Oww! You idiot—”

  “You are.”

  We huddled under the open lid of the trash bin, waiting for the pop-pop of gunshots, which I was certain would come. They didn’t. Just an engine revving and, oddly, people laughing. We stayed put until the cars quieted and the loud bass drifted away and it was only the two of us. Nothing happened. Just people, moving around. Downtown life. My ear was a grinding ache now. I was tired and too frozen to move.

  The alley that Tom had found was narrow, unlit, and night fell around us darker than ever, with white flakes dropping wet and fast onto the black pavement. By now his phone was dead. We didn’t know the time. My head was a burning lump.

  Somehow, under that funky metal tent, pain rolling through me, my legs and arms went limp and I drifted off. Not sleep, but exhaustion. I’d been moving every second since I woke up, hiding like an idiot at school, the trek to the hotel, Mom slipping on the stairs, my smelly house, this. The heaviness finally fell over me like a lead blanket.

  I guess the two of us under there were warm enough, because in my dream I was inside. It lasted, what, ten minutes, two hours? I only know I smelled soup and went looking for it in the same mall as the public toilets from my other dream, which was fairly gross but at least I knew the places not to go in. When I woke up, my mind was gray, blank, dull, heavy.

  “Do you smell soup?” I said, feeling crusty blood on my cheek.

  “Yeah,” he grumbled. “Duck soup.” He was holding his arm in a weird position and rubbing his elbow and now his shoulder. “So I guess you’re not dead.”

  “Not so fast. Maybe I am. That would explain why everything’s so dark.”

  “I found a tarp in the trash. I hung it.”

  “Like curtains.”

  “All the comforts of—”

  “Don’t. What time do you think it is?”

  He looked at his wrist. “Tuesday.”

  Stretching as much as I could, I pushed the tarp aside and hobbled out from under our roof. The snow had stopped but it was frigid, and what had fallen had stuck to the pavement. Everything was white and clean. The white streets rutted with black ribbons, the black brick outlined in white. The air seemed bright because of it, and the lights on the main street reflected clearly off the snow. We stumbled our way together to the corner, turned, turned again, and saw it, the hospital, a big white hazy glow and nearer than we had thought.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Carry me?” he said.

  “In your dreams.”

  “No, I was thinking for real.”

  I wobbled forward like an old man. “Just keep going!”

  CHAPTER 41

  IN THE WHITE WORLD

  Walking in the white world, step after step, we were finally near enough to the hospital to see people out front. It beamed clean and warm like its own city on a hill.

  “Final push,” he said, hunching his shoulders. “Right, left, right—”

  All at once, a car was honking its brains out on the street behind us. Tom jerked around to watch. The car started to skid. I pulled him off the sidewalk as it bounced to a stop at the curb. The window slid down and a head popped out.

  “Tom! Tom!”

  It was Rich Downing, his mouth hanging open, his ski hat half off his head.

  Mrs. Downing tore out from behind the wheel. “—been out of my mind! The police are looking for you! Everyone’s looking for you. Jeff?” She seemed half surprised, half angry. “What in the world are you doing here? What happened to your face?”

  “I fell—”

  “We were together,” Tom said, turning to me, then back. “I’m sorry I left, Mrs. Downing. It was dumb. I went to Jeff’s house, then we got scared, and it wasn’t supposed to take this long, or be long at all. Then Jeff mashed up the side of his head. I think he looks better this way—”

  “Get in, both of you,” she said.

  Rich scrambled around to open the back door for us and we slid in, stiff and achy and soaking.

  “Tom, I’m calling your dad,” Mrs. D said, tapping her phone. “Jeff, where’s your mother?”

  “There.” I pointed out the window. “The hospital.”

  Rich gasped. “Holy crow! What happened?”

  As he waited for me to speak, his face was open and bright and taking it all in and I think I saw Rich for the first time. I wanted to answer, but the words pushed up from my throat to my chest in a hot, wet lump. My face must have looked dumb because I felt it crack in half, as if it were made out of cheap plastic. I cried, sloppy blubbery sobs down my cheeks, and I cried about my mother and the drinking and the cold and everything.

  Tom translated. “His mother broke her foot. Jeff thinks it might have been her foot—”

  “Why didn’t you go with her?” Rich asked me.

  “She told me to run and I did. Because she was drinking.”

  I said this or thought I did or it was a mess of sounds no one understood. But whatever I said, Tom nodded. “Yeah, pretty much a disaster, huh? We’re sorry.”

  “Okay, okay,” Mrs. Downing said. “First things first. Tom, we’re taking you home.”

  A half hour later, Tom’s father was half running, half sliding down their snowy driveway to the car. He pulled us both into a big hug.

  Tom moaned. “Ow. I slipped and banged my arm!”

  “And I slipped and fell on my ear!” I said.

  But the hug went on. “Come inside!” Mr. B said. “I called the police and told them you two had been together all night and that you were safe. Come in. Come in!”

  Mr. Bender must have had some kind of talk with Tom while I sat in the kitchen and they poked around for first-aid stuff for my scraped cheek and cut ear, which bled some but had stopped and was barely anything. Mr. B didn’t seem mad, only focused. He called the hospital; Mom was sleeping, so he said we’d go there, “first thing in the morning.”

  “Which is… only three and a half hours from now,” said Tom, pointing to the kitchen clock. “We almost made it.”

  Mr. Bender grumbled like we were wise guys but said nothing.

  Good thing I took the first shower. Tom took at least a half hour for his. His dad finally pounded on the bathroom door. “Hot
water doesn’t grow on trees, you know!”

  “Actually, a typical tree breathes out hundreds of gallons of water each day,” Tom called back. “It’s the large surface area of the leaves—”

  “Does he do this to you, too?” his dad asked me. I nodded. He rolled his eyes. “Get. Out. Now!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  I wandered into Tom’s room while his father tossed a cot together for me, shaking the covers and smacking the pillow like you’re supposed to.

  When Tom finally appeared from the bathroom, he sank onto his bed and only mumbled a few words before he started breathing heavily.

  That cot was the best bed I’d ever had. Sleep was a warm ocean all night long. I took my time waking up, letting sleep pull away slowly like an outgoing tide. It didn’t last. I heard the phone jangle a couple of times and knew it was over. After a quiet breakfast of eggs and toast, we drove through the sun-white streets to the hospital.

  CHAPTER 42

  HOSPITAL

  Tom and his father stayed out in the hall.

  The nurse said it wasn’t just a fractured foot that Mom had. When they brought her in, her blood pressure was very low and her blood alcohol was high, way over two times something, so they were keeping her for a couple of days.

  That, and because she had no one at home to take care of her, or even a home.

  She was better this morning, the nurse said, and her vital signs were nearly back to normal. She was “on meds now,” but didn’t say exactly what kind, not that I’d know what meds did what.

  I stood frozen at the door, not going in. No one said anything to me, no one forced me. I could enter or not enter. I understood, or thought I did, that everything I did or didn’t do, or said or didn’t say, was suddenly important and different from Mom’s choices. Some things were actually up to me. Maybe there wasn’t any stopping much of what was going to happen to either of us, but what I did, what I chose, would mean something.