Stupid Fast

Chapter 16: WE COULD ONLY SEE EACH OTHER, SERIOUSLY




Yeah, what a huge day.

From the bathroom where I’d just applied deodorant to my entire body, I heard Aleah and her father enter my house. I’d had no intention of “visiting” with them. Before. But wasn’t I large? Wasn’t I a Division I football prospect? I dunked a basketball. Holy Christ, I dunked a freaking basketball! I liked what Cody said too. I had to carry myself like an athlete. Jesus.

Before doing anything, I went into my bedroom to check email. Surely Gus would have written something hilarious by now. I opened it up. Nothing. Where the hell was Gus?

I wrote: beautiful piano girl from your bedroom is upstairs in my house.

From downstairs in my bedroom, I could hear Jerri play cheery, although I knew she was not.

“Oh, wonderful! Oh, lovely! What a beautiful dress!” She actually sounded kind of psycho (not surprising). I couldn’t hear Andrew at all, which made me think he was acting strange, probably just staring unblinkingly at Aleah from behind his plastic nerd frames and thinking about how jealous he was of her.

If I let Andrew and Jerri represent the family, there was no way I could face Aleah Jennings, super genius, at her house for the rest of the summer.

Om shanti shanti shanti, I mumbled. Then I slapped myself in the face. No, no, no! Not freaky om shanti! I am big. I am huge. I am an athlete.

I stood straight. I broadened my shoulders. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror that hung on my bedroom door. I said, “I am really big.” What was weird was this: I looked really big. For real. I looked like a young man you might believe is fast. I clenched my jaw and glared and looked sort of mean and ugly and, potentially, sort of smelly, which was accurate.

***

You know, I’ve never had any particular dislike for people who play sports. When I was little, I even watched football on TV. Green Bay Packers. I asked for a Brett Favre jersey once for my birthday (a request Jerri totally ignored—I believe she got me a Shel Silverstein poetry book that year). I’ve watched basketball too. I like big dunks. Sure, jocks smell funny. But animals don’t smell good, and I never blamed them for that fact. It’s nature. I never would’ve even cared that Ken Johnson played sports if he didn’t knock me off my damn bike when he was the one who parked half sideways in the swimming pool parking lot. Yes, it pissed me off that jocks called Gus names and me names and that Karpinski broke Sam Peterson’s finger in seventh grade (I’m sure on purpose, but he never got in trouble for it). None of that has to do with sports. I don’t mind sports. I like sports. I can be good at sports.

In the mirror, I expanded my chest, stood straight, and said, “I am huge.”

***

Two minutes later, I’d thrown on sweats (not to look like a jock but because all my pants were too short and they made me feel dumb) and I was upstairs, ready to face Aleah and her dad, to show that Reinsteins aren’t just a bunch of freaks.

I walked into the living room. Jerri and Aleah’s dad were sitting in the leather chairs talking about the college or something. Not a terrible scene. Aleah, who was wearing an orange sort of airy kind of sundress and looked completely, utterly awesome, sat across the coffee table from Andrew. They weren’t saying anything.

“Hello,” I said and smiled while I walked in.

“It’s the paperboy,” Aleah’s dad said. “You look bigger in the daytime.”

“I’m growing,” I told him.

“You do look tall,” Jerri said, then stared at me and cocked her head a little. She breathed out really hard. “Umm, I guess you’ve met Aleah?”

“Yeah,” I smiled.

Aleah’s mouth was open. Her eyes were watery. She looked sort of stunned.

“Uh, hi…you…”

“Hi. It’s Felton,” I said.

“Hi, Felton,” she said.

And then I blushed. I couldn’t take my eyes off her eyes. We were in this tractor beam of eyeball heat.

“I could be a zookeeper,” Andrew blurted. “That wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I could pick up animal poop all day. I’d be happy working at the zoo.”

“Oh,” Aleah sort of whispered, still looking at me.

“I could be a veterinarian or an astronaut or a…” Andrew nodded.

“Andrew. Have you played anything for Aleah?” I asked without looking at him.

“That’d be great, Andrew. Play something for me,” Aleah said without taking her eyes off mine.

“I wouldn’t want to be a medical doctor. I don’t like people,” Andrew said. Then, he got up and played piano.

Andrew is really good. People hear him and they can’t believe he’s thirteen. He’s small, like I’d always been before the fur growth, but with big hands (I also have really big hands), and he puts his face close to the keys and looks up at the music and then back at the keys, which is sort of intriguing because it is so odd, and it seems impossible a tiny guy, so frail, can get so much sound out of a giant piano.

Neither Aleah nor I heard a single note he played. He must’ve played for ten minutes while Aleah and I stared at each other.

Then Jerri applauded and Aleah’s dad said, “Boy’s got chops.” Then there were crackers and cheese, which I didn’t eat. Andrew talked and Aleah nodded. I made a joke and Aleah laughed. Her dad laughed. Jerri laughed, not in a psycho way but in the sort of sweet, singy way she used to laugh. Aleah and I looked at each other.

“I don’t miss Chicago so much today,” she said.

“I don’t miss my old friend Gus that much,” I told her.

Aleah and I looked at each other. Andrew talked. Jerri and Aleah’s dad laughed. Jerri smiled huge. Andrew stopped talking. Andrew left the room. Jerri talked. Andrew came back dressed in his white orchestra jacket, wearing a bow tie. I laughed. Andrew played piano some more. Andrew bowed. Aleah and I looked at each other. Aleah’s dad said it was about that time. Aleah gave me her cell number and told me she’d be playing piano for me in the morning. I walked her to the door, and I guess her dad was with her, and I guess Jerri and Andrew were probably at the door too. But I honestly don’t remember. All I remember is Aleah walking to the car, backward walking so she could look at me and smile at me, and then she was gone. And I stared up the road, where dust from the Jenningses’ car hung in the summer air.

“Felton?” Jerri asked.

“Ass brain,” Andrew said.

“Hello,” I nodded at them both.