Stupid Fast

Chapter 25: WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM, OFFICER?




The last like week and a half of June slid by without terrible incident. Jerri wasn’t even remotely normal, but she wasn’t exactly hostile either. She just didn’t do mother stuff or Jerri stuff.

Mostly, she stayed in her room in bed or out in the living room on the couch. She read what appeared to be romance novels or sort of sex novels, judging from the covers (lots of bare-breasted muscle men with long hair carrying half-naked ladies). They were library books, so I know she must have left the house at some point, but I didn’t see her leave.

Reading these books was definitely, totally out of character for her. But so? She’d spent years reading philosophy books and spirituality books and poetry books. Look where it got her, I thought. She didn’t have any friends. Her not talking to Andrew and me was weird. But okay. Talking to us clearly got her nowhere too. Her not mowing the lawn was really weird. But not that big a deal. I sort of thought she was doing what I was doing—trying on a whole new lifestyle. Good for her!

Yeah.

Andrew thought it was a huge deal.

“She’s completely lost her mind,” he told me.

You’ve lost your mind, Andrew. I didn’t say that out loud.

He sort of had lost his mind. Jerri wouldn’t let his friends come over, and she wouldn’t let him play piano because it apparently rattled her nerves, and he didn’t go anyplace, although I’m sure he was free to go, and he started winding up really hard. Every time I saw him, he called me a name or slung some kind of serious insult at me. I considered telling him to take a chill pill because he was such a jerk.

I don’t know.

Jerri stopped cooking and stopped grocery shopping, which was a problem. Andrew and I ate bread and cheese for the most part. Then cans of kidney beans, then green beans, then peas. Then cans of corn, which we don’t like. Then there wasn’t a single can of anything in the cupboard except sauerkraut, which I eyeballed but didn’t open.

“You going to get groceries anytime soon?” I asked Jerri one afternoon when she was lying in bed reading.

She looked up from her book. Looked at me all confused. Shook her head like she was trying to shake out the cobwebs and then looked back down and started reading without saying a word.

“Jesus Christ,” I hissed.

Okay, I was worried.

Huge thistles grew. They grew up like three feet high in one week and were here and there all over the yard and a lot in the garden. They were taller than any of the plants Jerri put in during spring (yes, she’d stopped gardening).

“Those thistles remind me of you,” Andrew said one morning late in June when I rolled up on my bike after the paper route. He was digging around in boxes Jerri had piled in the corner of the garage years ago. “You grew really fast, and you’re ugly.”

“Andrew, come on. That’s not very nice.”

“So sorry. Really I am.”

“What are you looking for?”

“The key to life as we know it.”

“What? You’re weird as hell.”

“So?” he shouted, standing straight and turning toward me. He breathed hard and glared over his plastic nerd glasses. His cheeks were red. I didn’t say anything, but I stared hard back at him. He turned and went back to work sifting through junk, his little skinny body bent in an awkward looking way, his legs spread wide. “Are you going to football practice again?” he asked.

“Weights. Weight lifting. I have to change.”

“Can I come?” he asked without looking up.

“You want to come with me to weights?”

“I really should leave the property at some point.”

“Why don’t you visit your friends?”

“What friends?”

“Music friends.”

“Janie left with her parents for the summer. She’s the only one with a serviceable piano.”

“You’ve got other friends.”

“I don’t,” Andrew spat, turning his head, glaring. “I don’t have friends, okay?”

“Okay. Whatever. You can’t come to weights with me. You’re too young. You’d hate it up there anyway. It smells bad.”

“You smell bad.”

I felt heat rise in my face, but I really didn’t want to fight poor Andrew.

“I know. I’m a jock. Jocks smell, right?”

“Very bad,” he nodded.

“Fine,” I said. I went inside, slamming the door, and changed into lifting clothes. When I got back out to the garage, Cody was pulling up the driveway. Andrew was still digging through junk.

“Your smelly friend is here,” Andrew said without looking up.

“I know. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“Yes, you will, Felton. I’ll be here with Jerri sex book, digging through dirt piles, trying to find the key.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let’s roll,” Cody shouted.

“Never mind, Felton.”

Andrew was very irritating, okay?

Ken Johnson wasn’t at weights that morning, and that meant I could be totally free to concentrate and pump iron because I loved pumping iron and that second week of lifting, I could already feel this big difference—like my arms were muscley jungle snakes that could crush stuff. Yo, check out my pythons! And I just wanted to lift more and more weight.

After weights, Cody threw passes to just me and Karpinski. We went up on the field furthest from the school, where we could see the big M, the big Mound, the big bluff east of town where Dad jogged all those years ago (and I ate a rock), and me, Karpinski, and Cody just did pattern after pattern. Because Cody didn’t have a baseball game until Monday of the next week, he threw and threw and threw, and we ran and ran and then Karpinski fell over because he was going to barf if he ran anymore, and I just kept running and catching and running and catching, never dropping the ball, never stopping, not thinking at all. It was seriously like breathing to me, like taking a big breath and letting it slide out. Run, catch, run, catch, breathe, breathe, run, catch, and nothing else existed except the ground, my legs, my hands, the ball. I could’ve gone on forever. Cody could’ve too. We wouldn’t have stopped except Karpinski shouted, “Goddamn it, I’m hungry! Aren’t you done yet? Let’s get the hell out of here!”

He sort of woke me up. I sort of felt like I was in a trance.

“That was awesome,” Cody said.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“Recruiters’ wet dream,” he said.

Then we went to Walmart to get a sandwich and water.

Karpinski shouted out the window the whole way, at everyone, everything, people, cars, trucks, dogs.

“Hey, dawg,” he shouted at a barking dog, which was jumping behind a chain-link fence on Mineral Street. “You want a piece of me, dawg?”

The owner was on the front stoop of the house.

“You leave my dog alone!” he shouted as we rolled past

“Stick it in your ass!” Karpinski shouted, hanging out the window, flipping the bird back at the man.

“Jesus Christ, stop,” Cody said. “My dad’s a damn cop.”

At Walmart, I got an extra couple of sandwiches for Andrew. Thank God for my stupid, ridiculous paper route so I had money. I left them on Andrew’s bed. I saw him sitting at the dirty kitchen table eating them late in the afternoon, but he didn’t say thanks or anything. I walked down the hall and listened to Jerri breathing in her bedroom.

That night, I drove over to Karpinski’s with Cody to grill and watch an old football movie. Karpinski wouldn’t shut up. While we ate burgers that Karpinski’s mom (big hair lady, wears short shorts) grilled for us, Karpinski talked and talked and talked and talked, and everything that came out of his mouth was so stupid that I sort of felt like choking him to put him out of his misery.

“Shelby Adams is pretty hot, don’t you think? She’s got a big ass, but I like a big ass because what’s the point of a small ass. You might as well be dating your little skinny ass brother, and the last thing I’m going to think about when I’m all over Shelby Adams is your little brother, Rein Stone, so stop talking about him when I’m trying to talk about a chick’s ass. Just kidding, man. You know I’m kidding. You know who else is hot is that Katie Koehler. She’s going to be a freshman. You know her? Her ass is small, but I’m okay with that if…” and on and on and on and on. I chewed and nodded. Cody just chewed and looked across the yard.

And the freaking football movie? Even though I couldn’t really hear it because Karpinski was talking (“That’s a helluva hit—remember when I hit Bennett in the Dodgeville game? That was that kind of hit), I could see it fine. Pretty much horrible. There was some running and catching, which I like—high-arching passes in slow motion across the big blue sky—but it was mostly close-ups of total brutality times like five hundred, and there was a lot of blood and broken legs and noses and snot and stuff. Even though the movie was supposed to show how cool football is, I think, it more showed how terrible it is and how mean and mad everybody who plays football is. I totally loved running and catching a football but actually playing football? I didn’t like the idea of broken noses and snot and blood pouring out everywhere.

Thankfully, on the way home, while he drove, Cody shouted over the sound of night air blowing in through the windows, “Football’s not really like that at all, Reinstein.”

“What?” I shouted.

“Football isn’t that crazy. Your legs aren’t going to get broken,” he called.

“Yeah, but, isn’t that Jay Landry dude from St. Mary’s Springs going to try to break my legs?”

“Sort of, but legs just don’t break that easy, man. I’ve been playing tackle since Pee Wee, since I was seven, and I’ve never gotten hurt even a little other than getting the wind knocked out of me.”

“Oh. That’s good to hear, man.” The hot wind blew in. What did he mean wind knocked out?

Then Cody smiled big and looked at me.

“Karpinski never shuts up, does he?”

“No.”

“Did you notice?” Cody asked.

“What?”

He started laughing.

“My experiment?”

“What?” I started laughing too, even though I didn’t know why.

“I wondered if I could go to Karpinski’s house, have supper, watch a movie, and leave without saying a single word.”

“Did you?”

“Not one word in like four hours!”

“I didn’t notice!”

“Not even hi or bye!”

“I didn’t notice!”

“How could you? Karpinski never shuts up.” Cody smiled huge.

And he completely cracked me up. Totally hilarious. I really liked Cody. Seriously. He sort of made me like Karpinski too.

When he dropped me off, he said, “See you tomorrow, brother.”

Speaking of brothers: Andrew was digging in the storage area under the stairs when I got home. That wasn’t a surprise. But something did catch me off guard: my TV wasn’t on the stand in the basement.

“What did you do to the TV, Andrew?” I hissed.

“Jerri took it,” Andrew responded, still digging through crap.

“She took my TV?”

“I’m working here, assface,” Andrew said, continuing to dig.

I went to bed and looked at the football team’s playbook Coach Johnson gave me a couple of days earlier. I tried to figure out all these crazy arrows and Xs and Os that were supposed to show where me and the other players were supposed to run. It looked like algebra and geometry combined, and it made me tired, which was good because I was so mad about the TV that I didn’t think I could sleep. What gives you the right to just take my TV? It’s always been mine. It’s mine, Jerri. Mine! Cody told me I wouldn’t really figure it all out until we were on the field in pads and helmets when there’d be a defense there trying to break my legs, like Jay Landry is going to break my legs, except legs don’t break that easy. But he might knock my wind out, which doesn’t sound very pleasant at all because I need my wind—wind is breath, wind is air, wind in the clouds. I fell asleep.

***

Outside of spending a ton of time with Cody and Karpinski doing football stuff (and listening to Karpinski rant and rant), I spent a lot of time with Aleah the last week of June. Both weekends at the end of June, because she didn’t practice on weekends, we hung out a lot, taking walks all over town (yes, townies shouted at us, which Aleah loved), eating stuff she made, watching movies (all of it at her house because I didn’t want her to see what was going on at mine).

She still didn’t get out of bed until about dinnertime on weekends, so we did everything at night.

In a way, the fact that Jerri was sort of out of it was really good because she didn’t know or care where I was. If I was out until 2 a.m. before, she would’ve totally freaked. She had no idea where I was. She probably didn’t even notice I was gone. Jerri took my TV and then it was on in her bedroom twenty-four hours a day, and there was no way she could hear me come and go.

I spent most of the weekday mornings with Aleah too. (Probably like two out of every three days, she’d stop practicing by the time I got to her house.) She rode on the back of my bike when she went, and we got good at it. I’d accelerate really hard, and she’d hold on and scream and laugh. One time, she even said, “My football player is so strong,” which totally made me happy because I liked being somebody I’d never been before; someone not connected to what was happening at home; somebody who is obviously not a Reinstein because, I thought, Reinsteins aren’t football-playing powerhouses who make their girlfriends squeal with the massive power of their god-like thighs!

We never smashed up after the first day, though, which was kind of sad because I never had a chance to roll over and kiss her, which I really, really wanted to do. I spent almost all my non-football time when I wasn’t actually with her thinking about kissing her: when I biked, when I tried to sleep, when I watched Andrew digging through boxes. I began to worry that I’d never ever get another chance to kiss her. I mean, Jesus, how are you supposed to kiss somebody if you haven’t fallen over on the ground? Tickle fight? Tickle her. Tickle her. I didn’t tickle her because it didn’t seem respectful.

Hi, I’m Felton Reinstein, football player on the outside; Squirrel Nut Donkey Ass on the inside.

Of course, I didn’t come up with the solution. Aleah did.

The last Saturday of June, we watched Casablanca in her/Gus’s basement. We watched that particular movie because her dad was writing a paper about it and had the DVD. When Rick, the old dude in the movie, kissed the young beautiful one, Aleah totally grabbed me and kissed me. Then we kissed for a while until we heard Ronald get up and walk across the living room.

Then Aleah stared at me and said, “Haven’t you wanted to kiss me?”

“Yeah, I think about it all the time.”

“Why haven’t you kissed me?”

“Uhh, I didn’t want to seem like a dork?” Of course, I totally seemed like a dork by saying that.

“Don’t worry about being a dork with me,” Aleah said. “I’m a dork.”

“Okay.”

Then she got really serious. “When you ask me questions, do I hold anything back?”

“I don’t think so.” She clearly didn’t. She talked about everything.

“You hold back though. Is that because you’re worried about being a dork?”

“I don’t hold back. I talk! When don’t I talk?”

“When I ask how your mom is, you just say fine.”

“Because.”

“Because?”

“Because she’s fine.”

“And when I ask how exercise went…”

“Weight lifting.”

“Whatever! When I ask how that was, you say pretty good.”

“It’s just lifting crap. It isn’t very interesting.”

“I’m interested.”

“Why?”

“Because I like you.”

“Why?” Here we go, Gus. I’ll give it to you.

Aleah paused. She looked at me and didn’t say anything.

“Because I’m mysterious and you like mystery?”

“No. Because you come from a musical family and…”

“I’m not musical, Aleah.” This isn’t good. If she knew about my family.

“That’s not what I’m saying. I like you because you’re really gentle and…”

Blood rushed to my face. My eyes watered. I was so embarrassed. What kind of kid am I that a girl would call me gentle?

“You’re blushing.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Don’t be embarrassed, Felton. After the year I just had with my mom, I really love gentle.”

I looked down.

“I don’t mean you’re weak because you’re not. I know you’re not.”

I looked back up.

“How do you know?”

“Because what you went through with your dad and how you just seem like a normal kid who likes football, and you’re not all messed up. That’s strong.”

Then Aleah touched my face. Then she kissed me again. I was really aware of her face being so close to mine. Her face was right up against mine. She smelled like lilac bushes. We kissed for a while longer until Ronald, her dad, called down the stairs, “Getting real late, kids.”

I biked home through cool 2 a.m. air thinking about being gentle and about how I’m strong.

***

When I got home, I found Andrew awake with junk spread out all over the basement room where the TV used to be.

He looked up at me. His face was pale. He had dark circles under his eyes.

“I don’t think there’s a single picture of our father in the whole house, Felton,” he said. “Jerri got rid of him.”

This wasn’t news to me. I knew that. I remembered the bonfire.

“So?” I said.

“So?” Andrew snarled. “You don’t care what happened to our dad? That’s repulsive. I’m going to ask her. I’m going to ask.”

“Ask what? I found him hanging. I know what happened.”

“I’m going to ask her the hard questions!” Andrew shouted.

“Do whatever you want, Andrew.” I slammed the door to my room and put on music.

I didn’t feel very gentle.