Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Nine


Jeremy Fitch: An Overview





Jeremy Fitch came into our lives two months ago, the first day of freshman year. Sarah and I were rounded up with the rest of the ninth graders and herded into the auditorium, where we sat through a gamut of speeches from administrators about rules and more rules and the terrible things that would happen to us if we violated a single one of them. Following that, we heard a speech about school spirit from the captain of the football team and the head varsity cheerleader, the gist of which was, if you don’t have school spirit, forget about getting into the college of your choice.

I was wriggling in my seat, so eager was I to be filled with the spirit of Manneville High. I wanted to raise my hand and sign up for something—anything! everything!—right away. This was three days before the haystack-in-my-hair incident, three days before I’d walk cluelessly from class to class wondering why people were pointing at the back of my head and guffawing, three days before I’d stomp up the stairs to my room the minute I got home, yelling at my mom that I didn’t want to talk about high school ever again so she could just shut up about it right that very second.

The student body president, Megan Vanderbilt, came onstage to tell us how to Get Active. “There’s so much to do at Manneville High!” she exclaimed, and immediately I wanted to be student body president. I wanted to be Megan Vanderbilt, shiny and clean and pretty and involved.

Over the course of fifteen minutes, Megan brought out representatives of various clubs and let them do their thing. The Drama Club kids performed a two-minute skit, the debaters debated heatedly for ninety seconds. The last group to come up was the Manneville High School Jam Band. “These guys get together on Friday afternoons in the band room and just jam!” Megan said, sounding giddy and amazed. “And everybody’s welcome!”

And then, there he was, though we didn’t know his name yet. Jeremy Fitch, tall and lanky, his dark hair falling over his eyes as he strummed an electric guitar. He was wearing a gray Durham Bulls T-shirt under an unbuttoned blue flannel shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and low-top black Chucks, no socks. When he glanced up at the audience, his clear blue eyes seemed to look straight at me and Sarah, and he grinned for a second before bending over his guitar again.

Sarah elbowed me excitedly. “He was looking straight at us! What do you think that means?”

“He’s in love,” I replied. “But how ever can he choose between us?”

Sarah elbowed me again, but this time it hurt. “I’m serious. He really did smile at us.”

“They say sometimes when babies smile, it’s actually gas,” I said, refusing to take seriously that the cute boy onstage had singled me and Sarah out of the crowd. High school was shaping up to be the best time of my life, what with pep rallies and team spirit and all those wonderful, myriad ways to be involved, but there was no way it could be that good. But a few seconds later, it happened again. He raised his head, looked our way, and smiled a crooked smile that made me feel lightheaded.

“See? You saw that, right?” Sarah gripped my arm. “That look was definitely not a figment of my imagination.”

After the assembly ended, instead of heading directly to first period, Sarah and I took a right down hallway B and found the auditorium’s side door. We tried to look casual, like this was where we always hung out after school assemblies, just a couple of awesome babes chillin’. A few minutes later the members of the Jam Band straggled out, and there he was, whatever his name was, the cute guitar player of our dreams.

“That was great,” Sarah said to the cute guitar player as he passed us. “You sounded so good up there.”

The boy stopped, looked around at the other guys with his eyebrows raised, then turned back to Sarah. “Thanks,” he told her. “Do you play?”

“I’ve always wanted to play guitar,” she lied. “How good do you have to be to jam with you guys?”

“A lot of us really stink,” the boy said, laughing. “So you don’t have to be good at all. Too bad you don’t play bass, though. We could use a bass player.”

“Maybe I’ll try it,” Sarah said with a casual toss of her hair. “My name is Sarah Lyman, by the way.”

I stared at her, impressed by how cool she was acting. Sarah had always been better at talking to guys than I was, although she did have a tendency to lecture about the Clean Air Act and how we all needed to come to the aid of famine victims. Still, this exchange today, complete with casual hair tosses, was a new high.

A guy who’d been tapping a pair of drumsticks against a locker in a bored sort of way asked, “You related to Emma Lyman?”

Sarah nodded proudly. The cute guitar player guy grinned at her like he was seeing her for the first time.

“Awesome,” the drummer replied, and a couple of the other guys nodded.

Sarah put her hand on my shoulder to draw me into the conversation. “And this is my best friend, Janie. Janie Gorman. She’s a great singer.”

I glared at Sarah. I like to sing, but by no definition of the word am I a great or even very good singer. My talent is for singing along with CDs and songs on the radio. As long as another voice is coming out of a nearby speaker, I can hit a tune note for note. Turn the stereo off, my singing is toast. Not that I would admit that to the cute boy standing in front of me.

“I’m Jeremy,” the cute guitar player guy told me. “Come out and jam with us. We can always use singers. You need to bring your own mic and amp, though.”

I could feel my face turning red. “I’m not that great of a singer,” I mumbled. “Just sort of okay.”

Jeremy shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We’re not about quality control in Jam Band.”

“Dude, let’s go.” The drummer dragged his sticks down a trio of locker vents. “I’ve got things to do, people to see.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re an important guy.” Jeremy grabbed a drumstick and pointed it at us. “Definitely come out to jam sometime. We could use more girls.”

We waited until the Jam Banders were out of earshot before we began to dissect what had just happened.

“I am so learning how to play the bass!” Sarah declared to the hallway. “Not even Emma plays bass. It could totally be my thing.”

“But why did you tell him I could sing?” I complained. “Because I can’t, not really.”

Sarah plucked a few strings of an invisible instrument “Oh, yes, you can. You just get too uptight when other people are listening to you. When it’s just you fooling around, you sound great.”

“But if I tried to sing with the Jam Band, other people would be listening,” I pointed out.

“That’s a problem,” Sarah admitted. “But we’ll figure something out. In the meantime, it’s possible we’ve just encountered the cutest guy on the face of the planet.”

And thus, our obsession with Jeremy Fitch was born. He was a junior, we soon learned from digging through last year’s yearbook, and ran cross-country. And, as it turned out, his locker was just a few feet away from Ms. Morrison’s classroom, so if we timed it just right, we had a daily chance encounter with the man of our dreams.

We always timed it just right.

“You got your bass yet?” Jeremy asks today when he sees me and Sarah making a beeline for his locker. “We sure could use you.”

He says the same thing every day. His consistency is part of his charm.

“I’m still looking for one,” Sarah tells him. “Only, I wish somebody would make me a CD with really cool bass playing on it. You know, for inspiration.”

“I’ll get Monster to make you one,” Jeremy says as he works his locker combination. “He lives to make the mix tape.”

“Technically it would be a mix CD.” As always, Sarah is constitutionally unable to keep herself from correcting a perceived error. “Or a tape,” she amends quickly. “You say tomato, I say to-mah-to.”

“I say avocado,” Jeremy says, and bops Sarah on the head with his notebook. He turns. “What do you say, Motor-mouth? And when am I going to hear you sing?”

Before I can stammer out a reply, Jeremy slams shut his locker and is headed down the hallway. “Time to meander,” he calls to us over his shoulder, which is how he always says good-bye.

Sometimes I think Sarah and I are way more into Jeremy Fitch than he’s into us.

But that’s just a theory.

We stand in silence for a moment, the way we always do after Jeremy’s gone, letting whatever molecules he’s breathed into the atmosphere during our brief time together settle over us. I allow myself to believe for a few lovely seconds that maybe high school isn’t so awful after all, then await Sarah’s daily critique.

“I shouldn’t have said that about the mix CD, that was the first thing I did wrong. Why am I always doing stuff like that? Why can’t I just let things go?”

“Because you’re a perfectionist,” I suggest. “You can’t help yourself.”

Sarah sighs. “It’s true, I can’t.”

And then she shakes it off. “Okay, number two. I should have insisted Jeremy make the mix tape, not this Monster guy. Can somebody’s name really be Monster?”

“Probably a nickname,” I tell her, moving out of the way for a skinny kid whose locker I’m blocking. “I mean nobody’s going to name their kid ‘Monster.’ Nobody who’s sane, anyway.”

“They’re crazy as loons,” a voice booms. “That’s a fact.”

Sarah and I both jump. Standing in front of us—no, make that looming over us—is a Mack truck of a guy, six-two at the very least, in overalls and a tie-dyed T-shirt, his long red hair pulled into a ponytail. He shoves his hands in his pockets and leans back on his heels. “Monster Partin Monroe. It’s right there on the birth certificate. I’ll drive down to the county courthouse and get you a copy if you want.”

“Um, no, that’s okay,” I tell him, feeling my cheeks go hot with embarrassment. “But, uh, why?”

“Why ‘Monster’?”

I nod.

“You think I’m big now, you shoulda seen me when I was born. Thirteen pounds, six ounces.” Reaching out a long arm toward a locker a few feet to the left of me, he begins fiddling with the combination. “All my people are big. My grandaddy’s big, my daddy’s big, my mama’s big. We are, genetically speaking, just a goodly sized people.”

Sarah has seemingly been struck dumb for the last minute or so, but she finally finds her voice. “And do you play bass? Because Jeremy Fitch said you might make me a mix CD—uh, tape—of inspirational bass music.”

“He did, huh?” Monster grins as he pulls a solitary notebook from his locker. “By inspirational, do you mean that which inspires you to visions of God and all his angels?”

“No,” Sarah tells him. “I mean, music that will inspire me to play bass.”

This seems to stop Monster Monroe right in his tracks.

“You wanna play bass?”

Sarah nods. “For the Jam Band.”

“Ain’t that something?” Monster turns to me. “How ’bout you? You wanna play bass too?”

“Um, no,” I say. “I was sort of thinking about singing, I mean with the Jam Band and everything, but I probably won’t. I, uh, don’t really like to sing in front of other people.”

“You got to live bigger than that,” Monster admonishes me. To Sarah he says, “I’ll make you a mix. Teach you how to play bass, too, if you want. You got a bass already?”

“Not yet,” Sarah says. “I don’t actually know the first thing about finding a bass.”

Monster looks at us appraisingly. “So we got a singer who don’t really want to sing, and a bass player who don’t know how to get her hands on a bass. Y’all need help.”

Then he puts one hand on my shoulder and the other hand on Sarah’s and leads us down the hallway, the crowds parting like the Red Sea before us.