She doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen.
An hour after Brian’s frantic dive-bomb out the window, there’s a knock at my bedroom door. I say nothing, just flip on my desk light so she doesn’t find me sitting in the dark, where I’ve been since he left. I grab a pencil, start to draw, but my hand won’t stop shaking, so I can’t make a decent line.
“Noah, I’m coming in.”
All the blood in my body mad-dashes to my face as the door slowly opens. I want to die.
“I’d like to talk to you, honey,” she says in the same voice she uses when talking to Crazy Charlie, the town loon.
Whatever. Whatever. Whatever, I chant in my head, drilling the pencil into the pad. I’m hunched over the paper now, hugging it practically, so I don’t have to see her. Whole forests are burning out of control inside me. How come she doesn’t know to leave me alone for the next fifty years after what just happened?
Her hand touches my shoulder as she passes. I cringe.
From the bed where she’s sat down, she says, “Love’s so complicated, Noah, isn’t it?”
I go rigid. Why did she say that? Why is she using the word love?
I throw the pencil down.
“It’s okay what you’re feeling. It’s natural.”
A giant No slams through me. How does she know what I’m feeling? How does she know anything about anything? She doesn’t. She can’t. She can’t just barge into my most secret world and then try to show me around it. Get out, I want to holler at her. Get out of my room. Get out of my life. Get out of my paintings. Get out of everything! Blow back to your realm already and leave me alone. How can you take this experience away from me before I’ve even gotten to experience it? I want to say all these things but can’t make any words. I can hardly breathe.
Brian couldn’t either. He was hyperventilating after she left the room. His hands covering his face, his body all contorted, repeating, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” I was wishing he’d say something besides “Oh God!” but when he started talking, I changed my mind.
I’d never seen anyone act like that. He was sweating and pacing and his hands were in his hair like he was going to rip it all out. I thought he was going to take apart the walls, or me. I really thought he might kill me.
“So at my old school,” he said. “There was this kid on the baseball team. People thought, I don’t know. They saw that he went to some website or something.” His inside face had become his outside face and it was all knotted up. “They made it impossible for him to play. Every day, they found another way to mess with him. Then one Friday after school, they locked him in the storage closet.” He winced, as if remembering and I knew. I knew then. “All night long and the whole next day. A tiny, dark, disgusting airless space. His parents thought he was at the away game and someone told the coaches he was sick, so no one even looked for him. No one knew he was trapped in there.” His chest was heaving and I was remembering how he told me he didn’t used to have claustrophobia and now he did. “He was really good too, probably the best player on the team or could have been. And he didn’t even do anything. The guy just went to these sites and someone saw. Do you get it? Do you get what it would mean for me? The assistant captain? I want to be captain next year so maybe I can graduate early. No scholarship. No nothing. These guys aren’t”—he made finger quotes—“evolved. They’re not from Northern California. They don’t do all-day sits or draw pictures.” The dagger went straight in. “It’s brutal in a locker room.”
“No one will find out,” I said.
“You don’t know that. You remember that idiot cousin of Fry’s I nearly decapitated last summer, the one who looks like an ape? His little brother goes to my school. I thought I was hallucinating. He looks exactly like him.” He licked his bottom lip. “Anyone could’ve seen us the other day, Noah. Anyone. Fry could’ve and then . . . I didn’t even think about it I was so . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t get forced off this team. Can’t lose my athletic scholarship. We have no money. And this high school—the physics teacher’s an astrophysicist . . . I just can’t. I need to get a baseball scholarship for college. Have to.”
He came over to where I was standing. His face was crazy red and his eyes were too intense and he seemed about twelve feet tall and I didn’t know if he was going to kiss me or punch me. He took me by the T-shirt again except this time he balled a piece of it up in his fist and said, “It’s done with us. It has to be. Okay?”
I nodded and something really big and bright in me crushed to nothing in an instant. I’m pretty sure it was my soul.
“And it’s all your fault!” I spit out at my mother.
“What is, honey?” she says, alarmed.
“Everything! Don’t you see? You’ve crushed Dad. You banished him like a leper. He loves you! How do you think he feels all alone in that dying room breathing gray air and eating cold stale pizza and watching shows about aardvarks while you cook feasts and wear circus clothes and hum all the time and have the sun follow you around in the pouring rain? How do you think that makes him feel?” I can see I’ve hurt her and don’t care. She deserves it. “Who knows if he even has a soul left thanks to you?”
“What do you mean by that? I don’t understand.”
“Maybe you stomped it to nothing and now he’s hollow and empty, a shell with no turtle inside.”
Mom pauses. “Why would you say that? Do you feel that way sometimes?”
“I’m not talking about me. And you know what else? You’re not special. You’re just like everyone else. You don’t float or walk through walls and you never will!”
“Noah?”
“I always thought that you blew in from somewhere so cool, but you’re just regular. And you don’t make anyone happy anymore like you used to. You make everyone miserable.”
“Noah, are you done?”
“Mom.” I say it like bugs live in the word. “I am.”
“Listen to me.” The sudden sternness of her voice jars me. “I didn’t come in here to talk about me or about me and Dad. We can have those conversations, I promise, but not now.”
If I don’t look at her, she’ll drop it, she’ll disappear, and what she saw Brian and me doing will disappear with her. “You didn’t see anything,” I yell, completely out of control now. “Guys do that. They do. Whole baseball teams do it. Circle jerks, that’s what it’s called, you know?” I drop my head in my hands, filling them with tears.
She gets up, walks over to me, puts her hand under my chin, and lifts my face so I’m forced into the earnest hold of her eyes. “Listen to me. It takes a lot of courage to be true to yourself, true to your heart. You always have been very brave that way and I pray you always will be. It’s your responsibility, Noah. Remember that.”