Pressing was a barbaric method of execution in which increasingly heavy rocks were loaded on the accused’s chest until they pled guilty to their crime or suffocated to death. The French called it peine forte et dure—hard and forceful punishment. Mrs. Barnes, with her limited imagination, tried to describe the process of being pressed to death. Of the air being driven from Corey’s lungs by the immovable weight balanced atop his chest. The panic as he struggled to draw a breath and realized his chest and lungs lacked the strength. The parched, dry-mouthed gasps as his defiant but futile efforts earned him barely a wisp of air—enough to keep him alive, though few would call it living. And then, another stone pushing Giles Corey’s soul inches closer to the infinite void beyond.
According to Mrs. Barnes, Giles Corey took two days to die. I hadn’t thought about him since we’d completed the unit on the Salem witch trials. Back then he was little more than the answer to an exam question that, once bubbled in, became irrelevant in my world. But standing in the shower, thinking about my life—about Tommy and Lua and my parents and Renny and even Calvin Frye—I remembered poor Giles Corey.
Tommy was gone, and I had no idea how to find him; Lua was preparing to launch into her glorious new future; my only hope of escaping Cloud Lake rested in the hands of faceless admissions officers scattered across the country, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to go; my brother was days from marching toward danger when he should have been running from it; my parents’ marriage was irredeemably broken; the universe was shrinking; and the only person I thought might understand my problems sought relief from his own unknown-to-me problems by cutting himself.
Despite my efforts, my life had become a hard and forceful punishment. Troubles rose from the quarry of my mind—a metric ton of failure and fear—and stacked atop my chest, each worry heavier than the last. A stone for my parents, a stone for college, a stone for Tommy, a stone for Calvin and Lua and the shrinking universe. I stood in the shower, just me and Giles Corey, buried under all those stones, struggling to breathe.
Except, I refused to quit. I was determined to find Tommy and leave Cloud Lake, I would not allow Lua and I to drift apart, Warren was going to survive the military and come home, and my parents’ divorce would not destroy our family. Those stones crushed me, and I fought for every inhalation, but they were not going to kill me. Not if I didn’t let them.
Giles Corey remained brave until the end. He said to his executioners what I stood in the shower and said to life: More weight.
? ? ?
Mom had left early for the office, and I hadn’t heard Dad come home the night before, but their constant fighting had polluted the house. The echoes of their anger remained, and I needed a break from it before it permanently seeped into my bones.
Lua was busy rehearsing with the band for her show at a/s/l on New Year’s Eve and didn’t have time to hang out, and Dustin’s parents had dragged him to upstate New York for their annual guilt trip to visit his grandparents, which left Calvin Frye as my only viable option. If I could’ve hung out with anyone else, I would have. I’d texted him under the pretense of working on our physics project, half expecting him to not reply, but he’d messaged me his address and invited me over.
Calvin lived in a cookie-cutter subdivision filled with rows of identical townhouses nestled so closely together they looked like dominoes set up to be knocked over. Almost nothing distinguished one from the other, and I drove past Calvin’s unit twice before finding it. I parked in the empty driveway and sat in my car debating whether to stay or bail.
In the span of six months my boyfriend had vanished from his home and from the minds of everyone who knew him, I’d tried to run away to find him and had nearly died in a plane crash, and the universe was shrinking. Spending time with Calvin meant the possibility of inviting his problems into my life, but I couldn’t carry the weight of my own alone anymore, and I thought maybe Calvin was desperate enough for a friend that we could bear them together.
I made up my mind, grabbed my backpack, and walked toward his house.
Calvin answered the door wearing swim trunks and a tank top. I’d never seen him out of his jeans-and-hoodie uniform. It was like he’d molted. His skin was pasty white, but his arms—which were lined with scabs and scars—and legs were braids of taut, wiry muscle. I wasn’t a wrestling fan, but I found it difficult in that moment not to imagine him in his tight spandex uniform.
“Sorry about the mess,” Calvin said when he stood aside to let me in. “It’s just me and my dad, and we both hate cleaning.”
The inside of the townhouse wasn’t exactly filthy, but no sane person would have called it clean—half-empty cups stood on the coffee table, and heaps of unfolded laundry lay on the kitchen table. Lua’s house was messy too, but where the Novak house felt lived in, Calvin’s felt neglected.
“Whatever,” I said.
“Want something to drink? I could make coffee.”
My brain reminded me I hadn’t slept well the last few days, and I nodded. “That sounds great, actually.”
I hung around the kitchen while Calvin brewed a pot of coffee in a dirty machine that looked older than my mother—definitely older than her boyfriend. A mountain of dirty dishes rose out of the sink, threatening to topple, and I kept my arms at my sides because the one time I touched the counter, my hand came away sticky.
Armed with plastic tumblers of black coffee—all the mugs were dirty—Calvin led me upstairs to his room.
I’m not sure how I’d expected Calvin’s bedroom to be decorated. Maybe like a cross between Renny’s room—without the comic books and action figures—and Tommy’s—which had been more of a closet, with a mattress on the floor and his belongings piled in a corner—but with black walls and depressing poems or song lyrics framed and hung for all to see. The reality was something of a letdown. The walls were flat white and his twin bed sat perpendicular to the far wall, a nightstand on one side. A clean desk stood in front of the window, with a rolling stool to sit on. And nothing else. Calvin’s room was spartan, ascetic. No trinkets or posters or anything to indicate his hobbies or dreams, which was still depressing but in a different way.
“Did you just move in?” I asked, trying to make a joke.
Calvin shook his head. “Possessions are distractions.”
“Are you a Buddhist or something?”
“Or something.” He sat on the stool. “You said you wanted to work on our project?”
I had said that, and it was partly true. We needed to make some progress on our roller coaster to show Ms. Fuentes when we returned from Christmas break. Besides, I still wasn’t certain I should discuss my problems with Calvin. I’d been worried about inviting his troubles into my life, but maybe he had enough issues without me burdening him with my own.
“Yeah.” I dug the crumpled pages I’d worked on out of my backpack and handed them over.
Calvin studied them, nodding as he traced the lines with his fingers. “These are good.” He stopped at a barrel roll I’d added and said, “I’m not sure this will work. Let’s test it.” He grabbed his laptop and wheeled to the bed, where he popped it open and started working. A few minutes later he turned the laptop toward me to show off a 3-D wire-frame replica of our roller coaster.