Jacob entered a classroom and walked down the second aisle to his seat in the back row, where he had been assigned by alphabet some months ago. Through the loudspeaker on the wall, the voice of Father Peter Flynn crackled, “All the time,” to which the two hundred twenty-four students of Deerfield Catholic replied, “God is great.” To which Father Pete replied, “God is great,” to which the students replied, “All the time.”
And so another day began.
Jacob put his backpack on top of the desk and laid his head on it. Each day that passed in this stretch of life seemed to be filled with new forms of misery and, as far as school was concerned, Jacob dreaded first period most of all. It had nothing to do with the course or the teacher, both of which Jacob liked in his own quiet way.
It was instead centered on the broad-shouldered girl who sat like a catatonic in the row by the window. This was Trina Todd, who many might now peg as Jacob’s closest friend, if not something a bit stranger. Even Jacob, despite constantly trying, could not define their relationship. She’d been his brother’s ex-something, one of Toby’s many ex-somethings, and was with him on the night that he died. Not with him in the car, though, Jacob knew. Since then, she’d latched on to Jacob in curious and troublesome ways. She’d called and texted, cryptically hinting that Toby’s accident was not an accident at all. People, she said, were to blame. Toby’s friends, she’d told him, all the dickheads at their school, every single one of them, but offered no real evidence to back this up. It was just another binge-drunken night of high school, people said, and Toby never should have turned the key and driven.
That was everyone’s story but Trina’s.
Still, Jacob had listened those nights on the phone as if for no other reason than to hear his brother’s name again, as if for no other reason than to continue talking to a girl who wanted to continue talking to him and, in this time, confessed to also hating the dickheads, because he did. In the weeks after Toby’s wreck, he’d hated everything. But recently, Jacob felt, Trina had turned his simple confession into an alliance. She was hatching a plan, she’d said. She would take care of it. She told him they were in it together.
They’d stopped talking to each other at school nearly entirely the past two weeks, though, instead doing most of their communication through folded notes slipped into the slats of their lockers, via text message, or out in the open as they ambled the woods of Deerfield, killing the hot hours between school and dinner at the respective houses that they didn’t want to return to. This was where Jacob spent as much time being interested in Trina, and as much time feeling sorry for Trina, as he did being terrified of her. She had a look that unsettled him, as if she knew so many truths he did not, and this was not a comfortable feeling. Was it really friendship, then, that put them together? Was it obligation? Was it attraction? Was it loss? Was it something else entirely? Jacob did not know. Most important to Jacob was another question, the one that clouded nearly all of his thoughts lately:
Was there a way out?
Jacob sat up when he heard the door to the classroom shut, thinking it was his history teacher, Mr. Hubbard. This guy was an unabashed pop-quiz junkie and the way he had rambled on for the last twenty minutes of yesterday’s class about the possible political ramifications of the bald eagle’s inevitable extinction, or something to that effect, something about things seemingly beyond our control actually being in our control and forcing us to change our national symbology or systemology or some sort of -ology, had Jacob guessing there’d be a quiz.
It wasn’t Mr. Hubbard, though, who was now uncharacteristically three minutes late. It was instead Rusty Bodell, all five feet eight and near three hundred pounds of him, with his pasty white skin and ample breasts, who strutted into the classroom in the same peacockish manner he had done for the last week. He had the collar of his white uniform polo popped up to his earlobes, his shirttail untucked over a pair of navy blue Dickies shorts, and pink sunglasses on. He wore fluorescent blue Nike sneakers with ankle socks, and his legs were the color of cream cheese. His thick and freckled arms were also remarkable in their total lack of definition or even elbows, it seemed, and yet they appeared operational as Rusty lifted them to prop his red hair back into its improbable and aerodynamic shape. This was a new coif for Rusty, undoubtedly inspired by the page of a magazine at Supercuts or from some movie he’d seen, and its odd cylindrical attitude reminded Jacob of a snail shell. Regardless, there were no two ways about it. Rusty looked ridiculous.
Yet, Jacob had to give it to him. Here was a high school kid who had done the impossible. He had reinvented himself right in the middle of a semester. Not two weeks ago he was sitting alone at a lunch table using his fingers to shovel Nutella into his mouth, and now, here he was, still a kid by himself at a lunch table, sure, but dressed to the ludicrous nines and remarkably confident. So, what was the change? Jacob supposed it was all mental, in the same way other desperate kids of that age suddenly decide that they can’t stand another day in the skin they’re in. So, they join a new clique or try out some new sport or make up a rumor about sleeping with a substitute teacher and hope that it sticks, which it never does. Whatever Rusty’s reasoning, though, he looked to be all in.
He stood at the front of the class and took off his sunglasses. “I’d like to make an announcement,” Rusty said. “I want all the females in this room to know that I am currently untethered by any serious relationships. I am therefore available for long walks in the park, canoe rides at sunset, and sex marathons. But, please, ladies. One at a time.”
Somebody from the back of the class threw a wad of paper at him and, in the front row, Becca Colbert said, “My God, Rusty. What is that fucking smell? Did you bathe in cologne?”
“That, dear Becca,” Rusty said, “is the smell of your future in paradise.”
“Disgusting,” she said.
“I’m serious,” Rusty said. “That’s the name of it: Your Future in Paradise. It cost me twenty bucks.”
Jacob heard a strange buzzing behind him. It sounded like a June bug or some fat mosquito going by at close range, but when he ducked to the side to avoid it, he saw that it was a small drone the size of a coaster flying by his desk. This was a remote-control job, about five inches wide, with a prop like a tiny helicopter, and it made its awkward sojourn to the front of the classroom. Jacob looked back to see Jerry Whitehouse working the remote, his backpack opened on his desk, from where he unleashed the drone. He flew it up toward Rusty and then backed it away when Rusty took a swat at it. He laughed and floated it over his head in a circle as Rusty Bodell, in his predictable way, made a few awful jumps to snag it.
“Look!” Jerry said. “It’s King Kong!” and the class let loose.
Even Jacob smiled, though he was not proud of this. Still, it had become so easy to laugh at Rusty in their years since grade school that it felt like a form of therapy. The way his cheeks went bright red as he hopped and swatted at the thing. The way he climbed onto a chair, the skin of his gut poking out beneath his shirt. No one was immune to the cruel humor, nor would the moment be lost, as half the kids in the room began recording the action on their cell phones and uploading it to the larger world. Such was Rusty’s fate.