I wasn’t able to talk to Megan Rose a single time the entire week, actually. I did learn that in addition to student-body president she was captain of the tennis team, which only added to my frustration, because I was sure—well, almost sure…well, had a strong hunch—that if we did get the opportunity to talk, it might lead to her falling for me. Not because I was intentionally trying to make her do that. I wouldn’t do that; just because, you know, beautiful and athletic student-body presidents falling for aggravating newcomers with no outstanding attributes—in the movies, it happens all the time.
I did see Megan Rose around the school but only from afar, save for once when I was at my locker and she passed a few feet from me. Four friends were with her then, however, protecting her like hired muscle and filling the hallway with so much conversation the air got thin. I wasn’t even able to say her name.
So what, then? How was I going to find out what the hell was going on?
Friday at lunch, I got help from an unexpected source.
It had been another morning of cranky teachers chugging from gallon-sized coffee mugs, staring down over their clunky reading glasses, and assigning a month of makeup reading on top of the regular homework. (“It’s not about brains, new kid,” they said, “but effort. And, kid, it’s early, but”—the quiz tossed through the air, plopping on my desk, the failing grade circled in red pen—“we’re not seeing the effort.”) I grabbed potato chips and Twix from the vending machine and ate them while sitting on the floor next to my locker, the safest place I could find. And as I finished off a third bag of Lay’s and a sci-fi novel about young men and women trapped in a pointless space war that never ends, Stuart appeared. He arrived so suddenly, looking so broken, I thought for a second he’d fallen out of the ceiling.
He pointed at what remained of my five-day-old, Brad Stone–administered black eye. “That hurt?” he asked.
“Only when rude people stare at it,” I said.
“Really?”
“God, it’s throbbing.”
“Okay,” he said. “That hysteria stuff you were talking about. Is it for real?”
“I’m trying to find out.”
He sat down like a collapsing stack of broomsticks. “Melvin’s been acting strange the last few days. I know, save it—more strange than normal. He didn’t come to school today. He isn’t answering my texts. I’m getting worried.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like you,” I said.
“He’s been staring at trees all week.”
A potato chip went down the wrong tube. I coughed.
Stuart nodded knowingly.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked. “The hysteria. It’s in the trees?”
“I don’t know.” I coughed again. “I think Megan Rose knows, but I haven’t been able to get near her all week.”
“I can help with that.”
That surprised me. “You guys are friends? I thought she was going special places and we’re losers.”
“She will be,” said Stuart. “For sure. Places that don’t want us. But right now she lives across the street from me.”
* * *
—
After the last bell, I jogged to the apartment, dropped my bag, and inhaled a cold pepperoni slice. It was another ridiculously warm fall day in a month full of them—instead of fall crispness, the air had the warm grittiness of car exhaust. The half-hour walk from the apartment to Stuart’s house was straight uphill and got me sweating hard.
Now, I’m not sure what the Greek poet foresaw when he daydreamed about upstate New York municipalities being named in his honor, especially as he was blind. I figured most of Homer’s daydreams were of Helen of Troy in the bath anyway. Or Achilles. I forget which was his preference. Regardless, you picture a town with broad boulevards and fountains of naked archers and houses fronted by majestic columns and maybe a flat-topped mountain in the distance, where the gods interview virgins for internships without triggering performance reviews. North Homer had no such things. It was jammed into a valley at the south end of a long lake, squeezed between two steep ridges left by retreating glaciers in the last Ice Age. It had rusted pickups, sidewalk weeds so high you had to step around them, abandoned houses next to prefab ones on cinder blocks. The tuition-free revolution and the Confederacy were running neck and neck in bumper stickers and lawn signs. There was an ongoing debate between the residents and the town about when garbage would be picked up. The streets appeared paved not for cars but to make a point about the relentless passage of time.
And hysterics?
I passed a woman in a tattered bathrobe walking a panting dog in a shiny new sweater, a bearded man unloading two-by-fours from one pickup and loading them into another, a middle school student texting while skateboarding downhill at high speed, and an ornery deer shitting pebbles in the middle of the street.
None of them were hysterical, it appeared. Still, how did you know for sure?
* * *
—
Stuart lived on what had to be one of the nicest roads in town. Large houses, lawns professionally cut, trees pruned of dead branches. His house was a cedar-shingled three-story with white trim and an elaborate bush game. Directly across the street was the only fenced-in property around. The home inside the fence was the color of a storm cloud and the shape of a brick, and had a single giant window.
I knocked on Stuart’s front door, and he called from the side of the house. I picked my way around some rhododendrons to a basement entrance.
“Megan Rose?” I pointed at the strange building across the street.
“Yep,” he said.
“For real? It looks like a black-ops torture site.”
“Could be. Her father is about as friendly.”
Inside Stuart’s basement, the walls were covered with wood panels and posters of pensive superheroes. In the fight against crime, they were on the verge of going too far. Midpunch, they paused, shocked at just how far they had gone. A massive brown couch ran the length of one wall, and above it was a shelf of books with titles like How to Be Your Own Best Friend and Peace Is Inside You.
I pointed to them. “Are you your best friend?”
“No,” said Stuart.
“Have you found peace inside you?”
“No.”
“Maybe your best friend found it?”
“No and stop and fuck you.”
The basement had a high window from which we could watch for Megan Rose. The road ran sideways across the hill, and her house was on the uphill side, towering above us. It really was the exact shape of a brick. The architects of the seventies clearly had Star Trek in their eyes and cocaine in their noses.