“And then what?”
“And then? After I scratch it? I don’t know. I wish to God I knew. Maybe life gets bright and shiny and shit-free.”
Stuart stared at me in disbelief. I didn’t think I was doing a good job of cheering him up. Bucking people up was really not one of my strong points. Swap in an f and I could help you.
“Bright and shiny and shit-free,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “No need to mock. We all got our stuff. I really got to—”
“Melvin was talking about that. Before he stopped answering my texts.”
“Melvin said he wanted a bright and shiny life?”
“Not exactly.” Stuart’s face was white as a sheet. “He said he’d found it.”
My hand on the doorknob, my fingers frozen, my heart pounding, a thousand seconds in one.
“You better text him again.”
SEVEN
A FEW LAST shards of daylight punctured the sky as I shut the basement door and ran around the rhododendron bushes. And it was warm still, disturbingly warm. The seasons were playing rock-paper-scissors—and summer was cheating, throwing late. I reached the road in time to see the blue CRV pull up to the gate at the bottom of Megan Rose’s driveway. The gate slid open, and the car turned to where I stood.
Megan Rose sat in the passenger seat. The driver was the compact cheerleader with the painfully tight blond ponytail, the one who’d pulled Megan Rose away in the cafeteria on my first day. Both of them wore red football jerseys and had eye black smeared on their cheekbones.
The homecoming football game—that was tonight. I’d forgotten about it.
Megan Rose’s head was down. When the car drew close, about twenty feet away, the driver said something, and Megan Rose looked up. She saw me, and her face cycled rapidly through several expressions—surprise, then disbelief, then a moment of suspicion, then something truly unsettling.
The unsettling thing was that she looked terrified.
I raised my hand. At the same time, the cheerleader-driver took one hand off the wheel and, without slowing down, stretched her arm in my direction, over Megan Rose’s lap, and extended a single long finger.
* * *
—
I reached the football field at the end of the first quarter. The parking lot was packed with pickups the size of tanks, the bleachers were packed with texting students, Snapchatting students, Instagramming students, and drunken parents in Stand Your Ground hoodies. The field was immaculately cut, chalked, and lit, and on the fifty-yard line beautiful blue letters spelled out POETC, running out of chalk halfway through the S. Young children ran about behind the end zones, slamming each other to the ground in a lighthearted approximation of the game. The whole scene looked airlifted into place from a Hollywood movie about small-town folk going through hard times, but gosh darn it, how they cared for their town. It was almost poetic.
In the game itself, Brad Stone hit people so hard they forgot how to walk for a few minutes and even then could do it only with assistance. The wounded got polite applause, a water bottle, and encouraging calls to “shake it off.” I didn’t see the appeal, if we’re being honest. Young men ruining themselves for our entertainment is a long-standing American tradition but not one of my favorites. And where was Megan Rose?
Gunshot signified the end of the first half, and she materialized next to Brad Stone at midfield. He was sweaty and massive; she was regal and remote. They received the crowns of homecoming king and queen. There was more polite applause.
What was important about the game was this: I watched Megan Rose all through the second half; she was standing at the edge of the bleachers, putting her foot up on the railing and stretching out her leg. Her leg was quite long and flexible. She’d taken off her crown. Around her, friends were talking excitedly. She was next to them but not a part of the conversation.
Behind one end zone was the parking lot and the school. Behind the other were a few acres of woods. All through the third and fourth quarters, Megan Rose kept worriedly glancing in the direction of the woods. I followed her gaze. The trees she was looking at, the ones right at the edge of the forest and the field, were aspens, and they were doing that thing aspens do, where every single leaf in the entire tree moves at once. Aspens are, I think, one of the more underrated trees. They take every breeze as an opportunity to express delirious excitement, as if the wind were delivering shade-grown espresso shots or crystal meth. And these aspens, the ones past the end of the field, had something extra in their excited shimmering, like they were actually glowing, like beneath each leaf was a pin-sized white glow stick.
A trick of light off the bleachers’ floodlights, clearly.
I watched the aspens shimmer all through the second half, through the final gun, and through the postgame, the teams shaking hands, the field and bleachers clearing of people, the parking lot emptying of trucks, until at last there was no one left and the floodlights above the field were turned off.
Then the field was dark, and the bleachers were dark. But the trees stayed lit.
This deserves repeating: the trees stayed lit.
EIGHT
THEN MONDAY, MELVIN returned. Also Monday, he went full hysteria. Then I did.
On Monday, in other words, I started to get the hang of things.
* * *
—
All weekend I ate leftover pizza and conversed with the ceiling ants, too spooked by tree behavior to go outside. I did monitor the three oaks out front, and they seemed like perfectly normal, nonwaving, appropriately lighted trees, but how could I trust that? And then at lunch on Monday, after another morning of disappointing teachers and ducking Brad Stone, I grabbed chips and Twix and went to eat at my locker in the dusty hallway—and it was full of screams.
They bounced me two feet off the ground. They came from the direction of the cafeteria. I ran to it. And there, on top of a table, in a T-shirt honoring a band made entirely out of eyebrow rings and skull tattoos, Melvin screamed his head off.
His face was a blur. His voice was a sonic nuke. His inked forearms thrashed. His legs kicked trays of Superfund slop in high arcs, kicked milk cartons clear across the room, kicked air.
Students stared, some still holding their lunch trays. Stuart was up front. I made my way to him.
And it appeared, as I got closer, that Melvin wasn’t screaming exactly but whooping, like he’d just scored the touchdown that won the homecoming game. I mean that there was joy in his cries.
He was gone, in other words. Gone-in-space gone, off-the-grid gone, so gone he had nowhere left to go, so it felt like we, the witnesses, were the ones actually in danger. Because we still had the possibility of staying or leaving. And I looked around at the other students, and they, too, were looking around, asking that question: Am I really here? How do I know? How does anyone?