All the Ways the World Can End Page 12

  “Cheers,” I mustered, raising an imaginary cup.

  “So, what’s the plan, Stan?” she asked.

  “Um…” I wasn’t sure what she was asking.

  “Well, I’m heading to the courthouse and you have a very important job today. Do you remember what it is?” I shook my head no. “Three tickets for I Have So Many Desires please. Front row center.”

  “I Have But One,” I corrected.

  “Can you get three?” asked Mom.

  “No, I meant—wait, why three?”

  “Me, Dad, and Emma’s coming home next weekend!” Mom said with cheerleader glee.

  “Emma—why?” I felt weak in the knees.

  “Homesick, I guess,” Mom said quickly. I highly doubted that, but I also had too many other questions that I needed to get out first.

  “Wait, do we know that Dad will be out by then? What about the gamma knife thing, and we still haven’t gotten Lowenstein’s approval, and what about—”

  Mom had no time for doubt. She shushed me and said, “Listen, Chicken. I feel really hopeful about this new direction. Just between you and me, I think Lowenstein’s a little grumpy that Ganesh thought of this trial without him. Yes, there’s some politics to the whole thing because Dad’s got these lesions, which they don’t usually allow with the Varilililum.” She paused to put on a kooky voice and salute me like a soldier. “We. Will. Prevail!”

  She winked and flexed her biceps while I tried to process everything she’d just said. I didn’t know which part made me squirmiest—the fact that Dad wasn’t supposed to be on these meds with lesions or all of Mom’s theatrics. I didn’t get to ask for clarification on anything, though, because Julian beeped at that moment.

  “Yowsa!” Mom said, springing from her seat. “Time for some pants, huh?” She shoved my backpack at me and gave my forehead a peck. “I’m hoping to be home from work regular time. Dad says he doesn’t think anything’s happening until Lowenstein is back tomorrow. Meet you at oh-twenty hundred? I’ll pick up burritos or something.”

  I watched her gallop upstairs before slowly letting myself out the back door and cutting across our neighbors’ yard to the street parallel. I heard Julian honking again in my driveway, but I kept walking in the opposite direction. If I took this back route and ran for the last four blocks, I could potentially get to school in time for the late bell. I knew it was childish to be literally running away from my best friend, but I felt bruised all over and like I couldn’t trust Julian at all. I’d actually thought about texting him the night before and hashing it out. That was before I started sending lewd selfies to one of the pioneers in immunotherapy. Now I had no stamina for reconciliation.

  My phone started vibrating just as I was getting to the Mountainside parking lot and I did some awkward cross between a leap and a lurch.

  It wasn’t Dr. Ganesh. It was a text from Julian that read, Really?

  I wrote back: You said you wouldn’t abandon me.

  His response: I’ve worked so hard for this. Why can’t you be happy for me?

  I sent him a smiley face, which I hoped he knew was text irony, then walked into school.

  * * *

  I bombed the midterm. I was usually good at memorizing dates but I could never put anything in context. I couldn’t see how there was a Battle of the Bulge the same year Henry Winkler was born and also Mount Vesuvius erupted somewhere nearby, so the world almost ended and began at the same time. I also mixed up Khrushchev with Churchill in the quote section and I ran out of things to say in my essay about the Lend-Lease Act.

  I checked my phone in between classes approximately forty-seven times. At 11:18 a.m., I sent Dr. Ganesh a text saying, After the puddle incident I left my phone at my friend’s who looks like me and I’m really scared she did something weird and inappropriate with the camera.

  I followed that up with, Could you just write a Y for Yes or an N for No if you got something strange and tasteless from this number?

  No answer.

  My final stab was, To whom this may concern: This number has been hacked!

  For lunch I decided to avoid the world all together. I went to the library and looked at pictures of people in West Africa affected by Ebola, followed by washing my hands for ten minutes in the girls’ gym locker room. That was mildly helpful—the skin between my right thumb and pointer finger was rubbed raw. For a few minutes all I could feel was the sting of hot water touching new skin. Which in some sick sense was my definition of success.

  The rest of the day moved glacially slowly. My science lab was literally about waiting for water to boil. I didn’t get a message from Mom until two thirty, and then all it said was, Holding patrn w/Lowenstein. Staying @ court. Brblol. I wrote back, Gr8, and tried to think of a new excuse for skipping VaGeorgia rehearsal. But Marty had the auditorium door open and she was standing outside ushering everyone in.

  “This is it,” she urged. “The final push!”

  The room was complete chaos. It looked like a dust storm and it stunk like BO. The first two rows of seats were filled with light fixtures and power drills. Oscar was on a ladder stringing up another floating collage of blossoming femininity. Julian was going over a dance combination with Marty, weaving their bodies in and out of the pools of light on stage in a ridiculously graceful swirling motion I knew I’d never be able to replicate. My great fear of him being destroyed by my ditching him this morning was tossed out. My even greater fear that he’d barely notice my absence and feel free without the albatross known as me around his neck was now louder than ever.

  In the locker room, Becca was showing her minions a hickey that was just under her left armpit. I didn’t know what could be sexy about getting your skin sucked, especially there. It also inflamed me when the tiniest Becca wannabe—Leigh—squealed, “Ooooh, I can count your ribs, you skinny bean!” I never saw Leigh eat anything besides sugar-free gum. I hated how many girls in my grade were starving themselves or posting pictures of their bathroom scales. Julian had told me stories of some anorexics in his rehab program and said if I ever did that he’d poison me in my sleep. Which I guess was an effective threat because I ate mostly what I felt like eating. I also had the perspective that my dad had given up his butthole and part of his intestinal tract and I had no right to abuse mine.

  “Can I just tell you, Kevin is so into my body,” Becca said. The girls panted and giggled. Somebody even clapped. “I’ll show you after rehearsal. I mean, whoever feels like coming to Troops.”

  “Me! Me! Me!” came the chorus.

  Troops was the army-navy surplus store in our town where Kevin worked part-time. I’d actually been in there a few times to scout out radiation meters and protective hoods for biohazard attacks. The owner, Mr. Steig, was two hundred years old and had a shriveled arm from Korea. He listened to a tinny radio and did word jumbles behind the register while coughing loudly. It was always ten degrees too hot in there.

  “Ladies?!” Marty hollered. “Lots to do today!” No more warming up or touching our inner muse. Marty was going over someone’s new monologue and Julian was leading everyone else through an intricate dance routine.

  “Lenny, you’re there.” He pointed to a tape mark on the stage without a shred of emotion. “Just watch out. Still a lot of nails on the floor.”

  I knew he was busy and this was not exactly the time to get into it, but I felt stunned that he gave me no eye contact, no recognition, no nothing. I’d never had a major fight with Julian before, probably because I worshipped him too much. Also I’d witnessed how easily he cut off his mom, his stepmom, even a guidance counselor who once told him he should go into computer programming instead of dance. Julian seemed totally unaffected by our split now. In fact, he was literally leaping with a new joy.

  It took approximately thirty-eight seconds from the moment Julian said the word “nails” to the moment when I felt one under my left heel and skidded into a stepladder, making a huge clattery one-klutz band and falling on my ass. The most unbe
arable part was chomping down on my tongue. My mouth filled with warm, salty blood.

  Everyone stopped. Marty was the only one who thought to ask, “Are you injured?”

  I was seriously tempted to yell, “Yes! My vagina and my heart and my trust in the past, present, and future are all damaged irreparably!” But I didn’t say anything. I just pulled myself up slowly and kept sucking on my tongue.

  “Do you need to take a break?” Julian asked with a sigh. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or concerned. My jaw was shooting arrows of pain up into my head. If I’d fractured my face or had to get some sort of tongue grafting done, Mom would have to choose which hospital bed to sit by and I knew she’d choose Dad, or maybe we could be at the same hospital but I wouldn’t want Dr. Ganesh to know what I did because biting your tongue off had to be the stupidest injury in the history of boo-boos.

  Marty came up behind me and started working my shoulders with her small, muscly hands. “I want you to respect your body,” she said in a low voice. “Why don’t you go up into the lighting booth and sit down for a few minutes. There’s some coconut water in my thermos.” She steered me off the stage while I tried to envision tongue reattachment surgery. If there even were such a thing. I knew nothing about the human body, really. We were all just hanging on by these tiny tendons.

  I got into the lighting booth and locked the door behind me. It was stuffy and dim in here. There was a low ceiling that was seeping some sort of insulation I’d bet was a descendant of asbestos. I knew around the corner it led directly into the catwalk above the stage, and normally I would have been curious to spy on everyone down below, but I had no interest in investigating or staying there one second longer than I had to. I reached over the light board with all the switches and levers and shut the window leading into the auditorium so I couldn’t hear what was going on onstage. More importantly, they couldn’t hear me while I battered my head.

  I tried one of those mantras that I’d seen on the Breathe network: Hi Fear. You can leave now. You can leave now. You can leave NOW. Only with my puffy tongue it sounded more like, Youca weave mow. Youca weave mow. Youca weave MOW. Then I slammed my fists into my head with everything I had left. Youca weave mow!

  “Whoa, that can’t be helping,” came a voice in the dark. Even though I had no idea who was there and whether I was about to get murdered in a lighting booth, I wasn’t as alarmed as I was aggravated. I was only up to seventy-two hits and I had to get to at least one hundred. I started up again. But the voice came through once more, angrier this time. “Stop!”

  An overhead fluorescent light went on, and Oscar Birnbaum sat up from a lumpy futon mattress that was shoved into the farthest corner of the room. His long legs were twisted in a pretzel, and when he stood up it looked like a clown car of limbs. He had to bend his neck down to keep from bonking his head into the rafters. “Can you please stop doing that?” he said.

  “Can you please stop spying on people?” I said through flaring nostrils. He was blinking as if he’d just woken up. I hated him for looking so tall and uncomplicated. “You have no idea what I’m doing,” I added. I shrugged as if that could shake off his judgment.

  “You’re right. But it doesn’t seem to be helping,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Educated guess.”

  “Ha!” I said. “Educated? Are you in school right now? How does that work exactly? You put on your school slippers and walk into the kitchen before Mommy rings the bell? Does she grade you at the dinner table or take you on class trips?”

  Oscar just stood there, waiting for me to run out of insults disguised as questions. Then he said, “I can explain homeschooling to you if you want. We have standardized tests just like you. It’s not that mysterious.” He pointed to a landslide of textbooks and a closed laptop on his little futon nest. I noticed we actually were using the same elementary physics book in my class.

  “How do you make any friends?” I asked.

  “I don’t need to make friends,” he answered. “I don’t want to be attached to places or people.” I couldn’t decide if that was the cockiest or wisest thing anyone had ever said to me. I just knew he was looking at me with those marble eyes and it was making me feel itchy. “Until the cord be broken the bird cannot fly,” he mumbled.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a famous quote from Saint John of the Cross,” Oscar said.

  I shrugged. “I’m Jewish. Anyway, your mom told me to come up here because I tripped on one of your nails.”

  “First aid’s there, if you want it.” He pointed to a red metal lunch box above the lighting board with the words YOU ARE BRAVE, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL written in wide letters with permanent marker on the side. Hanging from the lock was a small ambery crystal. I opened the box and took out a sleeve of alcohol pads. Not because I needed one, but I also didn’t want to go back into the auditorium and pretend I was all better.

  I wasn’t. I doubted I ever would be.

  Oscar folded himself back on top of his lumpy mattress and cracked open his physics book while I spent a ridiculously long time wiping the bottom of my feet and inhaling alcohol fumes. The bleeding in my mouth had stopped and I now had to find a secret place to beat my head one hundred times uninterrupted. I was thinking maybe the locker room, since everyone else was occupied on stage.

  “Hey,” Oscar called as I was letting myself out of the booth, “it’s none of my business, but don’t do that thing where you hit yourself again.”

  “Yeah. It is none of your business. Thanks.”

  It took Oscar three long steps to be right in front of me, blocking the door. “Seriously,” he said.

  I hated how close and insistent he was. I felt like I was going to break out in a rash from being this exposed. “Why do you care?” I mumbled.

  He shook his head. “I don’t. I’m just being a good Samaritan. Which I mean in a purely secular context.”

  I didn’t know that Samaritans were from the Bible and I didn’t want to hear him expound upon that. I tried to ignore him and reach for the doorknob, but he intercepted my right arm and snagged me in the most awkward arm shake in history. We both looked down and then backed away.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Just promise not to do that. Please.”

  “Fine,” I said. “If you promise to stop … just stop.” I pushed past him and lunged out the door, thoroughly confused. I crouched in the back of the auditorium by the piles of untouched lumber for the rest of rehearsal, watching the waves of menstrual ferocity onstage. It wasn’t as if anyone missed me or even noticed my absence. When it was over, I merged myself into the crowd heading down to the locker room and decided I’d even follow them into town to check out what they had at Troops. I couldn’t stand the idea of watching night creep in all alone in my house. Mom wouldn’t be home for another two hours at least and I had no focus for homework. If I holed up in the bunker I would just be tempted to text Dr. Ganesh some more lies or crack my skull open with my fists and I’d somehow just made a pact with Oscar the homeschooled freak that I wouldn’t do that. I wondered if it meant anything to him. Probably not.

  As I fell in line with the girls leaving, I heard Julian call out from the stage, “Lenny, do you want to go over the choreography you missed?”

  “No thanks!” I yelled back. It felt a little electrifying to refuse his company.

  For the whole fifteen-minute walk into town, Becca told some story about swimming with dolphins in Florida with her super-rich uncle who had a new wife and motorboat, both named Tina. Tina was going to take Becca to her plastic surgeon when Becca turned twenty. Nobody dared interrupt, even to ask what I was doing there.

  When we got to Troops, Kevin Kripps was not in the window. Becca started chewing on her lip and pacing.

  “Let’s go to the drugstore,” she ordered. “Leigh, do you wanna do some laxatives with me?” Leigh looked stunned. Everyone else just waited, mouths open. “I’m kidding, you losers!” Becca said. I wanted to shoot he
r in the hickey. When we got inside the drugstore I made sure to stay close to Leigh just in case she got tempted to check out the diet section. I also bought a chocolate milk and chugged it right in front of her so she could see it felt good to actually nourish yourself.

  When we came back out, Kevin was hanging up some new gas masks on a clothesline next to a flakey-faced mannequin. I recognized a couple of them from my airborne toxin research—they were the MSA Millennium masks that were used in the Persian Gulf War. They were supposed to be excellent at filtering out nasty particulates, and they had a drinking tube built in that connected directly to a canteen.

  “We’re going in, right?” I asked.

  Nobody answered me. As I soon learned, the usual routine was for the girls to stand next to one of the parking meters pretending they were really engrossed in some conversation until Kevin climbed through the maze of steamer trunks and fatigues to tap on the glass window. Then—and only then—Becca walked up to him and blew a wisp of fog onto the glass so she could write him a secret message. He did the same back, then disappeared. Then more waiting by the parking meter.

  I was not a fan of the waiting part. I really wanted to know if that new gas mask was for sale and how much Steig was asking. I already had to budget for Don Juan’s lobster tank, and after hearing the girls discuss plastic surgery and endangered dolphins in the same breath, I knew I had to get better bunker equipment before we all were smothered by a cloud of botulism. So I said, “I’m heading in to look at something. Possibly purchase. Anyone coming?”

  “Whoa!” said Becca, putting her hand in front of me.

  “Kevin loves you so much,” I said. (Julian always said, kill ’em with kindness.)

  “Right?” she said, pushing the door open and marching in ahead of me.

  Mr. Steig was at his usual perch, unjumbling words next to his radio. Kevin came out from behind a rack of pea coats looking concerned.