Holding Up the Universe

by Jennifer Niven

  Do I like Jack Masselin? As in like like him?

  At some point I’m going to have to get out of this car and move up the walk and open the door and go inside. I will have to shut that door—me on one side, him on the other—and he will move down the walk, away from this house, and climb back into his car and drive away. I will go to my room and lie on my bed and wonder if this really happened or if I made it up and how on earth I feel about it.

  He rolls to a stop and turns off the car, and we’re both staring at our hands again. I don’t look up because if I look up, he might look up, and what if he kisses me?

  My body might just explode into a million pieces of shimmering, glittering light.

  I want her to look up. Look up, I think. Look up. Look up.

  My phone buzzes, and we both jump. This is my alarm letting me know I only have thirty minutes before everyone gets home. Shit.

  She doesn’t even wait for me to turn it off, just drops my hand like a hot potato and goes leaping out of the car. It breaks the spell, and I sit there thinking, What the fuck am I doing?

  I almost drive away, but instead I get out of the Land Rover, and she’s already on her front step. For the first time this year, I can feel fall coming. There’s a chill in the air that makes me think of bonfires, but my hand is still warm. I shove it into my pocket, and it burns right through my jeans to the skin.

  She says, “Thanks for bringing me home.” And I can hear it—she’s nervous.

  I look right into her eyes. “You are the most amazing person I’ve ever met. You’re different. You’re you. Always. Who else can say that except maybe Seth Powell, and he’s an idiot. You, Libby Strout, are not an idiot.”

  She points at my chest. “You do like me.”

  “What?”

  “Jack Masselin likes the fat girl, but you haven’t fully accepted it yet.”

  Okay, I think. Let’s see where this goes.

  “I’m not saying you’re right, but what if I did accept it?”

  “I guess we’d have to do something about it, then.” And she walks into her house and shuts the door.

  I stand inside, heart skipping beats. I can hear him on the other side of the door. I can feel him there. I know the moment when he walks away, two minutes later, because the air around me goes back to being normal air, not dangerous, electric-storm air that might lightning-strike you at any moment. My heart is still skipping beats as he drives away.

  I think about saying it as Mom passes the salad, as Dusty recites his lines from Peter Pan, as Dad passes the mac and cheese: I have prosopagnosia. It’s official. I was tested today by a brain specialist.

  No one knows I haven’t been home all day except Marcus, who keeps saying things like “I called home today but nobody answered the phone. Were you asleep, Jack? You must have been sleeping, right? Otherwise you would have picked up.” All these baiting comments, trying to trip me up. When Mom and Dad aren’t looking, I give him the finger.

  Dad catches me and says, “Hey. Not at the table.”

  I want to tell him not to talk to me. I want to say You’re the last person who should be reprimanding anyone.

  But I’m in this weirdly good mood, in spite of Dr. Amber Klein and in spite of my fucked-up brain. So I don’t say a word to my dad or to Marcus, which is so much more than either of them deserves. I stay locked in my own head, reliving the ride there, the ride home, my hand intertwined with Libby’s, the way she smiled at me, and the way she said, I guess we’d have to do something about it, then.

  —

  After dinner, I’m in the basement working on the Lego robot, trying to lose myself in the process of building something, but the only thing I’m building right now is the world’s largest pile of discarded robot parts. The hardest stage of any project is coming up with it. Once I know what I want the thing to be, it’s just a matter of collecting the pieces I need and putting them together in the right order. But right now I can’t nail it down. I’ve got fifty different ideas for fifty different robots, but none of them are right or extraordinary enough.

  I hear footsteps, and from the stairs a voice says, “Were you really sick today?”

  Dusty.

  “Not in a flu kind of way.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “I’m good.” He wanders over to me, sorting through the parts that are scattered across the worktable and the floor. I say, “Do you want to talk about anything? Are people still being shitty?”

  “I’m good too. I’m Peter Pan.”

  And I get it. He wants to stay in this moment. The bad moments always have a way of coming around again, way too soon.

  —

  I go up to my room and climb out of my window, into the tree and onto the roof. I lie back and stare at the sky. I think about it being the same sky that I looked up at when I was six, before I fell, and about all that’s happened in between then and now. It really shouldn’t be the same sky, for all that’s happened. It should look completely different.

  Marcus was playing in the yard. I went up to the roof to get away from him and away from my mom, who was always telling me to watch him. It was harder to get up there than I expected. That surprised me. And it was dirtier—bird shit and twigs and an old softball that might have been there for the past twenty years. Our roof isn’t flat—it has a slope—and I scooted to the edge of it, looking out over the street and the neighborhood. I held on with one hand, and Marcus looked up just then, and I let go because I wanted him to see that I was strong and fearless and bigger than he would ever be.

  It takes less than a second to fall twelve feet, but it felt like it lasted forever. In that moment of falling, they say the memory goes wide open. You can see things you don’t usually think of or see or remember. For me, it was my mother’s face—specifically, it was her eyes. I can’t remember what they looked like in that moment I saw them, but I remember that I saw them.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Jack. I was thinking about what you said.”

  “I say so many things. Can you narrow it down?”

  “I was thinking about what you said about doing something to address this whole you-like-me-I-like-you situation.”

  “I never said I like you.”

  Silence.

  “Jack?”

  “What you’ve just heard is the sound of my heart dying a swift and sudden death.”

  “Hypothetically speaking, if—and I’m not saying I do—but if I was to like you, what would you want to do about it?”

  “I would probably want to hold your hand.”

  “Probably?”

  “Hypothetically, yes. I would definitely hypothetically want to hold your hand.”

  “Well then, I would probably hypothetically hold yours back.”

  “I would also hypothetically want to take you to a movie, even though I don’t like movies as a rule because of the whole facial confusion situation.”

  “Which one?”

  “Which movie?”

  “I need to know if it’s something I want to see.”

  “Won’t it be enough just to be with me, holding hypothetical hands in the dark?”

  “I’d at least like to know what kind of movie we’d be seeing.”

  “Uh. I think it would need to be a movie with some of everything. Comedy. Drama. Action. Mystery. Romance.”

  “That sounds like a really good movie.”

  “So would you hold my hand during it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Okay. I’ll take ‘probably’ for now. I’d also want to take you out to dinner, either before or after the movie, depending, and I would absolutely want to walk you to your door.”

  “What if I wanted to dance to my door instead?”

  “Then I’m your man.”

  Are you? Is this what this means? My heart goes hopscotching out of the room and down the hall and out the door and into the street.

  “But after I danced you to the door, I’d want to kiss you.�
�

  “You would?”

  “I would.”

  And now my heart is nowhere on earth to be found. I can see it as it bypasses the moon and the stars and goes blasting into another galaxy.

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Well then, I would let you kiss me.”

  “Hypothetically?”

  “No. Definitely.”

  By the time we hang up two hours later, it’s 1:46 a.m. I lie there for the rest of the night waiting for my heart to return to my chest.

  THE NEXT EIGHT DAYS

  At lunch on Monday, I sit across the table from Kam and Seth, who are elbow to elbow. I’m sketching design ideas for Dusty’s robot, and I’m pretty much on fire for the first time, and I can see it, as in I finally know what I’m doing, and my blood is pumping and my heart is pumping like I’ve just run a marathon and sprinted all the way to the finish. Nothing, as in nothing, can stop the flow of these ideas, until Seth goes, “You know, Kam and me, we’ve got something that can help you out in your situation.”

  I look up, a little foggy, because my head is on the paper in front of me, not in the MVB cafeteria. Seth is grinning like a jackal, and whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.

  But I say, wary as hell, “What situation is that?”

  Seth elbows Kam hard, which makes Kam drop the three dozen french fries he was about to stuff down his throat. “Goddammit, Powell.”

  Seth keeps right on. “I did some research last night.” He pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket.

  “Jesus. Porn?” I should have known. I go back to sketching.

  “Not porn. God.” He actually has the nerve to sound offended, even though as far as I know Seth thinks the Internet was invented for two purposes: porn and poker. “Number one. They’re easy to talk to.”

  “Who’s easy to talk to?” I’m still making notes.

  “Fat girls.” My head snaps up so hard I probably give myself whiplash. He’s trying to keep a straight face, but he can’t help himself—he’s snickering already.

  “Two. ‘Pretty women aren’t always nice.’ ”

  Kam goes, “That one’s true.”

  I say, “What is it you’re reading to me?”

  “ ‘Top Ten Reasons to Date a Fat Girl.’ I found it online.” He waves the paper, and then holds it up to his face again, reads something to himself, and starts howling. I make a grab for it, but he holds it out of reach, over his head. “Three…”

  Kam rips the paper out of his hands and hands it to me. I crush it into a ball and get ready to launch it across the cafeteria into the trash, but I don’t want anyone digging it out of there, so I stuff it into my back pocket instead. I lean over the table and whack Seth in the head.

  He just keeps laughing. Kam says, “Moron.” And crams the rest of the french fries into his mouth.

  I know Seth thinks he’s being funny, but my insides are burning, like I’ve inhaled an entire forest fire.

  “Lay off her, man. I’m serious.”

  “Wow. Sure, sure, Mass. Whatever.” He’s wiping the tears away and trying to catch his breath. He sits quietly for a minute, and then, with one snicker, he launches into another laughing fit.

  I try not to let it bother me. Who cares what they think? I tell myself it’s not that she’s fat. That’s not what I’m worried about. I’m not worried at all. I just want them to leave me alone. Leave us alone. But part of me is going, What if you’re just shallow? What if that’s your identifier?

  “You’re a fucking idiot, Seth Powell.” And I gather up my ideas and what’s left of my lunch and walk away.

  The Damsels Drill Team auditions sign-up sheet hangs on Heather Alpern’s door. So far seven girls have signed up. I’m number eight. Jayvee hands me a pen, and I lean in and write my name. Behind me I hear, “Oh my God, you’re trying out?”

  Caroline Lushamp looks down at me with this weird pretend smile that makes her look like some sort of beauty queen serial killer.

  I say, “Oh my God, how did you know?”

  She blinks at me, blinks at my name on the sheet, blinks at Jayvee, blinks at me.

  I say, “Just imagine it—we could be teammates.” And then I squeeze her into the tightest hug. “See you at auditions!”

  Jayvee can barely walk for laughing. She weaves like a drunk person through the halls. Finally, she straightens up and stops laughing long enough to say, “So what did you do about the Atticus situation? Test or no test?”

  “No test. I decided he knew best after all.”

  “He usually does.”

  —

  In driver’s ed, we’re assigned three to a car, and since the rest of the class is made up of sophomores, the lone juniors are lumped together: Bailey, Travis Kearns, and me.

  I’m pretty sure Travis is stoned. He carries on a commentary in the backseat that goes something like: “Floor it, big girl…Go like the mother-effing wind…Open her up…Show this world what you can do…Take that beautiful big leg of yours and slam that gas pedal…Take us to the moon, sister…or at least to Indy…Take us to Indy…Take us to Indy…Indy…Indy…Indy…” (Several indecipherable words followed by mad laughter.)

  Bailey is in the back next to him, and she’s smashed up against the door, as far away from him as she can possibly get. But in true Bailey fashion, she’s wearing a determined smile. Mr. Dominguez, in all his manliness, is in the passenger seat. I’m behind the wheel, and I can’t help it—I’m excited. My hands are tingling and there is this crazy heat burning up from my feet, all the way up my legs, into my stomach, through my chest. I feel like I’m on fire, but in a way that lets me know I’m ALIVE.

  You have to understand that for a long time there was a part of me that thought I would never drive or run or do any of the everyday things that people my age get to do. My world consisted of my bed and the sofa, and after a while, when I couldn’t move easily from one to the other, I stayed in bed all day and night, reading, watching show after show, surfing around online, and, yes, eating. Sometimes I would hear Dean, Sam, and Castiel outside, and if I sat up enough, I could see out my window into the street and watch them play tennis or soccer or tag. I saw Dean and Sam leave for dances and dates (in my mind, they were dating me). I watched the youngest, Cas, climb one of the trees that hugged the house. I overheard phone conversations and make-out sessions and arguments. Sometimes I’d see Cas in my yard, looking up at my window, and I would sit very still, hoping he’d go away because it was one thing to spy and another to be spied on.

  So now I’m driving, which is why I don’t mind that Travis is nattering on or that Bailey is asking me about Jack and me and is there anything between us that means something and is there a Jack and Libby in any way, shape, or form that she should know about. Mr. Dominguez barks directions at me, and at some point yells at the two of them to shut up.

  Even though this is my first time behind the wheel, I’m good at it. Like it’s effortless. I feel AT HOME here. And at some point it hits me—I’m driving.

  As in I’m actually driving a car. Like a normal person. Like that person passing me on the other side of the road. Like the person in front of me. Like the person behind me. Like all these people walking down the street who probably have cars and licenses of their own. I AM DRIVING A CAR!

  This is one more thing I’ll never get to share with my mom, and before I know it, I’m crying. I miss her, but look at me behind the wheel, steering us down the street. Look at me waiting at this stoplight. Look at me making this turn.

  Mr. Dominguez says, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Without taking my eyes from the road, I say, “I’m crying. And also driving. I’m crying and driving!” This makes me cry harder, and the tears are both happy and sad.

  Bailey leans up and gives my shoulder a squeeze, and I can hear her sniffling. Dominguez goes, “Do we need to stop the car?”

  “Never! I want to drive for days!” Suddenly I’m talking only in exclamation marks. And then I check my mir
rors and, even though Dominguez hasn’t told me to, I go beelining for the highway entrance because I can’t hold myself back. I need to turn this car loose.

  Travis yells, “Floor it!” And Bailey lets out a little squeal as she goes flying back against the seat.

  I’m still crying, but now I’m also laughing because I’m free, and none of them can possibly understand. “You will never know what it’s like to be trapped in your house like a veal,” I say to Mr. Dominguez. “This is the best day of my life!” Even to me, my laughter sounds maniacal, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels big and sincere and endless, like I could laugh from now until the end of my life without interruption.

  And as ridiculous as it sounds, I mean it. This is the best day of my life. I’m on the highway now and everything is whooshing by, but then I start whooshing along with it all, just like everyone else, like I actually belong out here in this world. Like I could drive all the way up into the clouds, propelled by happiness and freedom.

  Someone turns on the music—“ All Right Now” by Free. In the rearview mirror I can see Travis air-banging his head, and poor Bailey clutching at my seat, blond hair blowing everywhere. The song plays on and on as I practice passing in and out of lanes, long enough that eventually all of us, even Bailey, sing the chorus.

  Two blocks from school, Mr. Dominguez makes us roll up the windows and sit up straight. But as I pull into the parking lot, we’re all still singing.

  After the Conversation Circle, Libby and I walk out of the gym together. We walk up the stairs and through the halls, side by side, and then we walk out to the parking lot. I want to hold her hand, but I don’t, and my brain grabs onto this with both fists. Why don’t you hold her hand? Keshawn, Natasha, and the rest of them are ahead of us, so it’s just Libby and me.