Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

  The morning our first guests, my aunt Cindy and her gang, were to arrive, my mom walked into my room and handed me a stuffed elephant.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s for Ethan. That’s Chloe’s son.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’s two. Cutest thing you’ve ever seen. Didn’t I show you any photos yet?”

  “No. Wait, how old is Chloe now?”

  “Twenty. Don’t ask. It’s been a wild couple of years for Cindy and Jim.”

  The last time I’d seen my cousin Chloe, she had dyed, jet-black hair and was wearing fingernail polish to match it. She had an eyebrow ring, too, and I distinctly remember walking up to her as she was staring at a candle that was sitting on the windowsill in my grandmother’s den and asking if she wanted any dessert.

  “Did you know that if you stare at a flame long enough, you can see its soul?”

  “No, Chloe. I did not know that.”

  That was also the Thanksgiving she kept bringing up some “Veronica,” who Mom was certain was her girlfriend. Aunt Cindy would get this look on her face any time Chloe said her name, and I saw Uncle Jim gently set his hand on her shoulder during dinner, almost like he was preparing to hold her down in case she decided to jump up and rip the ring out of Chloe’s eyebrow.

  “I thought Chloe liked girls.” I inspected the elephant, rubbed its plush against one cheek.

  “That was either a phase or a ploy to get attention and drive Cindy crazy.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yes. That girl is the most spoiled human being I’ve ever met. Cindy practically raises Ethan while Chloe goes and hangs out with her friends. Beats all I’ve ever seen.”

  “Classy. Is her husband coming?”

  “Her boyfriend, you mean. And no, your grandmother won’t allow it. She thinks he stole a spoon from her house last Christmas.”

  “Did he?”

  “Probably. You know, they use spoons to smoke those drugs.”

  “What drugs?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever kind they’re smoking these days.”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  I’ll admit that when they all arrived and were standing in the driveway, I was completely speechless seeing Chloe as an adult holding a two-year-old on her hip. I was even more shocked to see her younger brother, Toby, who was no longer a Dr. Seuss–quoting and adorable eight-year-old but a full-fledged skinny teenager with shaggy hair and big headphones around his neck.

  “Toby?” I walked up to him, and he looked over at his mom before doing anything.

  “Toby, don’t be rude. You remember Travis,” Cindy barked.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re so old. You’re almost my age now. Trippy.”

  He still didn’t say anything, but he smiled and exhaled a subtle laugh, holding out a closed fist. I bumped it and walked over to give Chloe a hug.

  “Ignore him—he pretty much hates everything,” Chloe said into my ear.

  “This is for Ethan,” I said to her, holding up the stuffed elephant.

  “Elwapunt?” he said. I laughed and let his outstretched arms grab it.

  “Yeah, elephant,” I said. “He’s cute.”

  “Quality genes, you know,” she joked.

  I liked her immediately. I mean, I’d always liked Chloe and we’d never had any problems or anything, but she was one of the cousins who stayed pretty distant during my whole illness, and I guess I just thought it would be weirder than it was. But we were laughing and joking already.

  “You look great, kid.” Uncle Jim shook my hand just as firm as ever, and I could be mistaken here, but I’m pretty sure he had tears in his eyes.

  “We certainly have a lot to be thankful for this year, don’t we?” Aunt Cindy said, moving in to hug me.

  The next group to arrive was Uncle Pete, Aunt Mary, and their twins (the aforementioned Chase and Chad), along with my grandmother, who they’d picked up on the way. Pete was my mom and Aunt Cindy’s only brother, but you’d never have guessed that from the way Mary so easily fit in with her sisters-in-law. When I say fit in, I mean that she talked nonstop and a little loudly, just like my mom and Aunt Cindy. And I loved it. The chaos of their combined voices seemed to make me forget all about my situation for once, if only for a few minutes. It was like if I closed my eyes and didn’t look at any of them, didn’t see how they’d aged and changed, then I could pretend away the dying and the surgery and the waking up to a new world. If every moment could just have this effortless familiarity, then I could be okay.

  Chase and Chad were now fourteen, still identical in every way, and even though they both gave me a hug when they walked in, I could tell they weren’t quite sure what to say to me or even if they believed that I really was me. They sat next to Toby on the couch and were discussing movies by the time I walked in and took a seat across from them in my dad’s recliner.

  “Dude, the CGI was so epic,” Chase or Chad said.

  “I know, right? What about that last battle scene? The Troll King? So cool.” Toby sat up and grabbed a chip from a bowl on the coffee table.

  “What movie you guys talking about?” I asked.

  “Troll Wars. Dude, tell me you’ve seen it,” Toby said.

  “Haven’t even heard of it.”

  “Holy shit. Holy shit,” one of the twins said. “We have to go. We have to leave this house and go right now.”

  “I don’t think they’ll let us,” I said.

  “Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow you’re taking us to see Troll Wars. Settled.”

  “I don’t have a license,” I said.

  “What? You’re sixteen, right? Like, almost seventeen?” Toby asked.

  “Lame,” one of the twins added.

  “So lame,” the other agreed.

  “I have to wait ninety days before they’ll let me take the test. It’s a medical thing.”

  “You didn’t have one before?”

  “Ran out of time,” I said.

  This made the three of them get quiet, that weird quiet where everyone thinks the same thing and waits for a brave soul to creatively change the subject. So I knew I had to just go for it if this day was going to work out at all.

  “Here,” I said, standing up and lowering the collar of my shirt. “This is where they did it. This part is me and this part is him. No, it doesn’t hurt and yes, it feels exactly like it felt when I had my first body.”

  They all stood up and stepped closer. Chase and Chad, as if they’d discussed this beforehand, each stuck out a finger and slowly went in to touch the scar. As they did this, Toby held up his phone and snapped a photo.

  “This is the single coolest thing I’ve ever experienced,” Toby said.

  “Get in here, then.” I pulled him over beside me and smiled as he held his phone out above us and snapped another shot.

  “You guys are so weird,” Chloe said as she walked into the room.

  “He is one of two people in history to come back from the dead,” Toby said to her. “I think we have the right to freak out a little.”

  “He was never actually dead, dumbass,” Chloe said to him.

  “You know what I mean. And watch your mouth. You’re a mother now, you b-word.”

  By the time they were done pretend fighting, Chloe had Toby in a headlock and was asking me if I thought he’d make a good candidate for head transplant surgery. You have no idea how amazing that felt either. To joke about this thing that everyone took so seriously was such a relief. I was so afraid that everyone would get there and we’d all be sad and moping around and talking all about when they lost me and everything.

  When dinner was ready and the scent of the turkey was wafting its way through the house and causing us all to turn ravenous, my cousin Thomas finally arrived. Thomas was Chloe and Toby’s older brother and had been twenty when I last saw him. He was dressed in his fatigues, hat and all, and gave my uncle Pete, a former Marine, a salute after he’d given everyone else a hug.
/>   “Travis,” he said, hugging my neck. “So good to see you, cousin.”

  “Alive and well, huh?” I tried to joke.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Damn, you look exactly the same.”

  “Look at his neck,” Toby said.

  “I’ll kick his ass for you later, Travis. Food ready?”

  I sat at the flimsy card table with the other kids, where I belonged, and watched Chloe and Thomas at the grown-up table. I’d been outranked. They did not mention this in the cryogenics brochure. Chad, Chase, Toby, and I waited for our moms to fix our plates, and even though it all happened the way I’d always remembered it, it still felt strange to be a part of this new generation of cousins and not sitting across the room with the ones I’d grown up with.

  “So you mean to tell me,” Toby began, quite loudly, “that if someone in this family gets frozen for a bunch of years, they still have to sit at the kiddy table until their new body is old enough to graduate?”

  “Yes, Toby. Eat your food,” Aunt Cindy said to him.

  “If Travis wants to sit over here, we can make room,” my grandmother said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Really. This is nice.”

  “Come on, Travis. Thomas, move over. Travis, you belong over here.” Chloe stood up and held her plate, making her way to our table.

  “No. Really, this is silly. I’m sixteen. You’re twenty. Stay put.”

  “You sure?” she said, her head tilted a little, a half frown on her face.

  “I’m sure. Everyone, eat. Please.”

  “Well, I do want to make a toast,” Grandma said, standing up. “To Travis.”

  “Oh man,” I said. I still hadn’t eaten a bite. My stomach was about to attack my spleen for nutrients.

  “No, now you only get to come back to life once, so we’re going to toast you all we want tonight,” she said.

  “Here, here.” Uncle Jim raised his glass of iced tea into the air, and everyone followed suit.

  “Sharon,” my grandmother said. “Would you say grace?”

  “Everyone please bow your heads,” Mom began. “We thank you, God, for all the miracles in this room tonight. For little Ethan, for Chloe. For Toby, Chase, Chad, and Thomas. And, Lord, we especially thank you for bringing us our Travis back. We missed him so much.”

  When I opened my eyes, which were fairly wet, I saw that everyone in the room had the same expression, one of those sad-but-happy ones that you see when there’s a good memory or joke shared in a eulogy or when your grandparents talk about their childhoods. This look they all shared, some with tears and others with shaky lips, it made me realize something that I hadn’t quite thought about up until that moment. It made me realize that no matter how often you see or talk to someone, no matter how much you know them or don’t know them, you always fill up some space in their lives that can’t ever be replaced the right way again once you leave it.

  “Travis,” my sweet grandma said. “I always knew you’d come back.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  COME BACK

  It’s always weird going back to school after a holiday. There’s this strange sort of feeling in the air and this distant look in everyone’s eyes—like no one really knows how to catch back up with their routines, from walking down the hallway to turning locker combinations. You see people stopping to remember what books they need for which classes, and sometimes you even see a kid or two wander into the wrong room at the wrong time. As I sat in my desk in geometry that morning, I wished I could raise my hand and explain to the teacher and to everyone that this feeling they all had, this out-of-time-and-place feeling, was exactly what I felt every second of every day. I wanted them to know, just for a second, what it might feel like to be this way, to be unable to catch back up, to make sense of the littlest things going on around you.

  Hatton showed back up at school with a black eye, courtesy of Skylar and a dictionary that he’d thrown at him from across a room. He was smiling, though, even took his thin wire-rimmed glasses off to give me a closer look. It was like he was proud of the thing.

  “I am proud of it!” he said. “I look like a total badass now.”

  “You look like someone who lost a fight.”

  “Even so. I look like I was in a fight. That’s all that matters.”

  “Yeah, with a dictionary.”

  Though I was relatively famous at school, and everywhere else for that matter, Hatton Sharpe was pretty much the only person I ever talked to, voluntarily at least. If high school couldn’t be the same—with Kyle and Cate, I mean—then at least Hatton was there to make it bearable.

  “What do you think the likelihood of a guy like me hooking up with a girl like Audrey Hagler is? Be honest,” he asked at lunch one day that week.

  “I dunno, Hatton. Do you really want a girl like that?”

  “Every single second of every day since I was twelve.”

  “Doesn’t she date Matt Braynard?”

  “Yeah. That guy’s a tool.”

  “Seems nice to me.”

  “You haven’t spent that much time around him yet. He uses that whole president of the Christian Youth Club thing as a way to cover up what he really is.”

  “Which is what?”

  “A sadist.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “You never answered the question. What are my chances?” Hatton was biting his thumbnail.

  “Okay. Seeing as she currently dates a sadist pretending to be the biggest Christian in school, and, adding to that, she’s about a year older than you are and doesn’t know your name, I’m thinking maybe one in about three million?”

  “Well, that’s not very promising.”

  “No. But you know what, Hatton?”

  “What?”

  “One day when we’re older and we’ve got jobs and families and all that, you’re gonna run into Audrey Hagler somewhere and you’re probably gonna forget her name too. It’ll take you a minute to figure out where you know her from, and when you realize who she is, you’ll laugh to yourself.”

  “And she’ll still be bangin’ hot and we’ll, like, start an affair or something. That could be cool too.”

  “You’re hopeless.”

  “I know. But thanks anyway.”

  “Sure. Has anyone asked you about the black eye?”

  “Couple of people. I told ’em I got in a fight with some private-school kid in my neighborhood. I kicked his fake ass.”

  “Nice.”

  “You still haven’t talked to Cate?”

  “Nope. It sucks.”

  “Maybe it’s like you said, though. Maybe she just needs to see you once and she’ll realize you’re the same guy.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. I just don’t want to scare her away before I get the chance to prove that.”

  “You think your new body’s gonna freak her out? Travis, not to be weird or anything, but your old one couldn’t have been any better than this. Aside from your scar, which makes you look badass anyway, there’s nothing wrong with you. I think if I’d been there when you were sick, then getting to see you like this now would be completely incredible.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . it’s not going to be the same. When we touch, it’ll be different, you know?”

  “When you touch? Wait, I’m confused. She’s engaged, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Oh.” Hatton sort of stared down at the ground for a few seconds.

  “What? Say it.”

  “Travis, I just think it’s a bad idea to expect her to see you and automatically be your girlfriend again. I know that’s what you want, but have you considered how unlikely that is?”

  “No,” I said. “And I don’t really care if she’s engaged. She’ll see me and it’ll all be okay again. So do you wanna help me or not?”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Help me get her back.”

  “You’re not going to give up on this, are you?”

  “Not a chance. Can y
ou be at my house at six?”

  “Sure, man. As long as it’s okay for me to run away when her fiancé comes to kick your ass.”

  “Fine. But I thought fights made you look badass?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I’ve reached my weekly quota already.”

  Even though I knew Hatton was wrong about her, that she would be my girlfriend again, even if it took a little work and a little time, I knew that sitting around waiting on her to come to me was not the right strategy. She wasn’t going to hunt me down and tell me she still loved me and that it didn’t matter what the world thought about any of it. She was waiting on me to do those things. I had to find her and tell her, show her, that Travis Coates might be mostly ash in some mystery container hidden in his parents’ house, but that the part of him that found its way back would always be incomplete without her. I wasn’t dead anymore, so we could be together. It was so simple and I just needed to tell her. So I’d either make it happen, or I’d die again trying.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DYING AGAIN TRYING

  The night I told Cate I was sick, she was driving us to a concert downtown. We were on the interstate when I decided I couldn’t keep it from her any longer. So I just came out with it and closed my eyes and held on to the handle on her passenger-side door and wished for the moment to pass as quickly and painlessly as possible.

  “I wanna die,” she said a few minutes later.

  “Cate, don’t say that.”

  “No. I wanna die!” She got louder this time, both of her hands gripping the steering wheel tightly, her arms stretched into straight, powerful rods jutting out from her chest.

  “Just pull over and let’s talk for a second. It’s okay.”

  “I wanna die! I wanna drive this car right off the road and die!”

  She was sort of flailing now, her hands still on the steering wheel, but the rest of her was shaking back and forth against her seat. Her hair was flying around her face. She kept repeating it over and over. “I wanna die. I wanna have a wreck and die!” Then she paused for one quick second, her crying stopped and her body motionless, and she reached over and set one hand on my left arm and said, “But not with you in here,” in the most normal, emotionless voice I’d ever heard.