Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

  But she wasn’t there, just like I hadn’t been there all those times when I was supposed to be. If a few months felt this bad, then I can’t imagine what five years was like for her. Every time I passed her old locker at school and tried not to look at it, I’d close my eyes and see her doing the same with mine. You have to forget about people when you can’t have them anymore. That’s the only way to be okay, I think—to forget how they looked and sounded and left Post-it notes on your desk and told you they’d come back from the dead someday. She had to get over me because there was no alternative. But I couldn’t do that with her. I couldn’t forget that she was still here and I was still here and we weren’t together.

  “Stacey Lowell wants to go out with me, I think,” Hatton said, sitting down at lunch.

  “So go out with her.”

  “She’s too smart for me.”

  “You’re smart enough.”

  “Not that smart. She’s always talking about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.”

  “She wants to be a therapist, I think. Maybe she just wants you for your problems.”

  “Nah. I don’t have any problems. It’s my hair. Girls love my hair.”

  “You do have great hair. It’s so . . . big.”

  “It grows out instead of down. I think it gives me a one-up on all the buzz cuts around here.”

  “Watch it.”

  “No, no. Yours has grown out a lot. You look almost like a real live boy again.”

  “You never saw me before, dude.”

  “Yeah, I have. Yearbook in the library. I wanted to compare. And the news, of course. That old photo of you.”

  “Creepy.”

  “Are you thinking about her right now?”

  “You don’t have to ask. I’m always thinking about her.”

  “Would it help if I told you that I’m fairly sure it’s illegal?”

  “What?”

  “You guys being together. It’s illegal. Statutory.”

  “I turn seventeen in March. Then it’s legal.”

  “Oh. Never mind, then.”

  “It wouldn’t matter, though.”

  “It might. Do you want to visit your girlfriend in the pen?”

  “Are you done?”

  “Quite.”

  When I got home from school, Mom was asleep on the couch, still wearing her pink scrubs. She’d worked the graveyard shift, something she only had to do once a month or so. Dad had driven me that morning on his way to work, which was awesome because when he drove me, we always pulled through McDonald’s for breakfast. Here’s what you should know about my parents: they had very opposing ideas of what was good for me. My mom, for instance, would’ve forced me to eat a bowl of oatmeal with a half a grapefruit or a banana before driving me to school. But my dad, he figured life was too short for stuff like that. So on mornings like that one, we ate our sausage biscuits and hash browns in secret, together, and we had a silent pact that my mother would never find out.

  “Gonna be late again tonight, pal,” he said when I got out of the car.

  “Bummer. See you tomorrow, then.”

  I hadn’t really thought about it too much at first, but these late work nights of his were starting to feel a bit strange. I’ll admit that it was hard not to immediately jump to the worst conclusion—to see all the thousands of movie and TV show scenarios where the father starts working late and neglecting the mother, and the marriage ends after a big affair with a secretary or coworker is revealed. But I knew that couldn’t be the case here. Not my dad. Not Ray Coates. His only secrets involved fast food.

  After school I fell asleep doing homework, and when the phone rang, I nearly tumbled off the bed trying to reach it on the nightstand. I cleared my throat and tried to wipe the sleep out of my eyes before answering. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello.”

  “Travis?”

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Cate.”

  “Cate.” It took a second to register. “Cate! Oh, hey.”

  “What you did Friday night wasn’t fair.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I just—”

  “Let me talk. It wasn’t fair. It was immature and it scared me. I don’t like being scared. You know that.”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “And I guess you thought that if you just threw yourself back into my life like that, then . . . well . . . then I wouldn’t be able to keep ignoring you.”

  “In so many words, yeah.”

  “Travis, I’m an adult now. And I make decisions like one. That’s probably hard for you to understand. Or maybe it isn’t, but it’s still hard for me to understand sometimes. We can’t have what we had before. I could tell you the millions of reasons why that’s true, but instead I want you to just trust me.”

  “I trust you, Cate.”

  “Trust me when I say that it’s better this way. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to see you. It doesn’t mean we can’t be a part of each other’s lives again.”

  “Just not a big part.”

  “Just . . . different, okay? Friends. We were friends once. You remember that. We were best friends. All these years later and I still haven’t found another friend like you, Travis. That has to mean something, right?”

  “When can I see you, then?”

  “I can’t say when. I wish I could. Things are so crazy right now. Turner found out about that night at the karaoke place, and he’s been really worried and acting weird about things. He really cares about me, Travis.”

  “And you love him? Like you loved me?”

  “I do. I wouldn’t be marrying him if I didn’t.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  They say the heart is just a muscle. They say it plays absolutely no role in our emotions and that its use as a symbol for love is based on archaic theories of it being the seat of the soul or something ridiculous like that. But as I quietly listened to every word she was saying to me, as each syllable shot a sharp arrow through the phone and into my ear, I swear I felt like my entire chest would collapse in on itself. I knew this feeling. They say a heart can’t really break because there’s nothing to be broken. But see, I once had to leave everyone I loved, and it felt this same way. Maybe Jeremy Pratt’s did too. Before he died, I mean. Maybe his heart was torn to shreds and maybe that’s why it hurt so bad now, like it hadn’t had enough time to heal before receiving its next blow.

  “I know this is harder than I can ever imagine, Travis. But I do love you. That can mean a lot of different things. I care about you and I’m glad you’re back. It’s nothing short of a miracle, and I only hope you see it that way too.”

  “I’m trying, Cate.”

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “When they did it . . . after you’d said good-bye to us and they were putting you under, were you scared?”

  “Not really. I was tired. I just needed it to be over.”

  “I was so angry,” she said.

  “You were?”

  “It’s so selfish, but I just wanted you to stay as long as you could. They said seeing you go peacefully or whatever would make it better. Everyone said it would be so much easier. But it wasn’t, Travis. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You came back, Travis Coates.”

  “God, can you believe it?”

  “I guess maybe some part of me wanted to think it might happen someday. Like maybe when I was an old lady or something. Like we joked about. But this is just—”

  “Bizarre?”

  “Different, yeah?” she said. “Just different and incredible and kind of sad, too, I think.”

  There it was. That’s all I needed her to say. I knew why it was sad and so did she. I was gone just long enough for her to move on, and now she was starting to wish she hadn’t. Turner? Turner who? Maybe she loved him. I didn’t expect her to go and destroy the guy. That wasn’t Cate. But I was back. And
she knew, just like I did, that this was going to change everything. There was no hiding from it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HIDING FROM IT

  One night, just a couple of days before a chemo treatment that was sure to kick my ass, Cate showed up at the front door holding two blankets and a big red thermos, the kind where the lid doubles as a miniature little mug. She was determined and her face showed it. Anyone who knew her less than I did, which was everyone, would have taken it for anger, both of her sharp eyebrows pointing inward toward her nose a bit, her lips pursed, her gaze dead-on and purposeful. This just meant she had a plan, though. And I knew not to stray from her plans.

  “What gives?” I asked, still standing in the doorway. I liked pretending to go against her wishes, like we were opposing forces and not completely entangled.

  “Leonids.”

  “Say what?”

  “It’s a meteor shower. Peaks tonight. Does your dad have a ladder?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I think so.”

  “Get out of the way, stupid. We’ve got to set up shop.”

  She never changed her expression, even when she leaned over to kiss me on her way inside. I followed after her, taking the blankets and thermos out of her hand and watching as she walked nonchalantly through the kitchen and over to the door that led into the garage.

  “Ladder?” She pointed before opening it.

  “Yeah. Let me get it.”

  “No, no. Stop. I got it.”

  “You know, I can lift a ladder, Cate,” I said, frustrated.

  “And I can kick your ass, Travis,” she said, smiling.

  No one let me do anything anymore, which was nice but also made me feel even worse about being sick, like I was just there to be a constant inconvenience to everyone. I knew that wasn’t the case, but still. Dying’s hard enough without everyone reminding you all the time.

  I couldn’t believe Cate let me climb the ladder, actually. But I got up just fine, and she was situating both blankets on the flat, slanted side of the roof, the side that perfectly faced the sky.

  “Our own private planetarium,” she said.

  We’d sat up there once before, with Kyle, on Halloween night so we could scare the trick-or-treaters at the front door. That night ended after Kyle fell from the roof when a kid threw a handful of mini Butterfingers at his face. He lived.

  “What’s in the thermos?”

  “Mexican hot chocolate.” She handed it to me with the lid off, and I smelled it, the spices tickling my nose, warming me up instantly. I took a sip straight from the thermos.

  “Here, at least use the cup,” she said, handing it to me.

  “It’s too good.” I took another sip, swallowed loudly. “Must drink it all.”

  “Save some for me, you maniac.”

  “Did you see that?” I handed her the thermos and sat up.

  I’d seen one, a meteor. It was yellow—maybe gold, even—and it streaked right across the sky. Younger kids would have called it a shooting star. But we’d reached that age where the science behind it mattered, where the wonders of the universe needed to be further explained to mesmerize us. But still, it was beautiful and, even though this sounds weird, it made me feel really tiny and insignificant. And I liked that. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to, but I did.

  “I missed it. Stop distracting me.”

  She took a sip of the hot chocolate and leaned back onto the blankets. I watched her for a minute, just watched her look up at the sky, a blue-purplish glow shining down on her face. Her foggy November breaths hung a little in the air in front of her. She eventually caught me and started smiling.

  “You’re missing quite a show, Travis.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “You’re a cheesy bastard sometimes, you know that?”

  “You love it.” I slid closer to her, set my chin right on the curve of her shoulder.

  “I do,” she said, looking back up at the sky. “You know, about four billion meteoroids fall to Earth every day. Most of them are just too small to notice.”

  “Maybe someone sees them,” I said. “Kind of sad to think they disappear just like that.”

  “Oh boy, you’re on a roll, cheeseball.” She shook her head with a little half smile on her lips. But she didn’t look at me, and I knew we were thinking the exact same thing.

  • • •

  Two weeks went by, and I hadn’t heard a thing out of Cate. Two weeks. And she wouldn’t answer any of my calls or texts. Just like that, I thought, Travis and Cate were doomed to be a thing of the past. A perfect little blip on the airwaves of time. I could tell you I got angry and threw things across my room and kicked at the walls and punched a hole in the back of my bedroom door. But I didn’t. One night, after I’d tried to call her, I walked quietly down the hall to the bathroom. I closed and locked the door, turned on the bathtub faucet, and then held on to the cold porcelain as I lowered myself onto the floor and wedged my legs between the toilet and the tub. And I cried. It was the kind where it’s hard to catch your breath, where every muscle in your body aches and you aren’t sure it will ever end. And my parents never heard a thing.

  The next day at school Hatton was still trying his best to make light of it all. And I couldn’t blame him for it, really. I would’ve tried cheering me up too, even if I thought it was impossible.

  “Travis, man, you’re a good-lookin’ guy. You can pretty much pick any girl in this school, and she’d probably be more than happy to help make you feel better.”

  “Thanks, Hatton.”

  “No, I mean, for real. I think you’re really missing out on a rare opportunity here, man. I see the way they look at you. Hell, if I got looks like that, I could tell my parents to cancel our Internet.”

  “I think they’re just interested in the freak head thing, Hatton.”

  “Oh, they’re interested in the head, all right.”

  “Gross.”

  “You bet it is,” he said, grinning.

  It was little conversations like this that reminded me so much of how it had been with Kyle. It was strange how sometimes I’d be talking to Hatton and, if I didn’t look right at him or pay that much attention to his voice, it was almost like Kyle Hagler had walked into the school, sat down, and picked right back up where we’d left off. I’d been so stupid about Kyle, and now he wasn’t there. I guess I had to stop thinking there’d be a day when everything I wanted, everything I had, would be set back perfectly into place. Truth is, I was the past and I had to find some way to exist in the future. It wasn’t going to be easy, that much I knew, but I had to try. That’s what people do in these situations, right? They try even when they know it’s impossible.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE IMPOSSIBLE

  My first priority was getting Kyle to talk to me again and, of course, apologizing for being such an ass. It wasn’t any of my business if he was gay or straight or both or neither. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were friends. Since I couldn’t get Cate back as easily as I’d thought, and maybe never, I at least had to salvage what I had with Kyle. So I called him up one afternoon, and I honestly still can’t believe he answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Kyle. Don’t hang up. Please don’t hang up.”

  “I’m not hanging up. Chill out.”

  “Oh. Good. Umm . . . how’s it going?”

  “Pretty good, I guess. Class is kicking my ass right now. Never go to college. It isn’t worth it.”

  “Noted. Look, I’m really sorry about everything.”

  “Travis, you know . . . if we could just not talk about it, that would work for me.”

  “Okay, but just know that I’m sorry.”

  “Deal. I mean, sure. That’s fine. Listen, I talked to Cate yesterday.”

  “Shit. Cate. What’d she say?”

  “Well, she told me about the karaoke place. That was bold.”

  “I was . . . desperate, I guess.”
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  “She liked it. It’s sort of hilarious, too. But she’s just really worried about you, I think. She feels bad about how everything’s . . . turned out.”

  “We’ve only talked once since then. It’s weird, Kyle. It’s so hard to explain how this feels to me. You guys haven’t seen me in so long, and I’ve just seen you a few weeks ago.”

  “That’s got to be really hard.”

  “I feel like I was reborn into a never-ending episode of The Twilight Zone.”

  “Pig faces. The horror.”

  “You wished all the other kids away into the cornfield, Anthony.”

  And just like that, we were making TV references like we used to. Maybe he was so quick to forgive me because of what Cate had said to him, that she was worried about me. Or maybe he needed me too, couldn’t stand the idea that I was back and that we weren’t at least trying to make it work. Either way, talking to Kyle, joking around with him like this, made me feel like everything that had happened was all just a daydream. I decided right then and there that I’d try to have as many of these moments as possible until the day I really did die.

  Before we got off the phone, Kyle invited me to a concert at his college that next weekend. An ’80s cover band called Judd Nelson’s Fist was playing, and he promised I’d know at least three or four songs, that we’d ditch the thing if it turned out to be lame, and that college girls would think I was the most adorable thing that ever happened. I was ready to say yes at “’80s cover band,” but the last bit of his argument was awfully intriguing too. I was single, after all, right? Fine, fine. I had no intention of even flirting with a college girl. And I definitely wasn’t going to go flashing my scar around like some cryogenic gigolo.

  “I’m in. What should I wear?”

  “Clothes, preferably.” Kyle started laughing.

  “No, I mean, what do people wear to, like, college concerts?”