Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

  “I love it here,” I said.

  “I couldn’t let you go any longer without seeing it again.”

  “Thanks. Coming up here alone would’ve been too weird.”

  There was that feeling in my chest—the one where it feels like something is drilling into your ribs on each side and the vibrations are sort of meeting in the middle. And then it starts radiating down your arms and you’re not sure if you can steady them enough to reach out for her, to touch the sides of her face as she leans closer. Your voice even starts to shake, matching the nervousness of your body, of Jeremy Pratt’s body, as she finally gets close enough to hear you, and you say to her that this is the most perfect moment of either of your lives.

  “You okay?” She snapped me out of my daydream.

  “I’m fine. Just thinking about something.”

  “What?”

  “Okay. So I was wondering—how do you refer to me? Like, when I’m not around.”

  “By your name. It is still Travis, right?”

  “No, you know what I mean. Do you call me your ex-boyfriend? Or maybe former boyfriend? Dead boyfriend?”

  “Well, in high school I tried not to talk too much about you. It was hard for me, I guess. I didn’t like saying things about you in past tense. It never felt right.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that, especially around the time I started dating again, I just decided that not talking about you was worse. That it actually made me feel more like shit. So I just called you Travis, my first boyfriend.”

  “That’s not so bad, I guess.”

  “I don’t think I ever called you my ex-boyfriend even once. So at least there’s that.”

  “We should do this again,” I blurted out.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We should. I’m super busy with school and work, but we’ll make it happen, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  And just like that, we were friends. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it would do. Anything that got me nearer to her would definitely work until I found a way to get even closer.

  A few days later she called looking for a good excuse to skip her night class the next day and offered to pick me up from school. I immediately thought that maybe this was it—maybe this would finally be the day she came clean about how she really felt about us and how she couldn’t keep pretending with Turner anymore.

  “Are you sure it’s okay to skip these classes?” I asked when she picked me up.

  “Yeah. It’s fine. I told them my grandmother was dying.”

  “Oh. Is . . . well, never mind.”

  “What is it?”

  “Is she? I mean, is she still alive?” I whispered alive like I wasn’t supposed to say it.

  “Yes, Travis. My God. You weren’t gone for twenty years.”

  “So where are we going?” I asked.

  “Not telling. Just wait and see.”

  We eventually drove up to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which I hadn’t been to since a school field trip back when I was a freshman. We parked in the underground garage and went inside.

  “Close your eyes,” she said as we walked past the gift store.

  “If I close my eyes, I won’t be able to see the art,” I said.

  “No. You’ve seen all this. I want to show you something else.”

  Then she grabbed my hand. I’ll tell you this much—if I’d never gotten to open my eyes again but could still feel her semi-sweaty grasp and the rough scratch of the tips of her fingernails, I would’ve been okay. She could’ve taken me anywhere as long as she kept pulling at me that way, tugging Jeremy Pratt’s arm and making my shoes squeak against the slick linoleum floor with every step.

  “Okay,” she said, letting go of my hand and positioning me by the shoulders. “You ready?”

  “If someone isn’t naked, I’m going to be unimpressed.”

  “Shut up, pervert. Okay. On the count of three.”

  “Do I open my eyes on three or right after three?” I took every opportunity I could to prolong this moment. Talking to her with my eyes closed felt more like it was supposed to feel than anything else had.

  “On three. Okay. One . . . two . . . three!”

  I thought I might cry. To be completely honest with you, I think I had at least one tear rolling down my cheek as soon as I saw it. I never thought it would happen, so it hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d open my eyes to see the one thing I’d always wanted to see before I died. But there it was, right in front of me. Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. You’ve probably seen it on television or in someone’s dorm room or something. And maybe it was lame to be so infatuated with a piece of artwork that was so popular, but I didn’t care. I used to have this huge print of it hanging across from my bed, and I’d stare at it for hours, especially when I was sick. They’d even moved it down to the guest bedroom for me when I couldn’t make it up the stairs anymore. Standing beside Cate, I looked at that thing like I was seeing the entire world for the first time. She’d remembered, of course, because I used to have this whole scheme about taking a trip to New York to see it in person before I died. But we ran out of time.

  “It’s on loan from the Met,” she said quietly.

  “Cate, I—”

  “I need to be honest,” she said. “I never really understood what all the fuss was about until I saw it up close. It’s really beautiful.”

  “I used to imagine I was in one of those boats,” I said, pointing toward it. “And you know I don’t really like water or anything. The ocean, I mean. But it never scared me. The idea of this huge wave crashing down on me was sort of peaceful in a weird way.”

  “Do you still have your poster?” she asked.

  “They got rid of it,” I said. “They got rid of everything.”

  “We’ll get you a new one, okay? They’ll have some in the gift shop,” she said, just barely gripping my arm.

  “Thank you, Cate. This is . . . just, thank you.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  After standing in the same spot for a while, and completely ignoring the several other patrons who wanted to get the dead-on view that I had, I broke my stare and looked over at her with a big smile. And as we started to walk toward the exit, I held up my finger and turned back around to get one last look.

  Before we left, Cate insisted on buying another poster for my room, and even though I argued with her a bit, I was excited to have this one familiar thing to hang up on my wall.

  On the drive home I must’ve had a dumb grin on my face because Cate, with one hand on the steering wheel, used the other to take her phone out of her purse and snap a photo of me.

  “There he is,” she said. “Travis Coates in his natural habitat.”

  • • •

  When she picked me up later that week and we drove out to the park, we started talking about movies. I was quite a movie addict in my previous life, and I’d spent a lot of my time with Cate trying to teach her the difference between a movie and a film. I was never one of those film snobs, though; don’t get me wrong. I loved a good silly movie as much as the next guy. But I had a hard time when people at school would say their favorite was something like Dumb and Dumber when they had literally thousands of better options. It wasn’t entirely their fault, though. They didn’t have someone like my dad to provide them with factoids about every movie playing on cable, or my mom to paraphrase entire life biographies of Hollywood’s most awarded and acclaimed actors. And, well, they didn’t have me to regurgitate that information and force them to sit in indie movie theaters or have director-themed marathons on the weekends. But Cate did. And because she was Cate and we were perfect together, she loved every minute of it.

  Except this one night a few months before my procedure. I’d been begging her for weeks to watch The Shining with me. She’d only seen bits and pieces of it, but she always remembered the little-girl ghosts and the blood rushing down the hallway and, though Cate usually wasn’t all that squeamish,
these images had terrified her as a young child innocently flipping through the channels. It was in those days when the various therapies and medications I was receiving were kicking my ass so hard that going out wasn’t really an option anymore. She’d drive over after school every day and on weekends, and we’d watch just about every movie that had ever been made.

  One of those weekends I finally convinced her to watch my favorite Stanley Kubrick film. And it was a terrible idea that led to maybe the best night of my life.

  But first I should tell you about my theater seats. When I was thirteen, a group of investors decided to reopen this old theater in downtown KC called the Triton. You’ll remember this as the same theater where I professed my love for Cate and much later, after I’d thawed out, saw her with her fiancé. It was during the renovations of the Triton that my dad happened to see, right there in the Kansas City Star, that they were giving away all of the original theater seats to anyone who could show up with a way to transport them. The next day I had two red-cushioned theater seats that dated back to the 1950s sitting right there in the back corner of my room. It took me a little over an hour to scrape off the decades-old wads of gum stuck to the underside of each seat using a butter knife, which I threw away and never told my mom about. I had to screw each rusty metal leg base to a small two-by-four just so the seats would stand upright, and every time you sat in them, they wobbled a bit from side to side and may or may not have sounded like a car being ripped open by the jaws of life. I loved them so much. In fact, I’d say I probably missed my theater seats more than just about anything else from my room. But I knew they couldn’t be replaced, so I didn’t even bother asking about them.

  “If we’re going to watch this movie, I need a lot of candy and you have to promise not to make fun of me.” Cate was visibly nervous, her top lip between her front teeth, her nostrils flared a little bit.

  “I make no promises.”

  Here’s the thing about The Shining: it’s terrifying. No matter how many times you watch it, no matter if it’s pitch-dark in the room or every light in the house is on, it is the scariest shit you’ve ever seen, and you are doomed to replay its most horrific scenes over and over in your mind for days to follow. But nevertheless, it’s a masterwork of cinematography, and I couldn’t let Cate avoid it any longer.

  We waited until nighttime, took our seats, and used my roller desk chair to prop our feet up in front of us. We never held hands much, but that night she didn’t let go of mine for the entire movie.

  When it was over, she didn’t really say anything for a while. It was pretty late and she needed to head home, but she also wasn’t moving from her spot in the theater seat.

  “So . . . good, huh?” I tried to stand up, even though my body really didn’t want me to.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so freaked out in my entire life,” she said in a shaky, low voice.

  “Cate, come on. It’s just a movie.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep.”

  “I’m . . . sorry?” It was becoming really difficult not to smile.

  “No, don’t be. I think I loved it. But yeah . . . I’m totally scared shitless too.”

  “That’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel. It worked!” I managed to finally get myself standing upright, and I held one hand up for her to high-five. She did, very slowly, still staring toward the TV screen.

  “I guess I better get home.”

  “Are you okay?” I wanted to laugh. I’d never seen her like this.

  “Yeah. Sorry, I’m fine. Okay. I love you.” She leaned in and hugged me, and kissed me on the cheek. “You need help with anything before I go?”

  “Nah. I’m good. Let me walk you out.”

  “Travis. You can barely stand. Get in bed and I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay. Love you. Night.”

  I made it to my bed and was lying with my eyes closed by the time I heard her car pulling out of the driveway. Then my phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Travis?”

  “Cate Conroy? It’s been ages.”

  “Stay on the phone with me until I get home. But, like, not just home. Maybe until I’m in my room with the door locked.”

  “Are you serious?” I was laughing.

  “Yes, I’m serious. I told you I didn’t want to watch that scary-ass movie, and now I can’t even drive home without looking out the window and into the backseat, like, a hundred times and—”

  “This is the best moment of my life.”

  “Stop it!” She tried to be mad, but I could tell she was smiling. When you talk to someone as much as I’d talked to Cate, you know how their voice changes when they smile.

  “Hey, Cate?”

  “What?”

  “Heeeeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!” I couldn’t resist. I mean, come on.

  “I hate you. Oh man, I hate you so much.”

  “You’ll miss it.”

  I talked to her that night for about an hour after she’d gotten to her room, locked the door, and checked under her bed and in her closet.

  I replayed the whole thing to Cate in the park that afternoon, remembering every single word that we’d said. She seemed amazed at how much of it she’d forgotten. She looked at me with these bewildered eyes and held her hand up to her mouth, her fingertips touching her lips. It was weird that she hadn’t remembered it the way I had. And I could tell it bothered her. But in that moment I understood what they say about nostalgia, that no matter if you’re thinking of something good or bad, it always leaves you a little emptier afterward. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of everything I was trying to ignore. Was this going to happen every time we talked about the past? I wasn’t sure I could do that to her and, well, I wasn’t sure she’d let me.

  The next day I was walking from chemistry to lunch, and I ran into Audrey Hagler. She walked up to me and didn’t say a word, just hugged me, and I could feel the warmth of her cheek on my own.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “You’re a good friend, Travis.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “To Kyle, I mean. Thank you.”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed.

  She smiled really big and squeezed one of my arms. And then she walked away and I was left standing right in the middle of the hallway, my cheeks flushed, my palms sweaty, my arm feeling as if her hand was still there gripping it. There are moments in your life when you imagine things happening in slow motion, when your movie-addled mind won’t let you experience things the way they’re actually going down, but instead replaces it with fictional special effects. And it was in this moment that I came to realize something very important, something that I hadn’t quite given much thought since my return. I considered the idea that maybe my death had slowed everyone down a bit. If I’d still been there, Kyle wouldn’t have felt compelled to live a lie for so long. It seemed to me that I’d screwed up years of his life. I wondered what things I’d screwed up for the rest of them. I’d wanted them all to move on and stop centering their lives on a kid who stood no chance of survival. I’d volunteered for all this craziness because I thought it was the least selfish thing I could do, the only thing I could still do for them. But in that hallway with all those people moving by me in a half blur and a cloud of noise swarming around my head, all I could think about was how badly I’d let them all down. Dying, as it turns out, may not have been the best decision I ever made.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE BEST DECISION I EVER MADE

  Now that Kyle and Cate were both back in my life, in some form or another, I was feeling almost . . . peaceful. It wasn’t exactly like before, but it would certainly do for the time being. And Cate and I were on the right track to becoming something even better than before, I’d say. And having Hatton was just an added bonus to it all.

  But it was inevitable that these two worlds—the one where I was just another teenager and the one where I was pretending not
to be—would collide. And I needed it to happen without one destroying the other. I’d planned on eventually getting Kyle and Hatton together to show them how one was pretty much the past or future version of the other. And Cate? Well, I wanted to tell them both at the same time that I’d been hanging out with her, figuring maybe they’d try to one-up the other as my most supportive friend and I’d be left unscathed in the process.

  But see, things don’t always go according to plan in my life. So the day after I got out of school for Christmas break, Kyle called me and I could immediately tell he had something to say that I didn’t want to hear.

  “Travis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’ve been seeing Cate?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Because she told me. I saw her last night at school.”

  “Oh well. I haven’t really had the chance to tell you.”

  “Bullshit. She says you guys have been hanging out for, like, two weeks.”

  “Yeah. What’s the big deal? We’re just friends, Kyle.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was going to,” I said.

  “You forget I know you just as well as you know me. You can’t ruin things for her.”

  “You know this is right. We’re supposed to be us again. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m being her friend, and it seems like she’s been pretty desperate to have someone to talk to.”

  “I just . . . I just hope it’s not the wrong decision. For either of you, okay?”

  “Why would it be? She didn’t stop loving me because I died, Kyle. I don’t blame her for trying to move on. But now she’ll see that it can go back to how it was, okay?”

  “I don’t think you get where I’m coming from here, Travis.”

  “The future?” I tried to joke.

  “Stop. I’m being serious.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Look, I’m just afraid you’re going to find out that no matter how perfect you guys were before, that maybe that doesn’t last forever. Plus, she has a fiancé. She is getting married.”