Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

  “And overseas, too,” Matt said. “Those two boxes are just from other countries.”

  “Shit,” Hatton said. “I mean, shoot.” He held his hands out and looked around the room.

  “I told him I didn’t want any of these,” I said.

  “I know,” Matt said. “But we just wanted you to know where they are when you’re ready. As long as they keep sending them, we’ll keep sorting them like this.”

  “Thanks, Matt,” I said.

  Audrey stood beside him now, leaning against his shoulder, and without even looking her way, Matt tilted his head to rest lightly on top of hers. Maybe that’s a stupid thing to notice, but this quiet little gesture of his, especially after what he’d just said, was flipping this entire image I’d had of him in my mind. Maybe there was something behind the ego and self-righteousness after all—something surprisingly genuine.

  I shook everyone’s hands as they started to leave for their classes, and a few of them gave me these big smiles and told me “Good luck,” even though I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Maybe they were wishing me luck in trying to figure out who the hell I was supposed to be now, after coming back from the dead and all. Or maybe they were just hoping I’d be able to be brave enough to open all those letters and see what was inside.

  The last one to leave was Matt Braynard. He shook my hand really firmly and gripped my left shoulder, looking right into my eyes for a few seconds before speaking.

  “Just take one box home,” he said. “Just one box. What can it hurt? It could end up changing your life.”

  • • •

  When I got home that afternoon, I hid the blue plastic container of letters in the bottom of my closet and had no intention of ever opening it. If taking home a box of letters every week or so would get them to leave me alone, then I could do that. I knew they meant well, after all.

  After staring at the phone for a few minutes, I tried giving Cate a call. I still hadn’t spoken to her in a while, and I figured she’d be ready to see me again. But no answer. Nothing. It went straight to her voice mail, and I didn’t even bother leaving a message. So I called Lawrence Ramsey instead.

  “So how do we do this?” I said as soon as he answered.

  “What do you mean, Travis?”

  “Well, you’ve been back for what, like, six months longer than I have? So surely you’ve got some secrets for me. Maybe you know how to deal with all this a little better than I do. Things are getting pretty weird pretty quickly around here.”

  “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “Let’s see . . . where to begin. Okay. Turns out my parents are divorced. Yeah, they’ve been pretending to still be together since October, for me, you know. And Dad’s got this apartment across town with this creepy Travis shrine in it. I can’t even begin to explain how crazy that is. And my girlfriend is getting married to someone who is, well, not me, and everyone expects me to just move on and get over all of these things when it feels like I keep getting pianos dropped on my head over and over and over.”

  “Yikes,” he said.

  “You bet your ass, yikes.” I laughed. “So tell me how to make this easier.”

  “Travis, it’s always going to be different for us. You and me, we’re always a little bit in the past, you know? It’s not like that’s going to change.”

  “Then at least tell me what it’s like,” I said.

  “What what’s like?”

  “What it’s like to know you’re glad to be back. That you’re alive again. You call me up and talk about being so relieved to have someone else to talk to and how hard it’s been and how strange it is that everyone missed you so much. But I see you on TV and I hear your interviews, and I can tell you’re happy. You’re so glad to be back. Tell me what that’s like.”

  “Okay. Okay, listen. Yeah, I was happy to wake up. After figuring out what the hell had happened to me, yeah, I was damn happy. Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve got my wife and my kids. But she waited for me, Travis. That whole time. Claire waited all those years for me, and I’m still trying, every day now, to be worth it for her. I can’t let her down.”

  “But she waited,” I said. “She knew you’d come back even if no one else believed it, right?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “But it scares me to think that she’d give up a happy life forever just to sit around and wait on the off chance that I’d be back. All those years she raised our girls alone and she didn’t know a thing. She had no idea if I’d be back or not. Maybe that’s not fair, but it terrifies me.”

  “Everyone just outgrew me. Now I think I’m just haunting them.”

  “Give it time. You have to. You and I both know we’re just as surprised as they all are. You know how they all must’ve felt. They had to try to move on because waiting for you might not have worked. We did the easy part, Travis. We took a little nap. They all had to live for five years without us. They had to talk about us and think about us and see the things that reminded them of us. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute, huh? See if you don’t stop breathing.”

  “It was just so much easier before,” I said.

  “Travis,” he said, almost sternly. “Don’t you go your whole life comparing everything that happens to the way it was before. You know what else happened before? You died. Your body gave up on you. Just like mine did. We can’t waste our whole lives obsessing over what things were like before, or else we’ll end up even worse off.”

  “Maybe you’re right. At least my body’s better now,” I said.

  “Yeah. Mine too. I’ve even been running. I never used to run. I got too winded. Hell, I’m in the best shape of my life, and I’m supposed to be dead. How do you like that?”

  “Seems like cheating,” I said.

  “You and me, Travis, we’re the biggest cheaters in the world. You think people don’t look at us, don’t think about us, and feel sick about all the people they’ve lost? We cheated the one thing everyone’s afraid of. Question is, how do we prove it wasn’t wasted on us?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Me neither. But I’ll keep looking. And trying to figure it out. Maybe that’s lame and cheesy to someone your age, but I spent too many years the first time feeling sorry for myself and being afraid to do the things that make me happy. Not this time.”

  Lawrence and I agreed to talk again the following week. When I got off the phone, I felt like chatting with him for fifteen minutes had made me think about everything so much clearer. There was a sick sort of relief in knowing that someone else was out there completely confused and thrown off track like I was. And I thought about all those letters and how those kids at school who I barely knew, and one who I didn’t even like, had done this nice thing for me because they thought what happened to me was something special. “Inspiring.” And, see, that’s just the thing. Up until that point, any time someone said my story “inspired” them, I cringed and I wanted to tell them all the reasons why missing everyone’s lives and coming back and being the only one who was the same was the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine. But after that day, after the letters and the phone call, after everything that had happened with my parents, I thought maybe a day was coming when I’d stop constantly worrying about how to live. Maybe at some point I’d just start living, no questions asked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  NO QUESTIONS ASKED

  When I finally heard from Cate again, it had been a week and a half since we’d followed my dad. I guess Kyle had explained to her everything that went down the day after, because as soon as I answered the phone, she immediately started asking me if I was okay.

  “Hey, I get two Christmases next year. I’m fine.”

  “Travis, you don’t have to do that with me. You don’t have to make light of it.”

  “Look, it happened. I think I haven’t completely processed it yet. Maybe my head’s not screwed on right.”

  “Travis.”

  “Get it?”

  “Please sto
p.”

  “Where’ve you been, Cate?”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “I can’t talk to you if every time we have a conversation, it turns into this long, serious thing about what we are.”

  “What are we?”

  “Friends, Travis.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No. I am. You’ve been through too much.”

  “When can I meet Turner?” I asked.

  “Oh. Umm . . . are you sure?”

  “That’s only fair, I think. You said he wanted to meet me. If that means I can still see you, then let’s set it up.”

  “Thursday night? You want to come over for dinner?”

  “At your place? Your place with him?” I got up and looked in the mirror to make sure my face hadn’t exploded.

  “Yeah. Or no. Would that be too weird, maybe?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay. Yeah. You’re right. Steak ’n Shake?”

  She was taking Jeremy Pratt’s heart and scraping it against a cheese grater. She was stomping on it like a pile of grapes. She was running over it with her car, then backing over it to make sure it was dead.

  “No. That’s a bad idea,” she said. “We’ll just get coffee. How’s that sound?”

  “Perfect.” I was dead inside.

  So the plan was to meet them at the Grindhouse at five thirty Thursday afternoon. I was going to have Kyle take me, but he had class. So I asked Hatton instead, and I knew my mom would let me borrow the car, even if it required another driving test.

  “What am I gonna do while you’re in there?” Hatton asked.

  “I don’t know. You can come in if you want.”

  “No. That’s not going to happen. I’m already sort of cringing for you on the inside.”

  “Yeah. I’m not too excited. But the way I figure, I might as well size up the competition before making my next move.”

  “And what’s your next move?”

  “I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

  “You’re shitting me, right?”

  “Know that thousand bucks my dad gave me for Christmas?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m gonna buy her a ring with it.”

  “Doesn’t she already have an engagement ring?”

  “Not the one she’s supposed to have,” I said. “And I’ll ask her soon. Like, maybe this weekend. She’ll see how serious I am. She’ll see I’m not just a kid pretending to be grown-up to be with her.”

  “That’s kind of exactly what you are, though, Travis.”

  “Shut up. You know what I mean. This has to work. She keeps telling me we should just stay friends, but then she calls me and she comes over and she wants me in her life.”

  “Because she cares about you, man.”

  “She loves me. You don’t fall out of the kind of love we had, Hatton. I wish you could’ve seen us together.”

  “I think you’ve gone completely insane.”

  “You want to help me ring shop this afternoon?”

  “You need a ride, don’t you?”

  • • •

  “Do you know her ring size, sir?” the salesman at the Zales in the mall asked that afternoon.

  “Umm . . . small? Medium, maybe?”

  “It’s measured in millimeters, sir.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, maybe just give me the average size?”

  “Fine. Let me show you some of our new collection.”

  He took us over to a glass case and showed us some rings I was sure I couldn’t afford. I started looking around at the other cases, and I could tell he was losing patience with me. Hatton was making sure no one we knew was walking by. I hadn’t seen him look this embarrassed before. I think it’s because he didn’t approve of anything I was doing.

  “Do you have something more . . . affordable, maybe?”

  “What’s your price range?”

  “A thousand.”

  He brought out a small cushioned case holding five rings. They were simple and each had a single, tiny diamond in the center. There were two gold and three silver.

  “A silver one, I think.” I reached down and felt the diamond on one. I looked over at Hatton and he shrugged. Clearly he hadn’t been the best choice for this mission.

  “This one. Yeah. I like this one.”

  “But the question is, will she like it?” the man asked me.

  “Yeah,” Hatton said, rolling his eyes. “Will she like it, Travis?”

  After Hatton and I got home, I hid the ring under my mattress. This was something, I’m told, that boys used to do before the Internet. They hid things they wanted to keep secret from their parents under their mattresses. I wasn’t sure why this ever worked out well for anyone who had clean sheets. But my secret was temporary.

  • • •

  The next day Kyle picked Hatton and me up from school, and I knew immediately that they were about to stage some intervention or something. They had nearly the same expression on their faces, like they were getting ready to tell me really bad news.

  “Kyle, do you ever have anything better to do than hang out with two teenagers?” I tried to lighten the mood as soon as I got in.

  “Shut up,” Kyle said. He was angry.

  “You told him?” I asked Hatton.

  “He told me. Travis, what the hell are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I want to ask my girlfriend to marry me. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

  “Okay, well . . . for starters, she’s not your girlfriend. And also, she’s already getting married.”

  “Minor technicalities.”

  “You’ve completely lost it, you know that?” Kyle pulled into a supermarket parking lot.

  “Really, Kyle? I think I’m holding it together pretty well, considering all that’s been going on.”

  “Considering what?” He raised his voice, turning around in his seat to face me. Hatton was terrified and silent. “Oh man, your parents split up. Damn. And they get along so well they were able to pretend to still be married for three months, and you didn’t even have a clue! Oh, and you no longer have a body that’s literally deteriorating. That must really suck.”

  “My parents won’t even talk. They use me as a carrier pigeon,” Hatton said.

  “And you know what, Travis? You and Cate were great. You really were. And I wish more than anything that we could all go back to the way it was, that we were all sixteen again and you didn’t have to go away. But you know what else? I bet we could walk into that store right over there and ask any stranger we ran into if they wanted the same exact thing, and they’d say yes. Everyone wants to change the past, Travis. But they can’t. None of us can.”

  “Just let me do this,” I said. “I know it’s crazy and I know I’ve been acting ridiculous, but I have to do this.”

  “And then what? What’ll you do when she says no, Travis? What’ll you do?”

  “She won’t. You know she won’t.”

  “You’re full of shit, you know that?” Kyle practically shouted.

  “I have to be back for something, Kyle!” I yelled. “I can’t just be here like this for no reason. Don’t you see that?”

  “Travis,” Kyle said, quietly this time. “If you’d just open your damn eyes for a minute, then maybe you’d see that Cate isn’t the only good thing in your life. Just open your eyes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  OPEN YOUR EYES

  I made the mistake of telling Kyle and Hatton about my phone calls with Lawrence Ramsey. They weren’t some dark secret or anything, but I knew it would be hard to explain to people what we talked about. When they found out, though, they made me promise to talk to him before Thursday afternoon, before I made my grand gesture to get Cate back. They had a good point. I wanted to know what he’d say too. Maybe he’d have a new perspective on the whole thing. Or maybe he’d tell me I was crazy like they had and I’d ignore him, too.

  “Travis! I’m so glad you ca
lled.”

  “Thanks, thanks. I should probably apologize for last time.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, I have got to tell you something crazy. You won’t believe it.”

  “Oh yeah? I’ve got something for you, too. You go first.”

  “I talked to his family. It was so wild.”

  “Whose family?”

  “His, my body’s. Umm . . . my donor’s family.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. Last week I get this call from the Saranson Center, and they ask me if I’d give the family permission to contact me. I figured why not, so I said yeah and about two days later I get a phone call.”

  “Who was it?” I was half-convinced he was making this all up.

  “His wife. How weird is that? She told me all about him. He was a travel agent in Palm Springs. They used to fly around the world together.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Yeah. Then one day he has a brain aneurysm and dies. Just like that.”

  “So she donated his body then?”

  “Yeah. Her sister told her about the project in Denver. She’d read about it somewhere. His wife, her name’s Jackie, she said she knew immediately that she had to do it. Said he would’ve loved the idea of it.”

  “Seems like a cool lady.”

  “It was so unexpected. I didn’t know if I should thank her or what. I could hardly speak.”

  He told me more about her and about Stanley Baker, the man who was now attached to him. I think Lawrence was having a hard time even talking about it. He might have even been crying a little because he kept pausing midsentence and breathing in really deeply. It was heartbreaking but also sort of annoying because I’d called to talk about proposing to Cate. I’d called to talk about the future, and all he wanted to do was make me think about the past.

  “Look, Travis. You have to meet the family. Or at least talk to them. It made me feel so . . . I don’t know . . . just so much better about everything. I don’t feel as lost.”

  “Are you gonna talk to them again?”

  “Hell yeah, I am. I’m thinking of flying out to California really soon so I can meet them. He had two kids, Travis. I just don’t see how I can’t go tell them how grateful I am in person.”