Noggin

by John Corey Whaley

  “That’s gonna be so tough, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be tough for all of us. But good for us too, I think. They reached out to me because they wanted me to know what kind of a man he was, and I can’t tell you how much of a difference it’s made.”

  He was happier than I’d ever heard him—excited, I’d say. About everything. About the next day and the next week and the week after that. He was ready to fall back in love with life, he said.

  And I was jealous of him. Because even though I was about to do this incredibly romantic and drastic and insane thing, I wasn’t so much excited as I was completely and devastatingly terrified. But Lawrence, he had been enlightened. The nerve endings and veins and arteries carefully attaching his head to his body were firing and pulsating and pumping with a renewed sense of opportunity and fervor. He had found his answers, and they all added up to one ultimate mission. He just had to keep living.

  “So what did you want to tell me, Travis?” Lawrence asked.

  “Oh. It’s nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, Lawrence. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  • • •

  Hatton and I sat in my mom’s car around the corner from the Grindhouse and let the heat blasting from the dashboard vents make its way onto our faces in silence. I was passing the little felt ring box from one hand to the other, and Hatton was looking over at me from the corner of his eye. I think Kyle had said everything that needed to be said, so Hatton was just going to let this all play out without trying too hard to stop me.

  “You’re asking her in there?”

  “I might. Depends on what happens.”

  “In front of him?”

  “I think it would be romantic, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Or a total train wreck.”

  “It’s almost time. My hands are sweating.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Travis.”

  “I do, though. Thanks for bringing me.”

  “I’ll be waiting right here, man.”

  My walk down the sidewalk felt more like a funeral march. Then when I walked inside and saw them sitting in the back corner, I almost turned around. Cate raised one hand up to get my attention, and Turner, who had his back to the door, turned around and smiled. He had sloppy brown hair combed to one side, and his forehead was large and shiny. He had a good smile, an honest one, I think, and it seemed like he probably got a lot of compliments on his teeth. When he stood to shake my hand, I was noticeably taller and it was hard not to show how great this made me feel. Thank you, Jeremy.

  “Travis. Nice to meet you, man.”

  “You too.”

  He sat down beside Cate, leaving one side of the booth empty for me. I took a seat and nervously looked up at her and smiled.

  “So this is nice, huh?” Turner began.

  “Yeah,” Cate agreed. “How was school?”

  “It was fine,” I said. “Same as every day, I guess.”

  “And what grade are you in again, Travis?” Turner asked. I could see how this was going to go down.

  “Tenth. Supposed to be a junior, but I didn’t have the credits from before.”

  “Travis missed a lot of class when he was sick,” Cate added.

  “Oh. Man, that’s really too bad,” he said with surprising sincerity. “I bet it’s weird being back there, huh? After so long?”

  “Turner,” Cate said. “I told you, for Travis it’s not been long at all.”

  “Oh, right. Right. That’s confusing for everyone, I bet.”

  “It is,” I said. “It’s confusing for me sometimes too.”

  “Turner here went to Prentice Academy.”

  “Oh geez,” I said before thinking.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just used to know a few guys from there.”

  “Yeah. It can be a pretty lame place sometimes. But I liked it there. I mostly kept to myself, though. I had some trouble fitting in when I was a freshman.”

  “Fitting in?” I asked.

  “You know, those kinds of guys like I’m sure you’re talking about. They didn’t like the chubby kid with the wiry hair and glasses.”

  “You’d think bullies would eventually evolve past that, right?” Cate said.

  “Seriously,” I agreed.

  I looked over at Turner and was really impressed by how he talked about the past, even painful things, with confidence and not an ounce of shame. He was older, sure, but even my parents had trouble bringing up past embarrassments. He seemed so levelheaded and calm. It was as intimidating as it was surprising.

  “I need a refill. Travis, you want something, man?” Turner shotgunned the rest of his coffee and went to stand up.

  “I’m okay, thanks.”

  “Babe? Refill?”

  “No, thanks—I’m good.” Cate took a sip from her mug of tea, the little white string hanging down and hitting her hand.

  I could see this guy’s charm, and it wasn’t making me feel any better about things. I’d wanted to hate him, to be repulsed by him. I’d wanted him to be an asshole and threaten me in front of her and make her realize that she was about to ruin her life by spending it with him. So far he was such a disappointment.

  “He’s nice, right?” she asked me after he’d walked away.

  “He is.”

  “Thank you for doing this.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Are you okay?”

  I decided to do it right then, just grab her hand and fall to the floor and take out the ring and re-create every television and movie scene I’d ever watched that played out in that exact same way.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said. I took the ring box out of my jacket pocket and set it on the table.

  “Oh, Travis. What . . . what is that?”

  “Cate, I think you know how I feel about you and—”

  “No, Travis, you have to stop right now—”

  “And I think you feel the same way because all this time we’ve spent together and the phone calls and the trips to the park. And I thought maybe you hadn’t waited on me, but now I realize that you did—you just didn’t know it, I think. And I have to do this now so you’ll know we can work. We can do this. It doesn’t matter how crazy it is or how—”

  “So that barista guy just asked me if you’re that head kid from TV,” Turner interrupted, walking up behind me.

  “Jesus,” Cate said.

  “What’s happening?” Turner looked at Cate’s face, then the ring box.

  “Nothing, we were just playing around.” Cate snatched the ring off the table and threw it into the seat beside her.

  “Look, Turner, you seem like a nice guy. And I’m sure you are. But I just proposed to Cate, and I think she and I both know it’s the right thing to do. It’s supposed to happen this way.”

  He laughed. Turner laughed and sat down, looking behind him to see if anyone else was listening.

  “Just now? You just proposed to my fiancée in the Grindhouse Coffee Shop while I was standing ten feet away?”

  “Well, I wasn’t done. You kind of interrupted us. But yeah.”

  “Let’s see the ring, Cate.”

  He gestured over toward the seat. She placed the little gray box in the center of the table and when she did, I saw the ring he’d given her months before right there on her finger, and I briefly thought about standing up on the table and leaping through the window. That ring had never looked bigger or shinier than right then.

  “What’d you say?” he asked Cate. He opened the box and examined the ring. I’d say he had a slightly amused expression on his face. Not anger. Not yet.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, you should answer him, Cate. You can’t do that to him.”

  Cate cut Turner a sharp look, one I was all too familiar with, as if to say, You’re being a complete ass right now. Then she turned back to face me and sighed.

  “Travis, I . . . you know that we .
. . I can’t . . .”

  “Hey, everybody!” The voice sounded loudly from speakers all over the room. We turned to see one of the baristas in black skinny jeans and a red T-shirt standing on a tiny stage. He was adjusting the microphone on its stand as he spoke.

  “It’s Thursday, and you know what that means—open mic night here at the Grindhouse.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said under my breath. Turner was laughing. Cate looked like she’d just witnessed someone being bludgeoned to death. In a sense, she had. It was me . . . I had been bludgeoned to death by this moment.

  “Can you even legally get married?” Turner leaned in and whispered.

  “Turner, stop,” Cate said.

  “My birth certificate says I’m twenty-one years old,” I whispered back, looking right into his eyes.

  “Our first performance tonight is by one of your favorites. Let’s give it up for Rodrigo.”

  Then the room started clapping as Turner and I had sort of a stare-down and Cate looked on in horror. Onstage an overweight blond guy with dreadlocks approached the microphone. He held a single maraca in his hand. He was wearing a poncho.

  “Hey, everybody,” he began in a nasally voice. “I call this one ‘Man.’ ”

  “Do you think we can speak alone, Cate?” I leaned down and asked her.

  “Are you crazy?” Turner said.

  “Man,” Rodrigo said in a monotone from the stage.

  “I’m not crazy. I love her. I loved her before you even knew her.”

  “Man.” Rodrigo used a high-pitched tone this time. I was afraid of where this was going.

  “You know, Travis, I’m trying to be nice here, but you aren’t making it very easy.”

  “I think we should go. Maybe we should go.” Cate stared blankly down at the table.

  “Man!” Rodrigo yelled. We all jumped a little in our seats.

  “Yeah, Cate, let’s go,” I said.

  “Travis,” she whispered. “I’m with Turner. I don’t know why you—”

  “Man.” Maraca shake. “Man.” Maraca shake. “Man.”

  “I’m gonna kill him,” Turner said.

  “Turner, calm down.” Cate put her hand on top of his.

  “No, not Travis. This moron hippie on the stage.”

  “This is the worst moment of my life,” I said, setting my head down on the table.

  “Which life?” Turner asked, laughing.

  “That’s not funny,” Cate said.

  “The one where I kick your ass in this coffee shop,” I said, sitting back up.

  “MAN! MAN! MAN! MAN! MAN! MAN!”

  “Okay, Travis. Chill out, dude.”

  Then I stood up and punched him right in the face just as Rodrigo held up his maraca and started convulsing on the stage. Turner fell back in the booth and held his hands to his face. There may have been blood, but I didn’t get a good look. I thought about grabbing the ring from the table, but instead I just bent down into Cate’s ear and said, “You can sell that to pay for the honeymoon.” Then I walked out holding Jeremy Pratt’s aching fist.

  I didn’t tell Hatton what had happened, and I ignored the five calls in a row from Cate on the drive home. Once we got to my house, I stormed over to the front door. I wasn’t crying. I was too upset to cry. I sat down on the doormat with my knees folded up to my chest. Hatton walked over and sat down beside me.

  “What happened?”

  “She didn’t say yes.”

  “Shit.”

  “But she didn’t say no, either.”

  “Oh. Travis . . .”

  “I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “This. Exist. Be here like this with everything so fucked up.”

  “Hey, Travis? I don’t think it really matters if you know how to exist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think any of us do.”

  “Then what are we doing?”

  “I don’t know. We’re just meandering.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  JUST ME AND A RING

  Let’s pretend the whole thing at the coffee shop never happened. Let’s pretend Turner never came back to the table and Cate said yes to my proposal and, miraculously, Rodrigo never showed up to perform. Let’s pretend it all worked out and everything was okay again. Everything was as close to normal as it ever could be.

  It doesn’t work, does it? Pretending away something you can’t change doesn’t work. I thought I was so close, and then I was further away than ever. I was finally forced to face the truth: Cate Conroy was no longer mine. And Turner, who should’ve beaten me to death with that weirdo’s maraca, didn’t. And that probably made him the better man. The only man, really.

  Two weeks went by after that, and they seemed much longer than all the weeks before. Maybe it was because I stayed pretty zoned out the whole time, at school, at home, even when Kyle and Hatton would drag me out of the house to go see a movie or go eat or just ride around town aimlessly. They tried. I’ll give them that. They tried really hard to cheer me up.

  I even spent a night at my dad’s place, and despite still being pretty disturbed by his secret Travis museum, it was nice being there with all my old stuff. After he’d gone to bed, I went through my clothes and searched all the pockets. And I smelled them, which I know is weird, but you’d have done it too. All these years they’d been in storage and then this apartment, and they still smelled like my house. They smelled like I could open the door and yell for my mom and she’d be just down the hall.

  I found an old notebook from school on the shelf in the closet and flipped through it. Aside from algebra notes, each page was covered in sloppy doodles and black-and-white checkerboards of ink. It was something I still did sometimes in class when I was having a hard time listening. I’d draw six vertical lines and intersect them with six horizontal lines, and then I’d fill in every other little square with my pen.

  Then I looked through all the books on the bookshelf. I’d read a handful of them, maybe, but Mom had let me sign up for one of those book-of-the-month club things at the book fair when I was in middle school, and I used to get copies of the Boxcar Children or Hardy Boys like clockwork and just add them to the overflowing shelf, promising to read them someday. In one book I found a leaf pressed between two pages. It was almost falling apart when I lifted it up to look at it. I’d taken it from the park one day when I was a kid. I’d wanted to remember that day for some reason. And even though I was holding the leaf all those years later and I knew it was supposed to remind me of something, it had escaped me completely.

  The drawers of my desk were filled with more notebooks and junk that I’d hoarded. There was a Frodo Baggins bobblehead figurine on the desktop that still shook every time I slid open a drawer. In the back of the third drawer down, I found a photograph of Cate and me that I’d stuck under a couple of old yearbooks. We were fourteen and sitting side by side in eighth-grade French class. I was smiling, but I wasn’t showing my teeth. I never liked showing my teeth in photos when I was younger. Cate had her hair in a ponytail, and her smile was wide and unattached to any sense of self-consciousness.

  I ended up sleeping better that night than any other I could remember, with my old movie posters of Vertigo and Jaws and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hanging on the walls around me and my too-long body making my feet stick out over the short wooden railing of the twin bed. On the far wall, just above the TV, there was an empty spot where Cate’s painting of the movie theater should’ve been hanging.

  She kept trying to call. For two weeks she called at least twice a day and left messages apologizing and saying she was worried about me. In some of them she was crying. I never thought I could be the kind of person who ignored someone like Cate. But it was too much. I needed more time. Talking to her would make it worse. Seeing her with Turner had changed everything.

  Then one day she stopped calling and I found the ring box sitting on the front steps a
fter school. I stood there looking at the tiny silver circle in my hand and wondering what the hell had happened to me.

  My parents were worried too. I’d never been the quiet type. Not before and not when I’d come back to them. But now I just sat around listening to music or watching TV and felt like I didn’t really have anything to say. I didn’t want to talk about the divorce. I didn’t want to talk about Cate. And I surely didn’t want to talk about the future. The future was something I didn’t really care about anymore. It had pretty much been a bitch to me so far, so I think I was allowed to be a little wary of it.

  One Saturday at Mom’s she came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. It was around noon, and I hadn’t gotten up yet. This would’ve been normal teenage behavior if I hadn’t been in that same spot since four o’clock the afternoon before.

  “Travis, you know, you can’t stay like this forever.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. Now let’s get you up. It’s a nice day outside. It’s warm. The sun’s shining.”

  “Pass. It’s a good thought, though. But still. I pass. I’m fine right here.”

  “You’re making it hard to feel sorry for you.” She looked down at the half of my face that wasn’t smashed into a pillow.

  “I’d think it would be pretty easy, actually.”

  “You want to know what I think?”

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  “I think if the old you were here right now, hooked to IVs and doped up on all kinds of drugs, well, I think he’d probably kick your sorry ass.”

  With that she put some clean socks she’d been holding into my top dresser drawer and walked out. She had a point, I guess. The old me probably would kick my sorry ass. He’d probably look at me and be embarrassed at what I’d so quickly become—someone healthy who pretends to be dying.

  After she left, I rolled over enough to nearly fall out of bed and caught myself before my face hit the floor. When I looked up, I noticed my closet door had been left open just enough to see the bottom edge of the container full of letters from school. I dragged it to the center of my room and tossed the lid aside, then reached in with my eyes closed and grabbed an envelope. I tore it open at one end and started reading.