by RJ Martin
“FOUR CHANNELS?” Rusty clicked through one more time as if needing to do it again to believe.
“There’s a French one from Canada we get on clear days.”
“Wow.”
“There’s no cable this far out.” That was a lie, but I was embarrassed to say we were too poor for it. I tried not to miss real TV because I was supposed to be okay with sacrifices.
“What about satellite?” Rusty gave up and settled on a game show where skill of any kind was not required. The guests just pointed at boxes. Why this was supposed to be entertaining, I had no idea. “I mean Jace put one in as soon as we got here.”
“You live here?”
“Down by the lake. Someplace Jace saw in The New York Times and suddenly had to have.”
“Where did you live before here?”
“We’ve lived lots of places, but that’s where we always end up, back in New York.” Rusty sounded almost disinterested in his life. To me it was more fascinating than anything that I’d heard or read since… ever. Except JC’s story, of course, that was still most important.
“Is it as crazy as they say?”
“Who are they?”
I shrugged. Maybe it was an expression like warm winter, full graveyard, and other grim sayings locals used.
“You come down sometime and judge for yourself. We still have an apartment there.” Something else that intrigued me, apartment meant neighbors and not a quarter mile up the road. There were lots of people to chat with and maybe share coffee or a slice of pie. Rectories appealed to me for a similar reason. You could serve JC and not be lonely.
“You really think I could?”
“Sure, your sister is already bugging me to go.”
“What about your mom?”
“Jace doesn’t have to know.” He shifted his glance from the TV to me just as a tubby man wearing a too-small sweater chose badly, and his gigantic box only contained a few tins of tuna. “There’s lots she doesn’t already.”
“Why do you call her Jace?”
“It’s her name.”
“I don’t call my mother Sally.” No way.
“You don’t share her with the world.”
“So you’re not going to beat me up?”
“No,” he yawned. “I’m over it.”
The reek of medicinal fog wafted between us and I returned to the kitchen to find Mark and Luke, experts in their treatment by now, already huffing away. “Good,” I said. I raised a fist and bumped each of theirs before hustling back to Rusty. I found him stretched out, his whole body so his arms and feet hung off the couch at the ends.
“Priest, huh?”
It sounded weird when he said it. So, I just nodded, sat on the rug in front of him on the couch, and pretended to watch a lady “Go for it!”
“You know you can’t have sex, right?” He rolled on his back but leaned over so his face was upside down looking at me upright next to him.
“I know.” My mouth was dry.
“Don’t you like to make out?”
“It’s okay.” If Rusty thought he was clever, he wasn’t. Chad, Darcy, and I had this conversation a bunch of times, especially since we’d gotten to NC3 and they got as horned up as the rest of our classmates. I loved JC more.
“Okay?” He chuckled. “Okay.” Rusty’s jeans slid down a little as he shifted on the lumpy cushions. The thin line of hair down from his belly button appeared again. It went farther now and thickened at the waistband of his exposed boxers. Rusty raked his abdomen with his fingers. “Jonah, you don’t look so good.”
I liked when he said my name and suddenly hated I liked it. I was sweating, and our house was never warm except on the few actually hot days each summer. I stood up too fast, the air thinner up there than by the floor, and I got super dizzy. I reached out to grab the wall as I stumbled into the kitchen.
“Sally!” Mémé called for Mom before she even got to me. “Jonah will be sick.” The old lady had some kind of sonar for any of us in distress. Maybe when Mom called her a witch, she was telling the truth. “Hmph!”
“No, Mémé.” But she was right, and I was, all over the kitchen floor. Not right away, no I held it together long enough for my audience to gather: Mom, Dad, and Rusty’s famous mother. Hers was the most horrified expression I’d ever seen outside a movie. She even screamed. That scared me, and the sudden jolt it sent through my burning guts brought up round two.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“RUSTY!” JACE held her hands in the air like they were wet and she couldn’t find a towel. My puke was not a big deal to my parents. They were used to sickness. I mean with the twins, come on. But Jace Naylor was a totally other story. “Oh my God!” Rusty’s mom backed through the dining room as if I had one of those movie viruses that would turn me into a flesh-eating zombie.
“Mommy, please.” Rusty looked sick now. Jace Naylor banged into the table and screeched like a blue jay before he got hold of her. “There’s wipes in the car,” he soothed. She nodded but looked really scared. “Jace has a thing about germs,” Rusty told my whole family at once.
“Angie, bring a bucket,” Mom said. She and Mémé each had one of my arms.
“O-o-oh Go-od-d.” Jace said it long like the words had more than one syllable each. “Rusty, take me home, now!”
“Feel better, Jonah,” he called after me. I felt the cold blast of the opened door. “I’m sorry!”
I wanted to go to the door, see her car, know everything I could about the Naylors. The fact Rusty’s mom had “issues” made them even more interesting to me if that were possible. I didn’t because my guts, now empty, twisted around each other and made quick little stabs in my belly. It was like getting pinched hard by the twins if they were octopuses and had eight hands each.
“Angelique!” Mom used her outside voice. The door opened again and my sister stepped back into the foyer. I thought I saw steam rise from her lips. No one had even seen her go outside. Angie was so good at bad.
“The bucket, now!” Mom became angry on top of worried.
“Yes, Mama.” My sister’s smug saunter toward the broom closet was the last thing I saw at normal speed. After that everything faded in and out, sound without picture, picture with no sound, like the old projector television in the corner.
I WAS on my bed with Mom and Mémé tag-teaming me to get my puke-splattered clothes off. It was embarrassing, but my T-shirt and jeans were soaked in sweat. “He’s burning up,” Mom said. “Angie!”
“I can only find this one.” She’d been sent on another mission and returned holding a thermometer but not one for your mouth. It was thicker and had a rubbery end, the one Mom used on the twins’ backsides. I felt myself being rolled. Angie grinned like a demon and held it close to my eyes before Mom snatched the baby thermometer from her claw. I think my sister might have clapped, but I was suddenly too busy keeping my boxers up.
My eye caught my school slacks crumpled on the floor, and the baggie of JC had slid out of the front pocket. I grunted at Angie. She was my only hope. I think at first she thought I was just threatening her or something for her latest prank. I know she found this one even more hysterical than puddle jumping me.
“Angie,” I mouthed without sound and shifted my gaze to the pocket. Through her teary chortle my sister at last saw what I did, and her mouth fell open. She gave me an Is that what I think it is glare. I threw her the best pleading expression I could muster in my stomach flu delirium and panic at being anally invaded by my Franco-Canuck grandmother.
Angie slid a foot over the baggie. Ever so slowly, she retrieved and pocketed it. That accomplished, I could refocus on the other matter.
“Get out!” I ordered, but no one listened. “I have a fever, okay.” I tried to reason. “Let’s just make that a fact.” As far as I knew, neither my mother nor Mémé had seen my butt in like ten years, and I struggled with what little strength I had to keep the streak alive. “I don’t think that thing works on grown-ups,” I pleaded. The twins g
athered at Angie’s feet, all three staring, me better than any show on our fuzzy old TV.
“Of course, it will.” Mémé could have been Madame Defarge, demanding justice. To the guillotine! We read A Tale of Two Cites last year. Most of the NC3 freshmen reading list seemed to be about sacrifice. “We have to measure, hmph.” She came at me again.
“No, no….” I tried to twist away, but Mémé’s little hands were like barbed hooks. She’d rip my boxers if she had to.
“Don’t be a baby,” Mom scolded.
“I’m trying not to!” I started to kick like a fish in Dad’s creel. The last time he took me along, I freed his catch. Now he always fished alone. “No!” I knocked Mémé backward off the bed. She crashed into Dad as he marched back into my room.
“Jesus, Mary, and….” If Dad didn’t finish listing the holy family, it was worse than if he did. Joseph, the patron of fathers, seemed to cool him down a little. If skipped, then the rage continued.
“We have to measure.” Mémé held up the ass thermometer and actually made a poking gesture. We have ways to make him talk.
“He’s fifteen, for Christ’s sake.” My father pleaded my case.
“We can’t find the other one,” Mom explained. “He’s burning up, Hank. If it’s over one hundred and three, he’s got to go to the emergency room.” The twins’ condition made both my parents experts at knowing what symptoms required immediate care. It was necessary since Dad’s crappy health insurance only covered so much and anything hospital related cost.
Dad washed his face before hoisting both my arms over my head; I was pinned there in his baseball-mitt hands.
“Angie, take your brothers out of here.” My father spoke like an old movie Army doctor, the kind that said bite down on this before amputating a limb. My sister swallowed her guffaw and scooped the little squealers away from the impending horror.
“You brought this on yourself.” What? By going to school? That seemed fair not! “Now be a man.” I saw him turn away as my five-foot-nothing, cabbage-faced grandmother stuck the plastic rod inside me. The struggle took what little will to live I had left, and I faded. I hardly felt Mémé’s prodding until she slapped my bare butt.
“Stop pushing.”
I hate you.
“Mommy,” Mark started.
“Is Jonah broken?” Luke finished. They were in the doorway with Angie behind them.
“They got loose.” She winked at me.
“Sick, sweetie.”
“Will we get broken?” Luke took Mark’s turn.
“Not if you stay away from him.”
“We get broken a lot,” Tragic Mark said.
“He gave us cookies,” one of them said; it was hard to figure out which one ratted. Angie must’ve realized the cookies were really the stolen hosts because her eyes bugged and she slapped a hand over both their mouths.
“Jonah, you didn’t?” My mother shook her head as Angie and I froze. “How many times have I told you to ask before giving them sweets?”
Relief wafted through me. “I guess I got carried away with Ms. Naylor being here and stuff.” I didn’t like to lie, but they did come easily sometimes.
“Come with Sissy, now.” Angie nodded her approval as she hustled the little narcs out of my room. “I don’t want you getting bad dreams.”
“Cent-un.” Mémé announced my temperature of 101 in French. That was how she emphasized. At last one of them pulled up, not my boxers, but the bottoms of my old pajamas.
“Sit up,” Mom directed, and again, with my grandmother, she went to work. I never wore pajamas, not in years, but Mom kept an old flannel pair with horses on them, I think, for when I was sick. They were too small and my arms and legs shot out of the cuffs like a scarecrow. At the moment I kind of did feel stuffed with straw and the critters that burrow into it. No one said anything, and I could see behind my lids when the lights went out, and I heard the door close. Slowly, I opened my eyes. My plastic crucifix glowed in the dark as long as I remembered to leave it in light during the day. I didn’t care for this version of JC nearly as much as the one at church. He was handsome and all but busy being crucified, so I didn’t think he had time for me, not like his resurrected self at Holy R.
I felt really sick and wanted to just pray from my bed, but I knew my multiple trespasses required good old-fashioned kneeling prayer. In an eruption of sin, I’d lied, stolen, drank, and been mean to my sister. It never mattered to JC if she may have deserved it. What tribute would she demand to keep my sacramental secret and for how long? Thinking about it all dizzied me again, and I had to put a hand on the wall as I tried to reach him.
I should have added Rusty to the list, and I debated doing so.
“Don’t even think it, kiddo.” Mom returned, a bottle of aspirin in one hand and a glass of water in the other. “Get back into bed.” She pulled my quilt up under my chin, tucking me in the same way she used to do way back when I was little. Her comforting reminded me she shouldn’t be doing this anymore. She needed to see me as a grown-up or at least more man than boy. I could’ve asked her to stop, but I didn’t. I guess I figured it wasn’t going to happen too many more times.
She sat down beside me, but there was no bedtime story, and I was glad for it. Mom just finger combed my hair back across my forehead, the way she’d taught me to do it.
“I think he’ll understand if you take a night off.” She nodded for emphasis. “You’re not a priest yet.”
“Don’t you want me to be?” Getting her to agree to the retreat might be a challenge and not just because of the money. I could go around my mother and hit up Dad. He was a bigger supporter of my career path for sure, but that route had risks of its own. Mom ruled the roost, and he was more the hunter-gatherer type. She’d consciously deny it, but crossing her could lead to a prolonged backlash. Part of Mom’s feud with Mémé stemmed from my grandmother expressing her parenting advice one time too many. The twins were sicker than usual, and Mom had been feeling extra frayed. I don’t think they had many pleasant conversations since. If she could, Mémé would move out tomorrow, and Mom would help her pack.
“I want you to be happy.” Mom kissed her fingers and then put them on my lips. “Go to sleep.” My mother left, and I didn’t get up. I’d be home tomorrow and maybe another day too. There was lots of time to pray. On top of everything else that happened today, my mother had just expressed her doubts about what I wanted to do with my life. It was the first time I ever thought she was wrong—I mean about something big.
CHAPTER NINE
MY EYES fell open to see the baggie of JC so close to my face I could smell the ham and cheese that once filled it.
“What gives?” Angie shook the baggie. “I could barely get to sleep last night I was so curious.” She started to bounce up and down on my bed.
“And all hot and bothered over Rusty.”
“Jonah?” Angie shook the baggie again.
“I was hungry after Mass.” I twisted under the covers in an attempt to slide off the other side of my bed. Angie grabbed my wrist with her free hand and put me on my back.
“What about the twins?”
“They thought they were cookies.”
“So they’re not Jesus yet?”
“If you mean transubstantiated….” I tried to grab it, but my sister was ready. She held the holy baggie aloft above my bedbound reach. “No, they were still just wafers.” That lie was worth a good three rosaries at least. I could imagine my sins racking up like a tote board in my head.
“So I can scarf down a few.” Angie reached into the bag as I tried to stop her. One side of the blanket was still tucked in and Angie had her butt firmly on top of the other. It was like being inside one of Mom’s too-dry crepes. She overcompensated for Mémé’s devotion to butter by leaving it off and out too much. If they’d ever make up, our food might taste good and not kill us both at once.
“Angie, don’t!” I surrendered. I was at her mercy, and we both instantly knew it.
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br /> “That’s pretty twisted, Jonah.” She looked over the bag. “And giving it to the twins?” Angie shook her head. “Trying to get them hooked?” She leaned forward. “Like the drug dealers in our health videos?” NC3 still used VCRs, for stuff like this and the tapes were just about worn out. One of them had girls with big hair and shoulder pads and guys with polo shirts and their collars up. It was about the importance of abstinence and the dangers of one thing leading to another. The curly-haired brunette star drank wine coolers with her seedy-looking boyfriend. Next, she skipped choir practice and “smoked marijuana” in his van. They never showed it rocking, but she ended up a pregnant, friendless, ex-choir girl who wore her sunglasses inside the school. The pusher who got her hooked didn’t take her into his van anymore either because he got a new special lady. It ended with her getting arrested for shoplifting to pay for the weed that was going to make her baby stupid. I thought it was hysterical on, like, every level.
Sister Margo saw we weren’t taking it too seriously, so she stopped the tape and said, “If getting hooked and ruining your life isn’t enough to make you think twice, then know this. Any violation of our substance abuse policy will result in immediate suspension and maybe even expulsion.” This went over better but still not the shock and awe she’d wanted. Everyone knew NC3 needed students the way the church needed priests, and it was only sex stuff that got you the boot. Well, that and maybe stealing Communion.
“Jonah, are you high on Christ?”
“That’s like blasphemy, Angie.” I was beyond irritated at the good time she was having.
“Maybe I should just smother you.” Angie grabbed the pillow from behind my head.
“I’m still kind of sick, you know?” My stomach felt raw with emptiness, and my mouth tasted like I’d rinsed it in one of those roadside puddles of milky grime that take all spring to dry.
