One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  “Whatever.”

  My mother scowled. “Why do you have to be so negative?”

  “Why do you have to be so negative?”

  “I’m not negative,” she said. “You’re negative.”

  “Then why won’t you go to physical therapy?” I asked.

  “Don’t start acting like your father!” she said. Reaching up to remove the frying pan from the stove, she grabbed its handle and dropped it into the sink, where it sank below the soapy water.

  “Where’s Lucy?” I asked. Lucy was a safe point of conversation. If she wasn’t at our place, it seemed somehow not normal.

  “Still at home. Seeing how you’re set on fighting with her, we thought it best you got off to school before she came over.”

  “Figures.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. I swallowed a triangle of pancakes.

  “If you don’t mean something when you’re talking,” my mom said, “don’t say anything at all.”

  I set my fork down and gulped the rest of my milk in one swallow. “I’m out of here,” I said, and grabbed my backpack.

  “You haven’t finished your breakfast.”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  I’d had enough and I hadn’t even gotten to school yet. Outside, Andy waited in his car, an old Malibu Classic from the early eighties that he’d restored with my dad. They did things like that together. The car was his baby, midnight blue with a lighter stripe of blue dividing it. Very cool in a retro sort of way. The inside smelled of smoke and marijuana. Andy had tacked a Confederate flag to the inside roof, even though we weren’t from the South. My brother only allowed one type of music to come out of his speakers: heavy metal. Still, it was better than riding the bus with all the junior high kids who did nothing but chatter about nonsense.

  I could see it all happening in slow motion. The hush falling over everyone, the bus driver staring at me as I climbed those steps. Then conversation returning, filling the bus, buzzing. Whispers would begin to make their way up to where I’m sitting behind the driver, who’s eyeing me in the rearview mirror. Crazy, they’d call me. Fuckup. Freak. All the words I suppose I deserved fluttering around me, lighting and landing on me like a horde of flies.

  Riding with my brother was definitely the better option.

  Andy peeled out of our driveway, throwing gravel as he pressed down on the gas. He slid a CD into the stereo and rolled his window down a crack. From his front pocket he pulled out a pack of Camels and a silver lighter my grandma had given him. The lighter had been my grandfather’s during World War Two, or so we’d been told. Andy lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window real harsh. He didn’t look at me, just turned the music up loud enough to vibrate the car.

  My brother didn’t hold on to my grandfather’s lighter out of any sentimental attachment. He’d asked for it because there was a skull and crossbones engraved on one side and on the other side were the initials F.U. My grandfather’s name had been Francis Ulster. Andy thought it was funny our granddad’s initials were shorthand for “Fuck you.” Sometimes he and his friends would smoke a joint after school and when they’d ask Andy for his lighter, which they called Fuck You Francis, he’d say, “Here you go. Fuck you.” Or he’d say, “Do you mean fuck you and your mother too?” All of Andy’s friends were jealous of the lighter, which gave him an endless supply of fuck you jokes. No one got that lucky.

  I never thought it was funny, though. I couldn’t help but think of the real Fuck You Frances, the girl who was buried in the old Wilkinson family cemetery on the outskirts of town. Andy had never been good at making connections though. He never saw signs, ghosts or shadows. He was, in effect, a blind and deaf boy. Unfortunately he could speak and lived in the same house with me.

  As we drove to school, I looked out at the passing fields, at the brown earth graying, at the broken yellow stalks of corn stubbling the ground. Crows scavenged through the remains of a late October harvest, picking up their heads to watch as we rushed past. I started counting them like my grandma and I used to do when I was little. Years ago she’d taught me a rhyme that went something like:

  One for sorrow,

  Two for joy,

  Three for girls,

  Four for boys,

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold,

  Seven for a secret

  To never be told.

  I counted four crows and wondered what would come of the answer. Boys could mean anything, and my grandma would have predicted something from it. But they could mean nothing too. It was just an old rhyme.

  When we arrived at school, the buses were already lined up in the parking lot. Kids swarmed out and into school, chatting, holding books against their chests, slung across their backs in backpacks or casually rested on one of their hips. You could tell which ones had found some kind of group to be in and which ones hadn’t. The ones who hadn’t yet mostly hurried around with anxious expressions, the ones who walked the hallways leisurely had probably already found a clique. Or at least they were good at making it seem so.

  Consider Marty Chapman, president of my sophomore class, captain of the baseball team, discus thrower, straight A student, leisurely hallway walker. He was the guy everyone wanted to be. He walked through the halls with his head held high, a smile ready for everyone.

  You could always count on Marty Chapman for a hello and how’s it going, so when I got out of Andy’s car, I headed in his direction. I needed a hello and how’s it going right then, even if it was from Marty, who said hello to basically anyone. If Marty acknowledged me, the rest of the day would go fine. I’d take tests and walk through hallways unnoticed. A ghost.

  So I walked right up to him and said, “Hey, Marty. How’s it going?”

  And this was his reply:

  Marty’s mouth dropped open, but he only blinked his eyes a lot while his lips squirmed. I could see that H forming, the “heh” of hello about to roll out of the back of his throat. Then quickly he turned his head in the opposite direction and walked away in a hurry.

  After this, I began to panic a little.

  As soon as Marty walked away, my stomach twisted. I could feel it coming on me then: that slow burn in the center of my chest from when I was a little kid and had trouble breathing. Underdeveloped lungs, my mother called it. Her miracle child. What a joke. I was no miracle. I was a freak who’d climbed into a hole where a murdered boy had been hidden. One look from Marty Chapman was all I needed to know how everything would go.

  I breathed deep, though, like the doctor had taught me. I thought about air and snow and cold and how easy it is to breathe in winter, when breath steams and you can see it isn’t just an idea, that your life is right there in front of you, flickering in and out like a snake’s tongue. Jamie still needed me. I couldn’t let Marty Chapman or anyone get to me. And I still needed to talk to Gracie, to touch her again if she’d let me. If she wasn’t afraid of me, I would touch her, or let her touch me (which is what happened really). And pretty soon, my breath started coming on its own again.

  I walked into school even though I knew Marty’s reaction was only the beginning, and I was right: everyone stared. Heads turned from conversations in progress, lifted from the depths of lockers. I made my way down the hallway, and as I walked, everyone parted.

  Before I even reached my locker, I heard the names. All the words I’d imagined being whispered on the bus followed me through the hall. Here they were. But they couldn’t touch me. I was ice and rock with no entry. I looked at the words and stopped them in midair, plucking them from their trajectories before they could get inside me.

  I sat through Chemistry and History and English, not looking up from my book unless I had to, not even when Mrs. Motes asked me what sort of story Edgar Allan Poe invented. I knew the answer and she knew I knew it, and even when I finally muttered, “The detective story,” she wouldn’t let up. She kept calling on me for questions until I finally started say
ing, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Sure you know, Adam,” she said. “Come on. What’s the significance of the house coming apart at the end of The Fall of the House of Usher?”

  I said, “Its foundation was unsound.”

  “You’re thinking literally,” she said. “Now really. Why does it fall apart at the end? What is Poe saying?”

  I said, “Poe’s saying everything comes to an end, and that’s about all that’s logical in the world.”

  “Close,” said Mrs. Motes. “What does this stand for?” There was some clicking on the chalkboard, then the chalk being set back in its tray. “Adam?”

  I looked up. She’d written the words ad infinitum on the board. “I don’t know Latin,” I told her.

  “It’s a shame they don’t offer it anymore, it’s an important language,” said Mrs. Motes.

  Right then Elizabeth Moore, who sat two seats over and had her commentary ready as usual, said, “Umm, I think Latin’s a dead language, Mrs. Motes.”

  “I know that, Elizabeth.”

  And Elizabeth, smirking, said, “Well, then. What’s the use of knowing it?”

  The room went quiet. Outside there was sunlight and trees to look at. A crow lingered in an old maple, hopping from branch to branch. One, I counted in my head. One for sorrow.

  “Ahem,” said Mrs. Motes.

  I turned back to her.

  Mrs. Motes moved a stray piece of salt and pepper hair out of her eyes and said, “Just because a language is dead doesn’t mean it’s not important. A lot of the English language—your language—has roots in Latin. Poe often used it in his writing to good effect. The language may be dead, or more correctly, dying, but its ghost still haunts your grammar and vocabulary.”

  Elizabeth Moore didn’t say anything. I turned around to look at the crow again and just then it took off in a whir of feathers. Mrs. Motes, making another plea for my attention, said, “Ad infinitum means to go on forever, Adam.” A moment later she sighed, frustrated or sad, or feeling both of those things, and when I turned back to her, I found she’d been looking out the window with me.

  At gym time, I headed straight to the locker room. If you played sports for the school you had a locker in the gym so you didn’t have to keep bringing clothes back and forth from home as often. All of my warm-up pants and shirts were in there, along with an extra pair of running shoes. I hadn’t put them on in weeks. They sat at the bottom of the locker, their toes touching. I imagined an invisible kid wearing them instead of me.

  I hadn’t been coming to cross-country practice for weeks. After a while the coach had stopped calling to ask if I was still on the team. But even though I wasn’t running for him anymore, I still thought of myself as a runner. I just wasn’t running around that cinder track in back of the school. I was running on my own time now, on a track no one but I could see.

  The second bell rang and in swarmed the rest of my gym class, pulling off school clothes, hiking sweatpants on in place of jeans. I was almost ready, sitting on a bench, lacing my shoes up, waiting for the coach to come out and tell us to hurry, when I heard Matt Hardin, our school’s best basketball player, say my name. He didn’t call my name like he wanted to ask a question; he said it loud enough so I’d hear him talking about me on the other side of the lockers. I couldn’t make out what he said, but I didn’t care. I told myself, Ice, rock, air, breathe. I reminded myself to ignore everything.

  So I was sitting there, ignoring Matt Hardin, lacing up my shoes, when he came around the corner still in his underwear, running his fingers through his frosted blond hair. Steve Carroll and Jesse Logan followed, his lackeys, and when they arranged themselves around me, Matt said, “So, McCormick, what the fuck’s your problem?”

  I didn’t say anything, just threw my clothes inside my locker and closed the door. Ice, rock, air, breathe. I looked toward the door to the gym. A kid opened the door to leave and the sound of basketballs bouncing and shoes squeaking came in. Then the door closed and it was only our own voices in the locker room again. I started heading for the door.

  Before I could go anywhere, Matt Hardin’s hand landed on my shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t fucking walk away from me when I’m talking to you, faggot. What the fuck’s your problem? You got a thing for jerking off to dead people or something?” He laughed, but his hand stayed on me.

  I craned my neck so I could see him over my shoulder. I could feel my face twisting. I tried to stop myself from saying anything, but fire unfurled in my blood, ran down my spine, the opposite of chilling, and I went and said, “Fuck you, Hard-On,” through gritted teeth, a name I knew he hated, and ripped my shoulder away.

  He pushed me and said, “Don’t talk back to your fucking elders,” even though he was only a year older.

  I looked down at his shadow, which lay between the feet of Steve and Jesse, and concentrated on it, searching for its voice, trying to coax it into talking. But it wouldn’t talk. I’d only heard Lucy’s shadow, but I was in a pinch so I squinted and tried looking inside Matt’s instead of just listening. It was dark in there, and furry, but there was no barrier, so I went in, searching, picking up and discarding things until I finally looked back up with what I needed.

  “What do you care what I jerk off to, Matt?” Cocking my head to the side, arching my eyebrows, I said, “What? You want to watch me?”

  Hardin’s face was confident before I said what I’d found in his shadow, but afterward his eyes widened and his face went red. Then his fist came up under my jaw and my head went back and my teeth rattled. Above me, the fluorescent squares of lights in the ceiling suddenly blinded me.

  He was on top of me in a second, but I shoved him off and into the lockers, then scrambled over before he could collect his thoughts and grabbed a fistful of his frosted blond hair. Once, twice, a third time. Bam! Bam! Bam! I smashed his precious head into the lockers while Jesse Logan called for the coach and Steve Carroll said, “Get the fuck off him, asshole!”

  Someone grabbed hold of me and pulled me off, but I kept my eyes on Hardin, glaring, my breath coming hard. He didn’t move from where I’d left him crumpled on the floor.

  “McCormick!” Coach shouted. I shrugged out of his hold. “What the hell are you doing?!”

  “He hit me!” I said, and wiped blood away from my lips to show him the proof.

  “That’s no reason to bash his head against the lockers,” Coach shouted. “Now settle the hell down and consider yourself lucky I caught you two jerkoffs. Otherwise, you’d both be out of school for the next two weeks!”

  Hardin pulled himself up and moved past me, his eyes never leaving mine until he turned the corner, back to his side of the lockers. I went for the door to the gym again. But before I could go anywhere, a hand clamped down on my shoulder.

  “McCormick,” Coach said. “My office. Now.”

  I followed him back to his office and he sat me in the chair across from his desk. I slouched down like the burnout kids do whenever they get in trouble and stared at a calendar of track meets that hung on the wall behind his head. I’d missed four weeks, a month full of red X’s, and didn’t care.

  “Why aren’t you running?” Coach asked.

  “I still run,” I said.

  “Well, why aren’t you running for me any longer?”

  “I don’t run for anyone,” I told him. “Not anymore.”

  “That’s a shame, McCormick. I need you. The team isn’t doing so well. I know you’ve been having some problems lately, but—”

  “Don’t,” I said before he could finish. “Just don’t. I appreciate it, but really. You have no clue.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  I looked away from the calendar and met his eyes. They were brown and crinkled at the corners. The hair at his temples was graying. I searched his face, but nothing in it told me he’d have answers.

  “You wouldn’t understand this,” I said, and got up.

  “We’re
playing touch football,” Coach called behind me. “But I think you’d better run laps instead, McCormick. You’ve done enough touching for today.”

  It was then, a few minutes later, as my legs propelled me across the cinder track, as my arms pumped and my fists clenched and unclenched, as I breathed in and out, Ice, rock, air, ice, rock, air, with the grayish-black cinder track before me, my feet eating up the distance, my muscles using what had been called up in me, that I finally realized how Hardin, and everyone else, had found out I’d gone into the place where Jamie had been buried.

  Who else would know why I’d been absent from school except my brother?

  At lunch, I sat alone at a table in the far corner of the cafeteria, sipping a cola and eating potato chips, trying not to think about how much my brother hated me. But there weren’t enough things to distract my attention. So I took a notebook from my backpack and chewed on my pen for a while. Then my head started to fill with the first clear thoughts I’d had in weeks and this is what I wrote:

  Things I Know about the Dead and Other Observations

  1. My father is a man who can’t talk to me like I’m a real person.

  2. Contrary to popular belief, mothers can easily miss early warning signs of problems concerning their children.

  3. When you’re dead, you don’t have to care about anything, unless you want to.

  4. People aren’t what they seem, whether they’re dead or living.

  5. The dead want the world of sight and sound and smell and taste and touch more than anything else.

  6. The dead aren’t as polite as the living. They’ll make messes of your room.

  7. When you’re dead, you can do a lot to the living and not care, because what can the living do to the dead anyway?

  8. My mother’s friend Lucy is exactly what she seems, and I’ve known that from the start.

  9. The dead aren’t mannerly. They drop in unannounced without apologizing.