I swallowed the mound of oatmeal I’d just shoveled into my mouth before shaking my head and saying, “No can do. There’s a Halloween party tonight.”
“A party?” my mom said, and her eyes lit up like she couldn’t believe what I was saying. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word leave your mouth before.”
I wasn’t sure if my own mother had just cut me down for not being the type of person who got invited to parties, so instead of rolling my eyes at her, I just shrugged and said, “Yeah. At Jarrod’s.”
“At Jarrod’s?” she said, her voice going up into even higher frequencies of disbelief. Now that her initial shock had passed, she began to shake her head. “In that old trailer? I can’t see how any party, at least a good one, can be thrown in that place.”
“Well, it’s just a small party,” I said, as if I knew anything about it. “Me, a few guys from the baseball team, maybe some people from his classes.”
“Girls?” my mom asked, turning back to the sink. A dish squeaked as she wiped it with a wet cloth, and I flinched at the sound of it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not my party. He just invited me.”
“Well, he must be trying to make friends again,” my mom said as she set the dish in the drying rack. “Parties will do the trick, for sure. But don’t do anything stupid, okay? First sign of alcohol or drugs, you get out of there.”
“Mom,” I said, looking up from my just-emptied bowl. “I don’t think he’s going to have alcohol or drugs in his mom’s place after what she went through to get off them.”
“You never know,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Just because his poor mother had trouble with all that and got over it doesn’t mean he’s not going to have his own troubles. Sometimes these things run in families.”
I dropped my spoon in the bowl and stood to bring it to her, let it slide into the soapy water and clunk against the sink’s bottom. “Did you dream that,” I asked, looking straight into her eyes, “or is that a genuinely concerned opinion?” There was an edge to my voice that surprised even me.
My mom’s eyes turned to slits in an instant. “Don’t you talk to me that way, young man,” she said. “I’m just trying to look out for you. It’s my job, you know. Being a mother isn’t easy.”
“I’m seventeen,” I said. “I can look out for myself.” Then I grabbed my backpack from my chair, thudded down the mudroom steps, and opened the back door.
As I stood there with the door still open behind me, my mom got in one last jab. “You think you know everything, Aidan Lockwood,” she yelled from the kitchen, “but you don’t know the half of it.”
I shut the door on her voice and shook my head at what she’d said. “ ‘Sometimes these things run in families,’ ” I whispered into the morning air, as if by saying the words aloud and scoffing at them, I might exorcise the idea they held in their syllables. The idea that none of us can escape the problems of our families.
The words turned into a white fog in front of me as soon as I said them, chilled by the late-autumn air. They turned into a fog as thick and white as the one inside me. Then they disappeared.
For the rest of the day, whenever I looked up from a test or away from my teachers, the clock seemed to have moved far into the future instead of keeping the usual school-like time of never-going-to-end. Before I knew it, the day was half over. And in what seemed like the next moment, the bell for last period rang, and I was walking out the doors.
Some people had dressed up because it was Halloween, so it had been a day of costume watching. There was a lineup of mostly bad Lady Gaga renditions and guys wearing plastic claws with their hair slicked up to look like Wolverine. One girl came as Catwoman, wearing a black leather bodysuit, twirling a fake plastic whip like a tail, which got her sent home by the end of first period. A bunch of the school athletes unimaginatively wore their team uniforms. And some teachers managed to get into the spirit. Mr. Johnson was wearing breeches and tights in an effort to look like Shakespeare, and Ms. Woodyard wore a severe nunlike costume that she continually had to explain was a replica of the garb women might have worn at the Salem witch trials. At the end of the day, all of these masked spirits exited the building together, as if in a parade, then drove off in a hurry toward their various Halloween destinations.
Jarrod was already leaning against the Blue Bomb when I got outside. It was weird to see him not smoking an after-school cigarette; apparently, that image of him had been branded into my mind. I think it must have been weird for him, too, because he jiggled his leg up and down and kept playing with a lock of his hair like it really needed his attention. The only time I’d seen him look so nervous was when he took me to Mill Creek to show me one of his memories. One of my memories, that is. One of our memories, I should say.
“What?” I said as I came up to him, as if just last week he hadn’t told me any of those completely unbelievable things. “No costume? Really?”
He looked me up and down before he said, “You’re one to talk. Jeans and a flannel shirt? Again? One easily purchased hockey mask and you would have been a hit today, so don’t go giving me a hard time.”
“On Halloween,” I said, “at least originally, masks were supposed to come off, according to Mr. Johnson. But we are for sure the least fun people in this high school regardless. Even Ms. Woodyard came dressed for the Salem witch trials.”
“Huh,” said Jarrod. “I thought that pilgrim dress was one of her regular outfits.”
I grinned, and was relieved to be grinning. Jarrod and I had begun to understand each other’s sense of humor—dry and cutting, in his case—which meant we were getting back to being the way we must have been when we were kids, when we’d understood one another in some way that made us want to be around each other. To be friends.
“Need to pick up anything for the party?” I asked. “We have time if you’re not ready.”
“Nah,” Jarrod said, shaking his head. “I’ve got everything we need. We can head out if you’re ready.”
“Ready,” I said, confident as a businessman, even though I had no clue what the fine print on the contract said.
So we got into the Blue Bomb and headed toward the trailer on Cordial Run, where, when Jarrod unlocked the front door and pushed inside, the door squealing on its hinges, I found the place in what must have been the cleanest state it had been in since we were kids.
The shock must have shown on my face, because Jarrod said, “My mom said I had to clean if I was going to have people over. I told her it was just you coming, but she said that didn’t matter.” He looked at me after saying that and laughed at his own joke.
“What a guy,” I said, and shook my head at him. I’d gotten snagged, though, on what he’d said about it being just me coming, and wondered what had happened to the others. “Didn’t you invite anyone else?” I asked. “You said some of the team were coming over.”
Jarrod made a face like the guys on the team were some exotic food he’d never try willingly. Octopus or raw fish, maybe. But baseball players? “Nah,” he said. “I’ll have to hang out with them soon enough, once we start spring training. I figured we could have one of our old horror-flick-marathon nights, like we used to. For old time’s sake.”
I looked at him for a while, wanting to say I wasn’t comfortable with this change in plans, wanting to say I wasn’t comfortable doing something we did back when we were kids, because doing that would make me think about all of the other things I couldn’t remember us doing.
But instead I said, “Sounds fun,” and asked, “What do you have in the lineup?”
“I’m thinking we should go for a classic first,” he said, raising his eyebrows a few times with real excitement that I was good with his change of plans. “Maybe a slasher. Then we can move on to something current, possibly a supernatural thriller. Those were always your favorites. Or we could watch something so bad it’s funny.”
“When we were kids,” I said, “we didn’t watch scary movie
s and laugh.”
I said this with confidence. This much I could remember.
“Christ, no,” said Jarrod. “Back then I believed in the boogeyman. And you seeing all kinds of spooky shit sure as hell didn’t help convince me otherwise.”
I looked down at the orange shag carpeting. It was the same carpet I remembered from when we were kids, and it was probably the same carpet that had been in that trailer before Jarrod’s parents had lived there. Looking at it made me feel a little better, because it was something I hadn’t forgotten, a touchstone, something that had leaped the chasm between my past and present, making everything feel continuous inside me, at least for one brief moment.
Also, it was easier to look at that carpet and refuse to think about what Jarrod had said about me seeing spooky shit back then.
“Hey,” he said, his voice softer now. “I’m sorry, Aidan. I didn’t mean to bring that up again.”
I looked up, sucking in one cheek a little, and said, “It’s okay. I’d rather you talk about it than pretend it was never real.”
“Thanks,” he said, like I’d done him a favor. He stood in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, his arms braced on the frame above his head. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I hate having to be fake around people. I’m glad I don’t have to be fake around you.”
He turned to go into the kitchen and left me standing there wondering why he would ever have to be fake with anyone. A guy like Jarrod is usually the sort lifted up on everyone else’s shoulders because he can throw a baseball past batters and leave a bit of smoke coming out of the catcher’s mitt afterward. At least he didn’t see things other people couldn’t. At least the thing that made him different was a good thing.
A minute later, he returned with a couple of beers. “Want one?” he said, holding out a sweat-beaded bottle.
I thought about my mom and her prediction that drugs and alcohol would appear at Jarrod’s party. A little anti-drinking commercial played in my mind for a second, and my mom was an actor in it, wagging her finger at me. Why did she always have to be right?
I shrugged it off a second later, though. It’s just one beer, I told myself. And it’s just the two of us, anyway. And that piece of logic nullified the accuracy of my mom’s prediction just enough for me to not care.
I took the cold bottle out of Jarrod’s hand then, and twisted the top off like a trouper.
By ten, we’d made our way through two old slasher flicks—Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th—and we were just getting to the end of a third movie—Paranormal Activity—which had been made like a documentary about a demon-possessed woman whose boyfriend won’t stop filming her.
“What an idiot,” Jarrod said, shaking his head as the movie ended.
“She kept telling him to stop filming her,” I said. “No means no, dude. You get what you deserve.”
Jarrod chuckled and took a swig from his bottle. We were on our fifth beers, and I was feeling fuzzy around the edges. A different fuzzy than how I usually felt. This felt like I was somehow lighter, like some kind of pressure had been relieved. This felt like the opposite of those times when a migraine would come for me.
When Jarrod finished his beer a second later, he stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve the last two, then came back with the top already taken off mine. “I don’t think you should drive home tonight,” he said as he stretched to pass me the bottle. “I couldn’t live with myself if you got into an accident after drinking over here.”
“I guess I could stay here,” I said. “I’d just have to call my parents and tell them.”
“Sure,” Jarrod said. “Just don’t sound drunk when you talk to your mom or she’ll be over here in a hurry to get you.”
“It sounds like you’ve had practice at doing this,” I said, laughing.
Jarrod laughed too. “Okay, okay,” he said. “You’ve got me. But learn from my mistakes, grasshopper. Practice makes perfect.”
So I practiced talking out loud for a while, just to make sure I wasn’t slurring my words, which I didn’t do at all. Which surprised me. I’d always expected that the first time I drank anything alcoholic, I wouldn’t be able to stand, let alone talk coherently. The beer, though, hadn’t hit me hard. Probably because it was the cheapest stuff Jarrod could find in the coolers of the shadiest little convenience store in the next town over.
After all that practice at talking sober to fool my mother, though, it turned out to be my dad who answered the phone when I eventually called. He said staying over at Jarrod’s was fine, but he expected me home early enough to help him with chores the next morning. I said, “Sure thing. Will do. Thanks, Dad.” And when I clicked my phone off a second later, Jarrod slowly raised his fists into the air, shaking them victoriously, like we’d just won a championship ball game.
“Come on,” he said, and got up to lead me back to his room.
While the carpet in the trailer was something I remembered from hanging out there as a kid, Jarrod’s room seemed different. It was the size of a matchbox, made even smaller by his bed, which was this huge sleigh-shaped thing that barely fit. It took up most of the space, leaving only a person-sized path to walk around its edges. In my memory, the room had been way bigger. Maybe, though, I only remembered it like that because I’d been a lot smaller.
“You can have the bed,” Jarrod said, nodding toward it. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
I looked at that narrow strip of free space around the edge of the bed and said, “No way. That won’t be comfortable at all.”
“I’ve slept in worse places,” Jarrod said, shrugging. I wondered what he meant, but didn’t ask.
“I can sleep out on the couch,” I offered instead, turning back to the living room. “I don’t mind. Really.”
“No,” he said. “My mom will come through there when she gets home from work, and if she smells beer on you she’ll go crazy. I already put the other evidence in the trash can out back. I don’t usually have anything around to set her off, but I figure what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”
“It’s your call,” I said. “But it’s also your bed. Why don’t I take the floor instead?”
Jarrod opened his mouth, but for a moment he just stood there, saying nothing, as if he’d lost all of his words. A strange look passed over his face. Then quickly he sat down on the edge of the bed, put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and he started to mutter, saying how stupid he was, how he wished he wasn’t so goddamned stupid.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. But he just kept shaking his head and mumbling about how he was a complete idiot. When that was all I could get out of him, I sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulders, trying to comfort him. He flinched when I touched him, though, as if I’d tried to stick a knife into him, so I let my arm drop again. “Hey,” I said, “what’s wrong? Did you drink too much? Are you sick?”
“You should probably go,” he said, not looking up from the floor to face me. His voice had fallen to almost a whisper. “I’m sorry I had you over like this.”
“I had a good time,” I said, still not comprehending. “It’s been fun. I don’t understand. Did I do something wrong?”
He looked up from the gloomy position he’d taken, and I could see that he was thinking about something. Behind those dark eyes, some unwanted thought kept floating by, like a fish behind glass, wanting to get out, to be free of his skull. “You don’t remember a lot of things, I know,” Jarrod finally said, his voice shaking a little. “But I was wondering, do you remember this?”
He took my hand from my lap then, and held it in his. At first I thought that he was going to share a memory with me, the way he had at the park, that he was reaching across again. But when no memory came, and his thumb continued to softly caress my knuckles, I looked up and saw him waiting for my reaction. “We used to hold hands like this,” he said, “when we were kids. Even when we were almost thirteen. I know it must sound strange. So many other things
that used to be normal, you can’t remember. But do you remember this?”
I shook my head, slowly, but he didn’t take his hand away. I didn’t take mine away either, even though I wasn’t sure what I was even thinking, if I was thinking anything at all. Holding his hand did somehow feel normal. But I wasn’t completely receiving his message.
“Is it there now?” he asked.
“Is what there now?”
“That wall you told me about. The wall that springs up inside you sometimes.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head, even though I was starting to get nervous enough to almost wish that I had the wall there right now.
“I’m trying to tell you something, Aidan,” said Jarrod, his voice growing smaller as he tried to admit something big.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to that moment and wake up right then, to understand everything again, so I could do the right thing, so I could say the right thing to Jarrod. But at the time, my head was still broken.
After it became clear that I wasn’t able to say what he hoped for, that I still didn’t know my lines, Jarrod took his hand away from mine. “I didn’t come back to Temperance because I missed it,” he said, his voice now flat as an iron. “I came back after my dad caught me with a guy and kicked me out.”
“I thought you left because of your dad’s girlfriend,” I said, and Jarrod looked over to roll his eyes at the enormity of my stupidity.
“Jesus, Aidan,” he said. “I made that shit up. His girlfriend has her own apartment.” He stood then, and went over to lean against the doorframe with his back to me. “I was embarrassed by the truth, okay? When I came back here and saw that something was wrong with you, that you couldn’t remember some things, I was afraid you wouldn’t remember us. Like that. Like the way we were with each other. And clearly you don’t.”
He sighed, frustrated that I couldn’t fill in the rest of what he was trying to say. “Just go,” he said eventually. “I’m sorry I had you over like this. I was being selfish. I was hoping if we spent time together like we used to, alone, you’d remember how you felt. Which was pretty dumb of me, obviously. We were just stupid kids back then, anyway, weren’t we?”
Wonders of the Invisible World Page 6
