I’m just about to give up and go inside when a man enters the area dressed in a dark blue suit. Since most teachers and administrators dress fairly casually, he stands out.
It’s Nick; Nick, looking surprisingly handsome, pockmarked cheeks and all.
“I came to say goodbye,” he says, without ever having said hello.
“What?” I don’t understand.
“I’m on my way to the airport,” Nick says, only adding to the mystery, my confusion. “I’ve got a tryout with an NFL team down in Florida.”
Ah. The light in my brain finally clicks on.
“I heard kickers are in high demand this season,” he goes on when I fail to speak. “Come to think of it,” he adds with a grin, “I think I heard somewhere that kickers are always in demand.”
“I think I heard that same thing too,” I speak at last.
Nick Greek holds out his hand. It’s obvious it’s not the unconscious, unthinking gesture others have done. On the contrary, it’s very deliberate. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
I don’t want him to go.
This could not come at a worse time for me. With Aurora gone, no doubt forever, he is the only friend I have left in the world.
But if he is my friend, and he is, then I should want what’s best for him.
I reach out my right hook, shake his hand like a man.
“Maybe this year I’ll be great,” Nick says. “Maybe next year I’ll be a goat. But I gotta try.”
“You’ll be great every year,” I say.
“Well, then . . .”
There’s nothing left to say.
Nick starts to walk away, then stops, calls over his shoulder:
“Thanks, Lucius. If it wasn’t for you . . .”
Before he can say anything further, I salute him with my hook. I let him go.
Aurora
A day that begins terrible and then gets worse turns into the worst day of my life.
It’s Deanie who tells me what’s happened, not long after third period. I stand outside the door to our American History classroom and listen, not believing the words I’m hearing. Then I look at her face to see if she’s telling the truth or if this is some kind of sick joke.
Immediately I can tell it is the truth. What I can’t tell, looking in her eyes, is if she’s glad to be the bearer of bad tidings or not.
Lucius is not only crazy. He’s evil.
Lucius
I’m standing in front of my own locker when I feel the tap, hard, on my shoulder. I’m standing in front of my locker not because I need to put anything in it or get anything from it but rather because I have no idea where I should be anymore.
I turn around and see Aurora standing there.
I’m so happy to see her. She must have forgiven me, or at the very least, she must be willing to talk to me some more about it. Maybe she just wants to try to understand. That would be like her.
I open my mouth to speak. I want to tell her how relieved I am that she wants to talk to me.
That’s when she reaches out with an open palm and slaps me hard across the face.
“You are . . .” She is so angry, she has no word to describe what I am, leaving vacant space to describe me instead.
My face is still stinging from the slap, but I couldn’t care less about that.
“I just can’t believe it,” she says. “I can’t believe you would be so hateful.”
I have done more than one hateful thing in my life; I know this, and I am trying to get better.
But in this moment, I have no clue as to what she’s talking about.
Aurora
I don’t care what Deanie said. I don’t care what everyone is saying now about my father. They’re wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’m not there to witness it, but others are all too eager to tell me what happened.
“They took your dad away for questioning,” Deanie says.
“They didn’t have cuffs on him or anything,” Celia says. “I think they just want to talk to him. My dad says he’s been suspended . . . indefinitely.”
I remember, in some dim corner of my brain, that Celia’s father, Mr. Wentworth, is the vice principal here.
“I’m sorry,” Jessup says, and I can tell he means it.
I’m sorry too.
Lucius
I have no idea what’s happened.
One talent I have acquired since the explosion is the ability to just be quiet and listen and watch. So as the day goes on, I learn enough to realize that whatever has happened, it has something to do with Mr. Belle, Aurora’s father.
I watch Jessup with Aurora at lunch. Something has changed between them. Whereas before I could see that he relentlessly pursued her while she resisted, now it is as though she is leaning on him. When she doesn’t eat any of her lunch, Jessup goes up to the cafeteria line and waits patiently—it is a very long line—to get a carton of chocolate milk to try to tempt her. When Celia sits down in the place Jessup has vacated—meaning that now Aurora is flanked by Celia and Deanie, leaving no place beside Aurora for Jessup when he returns, so he will have to sit on the other side of Celia—Jessup tells her to move. He makes his request politely, but it’s obvious that it is more of a command. The look on Celia’s face? It’s clear to me at least that she expected something different from him. I am puzzled: Did she really think that for some insane reason Jessup would stop liking Aurora and would turn his attentions to her instead? Why would he? I am sure Celia has her share of attractions, for some—most people do, with the possible exception of me—but why would any guy turn from the possibility of Aurora to that of any other girl?
Aurora, still not eating, excuses herself from the others. I watch as she goes over to the cafeteria monitor and I assume she asks for a pass to go to the library or study hall. Well, perhaps not the library. It would probably be too sad for her there now without Mr. Belle.
Her shoulders are slumped as she exits the cafeteria. She looks so sad. And even though she slapped me, even though she has turned her back on me, this impresses me as wrong. Yes, there are plenty enough bad things that go on in this life—enough sadness in the world to make a person cry if he thought about it too much, or to make him want to blow up something—but it is not right that Aurora should feel so sad. It makes me want to fix it for her.
People may say, as they have often, that there is something broken in me. But I want to fix what’s broken in her.
It’s only after the door closes behind Aurora that I start paying attention to the conversation at Jessup’s table again. It’s only after she’s safely gone that I hear Jessup say to the others in a smirking tone of voice:
“I always knew that librarian was crazy.”
Then he drinks the rest of Aurora’s chocolate milk, crushes the empty carton within his fist, and tosses it in the direction of the garbage pail.
It is with some satisfaction I note that he misses, and by a rather wide margin.
Still, I cannot believe what I have just heard.
I know crazy and—believe it or not—I do know normal. And I’ve met Mr. Belle, spoken to him in his home.
Mr. Belle isn’t crazy.
Mr. Belle is the most normal human being I’ve ever met.
Aurora
I want to skip play rehearsal after school. I want to go home to be with my dad. But the school secretary gives me a message from him. The message says that he’s all right, but that he’s very busy and he wants me to stay for rehearsal, take the late bus home.
So it appears, whether I want it to or not, the show must go on.
Lucius
I go to rehearsal where, I learn, I have become a pariah.
What’s worse, I wonder, to be a pariah or a piranha?
Easy answer: a piranha.
It’s true that at Jessup’s party, no one other than Aurora was exactly what you could call friendly to me. But the last few weeks we’ve been rehearsing, I’ve seen a respect for me grow in the eyes of the cast and crew. Aga
in, if not friendly, they’ve clearly recognized that I am the go-to person in this production and they have all been going to me for help.
But now no one asks me for anything, no one listens to me when I speak. I might as well not even be here.
What is going on now reminds me of a story my dad used to like to tell back before the explosion, when he was still what he and my mom referred to as an HG: Happy Guy.
My mom and dad used to have this agreed upon theory that you could divide everyone in the entire world into just two types: HG, for Happy Guy, and MG, for Miserable Guy, and that these tags applied to females too, because no matter what the gender, all human beings were either Happy Guys or Miserable Guys. My mom and dad claimed you could determine who was which at a glance, but that it was easiest to do with celebrities or politicians, people that others already had an opinion about. It had to do with their basic nature, though, not their general fortune or lack thereof. Jon Stewart? Happy Guy. Tom Cruise? Miserable Guy. George Bush? Miserable Guy. Bill Clinton? Happy Guy.
“Bill Clinton,” my dad used to observe. “You could tell just from looking at him, that even when times were at their worst, he was still having a blast every day of his life.”
Aurora Belle? Happy Guy.
Lucius Wolfe? Well, on him, the jury is still out. He used to be a Miserable Guy, just like his dad used to be a Happy Guy. And maybe, one day, his dad will be again. According to my parents, it’s possible under extraordinary circumstances for a person to make the leap from Happy Guy to Miserable Guy and vice versa.
So you see, before this all happened to my family, before the explosion, both my parents were Happy Guys, and Misty too. I was the only MG in our old household. So you see, too, I don’t blame my parents for what I became and never have. It wasn’t my parents’ fault I wanted to blow something up. It wasn’t my parents’ fault I was so angry with the world. And why was I so angry? I suppose—and I know this is no excuse, but it is the reason—I was exhausted with being so different from everybody else. Intelligence can be an isolating thing, and I grew lonely. And it does get weary-making, not to mention anger-making, always being the guy who gets shoved into his own locker, gets called Hooks.
Sure, many, many people survive extended abuse or bullying and never snap. But some do snap. It is a thing, I think, worth thinking about.
So much of life can be divided into before and after. It’s as though whenever there is a significant event, there’s a picture with two sides that look remarkably similar, but not quite, and right down the center is an invisible line representing that event. This is Lucius before. This is Lucius after. This is the Wolfe family before. This is the Wolfe family after. Two slightly different versions of the same picture, the second image like a smoky mirror. It kind of makes you wonder what after would look like were it not for the existence of that line.
But anyway, getting back to the story my dad used to like to tell, back before the explosion, before he became an MG.
My dad said there was this man in Japan who worked for a company. The company wanted to get rid of the man because he was getting old; I’m not sure if it was because he was no longer doing his job properly or if they just didn’t want to pay his salary anymore. But they didn’t want to be rude and fire him. So what did they do instead? First, they kept moving him to increasingly smaller offices, I suppose in the hopes that he would just quit. When that didn’t work, they moved him to an office in the basement. They also stopped giving him any work to do, so he had nothing to do there all day long, alone. Finally, when nothing else worked, they began dimming the electricity in his basement office each day so that the lights over his empty desk grew gradually less illuminating until one day there was no light left. When he was in complete darkness, they got their way and he resigned.
I have no idea what is going on, what is happening to me. All I know is that I am like that little Japanese man sitting in the basement: alone, as all around me the lights slowly go out.
But I’m not going to quit.
I will not quit.
Aurora
I get off the late bus, run to the house, tear open the door, and find my father at the kitchen table.
He’s just sitting there, head in his hands.
“Daddy?” I say.
He looks up, sees me looking at him. I swear, those are tears in his eyes.
“I didn’t do it, princess,” he says. “Whatever they’re saying, I didn’t do it.”
I feel a knot of sadness in the pit of my stomach that grows, threatening to overwhelm me, sadness that he could even think for a second that I would believe anything bad about him.
“Of course not!” I cry. I move to sit at the table, take one of his large hands in mine. “But what happened?”
“One of the students . . .” He pauses. “One of the female students . . . leveled an accusation of improper conduct at me.”
“I know,” I say.
“She said I made . . . inappropriate advances.”
“I know that too, Daddy.” I don’t want to say the next, I don’t want to hurt him any more than he’s already been hurt, but surely he must already know. “Everyone at school is talking about it.”
He releases a heavy sigh. “Yes,” he says, “I suspect they are.”
“Who is she, Daddy?” I need to know. “Who is saying these awful things?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” he says.
“‘Not at . . .’”
I can’t believe he won’t tell me!
I think back how, after the party Friday night, when he picked me up, he wanted to know what was wrong. And I refused to tell him. Now he is refusing to tell me something crucial. But this is different.
“You have to tell me,” I say. “I can find a way to fix this!”
“No,” he says. “She’s a minor. I’ve been ordered not to discuss the specifics while the investigation is pending.”
I feel so helpless.
“But I can tell you this: Mr. Wentworth says that it’s not just a matter of her word against mine. There’s another student, a boy, who can corroborate everything the girl has said.”
Yes. I’d heard that too.
It was why I struck Lucius.
Deanie told me that Celia told her that she heard from her father—the vice principal, Mr. Wentworth—that Lucius was the one who corroborated the story about my father, saying he saw the incident. But Deanie claimed Celia said that Mr. Wentworth wouldn’t tell her the girl’s name because they needed to protect her.
In my mind, I can still hear the sound of my hand striking against Lucius’s cheek, still feel the backlash sting of his cheek against my open palm.
If he were here in front of me right now, I would hit him again.
I can’t believe we ever invited him into our home.
I can’t believe he could be so vengeful.
He told me he once wanted to blow something up, and now he has blown up my world.
Everything everybody said about him is true.
Lucius
Two more weeks pass and almost nothing changes.
Mr. Belle’s suspension continues—pending further investigation—and now I know what he is being investigated for: trying something improper with one of the female students.
How could any sane person believe such a thing of him?
I know this can’t be true.
I wish that I could prove it.
Also in the Nothing Changes column: the way other people treat me. I am still pariah non grata at rehearsals, but I am no elderly Japanese businessman toiling away in the basement of Heartless Employer Inc. and I refuse to quit. Let the other cast and crew petition for my removal if they want me gone so badly.
One thing that does change, and I confess this upsets me deeply: I see Aurora growing even closer to Jessup. Their scenes together as we edge toward opening night on Friday take on a real-life quality that goes beyond mere acting. It makes my stomach churn, and yet on some level higher than my usual s
elf, I’m grateful that she has someone to lean on, even if that someone isn’t me.
Still, I worry about Aurora, worry about Mr. Belle. So on Thursday, rather than sticking around for the final rehearsal, I tell Mrs. Peepers I’m not feeling well and take the regular bus instead of the late one. Her expression tells me that even though we are just one day away from opening night, she’s picked up on the coolness of the cast and crew toward me and she knows my presence won’t be missed.
Once on the bus, rather than getting off at my own stop, I get off at Aurora’s. As I knock on the door with my hook, I worry that Aurora might have told Mr. Belle what I told her about myself the night of Jessup’s party and I pray that he won’t turn me away.
“Lucius.” There’s no surprise in his tone at seeing me, his delivery is so flat, which is in itself surprising. But when I look into his eyes I see that his usual cheerful light has gone out. His face looks haggard. His hair, what little he has, is untidy, and he’s not even wearing a tie. Mr. Belle always wears a tie, to the point where it’s easy to picture a newborn baby Mr. Belle, diaper sagging but tie perfectly tied around his wrinkled baby neck. I know what crazy looks like and what normal looks like. I also know what depression looks like. It looks like this.
“Aurora’s not here,” he says.
“I know that, sir,” I say. “Can I come in?”
He looks like he’d like to refuse but then can’t think of a good reason why, so he holds open the door for me.
“Please,” he says.
“Can I get you something to drink?” he offers once I’m inside, forcing a pasted smile on his face. It’s as though someone turned on a switch in him: This is the way to act when company comes calling.
“No, thank you, sir,” I say. “I came because I want to help Aurora. I want to help you.”
“How can you help?”
“If you would just tell me what happened. If you would just tell me who is spreading these terrible rumors about you—”
Crazy Beautiful Page 13
