Edge

by M. E. Kerr

  “You know how here on earth we might name a girl Felicity or Joy?” Denny said. “On Perfecto, they’d call her Sorry or Dismal.”

  There were times I almost believed Denny’s story that he’d invaded my real brother’s body before birth. Why couldn’t there be other forms of life doing research on us? And wouldn’t that explain why Denny was so different?

  Anyone could tell that Denny wasn’t one of the crowd, and it didn’t matter what crowd you were talking about. He didn’t fit in anywhere, except in his room, where he spent most of his time. There, or in the kitchen watching Mom bake. She made our bread, and our cakes, cookies, and breakfast muffins. He liked watching and thinking up names like Crushed Walnut Cake and Downhearted Doughnuts, Heartsick Cinnamon Rolls, and Weeping White Chocolate Bars. Perfecto names, he told me … Shhh—don’t tell Mom.

  I’d tell Mom anyway. At times I’d get to thinking it would all add, up if there really was a place called Perfecto and Denny was from there.

  Mom would say something like, “You go back and tell Denny he’ll have a very sad story to take back there if he doesn’t get his bike out of the driveway before his dad … excuse me, your dad gets home!”

  When Denny wasn’t around, our father used to say, “Joey, you got the looks in the family. You’re the spitting image of your mom.”

  Once, I asked him, “What’d Denny get?”

  “Hmmm? What’d you say?”

  “You heard me,” I said. I knew he was stalling, crossing out brains, brawn, and personality. None of it applied to Denny.

  But Dad came up with something. “Why, he got that beautiful name,” he said. “Dennis Guilder Smith—that’s got a ring to it!”

  He was right about that. My mother had named Denny. I was named by my father. I was just plain Joe Smith. Not even a middle name. Dad thought middle names, were phony. Thanks, Dad, for all the choices.

  Our dad was not imaginative, and he didn’t read Stephen King. Dennis Guilder was a character out of a King story about a 1958 Plymouth named Christine.

  If Denny had been a girl, guess what name he would have?

  Is it easier to be different if you’re a boy, or a girl? Would Christine Smith have found people backing away from her as she gave detailed descriptions of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or Repo Man?

  Postcards from Denny early that autumn were actually Mom’s. She had made them out for him ahead of time.

  I am feeling a) okay, b) awful, c) in between.

  Denny would check all three.

  Soon I began wearing sweaters to school, and slipping a blanket over me nights in the top bunk. With Denny gone, I was sleeping up there. I could touch the stars he had pasted to the ceiling so he wouldn’t be too lonesome for Perfecto. On Perfecto, the stars were an arm’s length away, said Denny, soft as rose petals and the only light.

  At the end of September, Dad got tired of postcards that carried no news. He called Denny at college.

  “Great! Great!” we heard him say. It was already a suspicious beginning to any conversation between Dad and my brother. When Dad glanced across the room at Mom and me and said, “Denny’s got a girlfriend,” we both ran for the extensions.

  Dad was asking, “How do you like living at Phi Deke?”

  “I’m still in the dorm, Dad, until I’m an active member. But I’m treasurer of my pledge class. And I’m taking Mildred to the house for the big Halloween dance.”

  “Dennis, you don’t dance!” said Mom.

  “Mildred says dancing bores her anyway, so we’ll sit it out in the TV room.”

  “Where did you meet Mildred?” Mom said. Dad was shouting over her that a man had to learn how to dance and Denny should take lessons.

  “The guys fixed me up with her,” said Denny. “She was a blind date.”

  After that, if we wanted to communicate with Denny, we had to call him. All he wanted to talk about was Mildred. Mildred looked like a young Madonna. Mildred was brilliant. Mildred wanted to be a scientist. Mildred believed that our planet was situated in the black hole. Etcetera, etcetera … Dad was delighted. He said we could thank the Phi Dekes that finally Denny was finding his way in this world. That’s what fraternities were all about, Dad claimed. They gave you confidence, and pointed you where you wanted to go.

  The one time Denny did make a call, it was after the Halloween dance.

  There wasn’t time, he said, to go into detail. But it was a nice dance, he supposed. It had just cost more than he thought it would, which was why he was calling.

  I’d never heard Dad okay a request for money so casually. “I bet you all went out to eat, hmmm, that place on the lake costs an arm and a leg, what’s the name?”

  Denny didn’t come up with the name.

  Dad said, “A chip off the old block, Den, that’s you. When I’d call home from college, you know how my father’d answer the phone? He’d say, ‘How much?’”

  The night we met Denny at Islip airport for Thanksgiving vacation, he was too tired to talk. Some airline foul-up had made him five hours late. Before we went to bed, he got out this picture of Mildred. It was an 8x10 in an old silver frame. He took the bottom bunk so he could look up at it. He didn’t seem to mind that he couldn’t reach out and touch the stars. All Denny wanted to talk about was Mildred. He said she looked like a young Madonna.

  “How do you like the Phi Dekes?” Dad asked him at breakfast.

  “They aren’t going to make me an active, Dad.”

  “They have to, Son, like it or lump it.”

  “Not if you break a trust. Just listen, Dad. Okay?”

  Denny told us that Mildred had been workings her way through college. She clerked at a mall just outside Ithaca. She had some scholarship money, too, but everything was more expensive than she’d thought. She was struggling to survive at all.

  “She was very impressed that I was a Phi Deke pledge.” Denny said. “So the night of the dance I bragged about being treasurer of the pledge class. While everyone was dancing, I showed her the president’s suite, where the safe was. I told her the combination was the date that Christopher Columbus discovered America.”

  “1492,” I said. I was pleased that I could remember any date, since I’d never gotten higher than C in history.

  But Mom was way ahead of the story. She held her head with her hands and murmured, “Oh, no, Denny.”

  “She couldn’t help it,” my brother said. “It was like showing a baby where candy was. There was about two hundred dollars cash in the safe. We were watching TV downstairs later and she excused herself to go to the john. That’s when she went back up and cleaned us out.”

  “Did you pay back the money?”

  “Yes. Some of it I borrowed from you, Dad.”

  “Then they ought to give you a second chance. You’re a legacy!”

  “They won’t, and I don’t want them to,” said Denny. “I didn’t think I belonged there and I don’t—not in a fraternity, not in college at all. I think I might be a writer.”

  “And starve to death,” Dad added. But he wasn’t going to give Denny a fight this time. Not even Dad would send Denny back into the fray after he’d made such a valiant effort at college, and romance, and frat life.

  Mom just put her arms around Denny and said she was so sorry. Did he know where Mildred was?

  Denny said he didn’t care. After that, he never talked about her. But for a long time he kept her picture on the bureau. She would smile at us in our room, making me feel sad for my brother.

  Maybe Denny listened too well to Dad about starving to death if he became a writer. Instead, Denny got a job in a bakery. By the time I was a junior in high school, he had borrowed enough from the bank to buy the place.

  The Perfecto Bakery does okay with its Teardrop Cookies, Heartbreak Bread, and Glum Pudding. And you’d have to say that Denny does okay, too. He
lives alone above the bakery in an apartment. He sleeps in our old bunk bed, which Mom gave him after I was graduated. He sleeps in the top bunk, I know, because he has put stars up on the ceiling in his bedroom.

  As “D.G. Smith,” he has not written very much. Denny takes a long time getting his ideas down just the way he wants them. Two of his stories have been published in Fantasy magazine, and reprinted in anthologies. One was translated into French. He has some small fame because of them, even though he was paid very little.

  The first is about Perfecto, as Denny described it to me over the years.

  But it is the second one I find most interesting. That one is about a club of the One Eyes. The One Eyes are male inhabitants of Pitch Dark, a place inside the black hole. Any Son of a One Eye is invited to join, unless he is proven to be dishonorable. One of the legacies has two eyes. His name is Guilder. Not only is he ugly with his two eyes, but his mind cannot stay on one subject only, as the minds of Pitch Darks do. His mind runs all over the place, and he is repulsive because of it.

  Shortly after he is put in charge of The One Eyes’ Heavy Egg, he meets the beautiful Muldred. Unable to believe that this lovely one-eyed female with the narrow mind might find him attractive, he boasts of guarding The Heavy Egg. He tells her how to get it out from the glass case. She takes it from the clubhouse, leaving Guilder to resign in disgrace. When he learns from an enemy of the One Eyes that Muldred was paid six rare scarlet parrot feathers to lure Guilder into disgrace, he still keeps a likeness of her in his locket. Across it he’s written ONLY TRUST YOURSELF.

  Mom said that Denny’s stories always have a kernel of truth in them. She said that Perfecto is really about a kid who’s so offbeat he feels as though he’s from another planet … And we know who the One Eyes are, don’t, we? said Mom. She said that after she read the second story, she had asked Denny if he’d known when he was home Thanksgiving that the Phi Dekes had set him up. My brother told her that Mildred had left him a note confessing everything. At the end, she had written: I don’t blame, you if you never trust anyone again!

  Dad said he didn’t believe it. Either the girl was a liar, or Denny was twisting the truth because he was still mad at Phi Deke. “Don’t listen to your brother on the subject of Phi Deke,” Dad told me that last summer before I left home.

  “Denny never mentions Phi Deke,” I said. He never mentioned Mildred, either.

  “Your brother Dennis has a great imagination, I’ll give him that,” Dad had said. “But where will that get you in the real world?”

  No one at the Phi Deke house remembers hearing anything about a Dennis Guilder Smith. Not even the housemother who remembers pledges from way back in the 1970s.

  I took the trouble to find out that the, treasurer of the pledge class that year was not named Smith, but Langhorn … Denny’s name isn’t on record anywhere. It’s as though my brother was never even there.

  THE AUTHOR

  Before the author comes to school, we all have to write him, saying we are glad he is coming and we like his books.

  That is Ms. Terripelli’s idea. She is our English teacher and she was the one who first got the idea to have real, live authors visit Leighton Middle School.

  She wants the author to feel welcome.

  You are my favorite author, I write.

  I have never read anything he’s written.

  Please send me an autographed picture, I write. I am sure this will raise my English grade, something I need desperately, since it is not one of my best subjects.

  The truth is: I have best friends and best clothes and best times, but not best subjects.

  I am going to be an author, too, someday, I write, surprised to see the words pop up on the screen. But I am writing on the computer in the school library and there is something wonderful about the way any old thought can become little green letters in seconds, which you can erase with one touch of your finger.

  I don’t push WordEraser, however.

  I like writing that I am going to be an author.

  The person I am writing to is Peter Sand.

  My name happens to be Peter too.

  Peter Sangetti.

  I might shorten my name to Peter Sang, when I become an author, I write. Then maybe people will buy my books by mistake, thinking they are getting yours. (Ha! Ha!)

  Well, I write, before this turns into a book and you sell it for money, I will sign off, but I will be looking for you when you show up at our school.

  I sign it Sincerely, although that’s not exactly true.

  The night before the author visit, my dad comes over to see me. My stepfather and my mother have gone off to see my stepbrother, Tom, in Leighton High School’s version of The Sound of Music.

  To myself, and sometimes to my mother, I call him Tom Terrific. Naturally, he has the lead in the musical. He is Captain Von Trapp. If they ever make the Bible into a play, he will be God.

  I like him all right, but I am tired of playing second fiddle to him always. He is older, smarter, and better looking, and his last name is Prince. Really.

  I can’t compete with him.

  It’s funny, because the first words out of my dad’s mouth that night are, “I can’t compete with that.”

  He is admiring the new CD audio system my stepfather had ordered from the Sharper Image catalog. It is an Aiwa with built-in BBE sound.

  “It’s really for Tom Terrific,” I say, but it is in the living room, not Tom’s bedroom, and Dad knows my CD collection is my pride and joy.

  I suppose just as I try to compete with Tom Terrific, my dad tries to compete with Thomas Prince, Sr. … Both of us are losing the game, it seems. My dad is even out of work just now, although it is our secret … not to be shared with my mom or stepfather.

  The plant where he worked was closed. He’d have to move out of the state to find the same kind of job he had there, and he doesn’t want to leave me.

  “I’m not worried about you,” I lie. And then I hurry to change the subject, and tell him about the author’s visit, next day.

  He smiles and shakes his head. “Funny. I once wanted to be a writer.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “Sure. One time I got this idea for a story about our cat. She was always sitting in the window of our apartment building, looking out. She could never get out, but she’d sit there, and I’d think it’d be her dream come true if she could see a little of the world! Know what I mean, Pete?”

  “Sure I do.” I also know my dad always wished he could travel. He is the only person I’ve ever known who actually reads National Geographic.

  He laughs. “So I invented a story about the day she got out. Here was her big chance to run around the block!”

  “What happened?”

  “A paper bag fell from one of the apartments above ours. It landed right on Petunia’s head. She ran around the block, all right, but she didn’t see a thing.”

  Both of us roar at the idea, but deep down I don’t think it is that hilarious, considering it is my dad who dreamed it up.

  What’s he think—that he’ll never see the world? Never have his dreams come true?

  “Hey, what’s the matter?” he says. “You look down in the dumps suddenly.”

  “Not me,” I say.

  “Aw, that was a dumb story,” he says. “Stupid!”

  “It was fine,” I say.

  “No, it wasn’t,” he says. “I come over here and say things to spoil your evening. You’d rather hear your music.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I say, but he is getting up to go.

  We are losing touch not living in the same house anymore.

  Whenever I go over to his apartment, he spends a lot of time apologizing for it. It is too small. It isn’t very cheerful. It needs a woman’s touch. I want to tell him that if he’d just stop pointing out all the things wro
ng with it, I’d like it fine … but it is turning out that we aren’t great talkers anymore. I don’t say everything on my mind anymore.

  He shoots me a mock punch at the door and tells me that next week he’ll get some tickets to a hockey game. Okay with me? I say he doesn’t have to, thinking of the money, and he says I know it’s not like going to the World Series or anything. I’d gone to the World Series the year before with my stepfather.

  “Let up,” I mumble.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  He says, “I heard you, Pete. You’re right. You’re right.”

  Next day, waiting for me out front is Ms. Terripelli.

  “He asked for you, Pete! You’re going to be Mr. Sand’s guide for the day.”

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “Because you want to be a writer?” She looks at me and I look at her.

  “Oh, that,” I say.

  “You never told the class that,” she says.

  “It’s too personal.”

  “Do you write in secret, Pete?”

  “I have a lot of ideas,” I say.

  “Good for you!” says Ms. Terripelli, and she hands me a photograph of Peter Sand. It is autographed. It also has written on it, “Maybe someday I’ll be asking for yours, so don’t change your name. Make me wish it was mine, instead.”

  “What does all that mean?” Ms. Terripelli asks me.

  “Just author stuff,” I say.

  I put the picture in my locker and go to the faculty lounge to meet him.

  He is short and plump, with a mustache. He looks like a little colonel of some sort, because he has this booming voice and a way about him that makes you feel he knows his stuff.

  “I never write fantasy,” he says. “I write close to home. When you read my books, you’re reading about something that happened to me! … Some authors write both fantasy and reality!”

  At the end of his talks he answers all these questions about his books and he autographs paperback copies.