by Joshua Braff
“Fine,” she says. “Swallow it.”
I open the squeaky door and keep it open with my foot. “Bye.”
“Hey. If I hear it again, I’m gonna say something.”
I take my foot off the door and it slams shut. “To who?”
“To him. Or your mother or the cops or anyone who’ll—”
“The cops, Megan? Are you kidding me?”
She reaches out and takes my elbow in her hand. “It was vicious,” she says. “Vicious.”
I pull my arm away from her and open the door.
“Wait,” she says.
“I’m gonna be late.” I shut the door and walk up on the grass.
She gets out of the car, comes toward me. “Just stop for a second,” she says.
“I’m late.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m mad at you. Because I’m not.”
“I don’t really care.”
“Don’t say that. Why’d you say that?”
I stop and face her.
“I was up all night, J. Just thinking.”
“You already told me that.”
“I was . . . thinking about your bar mitzvah,” she says, swiping nothing off my shoulder. “That dance, the hora, right? Your father, he was . . . flying, I mean, so high with his head back and his arms in the air. In and out of all those friends of his. And I thought, my God, what pride this man has for his boy. Look at him.”
“Can I go now?”
She stares at me for a moment and nods her head. “You spoke so beautifully up there,” she says. “All that Hebrew. Those songs. Do you know how good you are? Did he tell you?”
I step back from her.
“Say something to me,” she pleads.
“Like what? There’s nothing to say.”
“You have to hate it that he talks to you like that?”
“It was a . . . disagreement.”
“Are you kidding? A disagreement?”
“He gets tired at night, Megan.”
“That’s tired?”
“My father . . . loves me . . . Megan. Okay? I have to go now. I have class.”
“Jacob?” she says with a wrinkling chin. “What?”
She folds and unfold her arms. “You call that love?”
Like a sucker punch, I feel these words in my gut. Tears rise in my eyes with my classmates ten feet away. I try to breathe it away, to erase the sound of it from my heart. I turn once again and face her. “Go home,” I say. “Go.”
JONNY’S SITTING ON the floor with the back of his head against my locker. As always he’s gnawing on the leather laces of his Rawlings, ingesting the cowhide juice of our most beloved game. He doesn’t see me yet. I stop in the stairwell and lean my shoulder against the railing. When I run away in my mind I never come back. I catch a bus with my brother to Florida with all my bar mitzvah dough. We move into a motel near Disney World that has a pool with a slide and an ice machine outside every single room. In the mornings we walk barefooted across the soggy AstroTurf lawn and I head for the slide to wake myself up. My mother’s always crying when she learns we’re gone; some cop gives her coffee and asks to see my room. She doesn’t know we live in Orlando now. I think she thinks we’re dead.
When Jon looks up and sees me he rolls a brand-new baseball down the hall toward my feet. If I don’t stop it it’ll head through C wing and end up somewhere in Ms. Kerrigan’s science lab. I scoop it up and roll it back to him. Heather Dyer and friends jump over it with a squeal like they think it’s a mouse, and Jon looks at me with a laugh, to see if I saw. He’s the only person I know besides me who finds it impossible to tire of baseball. When he was seven he stood alone on his driveway and pitched a full nine-inning bout against his garage with a tennis ball. Pop-ups and cleanly fielded grounders were outs, the strike zone a rectangle drawn with chalk. Somewhere around the fifth inning he had to decide whether to take a bathroom break or continue the game. He pissed in his pants and went on to beat the Bosox 8 to 3—squishy britches and all. Seconds after I stopped laughing from this story, I knew exactly why I’d found the perfect best friend for me. We’re both human [
“Where ya been?” he says, getting to his feet. “I got good news.” Jon’s a smidge taller than he was in the fourth grade but still stands a foot shorter than me. He wears untied Timber-lands and white overalls a lot, and keeps his dark hair long, past his shoulders. I open my locker and throw my book bag in.
“Aren’t you curious?” he says.
“Go ahead. What is it?”
He walks in front of me and opens his mouth to speak but stops. “You been crying?” he says.
“Fuck you.”
“Sorry. You look like you were.”
“Fuck, no.”
“Okay, okay.”
I grab my gym shorts out of the locker. “So what’s the news?”
“The news. The news is Kara Brown. Remember her?”
“Yeah.”
“She wants to go out with you,” he says. “Fitsy says ‘guaranteed hand job.’”
“She . . . touched Fitsy’s dick?”
“No, no. He just knows that she’ll give you one.”
“How does he know?”
“I don’t know.”
“And that’s the news?”
“You were expecting something better? Fitsy says it’s guaranteed.”
“I heard you.” I hang my coat up and slam my locker. “Come on. We’re gonna be late for gym.” I walk down the hall and Jon follows me.
“I tell you Kara Brown wants to touch your wang and you’re worried about being late?”
“Didn’t we know this?”
“Not about the hand job!”
“Shhh. Okay, okay.”
“She’s a fuckin’ fox, man. She’s an eighth-grade fox.”
“I’ve seen her.”
“She let Lyle Hammlin finger her in a movie theater. It’s for real—Patrick smelled his fingers.”
“What movie?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Patrick smelled his fingers?”
“Yup.”
“Lyle probably stuck ’em up his own butt.”
Jon thinks this is hilarious. His laugh is high pitched and I can see his uvula fluttering around. We walk toward the gym and he starts jumping around me in a circle. “Oh, Kara, hold it. Hold it tight. Put it in.”
“Stop.”
“Deeper, Jacob. Deeper.”
“Doesn’t she go out with Boiko?”
“Fuck Tim Boiko,” he says, and swings a punch into the air. “You’ll kick his ass.”
“I’m not fighting that kid,” I say. “He’s got facial hair.”
“Boiko’s a pussy.”
“I don’t care enough to fight him.”
“You’ll kill him!” Jon says.
“I don’t want to kill him.”
“But you have to.”
I stop in the middle of the crowded hallway and Jon keeps walking. “What?”
He stops and walks back. “That’s the other thing. Boiko wants to fight you after school. It’s to be expected. She’s his girlfriend.”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t even know this girl.”
“I say you go nutso,” Jon says, placing two fingers in his nose, “and get in his nostrils like this. Then just tear upward, you know? Up, up, up, and just rip like this. Look. Up, up, up.”
Jon’s got an insane side that makes me love him all the more. His mother, Darcy, blames Jon’s father, George, for all his “aggressive energy.” His dad left the family for a place called Mendocino after h
e cheated on Jon’s mom with her best friend, Lorna. Jon says they did it doggy-style on his mom’s sheets while she was visiting her sister in Miami. I’m not sure how he knows this. George took Lorna with him to California and married her a few years later. Jon was six at the time. His dad visits once in a while and takes us to New York to see R-rated movies. He picks us up at the Hoboken train station in his rented Beetle and we can smell the sweet thickness of his marijuana cigarettes. I love these excursions. His dad is more like a friend than a dad. He lets us sip his beers and curse and once let us spit down an open manhole. I tell myself I’d love every single day if my dad slept with my mom’s best friend and moved to a city I’d never heard of. But I know Jon misses his father. I’d miss him too.
After we change, we walk into the largest gymnasium I’ve ever been in. It’s filled with kids in red shorts and Piedmont Junior High tank tops. Everyone’s already lining up to use the various apparatus. Three sets of wood rings dangle from the ceiling next to a cocoa-colored pummel horse and a foam vault called a trapezoid. I gaze out at the fat red crash mats and balance beams and all the retractable basketball hoops, folded up high against the fluorescent ceiling. It’s just a million miles from the yeshiva blacktop. Jon and I stand with our backs against a long gray mat that protects basketballers from running into the brick wall. We’ll wait for Mr. Renna to blow his whistle before we join the ranks. I rub the back of my neck and think about Megan.
“Hey, I got that thank-you note you sent me,” Jon says.
“Oh . . . yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t have to thank me for a thank-you note.”
“You got a little messed up though,” he says, lightly punching the mat.
I slowly face him. “Why—what do you mean?”
“It’s not a big deal. You just thanked me for the wrong gift. You said I gave you a horseshoe set and I gave you a basketball, remember? McGee gave you the horseshoe thing.”
I stare at Jon.
“What?” he says.
“I thanked you for the wrong gift?”
“It’s no big deal, man. You got a lot of stuff.”
“It is a big deal. It’s a big fuckin’ deal,” I say, rubbing my face in both hands. “I really . . . I really do like the basketball.” I feel tears rise up from my throat and into my face. “I’m just . . . so fuckin’ stupid.”
“Hey, man. Relax, okay? You got a lot of stuff,” he says, touching my shoulder. “What’s wrong with you today? You seem . . . bad.”
I wipe my eyes and turn to punch the mat behind me. It makes a thump when the flat of my fist hits it.
“Pretend it’s Tim Boiko,” Jon says, and gives it a kick.
I start jabbing some more, harder and harder. Thump, thump.
“You want to mess with me, Tim,” Jon says. “You want to mess with my friend because your girlfriend thinks you’re a loser. Take that! Hi-yah.” Thump.
I wind up and throw another punch. It makes a great sound when I connect with a blow. It echoes throughout the gym. I do it again and again. Jon stops hitting the mat to watch me. “Holy shit, man, you’re gonna kill him.”
I like that he says this. He’s right. I’m crazy, fucking crazy, and don’t like being threatened. I’m a goddamn wacko and you’ve picked the wrong motherfucker to mess with. “You picked the wrong motherfucker to mess with!” I say.
“That’s right, he did.”
“I’ll kill you! Get in my face again and I’ll fuckin’ punch your teeth out!” Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
“Hit him, man. Hit him.”
“Are you ready, asshole?”
“He’ll never be ready,” Jon says.
A flurry of jabs to the face. A gut shot. “Look out now,” I say. “Here it comes, Daddy.” And for the last punch, I get a small running start and . . . thump!
Pain [
“Yeah, baby,” Jon says. I glance at him, my fist still pinned to the mat. I pull it toward me, against my chest. I try to undo it, to make it all okay. But it’s over, cracked, I’m positive, somewhere deep in the purity of the bone. I grab it with my left hand. I squeeze to brace it, the pain climbs and begins to rage. I stumble as I run with wide eyes, confused by direction. My breath held, I see the locker-room door. I kick it open and run into the empty room. “You’re fine,” I hear myself say. But it’s a lie. A lie. The pain expands, pointed and vicious. I suck for air, squeezing the snapped bone. I can’t take it. “God, God . . . don’t . . .” I’m in trouble. It’s brutal and rising. I clench my gut and push, push it away, but I caaan’t, it’s bad. The hand, on the end, it’s blue and quivers. I try to wiggle the fingers, they’re stiff, in shock, I can’t take it, I can’t breathe, just stop it, stop it, stupid . . . stupid. I’ll puke, any second, I swallow, stop, stop for a second. Breathe. Fuck, fuck! the stinging, fuck . . . “Oh Christ.” I fall to the floor and slide my back up against a locker. I stare at the twisted wrist I’m squeezing. I’ll pass out. I might really pass out, right here, right now. The lights above swirl and I blink and breathe deep but it kills up my arm and into my elllbbbbbbooooowwwww.
“What the fuck happened?” Jon says, taking small steps toward me.
“Get someone,” I say, my head rolling on my neck. “I broke it, man. Go.”
“Okay. Stay there.”
I try to laugh at this but I’ll die instead. Die on this floor, this stupid, fuckin’ floor. I’m going to throw up, right now, right here, and I douse myself in warm milky puke. And then again, all over my chest and legs. “Fuuuuck.” The liquid pools and surrounds me, soaks my shorts and naked knees. Breathe, spit, breathe. If I let go of the wrist it’ll slip out of the skin. “It’s snapped,” I whimper to no one in the tiled room. I close my eyes. Just breathe, breathe . . . ride this out, breathe . . . ride it out, breathe. Like a horse, a dying horse, breathe, shoot it, shoot it now, just do it. It’s fallen, I see it, a black one, all shiny, the mane, the muscles, that shine, that oiled shine. It’s flat in the grass and will die soon, it will, soon it’ll end, yes soon it will end. Its long dry tongue, reaches to live, to breathe, breathe, a stunned marble eye. One clean shot, do it. One clean shot. “Pull it,” I whine, and tears fill my eyes. Breathe now, breathe. Breathe for me . . . beautiful boy. Lie down for me, now. Lie flat and still for me, now. Do not be afraid. Shhhh. Stay very still. Shhhh. Shhhh.
Uneven
My father jogs into the nurse’s office in a gray three-piece suit, his dark hair tousled. He kneels in front of the folding chair I sit in and rests his hands on my knees. “How bad?” he asks in a gentle tone.
I lick my dry lips, then nod with closed eyes. “Broken.”
On the way to the hospital he talks quickly, spending too much time facing me while he drives. He says he and Asher had a long talk after he left my room the night before and that he was “proud” of my brother for standing up to him. “Sometimes I get goin’ and there’s just, just . . . no talking to me,” he says with a chuckle. “But . . . your brother forgave me and . . . I forgave him for not coming to temple on Grandpa’s anniversary, and I think we should all just start over on this one. Forgive each other. In fact I told him—”
“Red light, red light,” I say pointing at the windshield with my chin. He slows the car.
“I told him that tuition for any of these . . . artsy schools he’s thinking about is something I will give him . . . if . . . if he can come halfway and promises to play more of a role in the family. And I told him, after we apologized, that I don’t think it’s too much to ask him to . . . come to Shabbat dinner and join us for synagogue once in a while and . . . be a member of this family.”
I glance at the speedometer.
“I don’t even care what he wears anymore, I swear I don’t. As long as it’s not in front of people he can wear a burlap bag on his head for all I care. It’s a losing battle. I see that n
ow. I lose.”
We’re moving seventy miles per hour on the S curves of Piedmont Avenue. I can hear the tires on his Lincoln Town Car squeal around each bend of the twisting, cement divide. I open my eyes just a slit to see how, exactly, I’d end up dying on this road. The car reeks of pukey gym shorts and pricey new car leather—the combo is just sickening.
“When your brother asked what happened in your room, I told him straight out that . . . occasionally, your learning . . . challenges . . . make me a little crazy and perhaps frustrated with you and that . . . it’s not always your fault and that . . . patience from me, as your mother has often told me, is something you deserve more of. But, I know you know all of this, and, you know I know you know all of this and . . .”
We’re almost there. The sign says two miles. Two miles to the ER at St. Joseph’s.
“I need to help you more,” he says with a shrug, “and give you more time than I might with others. I get it now, I do. Okay?”
I try to lift my arm. It sits like a lox in an ice pad against the wet numbness of my leg.
“Okay, J?”
“Okay, okay.”
“So, that’s the first bit of news. Your brother and I are all square. The second thing,” he says, “you’re just gonna die for. I got this client. Kind of a drip, but a nice enough . . .”
The school nurse said to hold my wrist high against the cold pack and made me a sling which has come undone. The pain is ridiculous. I shift and stare down at it, the darkening skin beneath my thumb.
“So he says to me, ‘All you need is a projector, I’ll get you any film you want.’ ‘Any film I want?’ I said to him. He said, ‘Name it.’ So right away I’m thinkin’ party, something fun, get us all back on track, and it comes to me—movie night at our house. Invite everyone. No one’s done it. Plug the thing in, turn the lights down, and . . . showtime. The guy’s got a hundred movies. So I’m about to call you and Asher to ask which movie we should get but then remembered driving cross-country three years ago and Memphis. Remember what we saw in Memphis? It’s perfect.”
I shake my head.
“Annie Hall. Where’s your memory? It had just opened and we loved it, remember?”
