by Pete Hautman
Jerry Preuss cooled on his election campaign, at least temporarily. Wes was happy about that, as he had neither the time nor the inclination to take on any more election-related tasks. As for Aqua Girl, he saw her in class, and that was it. The sight of her still stirred up feelings, but it was more like a sense of relief that he hadn’t got mixed up with her.
Izzy he managed to avoid entirely — he heard she was seeing Thom Samples, a senior.
The garage slowly fell victim to entropy. Small projects undertaken by Wes or his father created nodes of chaos that multiplied to become larger messes, and then, with the first heavy snows of mid-November, his mother insisted on parking her car in the garage, which meant a frantic hour of shoving everything against the walls or cramming stuff onto shelves, and with the car came chunks of ice and road salt and mud. The beautiful gray floor became blackened and gritty. Wes lost interest in the garage and began spending his spare time hanging out with the two Alans in Alan Schwartz’s basement, playing video games and watching movies and, every now and then, when Calvin Warner and Robbie Johanson came over, playing poker. Wes lost more than he won.
One Sunday afternoon in early December, during the first ten minutes of one of those poker games, Wes lost the entire forty dollars he had brought. He sat around for a while watching the others play. Calvin was going on and on about SHC, or Spontaneous Human Combustion, which is when a person bursts into flames for no reason. Calvin said it happened all the time; he’d read a book about it.
“They find a pile of ashes where there used to be a person,” he said.
“Maybe they were trying to light a fart,” said Alan Hurd. “Raise five.”
Wes suddenly became disgusted with himself and the whole scene, so he put on his jacket and said, “I gotta go.”
Alan Hurd, who had given Wes a ride over, looked up and said, “You gonna walk?”
“I guess so,” said Wes.
Alan went back to playing his hand. As far as the rest of them were concerned, Wes had already left.
June hated Minnesota. She had hated Illinois, Kansas, Arizona, and Texas, but her most fervent loathing she reserved for Minnesota.
It wasn’t the people. People were the same everywhere. Even Jerry Preuss, who had become her unofficial boyfriend, was just another guy with all the niceness, clumsiness, awkwardness, and irritatingness of boys everywhere. Jess, Phoebe, and Britt — they were all okay too. And the school was fine — just another school.
But the weather. Minnesota was the frozen armpit of the galaxy. No, said Scornful June, it’s the frozen asshole of the universe.
Especially on weekends, like this weekend, when she’d planned nothing more than to maybe go to the mall with the Three Bitches, and instead her mom got the Cold from Hell and turned her into Little Miss Home Health Care. Like if June didn’t run over to the SuperAmerica and get her some orange juice in, like, five minutes she would die.
That was the thing with her mom. She tried so hard to be perfect, but let one little thing go wrong — a bad perm, a cold, whatever — and she fell apart.
Also, the orange juice in Minnesota tasted like gasoline. Even worse than Kansas and Illinois. She thought about that as she pulled on her parka. Why should the orange juice taste different in Minnesota? Didn’t it all come from Florida?
Her hair was a mess, and she didn’t have her contacts in so she put on her old eyeglasses, and then she couldn’t find her hat. Since she was just running over to the SA and probably wouldn’t see anybody, she put on this ridiculous thing of her mom’s — a pink knit cap with fuzzy earflaps and an absurdly long tassel — and left for the SA.
It had started snowing again, and it was cold, like below-zero cold. Wes turned up his collar, pulled his stocking cap as far down as it would go, jammed his bare hands deep into the pockets of his thin leather jacket, and headed up Garfield Street at a brisk walk. It was even colder and windier than he’d thought, and it was almost four miles to home. The snow was that fine, sharp, crystalline variety that stung like shotgun pellets. Ice crystals found their way down his collar and into his eyes. Soon, he was running with his hands in his pockets, his eyes slitted, his chin buried in his collar, his retro canvas basketball shoes slapping and skidding on the icy sidewalk.
I could die out here, he thought. I could get frostbite. Hypothermia.
His right foot hit a patch of glare ice and he fell, landing hard on his hip. For a few seconds he thought he’d broken something, but it was too cold to just lie there, so he got to his feet and started walking. Everything seemed to work, except he was freezing. He looked around. Nothing but anonymous houses — he didn’t know anybody in the neighborhood. He kept walking. Three miles to go, at least. Wes had never run three miles in his life, but if he kept walking he would freeze to death for sure, so he broke into a run again. For a few blocks he hardly thought about the cold, but soon he was sweating and wheezing, and he had to stop. The cold slammed into him like a great frozen hammer.
A few blocks ahead were some lights — the SuperAmerica! He could warm up inside the store and call home for a ride. He began to jog again, and a minute later he was inside the SA gasping for breath. As his breathing calmed and his body warmed, he noticed the woman behind the counter staring at him.
“Cold out there,” he said with what he hoped was a friendly grin.
The woman shook her head. “You kids don’t know how to dress,” she said.
“I didn’t know I’d be walking,” Wes said.
“You kids never think about consequences,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Do you have a phone I can use?”
“Pay phone outside,” she said.
“I don’t have any money.”
The woman shook her head. “You kids. Store policy is no free calls.”
“Please? I live, like, three miles away from here. I just want to call my mom for a ride.”
She made him wait a few more seconds, giving him the evil eye, then sighed as if the responsibility of being an adult was an unbearable weight upon her soul, opened her purse, and handed him her cell phone.
Paula answered on the fourth ring.
“Hey, Paula, it’s Wes. Is Mom home?”
“Noper.”
“Where is she?”
“She just left for aerobics.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Ten minutes?”
That was bad. She wouldn’t be reachable for another hour and a half at least. Aerobics class was one of the few times their mom was completely incommunicado.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Are you coming home?” Paula asked.
“I’m working on it.” He hung up and tried to think who to call next. Maybe Jerry. He started to dial but was interrupted by the counter woman.
“I didn’t say you could call the whole phone book. I only have three hundred minutes a month.”
Wes handed her the phone.
Ordinarily, June liked driving her mom’s BMW, but the trip to the SA with the streets all slippery and snow blowing across the roads was no fun at all, not even in an arctic adventure sort of way. The extreme cold made her think of outer space. Even in deepest space, Mr. Reinhardt said, there was no true vacuum. There might be only one or two atoms per cubic meter of space, but there was always something. Atoms were running into each other all the time, like snowflakes. And in a few billion or trillion or centillion years, the Big Bang would reverse direction and atoms would start colliding more often, and eventually they would all be drawn into a single tiny node where every atom in the universe was touching every other atom, and time would stop. According to Mr. Reinhardt, this was called the Big Crunch, when the entire universe became an infinitesimal dot. And then the Big Bang would happen all over again. She found that reassuring — that no matter how messed up the universe got, it would eventually have another chance to get it right.
She was thinking about that as she pulled into the SA and got out and walked through the doo
r.
A girl wearing an enormous down ski parka, fogged-up glasses, and a pink hat with a long tassel entered in a swirl of wind and snow. She walked past Wes, heading for the cooler at the back of the store. She stopped in front of the juice section. It was hard not to look at her, with that hat. The tassel hung all the way down to her thighs, ending in a fuzzy pink ball.
“You kids,” said the counter woman. “You think she ever gets that thing caught in a door?”
The girl grabbed a half gallon of orange juice from the cooler. When she turned around, coming back toward the register, Wes recognized her.
“Hey, June,” he said.
June pulled up, startled, and dropped the juice. Both she and Wes bent over quickly to get the carton and they banged heads so hard that Wes fell to his knees and, for a second, thought he was going to pass out. He reached up to touch his forehead, expecting to find a bloody mess. There was no blood, but the lump was already forming. June had fallen back on her butt and was sitting with one pink-nailed hand cupped over her left eye.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
CHAPTER
TEN
“LET ME SEE,” SAID WES, kneeling in front of her. He gently grasped her wrist and moved her hand away from her eye. He could see right away where his forehead had hit her cheekbone, just below her left eye. It seemed important to get her off the floor, which was dirty and wet from people tracking snow into the store.
“Can you stand up?” he asked.
“I think so.”
Wes helped her to her feet.
“My glasses,” she said. They found her glasses a few feet away. One lens was cracked and the frames were bent. “They’re crunched.” June folded them and put them in the pocket of her parka.
“I’m really sorry,” Wes said.
“We crunched.”
“Uh … yeah, we did. I’m sorry.”
“Do I need to call nine-one-one?” asked the woman behind the counter.
“I don’t … I need to look at my face,” June said.
The woman pointed toward the back of the store. Wes, still holding her hand, started walking her toward the restrooms, but June shook him off.
“I can walk,” she said.
Wes watched her go. He noticed that the end of her pink tassel was filthy — she had fallen on it and ground it into the dirty floor.
“You kids have got to learn to be more careful,” the counter woman said.
June thought she had never seen anything so awful as her face in that restroom mirror. It wasn’t just the swelling, and the promise of an enormous black eye. It was the whole disgusting package — the pale winter skin, no makeup, dirty hair, and the pink hat. She cleaned up as best she could, then moistened a paper towel and sat on the toilet and pressed the wet towel to her cheek.
She imagined what was waiting for her outside. Wes — floppy-haired Wes — all apologetic and concerned, and that horrible counter woman — she had never liked that woman. But there was no avoiding it. She couldn’t stay in the restroom until the end of the universe.
June checked herself in the mirror again. Definitely a black eye coming.
She took her broken glasses from her pocket and tried to put them on her face, but the frame was completely twisted, and the broken lens was worse than nothing. With a sigh, she walked back out into the store. Wes was still standing by the front counter.
“Your OJ,” he said, holding up the carton of juice.
Wes wasn’t sure what to expect. Would she be mad at him? Would she be crying? Would she have to go to the emergency room?
June took the orange juice from him, put it on the counter, dug in her jeans pocket, and came out with a five-dollar bill. The counter woman rang up the sale and gave her change. Wes stood by helplessly.
“I’m really sorry,” he said.
June turned to him and held up her broken glasses.
“I can’t see. You have to drive me home.” She didn’t seem angry.
“I don’t have a car,” he said.
“In my car.” Not angry, but she wasn’t smiling.
If anything, it was even colder and windier outside. They got into the car.
“I’ve never driven a BMW before,” Wes said.
“It’s just a car.”
Wes turned the key in the ignition.
“I don’t know where you live.”
“On Twentieth.”
“Oh.” That was where he thought she lived. He backed out of the parking space, then stopped. She was shaking. “Are you okay?” He realized she was laughing.
“I can’t believe that happened!” she said between gasps.
Then Wes cracked up too, and a second later he realized he’d let his foot off the brake and they were about to roll into one of the gas pumps. He hit the brake just in time, and June started laughing even harder.
“You … almost … wrecked … the car!” she said, her eyes tearing up.
Wes, caught between embarrassment and laughter, put the car in drive and pulled out onto the street.
“That would have been perfect,” June said, then hiccupped. Wes thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard and had to pull over. He bumped the curb.
June looked at him in mock shock, one eye wide, the other one beginning to swell shut. Her eyes were a pale, icy blue, not the aqua he remembered. “You are the worst driver ever,” she said, and for no reason at all, that set them both off again.
It was only about a mile to June’s house. On the way, June told him about her mom’s Cold from Hell and of her urgent demand for orange juice.
“I just hope my mom appreciates I got a concussion for her orange juice,” June said.
“Everybody appreciates a good concussion.” Wes put a hand to the lump on his forehead.
“It’s the house with the ginormous Santa.”
Wes pulled into the driveway. There was a sparkly wreath on the door and a six-foot plastic Santa Claus guarding the front steps.
“Nice Santa,” Wes said.
“I know. It’s embarrassing.” She leaned across him and activated the garage door opener clipped to the visor. “Can you pull into the garage?”
They drove into the garage and got out.
“Thanks for driving me home,” June said. She looked him over and frowned. “Is that all you’re wearing?”
“I live pretty close to here.”
“Yeah, like a mile.”
“You know where I live?”
“You told me you lived on Fourteenth. When we were walking home.”
“I did?” That she actually remembered made him feel warm inside.
“Give me a minute to OJ my mom and put in my contacts and I’ll drive you home. You want to come in? I have to warn you, my mom has been filling the entire house with cold virus.”
“I’ll risk it,” said Wes.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
NATURALLY, HER MOM FREAKED.
“Oh my God, what happened?” She sat up in bed. “Are you okay?”
“Obviously not,” June said, setting the glass of orange juice on the bedside table. “I have a black eye.”
“I mean — oh my God, did you have a car accident?”
“Your car is fine,” said June. She told her mom what had happened.
“Junie, you have to be more careful.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.”
“Let me see.”
June leaned closer and let her mom examine her injury.
“You have to get some ice on it.”
“I know. I had to bring you your orange juice first.”
“Oh, Junie!” Her mom picked up the glass of orange juice and sipped. “There’s a bag of frozen peas in the freezer. Use that.”
Wes was sitting on one of the stools when June got back to the kitchen. She opened the freezer and found the peas. She held the bag to her cheek and sat down next to Wes.
“I don’t think I can
drive with one eye,” she said.
Wes leaned closer and looked straight into her face. She moved the ice pack aside to show him.
“They’re different colors,” he said.
“What?”
“Your eyes. Your right eye is aqua colored, and the other one is more like light blue.”
“Which do you like better?”
“I like both.”
“The right one is my contact. It’s tinted. The other contact I can’t get in.”
“How did you get that little scar?”
“Snakebite.”
“Really?”
“Stray bullet. Knife fight. Grizzly attack. Stray meteorite.”
Wes imagined each event.
“Exploding clown shoes.”
That was when he kissed her.
Later, Wes would wonder what had made him do it. But at the time, it was as if an enormous soft hand had pressed him toward her, and their lips had touched, and he heard his heart beating, once, twice, three times. He heard the bag of peas fall to the floor, and then it was over and they were staring at each other from about four inches apart. Her pupils were so big they nearly filled her irises, and the smell of her was making him dizzy.
“Oh no,” said Wes.
They pulled farther apart.
June said, “I didn’t …”
Wes stood up clumsily, knocking the stool over. He picked it up and set it back in place, then he picked up the bag of frozen peas and handed it to her.
“It’s okay,” said June.
“Look, I didn’t mean to —”
“It’s okay,” June said. “Just …” She fluttered her hand, as if waving him off. Wes turned to go, but she said, “Don’t go.”
Wes didn’t know what to do, so he stood there, halfway to the door, looking back at her. She returned the bag of peas to her face.
Wes stared. The dirty, mussed-up hair, the swollen, discolored cheek, the two different-colored eyes — none of it mattered.
“You look nice,” he said, and he meant it.
June’s mouth stretched and her eyes squeezed shut and she was laughing and her eyes were watering. Wes stood helplessly by as she brought herself under control.
