by Pete Hautman
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
WES STOOD OUTSIDE JUNE’S HOUSE for what seemed like an hour, though it was probably more like ten minutes. She was in there; he could feel her presence.
He thought through the likely scenarios. June would answer the door. Or her mother. Or Mr. Edberg. Or no one would answer the door. Every one of those possibilities frightened him. He might have stood there longer, but the cold was getting to him; he walked up the unshoveled walk to the front door and rang the bell.
Mrs. Edberg opened the door and gave him this pitying look that made him want to shrivel and die.
“Wesley,” she said with a sad smile.
“I really need to talk to June,” Wes said. He knew he sounded pathetic.
Mrs. Edberg was shaking her head. “She can’t see you right now. She’s … busy.”
“I won’t stay long,” Wes said. “I just need to see her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I tried calling.”
Mrs. Edberg nodded as he spoke. “I’m sure she got your messages. But this is not a good time.”
“When would be a good time?”
Mrs. Edberg sighed. “I’m sorry, Wesley. I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”
“I’m not leaving,” Wes said. “I’ll wait here until she comes out to talk to me.”
Mrs. Edberg’s expression went from pitying to hard. “I’m afraid you’ll have a very long wait.” She closed the door.
Wes didn’t know what to do. He could hardly believe he had said what he’d said. Refusing to leave. June clearly wanted nothing to do with him. But maybe she did, or at least if he had a chance to talk to her he could find out why she wouldn’t talk to him, why she was being so mean. He kicked the snow away from the top step and sat down, his back to the door. He would sit there until June came out, or the police hauled him away, or until his butt froze to the step.
Looking out her bedroom window, June could see Wes’s feet sticking out. He was just sitting there on the steps. She hoped he was wearing dry socks — it was cold out. She wished he would leave, but at the same time she loved that he wouldn’t.
“Junie?” Her mother was standing in the bedroom doorway. “Are you going to let that poor boy sit out there all afternoon?”
June looked at her mother. “I’m just doing what you always say. Ending it. Not looking back.”
“Go talk to him,” her mother said.
“I already texted him that I didn’t want to see him anymore.”
“He needs to hear it from the real you.”
When Wes heard the door open behind him, his entire body went rigid. He knew without looking that it was June. She sat down next to him. He kept his eyes on the street.
She didn’t say anything, and after a while he turned his head, his neck bones grinding like a rusty hinge. June was wearing slippers, jeans, an enormous down jacket, and that pink cap with the long tassel. The tassel was clean. Her hands were buried in the jacket pockets. The only part of her he could see was her face from her eyebrows down to her chin. He stared hard, trying to memorize every surface, every pore, the texture of her lips, the color of her eyes. She wasn’t wearing her contacts. He liked the natural color of her irises better — the pale blue, not the swimming pool aqua.
Her face was very still, as if she was asleep with her eyes open, yet still excruciatingly aware. He knew she could feel his eyes on her face. It was almost like touching her. No, it was exactly like touching her. He could feel his heart pumping. He could feel his skin. He could smell her, that clean, sweet smell — what had he thought before? Maple syrup and fresh-turned earth? That was not quite right. Not even close. More like pine trees and burnt sugar. And it wasn’t an actual smell, not really, but the things that came into his head when he was near her.
“Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop looking at me.”
Wes looked away, closed his eyes, and examined the fresh memory of her face.
She said, “Look, I’m sorry about that message I sent.”
She said, “I just have to go on with my sucky life.”
She said, “And not look back.”
She said, “You know?”
She said, “Because it would be too hard.”
She said, “Okay?”
Wes opened his eyes and looked at her. She was staring hard at him, her pupils drawn down to pinpricks, her face mostly pale but with red spots on her cheeks, her mouth — her lips — tight as two hard-stretched rubber bands. She looked as if she was about to crumble.
“I just wanted to see you,” he said.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
JUNE STARED STRAIGHT AHEAD through the windshield at the moving van six car-lengths in front of them. Her mother, driving the BMW, had finally stopped talking. Four more hours to Omaha, their next destination. June put her bare feet on the dash and rested her chin on her knees. The vibration of the tires on the road traveled up her shins to her skull.
“Why are you sitting like that?” her mother asked.
“I don’t know,” June said.
“You should do your toenails,” her mother said.
“It’s winter. Who’s going to see them?”
“I, for one, can see them perfectly.”
June put her feet down and put in her earphones and put on some Queens of the Stone Age.
Pound my ears, she thought.
New school.
New friends.
New boyfriend.
Figure out what was what.
Who was who.
She was good at it. She thought how quickly she had found her place at Wellstone, how she had met Wes Andrews, and how much fun they’d had.
For, like, five minutes. Until her parents had sensed that she might be happy for once.
Her mother was talking again. June pulled out her left earbud.
“What?”
“I said the house has a pool.”
“An indoor pool?”
“Outdoor. But we should be swimming in a few months.”
“If we still live there. Dad will probably move us to Uzbekistan.”
“Your father …”
“My father what?”
Her mother gave her a look, began to say something, then thought better of it and pressed her lips closed and shook her head and returned her attention to the road. After a few seconds she spoke again.
“This has been very hard for him.”
June made a phtt sound with her lips.
“He needs this,” said her mother.
“He doesn’t need anybody.”
“You’re wrong. He needs us. He’s … you know, just because your father and I are adults doesn’t mean we’re not scared shitless half the time.”
June gaped at her mother, shocked. She’d never heard her talk like that before.
Her mother’s face hardened. “We should be able to stay in Nebraska until you finish high school, maybe longer. I have a good feeling about this one, Junie. I —”
Junie replaced her earbud and turned up the volume, letting the relentless beat hammer smooth her thoughts. She closed her eyes. Images flickered across the screen in her brain. Wes looking at her — he had looked at her a lot, and when she looked back at him everything had become solid and real, as if the wisps of consciousness that made her who she was had congealed into something resembling a soul.
A sharp sensation, almost painful, but not quite.
“ — too loud!” Her mother had yanked out her left earbud. “You’ll fry your eardrums!”
June turned off the music and removed the other earbud without saying anything.
“You and all your plugged-in friends will be deaf before you’re forty.”
“I have no friends,” June said quietly.
“You make friends as easily as your father. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
Neither of them spoke for a long time, w
hich was fine with June. She put her feet back on the dashboard and tried to remember the names of all her boyfriends. Adam, ninth grade, Olathe, Kansas — he was the cutest. The next one had been at that school in Elgin. She could almost see his face, but she couldn’t remember his name. Something with a J. Not Jason. Not James. Not John. He was tall, she remembered. Taller than Wes.
Would she forget Wes? The thought of him disappearing from her mind caused her heart to speed up. She squeezed her eyes shut; his face swam into view: soft brown eyes, crooked, questioning eyebrows, the way he bit his lower lip when he was thinking. She had trouble with his ears — she couldn’t remember his ears. Was she forgetting him already? Something in her chest crumbled. She should have taken a photo. All the times they’d been together and she’d had her cell with her, she could have taken his picture anytime. She could be looking at his ears right now.
The seat belt was too tight across her chest; she could hardly breathe.
It occurred to her to open the door and throw herself out of the car. She imagined an instant of wind filling her lungs, then the rough asphalt tearing the skin from her body. She clutched the armrest, afraid for a moment that she would actually do it.
The moment passed. She drew a deep breath, then another.
“Are you okay?” her mother asked.
“I’m hot.”
“So turn down the heat.”
June stared at the controls on the dash but could make no sense of them. Her mother reached out and adjusted a knob.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
June nodded. Each inhalation required an act of will. She was sure that if she stopped paying attention to her breathing, she would die.
“There’s bottled water in the cooler.”
June shook her head and gripped the armrest and watched the front end of the car eat up the white lines on the road as she forced the air in and out of her lungs.
In and out.
She sank into the vibrations and the sound of the wind and the tires and the rasp of air moving in and out of her body and waited for something to happen. A tire to blow, a bird to strike the windshield, an engine hose to break, a meteor to fall from the sky, a hydrogen bomb, Armageddon, the Big Crunch.
“June?” Her mother’s voice.
June tried to shut her out, but ears do not close.
“Junie … are you crying?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
WES WAS OKAY.
He would be okay.
He was going to be okay.
There were things to do, and he did them. Wake up. Take a shower. Go to school. Go through the motions of getting an education.
He tried calling. Her cell number was no longer in service.
His parents, sensing some dark and mysterious adolescent funk, treated him as if he were made of nitrogylcerin. For a few days, Paula made a big show of pretending he didn’t exist, but when he didn’t seem to notice — although he really did — she began to observe him intently. He would feel her eyes following him, the way she might keep an eye on a large, scary dog.
At school, he zombied his way through his classes. He could almost hear the air hissing out of his grade point average.
Alan Schwartz had taken a cell phone photo of Jerry Preuss at the party — wasted, with the bra hanging around his neck — and printed it out with the words Jerry Preuss for President. The image got passed around school, but instead of destroying Jerry’s political ambitions, it made him more popular. He started going out with Naomi Liddell. Naomi, it turned out, was a tireless and effective campaign worker, and she worshipped him. Everybody she approached promised to vote for him, if only to get her to shut up and go away. Jerry seemed to enjoy her constant chatter.
The weather turned impossibly colder, with daytime highs in the single digits. Alan Hurd’s parents took his car away because of the party, so Wes didn’t ride with him to school anymore, but even on the coldest days he wouldn’t take the bus. He did a lot of walking.
Izzy broke up with Thom Samples, and that made Wes feel better for about one tenth of a second, and then it made him feel worse.
Phoebe Keller and Josh Sandstrom had a fight and ended their relationship. Over the next couple of weeks, Wes noticed that he kept running into Phoebe at school — she kept trying to talk to him, even though she seemed to have nothing to say. Eventually, he figured out she was flirting with him. After a few days she gave up.
One Saturday, Calvin Warner, who wasn’t even that good of a friend, stopped by the house and practically dragged him out of his bedroom.
“You gotta get out,” he said.
“Out where?” Wes asked.
“Come on.”
“I don’t want to play poker.”
“Screw poker. We’re going to the mall. Shopping.”
“Shopping for what?”
“Girls.”
Wes decided it would be easier to go than to argue.
At the food court, they bought giant frozen drinks, which Calvin spiked with miniature airplane bottles of vodka he had stolen from his father’s collection. They found a good place to sit in the central atrium. They sipped their drinks and waited.
“This is the best place in the world to meet girls,” Calvin said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Wes did not say what he was thinking, which was that as far as he knew, Calvin had never had any luck with any girl, ever. Also, it was too cold for serious girl watching. Not cold inside the mall, but below zero outside, so all the girls — not that there were that many — had on so many layers of clothing that they looked like puffy jackets with legs.
He thought about saying that. Puffy jackets with legs. June would have laughed, but Calvin wouldn’t get it. Every time he came up with something to say, Wes would feel his lips part, a seal breaking, and he would feel his breath moving out of his lungs, over his tongue, but whatever part of his larynx or brain or whatever it was that made words appear from rushing air would not engage, and instead of words he could produce only sighs.
“Check it out,” Calvin said, pointing at a girl walking out of Abercrombie & Fitch.
Wes opened his mouth to say She’s, like, ten years old, you pervert. But instead he released another sigh.
Calvin gave him a sharp look, a wordless Dude!
Wes leaned back on the bench, let his arms flop out to the sides, and stared up at the glass dome two stories above them. The sky was icy blue.
Calvin said, “Dude, you are seriously messed up.”
The corners of Wes’s mouth twitched.
“You got to, like, move on.”
Wes rolled his eyes in Calvin’s direction, asking for something but not knowing what.
“That June was toxic,” Calvin said. “She planted some, like, alien worm inside you.”
Wes heard what Calvin was saying. He had been thinking of himself with a big hole inside, but now he could feel the worm, the toxic alien worm, a long ropy thing anchored to his spine, gripping his organs with its ridges and prongs, secreting acids, belching clouds of noxious gases, gnawing on his liver. He imagined reaching in through the skin and grabbing it and ripping it out — was this what drove samurai to perform seppuku? No, samurai did not kill themselves over women; they did it for pride, to save face. Their worm was the worm of shame, but Wes guessed it felt pretty much the same.
He closed his eyes. His hand drifted to his belly, his middle finger found the indentation of his navel through his shirt; he pressed in until it hurt. If he had talons instead of fingernails he could unzip his abdomen with a single violent spasm, spill his guts onto the tile floor, detach the thing that was eating his liver, and cast it far away.
Calvin’s voice came from far away. “Dude, are you okay?”
Wes managed to nod his head, a silent lie.
“What you got to do, you gotta forget about her,” Calvin said. He looked around, took another mini-bottle from his jacket pocket, and poured it into Wes’s drink. “You gotta delete her.�
��
Wes nodded, tipped his head back to look up at the blue sky, and closed his eyes. Sooner or later he would be okay. Eventually he would be able to go hours, days even, without knowing she was there, without seeing her face.
After a time — five minutes? Half an hour? — Calvin said, “You know, you’re piss-poor company lately.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
THE NEW HOUSE HAD A HUGE ENTERTAINMENT ROOM and the empty pool in the backyard. It was still too cold to swim, but if they stayed through the summer it would be great. Her new school — Hills High School — was new and clean and everybody seemed really nice. June found that most of the time she was able to stay focused on moving forward, into the future. During the day she didn’t think about Wes, unless she saw somebody who looked like him, or heard a laugh that sounded like his.
At night, every night, just before she went to sleep, she would carefully dial his number on the new cell phone her mom had bought her. She let her finger rest lightly on the SEND button. She would close her eyes and see his face, almost as if she had a miniature model of Wes in her head. Some nights she thought she could feel his presence in a ghostly, distant sort of way. Was that the connection? The unbreakable connection?
Maybe it was all a game. That’s what her dad would say.
But it wasn’t a game. If she pressed that button, it would be real. If she pressed the button, Wes would answer. He would say, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for you to call.”
She would say, “I know.”
And they would laugh, even though it wasn’t funny.
She thought a lot about what her mother had said that day in the car, about being scared shitless half the time. Scared shitless? Was that what kept her from pressing SEND? Was that what she wanted her life to be like?
One day in February, Wes woke up to see water dripping from the eaves. A warm front had moved in overnight. He got dressed and went downstairs. Paula, always an early riser, was sitting at the counter in her pajamas, eating a bowl of cereal. She watched wordlessly as he took the orange juice from the refrigerator and drank straight from the carton. He grabbed a muffin from the bread drawer and sat down across from Paula, feeling her eyes on him. He noticed several cards and envelopes next to her.
