by Han Nolan
For the rest of the school day, I keep going over and over my explosion in Dr. Gomez's office and our conversation afterward. These thoughts make me restless all over again. I can't sit still. I need to do something, get up, run, pace, something. During the last period of the day, I get so restless, I can't stand it anymore. I walk out of the classroom, leaving behind my books. I wait for my teacher to stop me, but she doesn't. She lets me go because my mom's dead or she knows my dad's crazy, or she thinks I'm crazy, I don't know, but she doesn't stop me. I hurry through the hall, past the lockers and classrooms. "Forgive yourself," she said. I start to jog, and two students standing by the lockers look up at me. I feel their eyes on my back as I jog past them, and then I go into a full-out run and hit the exit doors, bursting through to the outside.
The first few gulps of cold air sting my still-sore throat, but it feels good, too. The sky is real gray and the wind is high, its sound competing with the noise of the highway traffic. I keep running, feeling the chill of the air passing through my jacket and shirt and jeans, and it feels like freedom to me—the wind and the sound of the rushing traffic. I race across the playing fields to a tunnel that runs under the highway where students who walk to and from school pass to get to the quieter, safer streets. Shelby must use this path. I remember that she walks to school. I remember she told me once that she lived nearby, on Vinton. I run through the tunnel and think about Shelby walking to school in winter, in shorts and no socks. I take a set of stairs on the other side of the tunnel, climbing up to a wide road with a good sidewalk. I keep running away from the highway and the school. I don't know where I'm going—I'm just going—but then I find myself near Shelby's house, and I realize I was headed here all along. It's a crazy thing to do. Her mother's just died, but I need to see her. I need to be in her presence. I don't know why, but as I run down the street I feel desperate to get there, to see Shelby, to see her face, to touch her, to just be with her.
By the time I reach Vinton, I'm out of breath. I lean against a stop sign on the corner and bend over, resting my right hand on my knee, and watch puff after puff of cold vapor escape through my mouth. For the first time I feel just how cold it is outside. I stand up, still breathing hard. A gust of wind hits me full in the face and chest, and I feel its bite on my nose and ears. I shiver and look down the street at the row of houses on either side, all of them white and stark-looking against the gloom. I know right away which house is Shelby's by the line of cars pulled up outside the house. I start jogging again, and then when I get there, when I find myself standing on the short walkway leading up to the front door, I can't move. How can I just barge into her house? Maybe this isn't even her place after all. I check the mailbox and see the name Majors—it's hers. I rub my bad arm, feeling the cold, and pace up and down the walkway, trying to decide what to do.
CRAZY GLUE: Go on, goob. Go see your girlfriend.
She's not my girlfriend. I don't even know why I'm here.
AUNT BEE: Go on, Jason. Ring the bell. Take a chance.
SEXY LADY: Why do you want to see that big mouth? Come on, Jase. I'm the one who thinks you're hot. What does she think of you?
Good question. What does anybody think of me?
LAUGH TRACK: Forgive yourself.
Yeah, and what does that mean? For what?
FBG WITH A MUSTACHE: You know.
AUNT BEE: He was only six years old. He was going to be buried alive.
"Jason? What are you doing here?"
I jump, I'm so surprised to hear Shelby's voice. I can't answer her question because I don't know. I look at her blotchy-red face, with her eyes, her cheeks, even her mouth, looking swollen, and I know it's a mistake for me to be here.
I back away from her. "Sorry, I—I don't know what I'm..." I turn to run but get no farther than the mailbox when she calls to me.
"Jason, what are you doing? Come on inside—it's freezing out here. Come on."
I turn around and she waves me toward her. I head back down the walk, climb the two brick steps to her house, and follow her inside.
I'm hit with the warmth of the house as soon as I enter, and I feel my fingers and toes, cheeks, nose, and ears start to tingle, then itch as they thaw. I'm in the living room, a large room with green walls and a deeper green carpet. The room seems dark, and then I notice that all the curtains are drawn. I wonder if Shelby's family drew them because of death or do they always live this way, in the dark.
I follow Shelby to her kitchen and notice the house smells funny, like cough syrup, or maybe it's embalming fluid.
CRAZY GLUE: This place feels creepy.
Everything in the house seems to speak of death, the dark rooms, the smell, the people in the kitchen talking in somber tones, their heavy, dark clothes. What am I doing here?
I wait in the doorway of the kitchen while Shelby enters the circle of people. "Dad," she says, "that's Ja-son. We're going to go up to my room, okay?"
Her father, a heavyset man with the thickest eyebrows I've ever seen, nods. "Just leave your bedroom door open, sweetheart."
Shelby makes no reply to this and as soon as we enter her room, she closes the door behind us and I'm suddenly in a jungle. She's painted the walls of her room in a wild jungle theme with all kinds of trees and ferns and grasses everywhere. There are animals, too—monkeys, zebras, lions, tigers, and elephants—all peering at me from various places on the walls. There's even a snake wound around the trunk of a tree, giving me the eye, and a couple of colorful parrots staring out at me as if they're considering attacking my head. The whole effect of the dark jungle scene is disorienting, and I'm still lost in the mural when Shelby bursts into tears and dives onto her bed. I wonder again why I'm here.
I watch the way she folds into herself and cries in a way I've never seen anyone cry before. It's so loud, so close to screaming, and her whole body shakes, even the bed shakes. As I stand watching her, it finally occurs to me why I've come. I need to see this. Shelby is acting out everything I've felt inside about the loss of my own mother. I can see her pain. I can hear it. I walk over to the bed and reach out for her hand, and it's hot. It's her pain. For the second time today I'm flooded with my own grief over my mom's death and my dad's illness. I grab Shelby. I pull her off the bed and draw her to me and I hold her tight.
We stand for several minutes, or maybe it's hours, just like this, holding on to each other and crying—both of us crying. I feel out of control with my grief, first in Dr. Gomez's office and now here, with Shelby, and I don't like it. I can't stop myself and I don't know what I might do next, and this scares me.
Chapter Thirty-One
I HAVE THIS sudden urge to kiss Shelby. One second I feel all out of control with my emotions and then this. I want to kiss her. We stand holding on to each other, crying into each other's shoulders, and I don't even know whose sound is whose; we just meld into each other. With my thoughts already so wild, feeling Shelby's hot body up against me, her hair smelling like perfumed peaches tickling my nose, her arms holding me as tightly as I'm holding her, I feel I just have to kiss her.
CRAZY GLUE: Goob, you've never kissed a girl in your life. You'll do it all wrong.
No. I don't care. I don't care about anything except kissing her. That's all. That's all there is in the world right now—Shelby, with her sweet, freckled, tear-stained face.
She notices how still I've become, how silent. She looks into my eyes and I lean in to kiss her, but she draws back and says, "How 'bout a haircut, Jason?"
I stare at her, uncomprehending. "What?"
"A haircut. I want to cut your hair. It's too long. You really need a haircut."
"What?" Why is she talking about a haircut? Weren't we about to kiss? Haven't we both just been crying our heads off? Where is this coming from?
Shelby pulls away from me. She moves over to the mirror hanging from her closet door and looks back at me. "Come on—look at yourself. What do you see?"
I don't know what to do, so I do as she asks and
join her in front of the mirror and stare at myself. What do I see?
CRAZY GLUE: Yup! Bad idea. It's that broken mirror. The one you smashed. You don't like mirrors, goob. You'd better close your eyes or you might see crazy.
I squint at the mirror. At first all I see are these jungle animals, tigers and elephants and zebras, peering at me from behind my back. It takes me a second to even find myself, but when I do, I see a squinty-eyed, red-nosed, blushing skinny guy with hair down to his shoulders. I look away.
"You've got really nice hair, all wavy and soft," Shelby says. She grabs some of it in her hands, runs it through her fingers, and drops it. "You could donate it to Locks of Love. You know, the people who make hairpieces for people with cancer?"
I look at Shelby. "What are you talking about? Locks of Love?"
"Yeah, you know them." Shelby doesn't look at me. She moves over to her desk, reaches into a drawer, and pulls out a pair of scissors, a comb, and a plastic squirt bottle as if she's been waiting for me to drop by just so she can cut my hair. She turns around and holds up the implements. "So let me cut your hair." She drags the chair out from her desk and pats it and, stupidly, I go sit down.
She pulls my hair back from my face and peers around to look at me. "That's better. You've got that Mediterranean kind of nose, you know, with the high bridge and kind of longish—in a nice way, I mean, but it's too big to wear long hair. There's all this hair and then this nose poking out from it."
Shelby combs my hair while she talks, and I sit staring at the two of us in the mirror.
"Gee, thanks."
"My mother once told me the nose and feet grow first, so that's why teens look awkward for a while. So your nose has grown. Eventually the rest of your face will match, but right now..."
CRAZY GLUE: Goob, what's her problem? Why is she blathering on about your nose?
SEXY LADY: Long noses are hot, anyway.
"Hey, enough about my nose, already. Okay?" I jump up and pull my hair away from her with my good hand. "I know my hair's too long. I've been cutting it myself for a while, but okay, things have been a little crazy lately and I haven't, but jeez, what the hell? Why do you suddenly want to cut my hair? I mean, we were just—just..." I can't finish my sentence. I don't know what we were just doing, but it had nothing to do with hair and my freakin' long nose.
Shelby blushes and sets the comb and scissors on her desk. Her eyes fill with tears again. "I don't know why I want to cut it. I used to cut my mom's hair all the time." A tear rolls down her face. "It always made us feel better, so I just—I just thought that maybe you'd feel better, too, and there's the Locks of Love, so..." She shrugs again, looking totally helpless. I can't stand to see her like this, so I plop myself in the chair.
"You're right—cut it off!"
"Really?"
I hear the hope in her voice and I nod. "Sure, cut it all off." I wave my hand and look at her through the mirror, and she smiles. Then I correct myself and say, "I mean, not like Pete's. No bald head for me, okay. I want some hair. I have a big nose, after all."
Shelby nudges me. "It's not that big. And anyway, I like it. Its distinguished-looking.
I feel my nose. It feels like it grew overnight. I hadn't even noticed, but it's bigger, and the high bridge is more noticeable. I look at it in the mirror.
CRAZY GLUE: Looks like you've sprouted an exact copy of your dad's nose.
I'm not ready to think about my dad just yet...
AUNT BEE: Forgive yourself.
I say out of the blue, "Did you know I got stabbed by this kid in the foster home I'm staying at?" Why do I keep bringing this up?
"What?" Shelby leans forward and bugs her eyes out. "Are you kidding?"
"No, I'm not kidding. I got stabbed. Right here." I lift my shirt and Shelby leans over farther to take a look at my bandaged wound.
CRAZY GLUE: You didn't show everyone else your bandage, hot stuff.
"Gross." She straightens up and looks at me in the mirror across the room. "That's all you needed, huh?" She combs out the tangles in my hair.
"Yeah, and the guy who stabbed me? It was weird cause he was in my room—I mean, we shared a room—and he had all this stuff, model airplanes and his computer and stuff. Then after he stabbed me, I went to the hospital and when I got back, he and his stuff had completely disappeared. It—it was kind of, I don't know, surreal the way he was just gone like that. It was like he never even existed in the first place." I pause and stare down at my hands, noticing that I not only have my dad's nose but his hands, too—palms like spatulas with long fingers, very straight. I think about my dad—gone.
I look up at Shelby, who's stopped combing my hair and is just standing, listening, her head tilted to one side.
"I keep wondering what happened to him," I say. "I even dream about him. He's one of us, in a way. I mean, he's had bad shit happen to him, too, you know? So I wonder where..."
Shelby shakes her head and laughs. "That's easy. He's in juvie, where else?"
"Juvie?"
"Sure, that's where they put kids who stab people."
"Oh yeah," I say, feeling stupid. I imagine Reed in one of those orange jumpsuits they make prisoners wear, looking something like a pumpkin with legs. I imagine him sitting in the juvie cafeteria plowing through a bag of Oreos. Just like my dad, he's locked away, separated from society—invisible to the world. He has no parents to remember him or to worry about him, and my dad, all he has is me. I'm the only one to remember him and to care, and to carry on his genes.
FBG WITH A MUSTACHE: Ah, but what genes did you inherit? There are the visible and invisible.
"Jason, will you sit still? What's wrong with you? You want me to cut your ear off?" Shelby puts her hands on either side of my head to hold it still. "Now come on—let me cut your hair."
A few seconds later the door opens and in walks a girl who looks a lot like Shelby, only taller and thinner and more sophisticated-looking with her sleek, pulled-back hair and dark suit of clothes.
"Mind if I join you?" the girl asks. "I need a break." She sits on Shelby's bed, then flops back onto her pillow with a grunt.
"That's my sister," Shelby says, "in case that isn't obvious. Nora, this is Jason. Jason, Nora."
I raise my hand and say, "Hi," but Shelby's got my bangs combed in front of my face so I can't see her anymore.
"Yeah, hi," Nora says. Shelby hands me a pillowcase. "Here, put that around your shoulders like a towel so you won't get hair down your back."
"Why don't you just get him a towel, Shelb?" Nora says. "Why use something like a towel when you can just use a towel?"
I've never had a brother or sister, but the way Nora says this seems to me that she's laying down some kind of challenge for Shelby, or maybe setting a trap, but Shelby doesn't fall into it. She just says in her matter-of-fact way, "The pillowcase is handy." Then she squirts something on my hair, and I jump in my seat and I pull my hair back. I look at Shelby. "What was that? I don't want hair spray on my hair. I'm not some Ken doll you're playing dress-up with, okay?"
Shelby and Nora laugh, and Shelby shoves my head with the tips of her fingers. "It's just water, silly. I need to wet your hair before I can cut it. It's too wavy." She shows me the plain plastic bottle and squirts me right in the eyes.
"Hey! Cut it out!"
"That's just what I'm trying to do." Shelby laughs again and combs my hair back in front of my face.
We're all silent for a couple of minutes, and then Nora says, "Shelby, how can you sleep in this room with all these creatures staring at you? Aren't you a little old for a zoo in your room?"
"It's a jungle, and I hope I never get too old for it."
"I guess you're still planning on being like that Jane Goodall and going to live among the monkeys."
"Gorillas," Shelby says. "I want to study gorillas, if that's all right with you. And anyway, Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees."
"Whatever, it's your funeral."
Shelby stops cutting. "G
reat choice of words, there, Nor."
"Okay, so, while we're on the subject, tell me about it. What happened? Were you with Mom when she died?"
I stiffen, bracing myself for another outburst of tears from Shelby or a story I don't want to hear—not today. I'm glad my face is hidden beneath all my hair.
"No," Shelby says. She cuts my hair, moving across the front of my face right at the bridge of my nose, and I shiver as the cold steel edge of the scissors touches my skin.
"No, I was asleep. We were both asleep—Dad and I. When I went in to check on her, I just—I just found her."
"Well, she's at peace, at any rate," Shelby's sister says. "She's finally at peace."
"Yeah," Shelby agrees, even though I notice a certain tension in her voice. "She's at peace, all right."
We go silent again after this, and then I hear Nora moving on the bed. She gets up and walks over to the door. I notice her red painted toenails as she brushes past me, because, like Shelby, she's barefoot. Her feet look sexy somehow with the polish on them. I glance down at Shelby's feet and wonder what hers would look like with polish.
CRAZY GLUE: She's not the type.
"Well, I'm going to go take a nap in my room. I'm exhausted. Call me if you need me," Nora says at the door.
"Right, sure," Shelby says, again with that tension in her voice.
Nora leaves, and Shelby follows behind her and elbows the door shut.
I peer between my much-shorter bangs and ask, "What was that all about?"
"Call me if I need her," Shelby says. "Right! When did that ever work? Her college is just two hours away, and yet ever since she left, she just couldn't be bothered to come home and check on Mom, even in the summer."
Shelby pulls my hair in a ponytail and yanks and cuts and yanks some more. It feels like she's fighting a war with my hair and my hair is winning.
"You wanna watch it with those scissors?" I lean away from her.
"Sorry. It's just she gets me so mad." She pulls me back and snips and yanks one last time, then holds my ponytail up to me. "For Locks of Love." She sets the hair on her desk, then starts back on my hair again.
