Fum

by Adam Rapp

  “Submit to Coach Task,” he said, referring to himself in the third person as he has occasionally been known to do. “Submit now, Bledsoe.”

  After Corinthia’s arms stopped swimming out and started sort of flapping around at her sides in a less intentional, more overpowered manner, between desperate breaths, in torn syllables, she promised Coach Task and Mr. Hauser that she was in control of herself.

  “No retaliation now, Corinthia,” Mr. Hauser warned.

  “Mmmmnnnnmmmnnnooooooo” is all Corinthia could muster.

  “DO YOU SUBMIT?” Coach Task pleaded again, dark thistles pulsing through the rims of his nostrils.

  After Corinthia pledged her self-control with “I ssssbbbbmmmmmmmtttttt!” they continued pinning her head to the base of the small trophy case that exhibits the few conference championships in football, baseball, and cross-country, her nose and mouth mashed into the joint where the wall meets the marble floor.

  “Breathe it out now, Corinthia,” Coach Task instructed her. “Breathe it all out.”

  Coach Task finally removed his knee from between her shoulder blades, and she remained on her stomach, inhaling the penitentiary smell of institutional disinfectant and dirty shoes.

  A few minutes later, after Doris Dabaduda was carried off to the gymnasium to have her leg tended to by the athletic trainer, Coach Task and Mr. Hauser helped Corinthia off the floor, which was like trying to right some toppled medieval iron throne. They then escorted her to the infirmary — Coach Task gently but ever so firmly guiding her by her enormous elbow — where she was administered to with several conical paper cups containing an electrolyte solution and calmed by the school nurse, Oona Kleinschmidt, who offered Corinthia aloe-and-eucalyptus HandiWipes.

  After Corinthia’s heart rate returned to an acceptable level and it was determined that a hospital visit wasn’t necessary, she was deposited at Guidance Counselor Smock’s office, where he offered herbal tea and sesame cookies, which, per usual, Corinthia refused. She simply sat across from him, physically spent, unblinking, and tried to not think about those tornadoes for some twelve minutes.

  Finally, Mr. Smock speaks again.

  “So we were talking about your junior year,” he says. “What lies ahead?”

  But before she can answer him, it happens again — that dreaded family of tornadoes overtakes her. The image seizes her mind: a triumvirate of bulging, undulating funnels, spinning and contorting improbably toward Lugo.

  Corinthia’s chin collapses into her Adam’s apple. A fault line emerges in her broad, smooth forehead. Her unblinking eyes are as wide as ostrich eggs.

  “Corinthia . . .?”

  When she opens her mouth to speak, she bellows a kind of human dial tone. She closes her mouth, opens it, and tries to speak again, but only a dirgelike sound issues forth. Guidance Counselor Smock removes his black-framed glasses. His brows gather at the center.

  This will be the last thing Corinthia recalls from her visit to the guidance counselor’s office in the basement of Lugo Memorial High School: Mr. Smock’s tense, gathering brows. It doesn’t occur to her that she’s walked away until she’s halfway up the basement stairs.

  “Corinthia!” Mr. Smock calls after her, in perhaps the most emphatic version of his voice she’s ever heard. “Corinthia Bledsoe, you’re not walking away from your guidance counselor’s office! You are NOT doing that!”

  But she is. And she doesn’t even bother answering, because she’s too busy taking the stairs, four at a time. When Corinthia’s trying to get somewhere fast, she’ll usually take them in threes, like when she’s escaping the gaze of speech team captain Swinta Folger, who sits behind her in Great Books class and whose disapproving eyes are like a pair of warm beetles crawling on the back of her neck, or when her stomach is funny from her thyroxine/anti-inflammatories cocktail and she has to get to her special second-floor bathroom like five minutes ago.

  It takes her only a few strides to reach the first floor, where she bounds across the sun-stroked, locker-lined hallway toward the school’s main entrance. She isn’t aware of any pain in her knees, or in her feet or wrists or hips or lower back, for that matter. No, no, no, there is no pain anywhere in her body, none whatsoever.

  She extends her stride, really opens up, digging the heels of her custom-ordered size 22 Pony low-tops into the marble floor, woomf-woomf-woomf, and bursts through the double doors of Lugo Memorial High School as if something’s chasing her.

  “Everything okay?” grounds supervisor Barrett Bacon, who the students call “The Milkman” because of his unusually waggly male breasts, calls to her from atop a loud, clattering riding mower. He’s just completed a long row of mowed grass.

  But Corinthia doesn’t answer. She just charges ahead, shielding her eyes from the bright late-August sun.

  August 26, 2015

  First day of classes

  Lugo Memorial High School

  Dear Dave,

  This is my first entry. Nice to meet you, Dave. My name is Billy Ball. William Eugene Ball, to be precise.

  I am fourteen years old, five feet four inches tall, and weigh 125 pounds. I have brown hair and hazel eyes, which means greenish-brown, and I’m pretty pale. I’m right-handed, but I like to try to do things with my left hand, too, like comb my hair and button my shirts and write letters to my dad, who died a few months ago. I’m not good at sports or dancing. But in junior high I received a bronze medal in creative writing for a story I wrote about a mute digital cowboy who falls in love with an analog talking mare named Claribel. The story is set in space, but it’s not about extraterrestrial beings or asteroids or intergalactic warfare. It’s about technology and love and the search for oxygen.

  Another thing to know about me is that I have a severe gas problem, meaning I have to pass gas often. Today it was pretty bad, Dave. Nerves, nerves, nerves. The simethicone, which is the drug I take to combat this ailment, didn’t kick in until just before lunch. I know that’s a lot to tell you right off the bat, but Mr. Smock encouraged me not to hold anything back. In general, my nervous system and stomach and bowels have a complicated relationship. Most of the time everything down in that arena feels heavy and swampish, like I have fish swimming around inside me. I pass a lot of gas and catch a lot of shade for it. “Shade” is attitude, Dave. I’m not going to assume that you know slang words. That’s one of the only slang words I use. If I start to use any other ones, I’ll be sure to let you know.

  It would appear that Lars Silence and Mark Maestro are planning to steal my Android Nexus 6. In English, while Mrs. Blanton was handing out the reading list, they kept whispering things about me. “Nerd” this and “nerd” that. And “Is that a Droid, Silence?” And “Is that supposed to be a haircut, Maestro?” I could feel them behind me the whole period, Dave. After class they waited for me in the hall, but thankfully Mr. Cuff was there, talking to a student, so they left me alone.

  Lars Silence isn’t any bigger than me, but I heard he studied at the Kuk Sool Won Martial Arts Academy in Peoria this summer. Mark Maestro is built like a box of baking soda, and he always has a toothpick in his mouth, which he uses to poke people with.

  I’m considering blindness. Meaning maybe I’ll try faking being blind for a while. Like I could just not blink and walk into desks and doors and reach for things like I’m forever lost in the dark. Or maybe I’ll take a fork to my eyes and do it for real. Then they’d give me a cane and a German shepherd, and I’d get to wear sunglasses ad nauseam. “Ad nauseam” refers to something that has been done or repeated so often that it has become annoying or tiresome. It’s a Latin phrase. I learned it in English class.

  The rest of the day wasn’t as bad as English.

  The cafeteria at Lugo Memorial is clean, and the food is pretty good. This Mexican girl was serving chicken cutlets. She has a face like a sad Bible person. Like someone who cried at Christ’s feet. Big faraway eyes and hardly any mouth. She’s the youngest server, and her hands are soft-looking and tan. When
we spied each other, it felt like slow tingly thunder rolling through my chest. I’m sure there are poems about this feeling, and I will have to find them. Poems about love and blindness and Mexico. I imagine she smells good and spicy. But not spicy in a burrito way. Spicy in a hot-blooded cholo way.

  Before she served me my chicken cutlet, she took off her hairnet and reached into her pocket and put another one on. It was pretty graceful, and I think she did it for my sexual entertainment. Her hair fell to her shoulders like a dark river. . . . What I just wrote could be lyrics to a song, Dave. I could be a blind singer with sunglasses and a devoted German shepherd at my side. When she wasn’t looking, I reached over the service station and took the discarded hairnet, which she’d left balled up next to the green beans. I’m small but I have long arms. Plus I’m double-jointed. You will learn many details about me, Dave the Diary. Like about my double-jointedness and my gas problems and the various items I keep in my school locker. The girl in line next to me saw me take the hairnet and squinted.

  “What?” I said.

  She called me a weirdo.

  She said, “Fucking bug-eyed weirdo.”

  I told her to stop throwing me shade and then she told me I stank.

  “You stink,” she said, and then squinted again and added, “Did you just shit your pants or something?”

  And I’ll admit that I passed gas, Dave, and yes, it was pretty bad, but I still wanted to punch her, I really did, with my right fist, not my left. But I stopped myself because Camila was there, and I don’t want her to think I’m a violent person. That girl who was throwing me shade’s name is Cinthia Hauk, and she is the first name on The List. I have to educate you about The List, Dave. It’s too complicated to go into right now, but I’ll tell you more about it soon enough. The List has been on my mind a lot lately, and when I actually saw it take shape in my head, I got so excited that my stomach went funny. Thank God the simethicone finally kicked in. Sometimes I can feel when it starts working. It’s like a switch gets turned on and all the swampishness stops. When I thought about putting Cinthia Hauk on The List, I got so excited I also almost urinated in my pants, but I didn’t. The List has powers.

  I wound up eating at a table with two other kids: a boy with a deformed arm named Durdin Royko and this chubby Asian girl, Keiko Cho, who brings her own lunch and never looks up. Keiko Cho eats cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and balls of popcorn. She pretty much acts like a cat that gets stuck in a room with weird plants, meaning she sort of slinks around and doesn’t speak. Durdin Royko makes clicking noises like there’s a little machine inside him counting stuff. His deformed arm is more like a tool than an arm. The three of us ate in total silence. You could see the muscles in Durdin Royko’s jaws bulging as he chewed. Keiko Cho’s smooth Asian face hardly moved while she ate her sandwich. Everyone else in the cafeteria was throwing shade at us, particularly Lars Silence and Mark Maestro, who were sitting three tables away and ribbitting like frogs every time Keiko Cho took a bite of her popcorn ball.

  I guess we are officially the Freshman Frogs.

  At home, Corinthia is met with a look of delicate consternation.

  Marlene Bledsoe is some twenty inches shorter and 140 pounds lighter than her daughter. Marlene’s hairdo, whose actual hue is difficult to decipher these days, might be mistaken for a world-class breakfast pastry. She is using a bristly kitchen blob to scrub potatoes with short, firm strokes. It seems like she’s punishing tiny limbless children.

  Corinthia is sitting on the kitchen floor with an ice pack on her head. A silence has been expanding between them like a giant mushroom in a damp fungal forest.

  “You left your special desk,” Marlene finally says.

  Yes, Corinthia finds herself in yet another room with another adult — her own mother this time.

  “It’s not that special,” Corinthia replies.

  “Of course it’s special,” Marlene retorts, really digging into the skin of a particularly dirty potato. “It took you days to make that desk. Days.”

  “It’s a few hunks of carefully arranged wood.”

  “But you were so proud of it. The first time you brought it home, you showed it off like it was the greatest thing you’d ever done.”

  Corinthia has the sudden sensation that her mother is on a small pontoon boat, slowly drifting away. A pontoon boat with a working sink and a bucket of brown Idaho potatoes, no less, but an actual pontoon boat.

  Marlene Bledsoe’s butt jiggles while she works. Recently she’s been trying to get back into shape, and for the past three weeks she’s been spending an hour and ten minutes a day dancing in place in the living room to a middle-aged workout celebrity who instructs Marlene while flitting about on the high-definition forty-two-inch flat-screen. This woman, whose name is Stacey or Lacy or Traci Something-or-other, has the same exact hairstyle that Marlene does and supposedly changed Madonna’s body and Miley Cyrus’s body and Barbra Streisand’s body and J.Lo’s body like at some unfathomable cellular, subatomic level, and this fitness guru appears to have more energy than three small children after eating ultraviolet breakfast cereal.

  Yesterday Marlene added a Hula-Hoop to the regimen. She doesn’t actually spin it, though; she simply sets it on the floor and dances inside and outside its perimeter. From her upstairs bathroom, Corinthia can often hear Marlene wheezing through the workout like some veteran truck driver.

  “Would you care for more ice?” Marlene asks her daughter from the sink.

  “I’m fine,” Corinthia replies, briefly closing her eyes, hoping for a kind of vast gray blankness or, more specifically, a freshly rained-upon natural slate wall. When overwhelmed, Corinthia does her best to summon this wall, this indefinable monolith. She imagines placing her hands on it, inviting its cool, stolid permanence to calm her. But after a few seconds, she finds that she has to open her eyes, fearing another visit from those tornadoes.

  Over the running water, Marlene says, “Mr. Smock spoke as if you’d abandoned your desk.”

  “Dogs are abandoned,” Corinthia replies. “Dogs and busted bikes.”

  “Don’t be smart, Cori.”

  “And dirty children at interstate truck stops.”

  It’s cooler here in the kitchen. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Corinthia will sneak out of her room, descend the stairs, and lie on the smooth Mexican tiles. There are fewer mosquitoes down here. In her room they disappear into the Sheetrock and wait for her to fall asleep. They particularly love her big, fleshy knees, which are so bitten up, it looks as if she suffers from a skin condition.

  “Do we need to schedule an appointment with Dr. Flung?” Marlene says.

  Dr. Flung is the psychologist whom Corinthia stopped seeing some months ago. Dr. Nene Flung, a small Filipina with a gentle voice and drawn-on eyebrows, who bought a pair of leather beanbag chairs especially for Corinthia because her office sofa was too small. During sessions they would each sit on a beanbag, Dr. Flung perched on top of hers like a little wooden bird. She would ask Corinthia the strangest questions.

  Questions like: “If you were to draw yourself twenty years from now, what kind of hair might you have?”

  And: “When I say the word porcupine, what’s the first thing that comes to mind besides a porcupine?”

  Hanging out with her for forty-five minutes was like visiting someone in their parents’ refinished basement. Corinthia always got the feeling that after twenty minutes of discussing physical ailments, mild family dramas, and the general anxieties of high school, they might eat cookie dough and play video games.

  Dr. Flung mainly led Corinthia through meaningless, childish exercises and acted supportive. But she did teach Corinthia about summoning her wall; she took her through the entire imaginative process, and for this Corinthia will always be grateful.

  “I think a visit with Dr. Flung might be a good idea,” Marlene offers.

  “Can’t I just lie here?” Corinthia says, adjusting the ice pack on her head. The peaks of her
tented knees almost rise above the horizon of the kitchen table.

  Marlene Bledsoe, mother of two, sighs mightily and continues washing the bejesus out of her potatoes. Wife to Brill, and former bookkeeper of Lugo’s only nail salon, Nails and Everything Else (“Everything Else” referring to eyebrow threading, bikini waxing, and anal bleaching), Marlene is a professional sigher. Or at least it seems that way to Corinthia. She certainly can sigh with the best of them.

  Once petite and downright smoking hot, Marlene is now a tad doughy in that strange fleshy way of middle-aged male fast-food managers. Prone to serial purchases from the FirmaMall catalog (eight-inch stone gnomes, electrolysis devices disguised as oral hygiene utensils, and a large triangular corduroy sleeping pillow the color of a popular indigestion medicine designed to rest on the coach-class seatback tray), Marlene likes to eat Haribo Gold Bears and has a hard time standing still. There’s always a slight tremor in her hands and a pinched quality about her hips and glutes that makes her look as if she’s constantly doing everything she can not to suddenly break into an exit sprint.

  Sometimes Marlene Bledsoe, whose maiden name is Ottinger, looks at her daughter with the astonishing thought, This THING came out of ME. Or, more specifically, This GIANT BURST FORTH from my VAGINA, and when encountering Corinthia, though blithely unaware, she’ll invariably plant a fist in front of her plum terry-cloth relax slacks (she also owns peach and mauve) as if to ward off any possible further birthing trauma.

  “You’re doing it again,” Corinthia will tell her mother.

  Marlene will then place her hands behind her back, clasping them together with a forced stoicism that would rival an army general’s.

  “I promise I’m not going back in,” Corinthia will joke assuredly. Because humor is the salve to sadness, after all, especially when that sadness is most tenaciously experienced in the spaces shared between mother and daughter.