Fum

by Adam Rapp

  “Cloris?” Marlene asks.

  Corinthia doesn’t have the desire or energy to broach the subject of Lavert Birdsong.

  “Yeah, Cloris the Clitoris,” she lies.

  “Well, that’s sweet of her,” Marlene says. “A triangle.”

  “A three-sided figure, yep.”

  “But why a triangle?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s an inside joke,” Corinthia says, and leaves it at that. She giggles and strikes the delicate instrument a few times. “Nurse, oh, nurse,” she goofs. She slips the triangle, Lavert’s note, and the little wand back into its velvet pouch and places the pouch back in the box and sets it on the table to her right.

  “Nurse Regan just told me you’re getting your appetite back,” Marlene says, standing over her daughter now, arranging a few sweaty strands of Corinthia’s hair behind an ear.

  Corinthia nods.

  “And all the scans came back negative, thank God. Dr. Neboshik says you’re right as rain.”

  “Lucky me,” Corinthia says. “Lucky giant.”

  “He said they’d like to keep you here overnight, but you can come home tomorrow morning.”

  “You sure you want that?” Corinthia says.

  “Want what?” Marlene asks.

  “For me to come home.”

  “Of course I want that, Cori. Where else would you go?”

  “I don’t know,” Corinthia says. “I could probably stay with Cloris.”

  “You belong at home with your family,” Marlene says sternly. “Besides, you wouldn’t be comfortable at Cloris’s house. What in the world would you sleep on?”

  “I’d sleep in her backyard. In her bounce house.”

  “Corinthia Lee Bledsoe, Cloris Honniotis does not have a bounce house.”

  “Cool image, though, right, Marlene?”

  “Cori,” her mother warns.

  “Marlene,” Corinthia says back, giggling.

  “You know I don’t like when you call me that.”

  Marlene’s iPhone chirps, and she quickly checks it. Her face suddenly falls.

  “What’s wrong?” Corinthia says.

  And then, just like that, Marlene starts to cry.

  “Mom,” Corinthia says. “Mom, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not,” she says.

  “Yes, you are. You’re sort of blubbering.”

  “I can cry if I want to!” Marlene protests, her voice faint and high.

  “Don’t cry about me, Mom. I’m gonna be okay — you just said so.”

  “I’m not crying about you,” Marlene says. Her face suddenly appears to be screwed into itself bitterly, as if she’s been forced to suck a lemon.

  “Then, why are you crying?”

  “Because . . .” Marlene starts to say.

  “Because why?” Corinthia asks, playing along.

  “Because I just found out that FirmaMall is going out of business. They just filed for bankruptcy, and they’re not sending out any more catalogs.”

  “Did they, like, text you or something?”

  “I get their push notifications,” Marlene bleats. Little bits of saliva leap from her lips. She sniffles and holds her breath and tries to stop, but she just can’t help herself.

  Corinthia is pretty certain that her mother is lying about the source of her sorrow.

  What Corinthia doesn’t know is that, not twenty minutes earlier, Marlene Bledsoe had contacted Lemon Tidwell to request another rendezvous.

  We could meet at that burrito place again, she texted. Just say the word and I’ll be there.

  Sorry, Marlene, he texted back just moments ago. Can’t do today. But I’ll see you at Group.

  And when Marlene tries to contend with the twenty-two-caliber-size hole this has left in her heart — yes, it feels as if she’s been shot — it’s that intense — it makes her want to hurl herself to the pavement behind the hospital, that really foul, venereal-looking pavement out back by the Dumpsters, where the orderlies go to smoke and play grab-ass and check their cell phones. She wants to prostrate herself and bloody her knuckles on this particular slab of extremely septic-looking asphalt and then smear this blood from her knuckles all over her mouth and nose and eyes and neck and keen insufferably like some fallen lunatic queen at the end of a Greek tragedy.

  “You got your hair done,” Corinthia says.

  “I got it lightened,” Marlene says, grazing it with salon-fresh nails. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s nice,” Corinthia says, less giggly now, sobered a bit by her mother’s tears.

  “I just can’t stand how many grays I’m getting.”

  Marlene crosses to the bathroom, fluffing her hair. She enters the room, leaving the door open.

  “Where’s Dad?” Corinthia asks after a silence.

  “He’s on his way,” Marlene answers, returning from the bathroom, wiping her smeared face. “He was just visiting with Detective Moon.”

  “Any word on Chan?”

  “Nothing,” Marlene says.

  When Marlene wears too much makeup, Corinthia thinks she looks like an aging porn star. And now that it’s smeared, she looks like an aging porn star who’s slept with a rodeo clown.

  “By the way,” Marlene says, her voice lower now, assuming its reliable, post-cry register, “a boy stopped by the house with your desk. Walked it all the way over from the high school.”

  “What boy?” Corinthia asks.

  “His name was Billy. Real nice boy. He said he was a freshman. I was surprised he was in high school. He was pretty small for his age.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Well, anyway, he brought your desk home. Billy Something-or-other. I think his last name was Wall or Paul. He was pretty worn out. He was sweating so bad, I thought he’d just run a 10K! Poor little thing!”

  Brill Bledsoe enters the room. He is out of breath and pushing his dark hair to the side with his hands.

  “She’s up!” he says.

  “All the scans are negative,” Marlene toots.

  “I heard,” Brill says. “Just ran into Dr. Nebraska in the hallway.”

  “Neboshik,” Marlene corrects him.

  “Nebraska, Neboshik, Nabisco . . . Hey, kiddo,” he says, greeting his daughter.

  “Hey,” Corinthia says.

  He takes the side of the bed opposite Marlene and leans over and kisses Corinthia on the forehead.

  “Sorry if I stink,” Corinthia says.

  “You smell fine,” he replies.

  “Cloris brought her a gift,” Marlene announces in a voice that might be more effectively used in an arts-and-crafts class for third-graders.

  “What’d she bring you?” Brill asks his daughter.

  “A triangle,” Marlene says.

  Brill says, “I didn’t know geometry had healing powers.”

  “It’s the kind of triangle you play,” Marlene says. “With the little thingy.”

  “Oh!” Brill says, feigning ignorance. “The instrument!”

  Marlene says, “Don’t be a dang ding-dong. . . . It’s apparently some kind of special inside joke between she and Cloris.”

  “Between her and Cloris,” Corinthia corrects her mother.

  “I mean her and Cloris,” Marlene says. “All hail the grammar queen.”

  “Sounds like they’re gonna let you come home tomorrow,” Brill says to his daughter.

  “But she’s gotta take it easy,” Marlene interjects. “You gotta take it easy, you hear me, Cori?”

  Corinthia says, “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

  “And we think it would be wise for you to pay a visit to Dr. Flung. Right, Brill?”

  “A session or two couldn’t hurt,” he says.

  “I’ve already spoken with her,” Marlene adds, “and she’s real keen on seeing you.”

  “You good with that?” Brill asks his daughter.

  Corinthia nods again.

  Marlene touches Corinthia’s cheek with the back of her hand and allows it to remain there for a
moment. With this forced tenderness, the little ICU room seems to acquire a strange density. When she can’t stand it any longer, Marlene pulls her hand away.

  “Any news about Channing?” Corinthia eventually asks her father.

  “No,” Brill replies soberly. “The police looked in the woods over by the frontage road, their thinking being that maybe those gray wolves had gotten to him, but all they found were a half dozen deer carcasses.”

  The grisly image renders the room silent. There is only the sound of Corinthia’s IV unit pushing fluid through the tubing, as well as some indecipherable hospital ambience beyond the room: murmuring nurses, beeping machines, the squealing wheels of mystery carts . . .

  “In other news, FirmaMall went out of business,” Corinthia says in a goofy news anchor’s voice. “No more stone Sasquatches or Gears of Time Sculptural Clocks to brighten our homes and gardens. What’s a consumer to do?”

  Marlene crosses her arms and squints at her daughter as if to say, Okay, you got me this time, missy, but it’s open season now.

  Corinthia simply smiles back at Marlene. She’s sure to force her lips together, sparing her mother the monstrous vision of her teeth.

  “Well, it’s good we got Chet when we did,” Brill says, half joking. “What on earth would we do without Chet?”

  The three of them share a halfhearted familial chuckle that, more than anything else, serves to relieve the tension.

  And then, after another silence, Corinthia finally asks what she’s been dying to know for the past few days. She’s resisted posing the question to Dr. Neboshik or to the various nurses and technicians of St. Anthony’s out of fear that they might think she’s crazy. As far as they know, she’s in the ICU because she had some sort of stress-related breakdown and bumped her head on her living-room floor; that she’s being evaluated for concussion-like symptoms; and, because of her past relationship with an exceptional life-altering tumor, they have to rule out certain things. But the fact of the matter is, her actual sanity isn’t the thing being evaluated.

  She’s been looking forward to her father’s arrival because she knows he will tell her the truth. She reaches toward Brill Bledsoe and gently grabs his wrist.

  “They came, didn’t they?” Corinthia finally says.

  Marlene looks at Brill, reminding her husband of twenty years about honoring their agreement regarding a particular off-limits subject.

  To her daughter she says, “Who came, sweetheart?”

  “The geese,” Corinthia replies.

  Marlene shoots Brill an unblinking dead-eyed stare so intense it almost has a sound. He looks down at his free hand. It appears as if he’s somehow seeking its counsel.

  “That’s why Mom won’t let them put a TV in my room,” Corinthia continues, “because it’s been on the news, right?”

  No response.

  “Just tell me,” Corinthia pleads.

  Brill finally looks up.

  “Yes,” he says to his daughter, “the geese came.”

  After a breathless silence, Marlene says, “That’s some coincidence, huh?”

  Corinthia looks to her father, who can only manage to offer a sad, knowing half smile.

  The following morning, at home, Corinthia places her prescription bottle of Valium (one pill, twice daily, or as needed; take with food) on her dresser, beside all her other meds. A small clump of mail has been left on her desk: a few more brochures from prospective colleges (St. Olaf College, Grinnell College, Clarke University) and a postcard from her favorite thrift store, announcing a sale.

  Corinthia treads downstairs as quietly as she can and goes into the garage, where her custom-made school desk is leaning against the wall. It appears to be relatively unscathed, until Corinthia turns it around and notices two crude rectangular blocks of black paint. Someone has obviously painted over something. From her father’s jumbled collection of supplies scattered about a convoluted metal shelving system, Corinthia grabs a small vat of turpentine and an old rag. She douses the rag and gets to work on the first black rectangle.

  The chemical smell of the turpentine sharpens her Valium-softened senses. Her entire being seems to expand. Her breath quickens. She suddenly smells the various odors of the garage: spilled motor oil, the nitrogen in the Miracle-Gro that Marlene uses for her little garden in the backyard, the gasoline in the spare tank in the corner.

  After a moment, the letters FUM, also in black, emerge. She immediately starts to work on the lower rectangular block, with even greater fervor now. Neither Marlene nor Brill Bledsoe knows what their daughter is up to. Marlene is out running errands and Brill, who stayed home from work today, is on the phone in the kitchen.

  Who blocked out these words? Corinthia wonders.

  Was it Denton Smock?

  Or the freshman boy who returned my desk?

  Was it my mother?

  After she works the turpentine into the lower, larger block, in what seems like a matter of seconds, the following four words, applied with tar, seem to radiate out of the wood grain as if the desk itself had willed the thought:

  DOWN WITH THE GIANT

  Just beyond the desk, underneath a pair of old rawhide, multistained work gloves, Corinthia spots a quart of paint and a small edging brush covered in black semigloss, still somewhat damp to the touch.

  October 1, 2015

  Dave,

  It’s been a few weeks — I know. Have you missed me?

  I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you in a while, but a lot’s been happening. Scholastic, social, and personal events. For instance, at school, the main building has been repaired and all the Airstream trailers are gone.

  This girl in my social studies class, Britney Purina, who is famous for her Instagram skills, left her iPhone in Airstream number two, and she will likely never partake of this device’s services again. Britney Purina is always texting and Instagramming and Snapchatting during social studies, practically right in Mrs. Gluber’s face, so I think she is deserving of her fate.

  What was weird and quite unfair was that Britney Purina accused me of stealing her iPhone.

  “He’s the one who took it,” she told Mrs. Gluber, pointing directly at me. “The Ball Boy did it!”

  Yes, that’s what people are starting to call me now, Dave: the Ball Boy. Not cool, or in any way legendary, I know. I will have to devise a plan to somehow reverse this unfortunate nickname.

  But when Mrs. Gluber asked me if what Britney Purina was saying was true, I told her that it wasn’t and that I would never do a thing like that because of my various codes of goodness, citizenship, and honor.

  “Check the Ball Boy’s book bag,” Britney ordered Mrs. Gluber. “Check his creepy book bag!”

  But Mrs. Gluber refused to, because she said this action would have violated my student rights.

  “Ball Boys don’t have any rights!” Britney Purina said.

  “That’s enough, Britney,” Mrs. Gluber said to her, and then it was over.

  Dave, I’d like to point out that my book bag is in no way, shape, or form creepy. I think it’s quite original, actually, because despite the fact that it’s a polyester JanSport book bag, it features the face of Sitting Bull, a 19th-century Sioux warrior chief who ruled the Lakota tribe. I ordered this great patch from the Internet and sewed it on myself with skills that I learned in freshman home economics. During the first week of classes, I was named Sewer of the Day, which made me proud, but other students used this information against me and started asking me if I would fix the busted crotch in their pants or sew my own vagina shut, which caused many to laugh and sneer at my expense.

  Chief Bull is especially famous for massacring General Custer and his 700 soldiers at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He had visions and was a great leader.

  Nothing else came of Britney Purina’s accusation, but she was already throwing high-level shade my way. You could almost see it throbbing out of her eyes. If her shade had had a color, it would have been electric pink.

  Du
ring lunch she came over to the Frog table, where Keiko Cho, Durdin Royko, and I were minding our own business, and she told me that if I had her fucking iPhone 6, I’d better fucking give it to her or Todd fucking Chicklis and Bronson fucking Kaminski were going to fucking butt-fuck me with my own fucking Fisher-Price baby Ball Boy boner, which doesn’t even seem anatomically possible, Dave, but all I could do was sit there and listen to her call me Billy Ball Boy and list the many different kinds of rapes I will receive with my own Fisher-Price baby Ball Boy boner, while everybody in the cafeteria stopped eating and watched.

  Dave, my body got so tense that it felt like I was turning into tin. I know you don’t actually have a body, because you’re mostly paper and cardboard, but if you did possess a human body and you experienced an attack of this proportion from a popular girl of the caliber and prettiness of Britney Purina, I think you would know what I’m talking about. By the way, I just realized that your metal spiral spine thing that keeps these pages together might be tin, but I’m pretty certain it’s actually aluminum, which isn’t tin but it’s close. Or maybe it’s copper. And copper is also close to tin. Maybe you know a little bit about this feeling after all.

  So anyway, Britney Purina was announcing to me and the rest of the cafeteria how she was going to basically use her pretty-girl power to make Todd Chicklis and Bronson Kaminski force me to rape myself with my own Fisher-Price baby Ball Boy boner, and every time I thought she was getting close to the moment when she might stop verbally assaulting me, it would just get worse and worse, and my stomach started making terrible gurgling sounds, and I thought I would expel gas, and I kept getting more and more frozen. I could even see into the food service area, where Camila, my beautiful Mexican princess, was watching from behind a bin of pizza pockets. When I saw her deep-brown eyes staring back at me, I felt like I was shrinking, like I was turning into a penny, but instead of the penny having Abraham Lincoln’s face on it, it was my face. I would no longer be a human, Dave. I would be a penny for the rest of my life.

  But then something amazing happened, Dave, something that made me feel like there are good forces in the world, and it was this: While Britney Purina was unleashing her wrath of words upon me, that extremely tall girl, Corinthia Bledsoe — the one who predicted the tornadoes — stormed into the cafeteria. She stormed into the cafeteria with great force and passion, and she stood between Britney Purina and the Frog table. Corinthia Bledsoe isn’t even supposed to be in school, Dave! She’s supposed to be serving a suspension for exhibiting extreme behavior. What happened was she accidentally destroyed school property, even though she knew the tornadoes were coming and was just trying to be a good citizen and warn everyone. I’m pretty sure that Principal Ticonderoga, Vice Principal Mejerus, and Guidance Counselor Smock think Corinthia Bledsoe is somehow responsible for general scholastic pandemonium. Or that maybe she’s some kind of evil high-school witch. She did break a door, Dave, I will admit that, but it was only because she was trying so hard to communicate her vision. I highly doubt that Sitting Bull got in trouble for communicating his visions. If anything, he was more respected for communicating them.