The Warning

by Patterson, James

  If we buried every animal we had to put down, our whole yard would be a cemetery. We didn’t make an exception for Nerf. Mom had a deal with the mortuary to send animals there for cremation, so she and I picked up Nerf’s still-warm body and deposited it into a plastic bag. We said nothing as we took care of business—no words of farewell or anything—but after she and I went inside to wash up, Mom put her arms around me, and I sobbed inconsolably over that doofy dog.

  That evening Mom went down to the Savannah Grill, which serves okay food but mainly functions as the town bar. She’d gone there the previous night, too, and I wondered whether she was meeting someone. Well, she was allowed. My dad hadn’t been in the picture since I was two, and Mom deserved to have some kind of social life.

  I jumped at an unfamiliar sound: the office phone ringing.

  “Hello, Mount Hope Veterinary Hospital,” I answered.

  “Hey, Maggie,” Jordan said, and immediately I detected some sort of question mark in his voice.

  “Hey, Jordan,” I said. “How’s your head feeling? You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, weirdly. You want the good news or bad news first?”

  “Does this involve our ice-cream date tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Then bad news first.”

  “Okay, but first some good news: The phones are working again.”

  I laughed, pacing the office floor. “No shit.”

  “Landlines only and no long-distance, but still.”

  “Right, and the nonfunctioning cellular networks are the bad news.”

  “No, the bad news is I got suspended from school.”

  “Wait, what?” I stopped pacing. “School hasn’t even started yet.”

  “I know, and the suspension starts immediately and will be over by the time classes begin next week, so it’s kind of bullshit. But here’s the thing: I got in a fight in the locker room.”

  “Right after I saw you? When you were going back there to recuperate from that …?” The image flashed in my mind and stirred up my stomach: Jordan flying, taking a brutal head shot, and crashing to the ground.

  “That would be when,” he said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Have you ever even been in a fight? Who were you fighting?”

  “Troy Cameron and Luke Bowman.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I don’t drop many f-bombs, but with those two thugs, this couldn’t have ended well. “Are you okay? Did you get in any good shots at least? Are you in the hospital?”

  “Someone is,” he responded, and let out the weirdest little laugh.

  I tried to process all of this. He certainly sounded okay.

  “All right, Jordan, what gives?” I asked. “How big of a brawl was this, and how did you survive?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “It was the two of them against me. But this was the kind of fight that you fantasize about.”

  “I don’t fantasize about fights.”

  “I broke Troy’s jaw. They’re wiring it shut right now at the army hospital. Luke tore his MCL and meniscus. I was a machine. They couldn’t touch me.”

  “They couldn’t touch you on the football field, either—until they did.”

  “I’m telling you, it wasn’t me doing the kicking and punching. I mean, it was, but I knew stuff that I shouldn’t know, like I’d been trained by a fighting master but didn’t remember it.”

  “You’ve watched The Matrix too many times. I hope you don’t have to dodge any bullets.”

  “You think you’re being funny, but everything really did slow down for me.”

  I seated myself in the rickety wooden swivel chair behind the office’s main desk.

  “Jordan,” I said, “you just beat up Troy Cameron and Luke Bowman, two of the biggest douchebags in school. You’re going to be hero of the nerds. So suspension aside, that can’t be the bad news.”

  “Well, I probably have a target on my back now if I ever show my face on the south side of town. Fortunately, I’m not visiting the Mansions of Mount Hope anytime soon.”

  “How about the Tastee Freeze?”

  “Uh, rain check?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

  “But, yeah, the bad news for Luke is that after what I did to his knee, he’s out for the season. And the good news for me is that just before he suspended me, Coach made me the new starting quarterback.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Maggie

  AFTER I HUNG up with Jordan, I kicked myself for wimping out about not telling him my bad news. I’d thought of revealing it over ice cream, not that that wouldn’t have been awkward, too. I almost called him back, but now wasn’t the time. I needed to confirm that it actually was bad news.

  My mind racing, I walked into the exam room, turned on the light, and stepped over to the new X-ray machine. We’d installed it only a few months before the evacuation, and it was one of the first things Mom checked on when we came back. It was super expensive, and the bills for it had been piling up. One good thing about the evacuation was that the government stepped in to freeze all of Mount Hope residents’ payments: cars, mortgages, X-ray machines …

  I slipped a CD into the old boom box sitting beside a yellowed lamp. We didn’t have a lot of music choices among the discs stacked crookedly on the shelf, but Devo’s Freedom of Choice had become a personal favorite and not just because of the band’s red flower-pot hats. It’s hard to feel completely forlorn when listening to Devo and that herky-jerky beat.

  “She’s just the girl, she’s just the girl …”

  I took off my hoodie, leaving on my “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!” T-shirt, which I found in a thrift store and couldn’t resist. I’d taken X-rays before but only on animals. Their fur was thicker than my shirt, so I figured this would work.

  I switched on the machine, and it shot a square of light onto the table. I lay on my back and angled my left breast into the square.

  Our town had been irradiated; how much was unclear, but I knew it was super rare for someone my age to get breast cancer. In one of my mom’s books, I read that 80 percent of lumps were benign and that teenage breasts can be lumpy. Well, that was exactly the sexiest thing I’d ever heard.

  So why was I scared shitless?

  The machine didn’t have a timer—it wasn’t designed for taking your own X-rays—so this would be tricky. Through trial and error, I learned that there was a three-second delay between hitting the button and the machine taking a picture.

  For the first effort, I didn’t make it back onto the table fast enough, and the image was a blur. The second attempt was decent, if a bit fuzzy, but the third looked good, as did the fourth, which I took just in case.

  Back on the office computer, I pulled up the images after moving them into a folder titled “Maggie Homework” and deleting the originals from the X-ray machine. I pulled out Mom’s medical encyclopedia and looked up a “normal” chest X-ray.

  That image was clear. Mine was cloudy. Some of the clouds were low, down by my liver and spleen. I couldn’t see even an outline of my breasts, and I wondered: If X-rays go through skin and tissue, would they show a tumor? The medical encyclopedia made me think they would, at least to some extent.

  On my images, I could see a blob that looked similar to the encyclopedia’s tumor pictures, but it was hard to be sure. Even doctors often needed to refer such matters to specialists.

  I pulled up the first two X-rays I’d taken, the ones that didn’t come out right. The first was a mass of clouds, no doubt stemming from my movement as I tried to position myself on the table. The other one was a little clearer but showed the right side of my body: arm, shoulder, and collarbone.

  Wait, what was that?

  Leaning closer to the screen, I stared at a single spot of bright white on my upper arm. I’d seen such things in veterinary X-rays, when dogs still had their collars on. A spot like that would have
to be something dense, like metal or plastic. Maybe something on the table or my T-shirt got in the picture?

  None of the other three images showed that arm.

  The clock read 8:00 p.m. Mom wouldn’t be home for another hour at least. I went back into the exam room and looked all over the table for something that might leave that pill-like mark. Nothing. Maybe I’d knocked the object off the table when I was rushing to get back under the X-ray beam, but I found nothing on the floor, either.

  I took two more X-rays of my upper arm, breathing deep and trying to be as motionless as possible. When I opened these images, it was clear that something was in my right deltoid.

  I dug through the medical encyclopedia again, looking for an X-ray image that might match. One person had swallowed a key, another a wedding ring. A kid had gulped down a penny, and another had jammed a pearl way up his nose. There also were X-rays in which people had inserted more bizarre objects into more bizarre places. I moved quickly past those.

  Nothing matched what I had.

  Then I remembered: That shoulder was where I had gotten my most painful flu shot ever, at the army clinic in the evacuation camp. It had ached for days and left a large red spot. Flu shots had never left any kind of lasting mark. Mom got one, too. Everyone had. The flu vaccine wouldn’t look like a pill, of course.

  I needed to tell someone. I picked up the phone to call Jordan but stopped myself. When he asked why I was Xraying myself, I’d have to tell him about the lump and my suspicion that I had cancer. I wasn’t just afraid that he’d freak out. I also didn’t want to talk to him about my breasts. I liked this guy and was hoping we might reach a romantic place before we started getting all clinical.

  I should have told my mom, but she’d kill me for Xraying myself—six times. Patients were supposed to wear lead blankets that covered everything but the areas being filmed, and the technician was supposed to stand behind the protected partition.

  As for the lump, where would she take me? To the army doctors? They’re the ones who had given us the “flu shots” in the first place.

  I needed another way to find out: What the hell was in my arm?

  CHAPTER 10

  Jordan

  MOM WAS, SHALL we say, displeased about my suspension.

  “You what?” she snapped, stepping away from the pot of jarred spaghetti sauce that she had freshened up with mushrooms, onions, peppers, and tomatoes from our garden. The lines at the grocery store were so long, she’d said, that she was going to cook what we had for now. “Getting suspended before classes start is impressive even for you.”

  “On the bright side,” I said, “I won’t actually miss any school.”

  “Well, how is it a suspension, then?”

  “I’m barred from the school for now, including practices. But, hey, guess who’s the new starting quarterback?”

  “You play DEE-fense!” Charlie chimed in.

  “Well, now I play OFF-fense!” I responded. “I’ll be dishing it out.”

  “Sounds like you got off to an early start,” Mom grumbled, giving the sauce a stir.

  “And I won’t miss any games,” I continued, ignoring Mom while Charlie ran upstairs.

  Actually, I wasn’t sure about that—not about just me but the whole team. Our main rival, the Canville Badgers, already had canceled their game against us for health concerns, and I wasn’t sure whether the army was allowing any outsiders into Mount Hope yet. Our first game was scheduled for a week from Friday.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, “have they opened up the roads? Can people come into town?”

  “No,” she said, putting the sauce on simmer and stepping into the living room to sit in the easy chair across from me on the couch. Both of us faced the TV, which, of course, wasn’t working.

  “You’d think we could get some kind of news,” she said irritably, hitting a button on the remote and watching an error message pop up on the screen. “Why should the power-plant problems—which supposedly were solved—affect our satellite?”

  “I’m sure things will be fine,” I said. “They said everything should be up and running in a week or so.”

  “They fed us that line in the camp, too,” she grumbled. “It was always ‘next week’ and ‘shortly’ and ‘as soon as possible.’ Oh, yeah? Define ‘possible.’ We haven’t seen your father in four months, and I had to jump through hoops to get one phone conversation with him every week. Now we’re back, and there’s supposedly no radiation, and everything is safe, so where is he? Why’s he still living at the nuclear plant? It’s a fifteen-minute drive.”

  “Well, we did get to come home,” I said. “They didn’t lie about that.”

  “They also didn’t tell us that everything in our house and in town would be fixed. They’re very selective about what they tell us.”

  “Yeah, it’s terrible that everything got fixed up,” I said.

  Mom slapped her hand against the end table. “Okay, smart boy who was chased by a bear and just put two kids into the hospital, you tell me that everything is normal.”

  “Everything is normal,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “I do what my mother tells me to do!” I protested, putting on a smile and waving jazz hands at her.

  “You beat up two big-time athletes from the south side and ended their seasons. You know who else lives on the south side? All the bosses: my boss, your father’s boss, and anyone who has any influence in this town. So keep joking your way through this, and see how that works out.”

  Sometimes my mom is where fun goes to die.

  “Okay, fine, I feel like crap now,” I said, putting my feet up on the ottoman as Dad usually did when he sat in that chair. “Happy? They started the fight. I defended myself. Would you feel better if I were in the hospital now instead of them?”

  “Of course not, you nitwit,” Mom spat out. “And the coach said you didn’t start it. But he also told me you were overly violent and cruel, and that’s not how we raised you.”

  “Mom,” I said, holding my hands up, “when have I ever been in a fight before? Do you think I did this on purpose?”

  “I think you were tired of those boys bothering you your whole life, and you wanted to hurt them,” she said, popping up the recliner’s footrest.

  I sighed. If I’d had time to think about it, I might have reached that very conclusion. But I didn’t have time. They came after me, and I eliminated them as threats, with unplanned/planned precision. It was as simple as that.

  Mom was quiet, her head back against the absurdly cushioned chair, her eyes half closed. “Jordan, this is how you’re going to face those bullies: You will apologize.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll do it because you’re the bigger man. They may spit in your face, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll apologize and mean it.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You will,” Mom said. “Or I’ll make you sorry.”

  I let out a long, slow breath in the manner of the meditation exercises we’d both learned. Whether she would follow through on such a threat didn’t matter. She knew I could never defy her. I said nothing, which for me amounted to surrender.

  Mom’s expression softened. “You know they’ll talk about this being two white boys.”

  “You mean two big white boys bullying a slender black kid in his skivvies?”

  She snorted out a laugh. “‘Skivvies.’ You and your vocabulary. Yes, that. But, no, not really.”

  “People don’t have to turn everything into a racial thing.”

  “Just like you and Maggie.”

  If I could’ve shot laser beams from my eyes, Mom’s head would have been soot by the time I said, “What about me and Maggie?”

  “Come on, people talk about you and your pretty little blond girl.”

  “And?”

  “And we’re still not living in a post-racial society no matter what some people want to believe.”

  “You should know,” I shot back. We al
most never talked about the fact that Mom was black and Dad was a quadroon or octoroon or whatever he was that allowed him to “pass” in certain situations and gave me my warm, Obamaesque skin tone.

  “I do know,” she said—and might as well have dropped the mic right there.

  “Mom,” I said, “Maggie and I have been friends forever, and nothing has ever happened between us.”

  She arched her eyebrow at me.

  “Look, I wish I had something more salacious to report on this subject,” I added.

  “Do you?”

  Yeah, I did. At some point I might even have to act on this feeling, because, damn, what was the point of being gossiped about if you weren’t actually getting to enjoy the thing you were supposedly guilty of? Also, I really liked Maggie, and there was something pathetic about my having the courage to beat the shit out of those two jock assholes while being petrified of, I don’t know, holding her hand. I bet it would be warm and soft, too.

  “Just be careful,” Mom said.

  “I’m the most cautious dude in town,” I said with my most charming smile, then muttered under my breath, “Maybe other people shouldn’t fuck with me. Bears, neither.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You said something.”

  I didn’t know where that had come from, actually. I never talked to myself, out loud or in my head, with that kind of aggression.

  “Must’ve been the concussion talking.”

  Mom got up and placed her hand on my forehead. It felt good.

  “When you get hit and lose consciousness, that’s a traumatic brain injury,” she said. “You’ll have to take it easy for a few days and see how you feel.”

  “I will, Mom. Love you.”

  That night the burning face came back to me in my dreams. I was tied down to a table, with restraints on my arms and legs and a metal collar around my neck. As I struggled to get loose, I saw a pair of hands peel open my abdomen as if it were a box and then start pulling my organs out and placing them onto a metal table.