by Tim Floreen
I sat down on my bed. “None of your business.”
He dropped into my desk chair again and wheeled around to study the ink and paint streaking my desk. “Seriously, I didn’t mean to stress you out, Rem. But at least there’s a bright side.”
“Oh yeah?” I snapped. “What’s that?”
“I snuck out last night and nobody died.”
“You want me to throw you a party?”
Franklin touched the desk’s surface, tracing his fingertips over the smears of paint. “You seemed pretty pissed at Tor when I saw you. It made me wonder if he was the reason you were sad the other day, before Callie died.”
He sat with his elbows on the desk, his fingers slowly moving, while he waited for me to say something. He’d pulled off his hood, so I could see the back of his skull, the pale skin visible through the dark stubble. On the spot where he’d had his surgery, the gauze and medical tape had now been replaced by a single large square Band-Aid.
“He was,” I said.
Franklin nodded, like he didn’t need me to tell him any more, but I went on anyway.
“I have a thing for him, I guess. We used to mess around down in the steam tunnels underneath Duluth Central. He’s not out, so it was a big secret. But lately he’s been dating Lydia. He’s been lying to her, acting like a jerk to me. Then he got incredibly mad when he found out I’d told Callie what we’d done. He slammed me against a door, said some ugly things, threatened me. So I suppose I’ve been feeling mad. And hurt. And jealous. And confused about what I should do.”
The muscles of Franklin’s jaw flexed.
“Are you okay? Are you mad at me?”
He shrugged. “I figured it was something like that. Mostly I’m just mad at Tor for treating you that way. He must be an idiot not to realize how amazing you are.”
I probably blushed. I wasn’t used to hearing that kind of talk pointed in my direction. “Tor can be a bully sometimes. I guess you know that. Probably better than anyone.”
His fingers stopped. “Probably.”
“Sometimes I wonder if he even thinks other people really exist.”
Another shrug. “Well, sure, but do any of us?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you ever secretly ask yourself if maybe you’re the only one that’s actually real and everyone else is just, like, a character in a video game? A bunch of pixels on a screen? It makes sense, if you think about it.” He knocked his skull. “We’re trapped in here. We can never experience the world from inside someone else’s head. So isn’t it only logical to doubt whether anybody else is real?”
I raked my fingers through my hair. “I guess. But we can imagine, and isn’t that almost as good? I think that’s what Emily Dickinson was getting at in that poem I read to you. The one Ethan liked so much.”
“ ‘The brain is wider than the sky,’ ” Franklin murmured.
“Yeah. Like, the brain can encompass the sky through imagination. In the poem Dickinson talks about how we can imagine the sea, and we can imagine God, and we can imagine our way into other people’s heads, too.”
He turned toward me halfway, so I could see the profile of his crooked nose. “You’re talking about empathy.”
“I guess I am. Maybe that’s one of the things that makes the human brain so amazing. You’re right that we’re trapped in our heads. Believing other people exist is sort of a leap of faith, like believing God exists. Maybe that’s why we evolved to have empathy. It helps us make the leap.”
“Because otherwise life is just . . .”
“Son of War,” I finished.
I thought of the notebook I’d glimpsed today in Nil Bergstrom’s backpack and, for a split second, considered asking him about it. But no. Better to keep that to myself for now. Instead I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees.
“I want to talk to you about something, Franklin. I’ve been a bully too. I want to apologize.”
Franklin rotated the chair to face me but kept his eyes on the floor. “Okay.”
“These last few days, ever since I started talking to you, getting to know you—or at least this new you—I’ve thought a lot about that day in the locker room. Then seeing my name on the list of targets when I played Son of War High made me think about it even more. Franklin, what I did was unforgivable.”
It had happened toward the end of sophomore year. Phys ed had just finished, and we’d all tromped into the locker room to shower and change. I hated this part of the school day, because I didn’t want anyone to see my mostly naked body, and because I didn’t want to get caught peeking at anyone else’s mostly naked body either. True, I’d already come out of the closet the year before, and people hadn’t seemed to have a problem with it, but I still didn’t want them to think I was the gross kind of homo who scoped out other guys in the locker room.
Luckily, the Duluth Central boys’ shower had individual stalls, so at least I didn’t have to deal with all my business and everyone else’s flying around in the open. As soon as I’d finish showering, I’d retreat to my locker in the corner, pull up my boxer briefs underneath my towel, and throw on the rest of my clothes while keeping my eyes on the banged-up green lockers.
On this particular day I’d just yanked up my undies and slung my towel over my locker door when my eyes slipped out of their safety zone and landed on Franklin Kettle. He’d taken a locker a few down from mine. He still just had on a towel.
My glance turned into a look. I’d never noticed Franklin’s body before. I’d always been too busy in the locker room keeping my eyes to myself. He had a slim build, but his whole torso was sectioned off into perfect units of muscle. I’d never in a million years have suspected such a thing existed under his clothes.
Maybe I let myself stare more than I would’ve otherwise because I didn’t quite think of Franklin as a full-fledged person. He was just Kettlebot. He was pixels on a screen. So it surprised me when my gaze skipped up to his face and I found him looking back at me. Not with surprise or anger, and not straight into my eyes, of course. He was looking at my body the same way I’d been looking at his.
The next second I shouted, “What the fuck are you staring at me for?” The words seemed to fly out of my mouth all by themselves.
All the other boys in that part of the locker room jerked their heads around, Tor and Pete included.
“Keep your eyes to yourself, pervert,” I snarled, my face searing.
The locker room exploded with yells and barks and laughter. Fingers pointed at Franklin, who just stood there in his towel with his eyes—partially obscured, as usual, by his hair and his glasses—still on me, but darkening now, his nostrils flaring, his lips puckering, his face tilting downward as it filled with anger.
The noise just grew louder. A few guys, Pete among them, whipped out their phones to capture the moment. Others insisted Franklin had a boner. Then a random kid named Eric must’ve decided he wanted to find out for sure because he yanked off Franklin’s towel. That jerked him out of his trance. He covered himself, turned back to his locker, and rushed to put on his clothes. The mockery went on, though. I let myself melt into the audience, laughing and yelling along with the others, but maybe a little less loudly.
I guess that incident should’ve tipped me off that Franklin was gay long before he told me himself. Maybe in the same way I’d never quite thought of him as a person, I’d never quite thought of him as having a sexuality, either. A day or two after the locker room episode, down in the steam tunnels, Tor said to me, sort of teasing but sort of not, “Hey, I saw the way you were checking out Franklin in the locker room before you started yelling at him. Should I be jealous?” I probably blushed, but I laughed it off and said, “Are you kidding? Hell no.” Because the thought really did seem ridiculous. Not even worth talking about seriously.
“I’m sorry,” I told Franklin now. “I was an asshole. I only did it because I was still insecure about being gay myself. It had nothing to do with you, really.�
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“Yeah, I get it.”
I glanced at my hands. I’d managed to wash them since art class earlier that day, but some green paint still showed in the creases of my palms. “Something’s been running through my mind lately,” I said. “I guess I have a reputation around school for being nice, and considering we live in a state known for its niceness, that must mean people think I’m extra nice or something. But a couple days before she died, Callie told me being a nice person isn’t the same as being a good person, and I think she was right. My brother was good. Not me.” My eyes rose to the picture of him on the shelf above my desk. His big grin. His warm eyes. “I remember once when I was nine and Ethan was turning thirteen, I painted a T-shirt for him for his birthday. At the time I was so proud of that thing, but I can tell you now it was hideous. Big purple and green and pink swirls all over it. Not the kind of thing a cool kid should ever wear outside the house if he wants to stay cool. But Ethan wore it anyway, all the time. And the really ironic part is, pretty soon other kids in the neighborhood decided it was the height of fashion and asked me to make shirts for them, too. Even Tor and Pete.”
“I remember those,” Franklin said. “They were hideous.”
“And thanks to Ethan, for a few weeks, they were everywhere. Ever since he died, I think me being nice is just my lame attempt at being good like him.”
“I bet lots of people feel that way. But what you’re doing right now, covering for me even though most people would turn me in, that isn’t just nice.” He’d swiveled the chair around to look at Ethan’s photo too. He turned back to me now, and for the first time I really noticed in his face and body what the last few days, and all the remorse he must’ve been feeling, had done to him. The way his shoulders hunched, and the haunted look in his once empty eyes, reminded me of Sam Durham, that soldier from Ethan’s unit. “You’re right that you were an asshole that day sophomore year,” he said. “I hope it wasn’t unforgivable, though. If it was unforgivable, what would that make what I did?”
I stared down at my hands again. “Of course. I’m sorry.”
The house, the whole neighborhood, was quiet. I couldn’t even hear Mrs. Kettle’s wind chimes. The moonlight filtered through the blinds, giving them a pearly glow.
“It’s strange,” I said. “When I think back on what I did that day in the locker room, I feel like it was me, but at the same time it was a completely different person. Sort of like those nightmares you told me about, where it’s you about to kill Pete, but it’s also not you.”
He nodded.
“You know, before Mom did her operation on you, I didn’t think it would work. I never admitted it to her, but I couldn’t imagine how you could just flip a switch in a brain and turn one kind of person into another.”
“You mean like this?” He grabbed my old paperback copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the shelf above my desk.
“Exactly. I thought that kind of thing only happened in books.”
He studied the novel’s garish, melodramatic cover. “I didn’t think it would work either, but your mom told me external influences change the way the human brain functions all the time. Like psychotropic drugs. Depressants. Antidepressants. Antipsychotics. Those all change your personality. Even alcohol.”
“I guess.”
“Or when you masturbate. That would be another example.”
My face must’ve turned tomato red. “Excuse me?”
He smirked. “You know, when you take your hand and—”
“Yes, I know what masturbation is, but how is that relevant?”
“Haven’t you noticed how when you masturbate your brain fills up with all these dirty thoughts, and then the second after you, you know, finish, it’s like all those thoughts suddenly seem disgusting and you can’t believe you were just thinking them? I’ve always found that really weird.”
“Yeah,” I said, hoping to plow right past the whole masturbation thing, “my mom talked with me once about how drugs and stuff can change your personality. It never quite convinced me, though. Those things don’t change who you are. They just sort of . . . tweak it a little.”
“Did she ever tell you about Phineas Gage?”
“Phineas who?”
He pulled up his feet so he could sit cross-legged on the chair. “He was a railroad worker back in the nineteenth century. Everyone thought of him as this great guy, a hardworking, upstanding citizen. Then one day there was an explosion that drove a big iron rod straight into his eyeball, through his brain, and out the other side of his head. No one expected him to survive, but he did . . . and all of a sudden he was nothing like before. He was lazy. Mean. Crude. A completely different person. The rod had damaged his brain in just the right way.”
I inclined my head from side to side. “Okay, but what about something like what happened to you? Somebody changing for the better? Has that ever happened?”
He nodded. “Your mom also told me about another guy. He had an accident sort of like Phineas Gage’s. He was suicidal, and for some reason he decided it would be a really good idea to kill himself with a crossbow. The arrow went all the way through his brain but didn’t kill him, and just like Phineas Gage, he became completely different. Before the accident, he was violent, antisocial, and depressed. After, he was calm, peaceful, and happy. Like, really happy. The arrow must’ve hit the perfect spot, because he lived the rest of his life in pretty much a constant state of bliss. Can you imagine that?” He stared at the moon glowing through the blinds. The pearly light painted his face a pale blue.
“Yeah, it sounds pretty cool.” I glanced at the book Franklin had set on my desk and the half-shadowed face on the cover. I wondered again if I should tell him the truth about the nanodrones. I wanted to. But not now. I still couldn’t be sure how he’d react. I needed to prove his innocence first, get him safe and in the clear. I needed to give Mom a chance to prepare. Then, hopefully, the truth could come out. For now I said, “I just want you to know, Franklin, even though I didn’t believe in my mom’s procedure before, I do now. I can see you’re different. People do change. I suppose they’re changing all the time. Like, I was a different person that day in the locker room. I was still getting used to being out of the closet. I was self-conscious. I was scared. Not that I’m not all of those things now. Just less.”
“And what you did didn’t really have anything to do with me anyway, like you said before.”
I peeked at his face and found myself wondering again what he’d look like without his glasses.
“Except maybe—”
I stopped myself. Now I’d started thinking about what he’d look like without his orange hoodie. I’d started imagining the body hidden underneath his clothes.
“Except maybe it did,” I finished.
“Did what?”
“Have something to do with you.”
I got up, my face searing hot. Franklin did too. We stood face-to-face in the narrow space between the desk and the bed, our bodies leaning in toward each other a little. With both hands, I lifted off his glasses and set them on the mattress behind me. The sight of his face, bare and beautiful, drained half the oxygen from my lungs. For a second I wondered if it was rude that I’d just pulled off his glasses like that, without even asking. If I’d taken the liberty with him because I still didn’t believe he was a real person. I hoped I hadn’t. I didn’t think I had. Right now Franklin felt to me like the most real person in the world.
And he didn’t look like he minded what I’d done. His eyes—a gray that usually appeared so much duller behind the lenses of his glasses—had settled on my mouth. His lips—full and purple-red, like he’d just eaten a handful of blackberries—parted a little.
I caught his chin with my fingers and lifted it. Little by little, his eyes slid upward until they met mine. This time, unlike those other fleeting moments when we’d made eye contact over the last few days, he held my gaze. I realized if you got close enough and really looked, you could see so many colors flecking
the gray of his irises. So much space inside the black of his pupils. And I could feel him really looking into my eyes too. As if I’d become as real to him as he had to me.
Slowly, slowly, we brought our mouths together.
Until a scream sliced through the night, slicing us apart. Franklin and I stumbled back from each other, breathing hard. We bolted to the window and I wrenched the blind aside.
The scream had come from Lydia’s house. Up the street, the police officer stationed at the end of our block had already jumped out of his cruiser, gun drawn.
“Get away from the window!” I said, pushing Franklin back toward the bed.
Another scream. It was Lydia, I was sure of it. The cop had reached the Hickses’ front walk. Lights had started snapping on behind their upstairs windows one by one.
“What’s happening?” Franklin grabbed his glasses and jammed them on.
“I don’t know. I’m going to find out. Listen, don’t go anywhere. Hide under my bed.” I grabbed him by the shoulders and hustled him down to the floor. “You can’t let anyone see you, especially if something just happened. I’ll be back soon.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t—”
But I’d already pulled on a pair of sweatpants and flung open my bedroom door.
Mom stood in the hall in her robe. “Did you hear that, Rem? It sounded like somebody screaming.”
I made sure to yank my door shut behind me. “I know. I’m going to check it out.”
“Honey, it could be dangerous. Why don’t you—”
“I’ll be careful.” I jumped into my sneakers but didn’t bother with my coat or scarf. The next second I was outside, sprinting down our walkway and across the icy street toward the Hickses’ house. Now, though, I didn’t hear any screaming coming from within. Only silence.
I bounded up the Hickses’ front steps and skidded to a stop just outside the open door. Inside, a huddle of people had gathered at the base of the staircase. I picked out the cop’s big winter coat, Mr. Hicks’s bald head, Mrs. Hicks’s blue robe, a too-large T-shirt with the words DULUTH CENTRAL CARIBOU hanging on the skinny frame of Lydia’s younger brother. But what about Lydia? Where was she?
