Ferocity Summer

by Alissa Grosso

  “Hello,” I said when I walked in after Randy dropped me off.

  “Hello,” she said, and that was that.

  I went to my room, closed the door, and slept for a seeming eternity.

  Summer’s End

  Sherman’s place in history isn’t entirely clear. He’s regarded by most as a hero, but a controversial hero. Undoubtedly his military campaign is responsible for bringing the Civil War to its long-awaited conclusion. He achieved his ends through the creation of an entirely new war strategy. The idea of total war. He brought the horror and ugliness of the war to the South, and didn’t relent until they cried uncle. Still, there are some who think he went too far. Maybe he did.

  Maybe his out-of-control, frenzied attack upon the South was the only way to assure a Union victory. We have no way of knowing. All we know for sure is that the man—like the charred landscape dotted with twisted railway lines known as Sherman’s neckties—bore little resemblance to the man who only a short while earlier had witnessed his first Civil War battle. War, and life in general, will do that to a person. Sometimes change is inevitable. Sometimes it’s the only way to save your sanity or your neck.

  With Willow wigged out of her mind and Andrea worried that being seen with me would damage her reputation, I was fast running out of people I could bum a ride off of. I hadn’t spoken to Randy since our trip home from the depths of hell, and I wasn’t about to turn to my lord and savior Christian Calambeaux. There was really only one other option, and I tentatively dialed his number from memory.

  “Hi. It’s Scilla.”

  “Hi,” Bill said.

  “Um, I was kind of wondering if you would want to give me a ride somewhere.”

  “All right.”

  I didn’t know what to say when I got in Bill’s car. Everything in my life had changed completely in the space of a week, and I was no longer sure how to communicate with people.

  “Where are we going?” Bill asked.

  “To a friend’s house. His name is Pablo. He’s that guy I was telling you about at the concert.”

  “Are you, um, free Friday night?” Bill asked. The beads of sweat on his forehead called into question the casual tone he seemed to be going for. “I mean, if you’re not, I understand, it’s cool. I was going to go see that new movie, with the spaceships, and I wondered if you wanted to go with me.”

  He was a far cry from being conventionally handsome. He made Randy look nearly sexy. He was weird. He did things like trying to build bombs, for fun. Even the movie he wanted to take me to was a complete nerd movie. The excuse was perched on my lips. Except I was free Friday night, and Bill was asking me on a real, live, actual date. I quickly glanced over at him, then back out my window. He wasn’t exactly ugly. He had an almost distinctive look that shone through beneath all the baby fat.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That movie looks kind of good.” It did, actually, and right about then I needed a bit of escapism. Leaving Earth’s orbit for a couple of hours might be just the thing for my weary mind.

  “I read the book it’s based on five and a half times,” Bill said. “The movies are never as good as the books, but the effects look like they’re going to be awesome.”

  He was a nerd, and probably always would be, but he was also a decent guy despite all his empty threats against the government. I could do a whole lot worse. Besides, it was just one date.

  “I’m reading Brave New World,” I told him.

  “That’s an awesome book,” Bill said.

  I stole another glance at Bill. He was sort of cute in a way. He might make a good boyfriend.

  “I don’t think anyone’s home,” Bill said as we parked the car in the overgrown dirt driveway. “It’s all boarded up.”

  “He’s here,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He’s got nowhere else to go.”

  We found Pablo sitting in the backyard. His face was overgrown with a thick beard, and his clothes were very dirty. He was rolling a small rock around in his hands. He smiled when he saw us.

  “Starburst,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “Not so great.” I said. “Bill, meet Pablo the Perpetually Stoned.”

  Bill stood there awkwardly, but Pablo smiled at him.

  “I just wanted to come here to let you know that you were right,” I said. “I mean about your fortunes.”

  “Oh,” Pablo said, looking back down at the rock in his hands.

  “I remembered what you said about people coming up here and yelling at you because they thought you’d got their fortunes wrong, and I wondered if anyone ever came up here to tell you that you got them right. See, a lot of stuff has happened to me in the past few weeks or so. Makes me feel kind of old, not like a kid anymore. It hasn’t really been good stuff, but I guess good stuff wouldn’t make you grow up quick. Anyway, I wish I was still a kid, you know—things were a lot easier, even if they did suck. You got Willow’s fortune right too. She wigged out on Ferocity. She’s in a hospital right now. She drools. She has no idea what’s going on. That’s why you didn’t really see anything for her future. She doesn’t have one. She’s just a human vegetable. She’s got a murkiness for her future, just like you saw in your palm.”

  “If you’re trying to cheer me up, Starburst, it’s not going to work.”

  “I just think it’s time you came down off the mountain.”

  “I like it here,” Pablo said.

  “I liked being a kid even though I didn’t know it at the time,” I said. “But sooner or later you have to face the real world.”

  “What do you make of all this, Rebel?” Pablo asked.

  There was a silence.

  “He’s talking to you,” I said to Bill.

  “Oh,” Bill said. “Make of what?”

  “This facing-the-real-world shit,” Pablo said.

  “It doesn’t sound like much fun,” Bill said, “but you can’t hide out in your basement forever, plotting ways to undermine the government.”

  “No,” Pablo agreed. “But that does sound like fun.”

  “It was, for a while, but I’m ready to move on. Do you want a ride?” Bill asked.

  “To where?” Pablo asked.

  “Back to the real world,” I said.

  Pablo shrugged. “All right.” He tossed the stone into the woods. It soared through the air, hit something, and fell to the ground. “It was a diamond,” he explained. “At least, that’s what I was trying to see, but it just kept looking like a dirty old rock to me.”

  “Maybe it’s time to take the soul glasses off,” I said.

  “Maybe I just need a new prescription,” Pablo said.

  The three of us walked silently back to the car, our feet crunching on the parched August grass. Bill drove us back down the unpaved driveway. Pablo made him stop at the bottom so that he could stick the neon gnome in the trunk.

  “For good luck,” he explained.

  Then we drove on down the road toward reality.

  Epilogue

  When I sat down to write that Sherman paper, I didn’t know where to begin. I’ve never been good at writing papers. I always lose my focus or don’t seem to have one to begin with. I caught up on reading about Sherman after I returned from Florida and he seemed hopelessly tied together with everything that had happened to me. So my paper, such as it was, turned out to be a bit longer than Mr. Berm’s twenty-page requirement. Of course, in retrospect, I realize that it could have benefited from a little editing. Did my history teacher really need to read about my mismatched love affairs? Did he even need to know about Willow? But I was angry, and when the paper was finally done, I didn’t even want to take another look at it. I just handed all two-hundred-and-something pages in.

  I got a C-, which was passing and not much more: You misunderstood the nature of the assignment, and the deductions and connections you draw are primitive at best and erroneous at worst, Mr. Berm wrote. Beyond that, proper manuscript formatting was ignored and no
sources were cited. I commend you for your effort and am thus awarding you a passing grade. If life was a movie, I would have gotten an A+ and a free ride to Princeton.

  I had better luck with the trial. Perhaps because of what had happened to Willow or perhaps because he had some sudden desire for moral rectitude, Tigue surprised everyone by getting up on the witness stand and claiming full responsibility for the accident. He was the one who served us the alcohol in a deliberate attempt to get us drunk so that he might take advantage of us. I knew this was bullshit, but the jury bought it. It was an easy story to buy, and it probably didn’t hurt that in legal terms, Tigue and Randy were adults while Willow and I were minors. Tigue even made a vague attempt to paint Willow and me as heroes by saying that we attempted to get the boat to safety in the middle of a thunderstorm even though we’d never driven a boat before.

  Tigue’s misdemeanor was deemed worthy of a five-year prison sentence, thanks in part to his previous alcohol-related arrest and the death of a South Jersey high school valedictorian at the hands of a drunk driver just a week before the trial opened. Tigue’s parents were mortified. His mother shrieked when the jury read the verdict, then ran out of the courtroom in tears. His father’s expression remained stony and impassive. Tigue looked almost relieved. I don’t know if he wanted to be punished, or if he just hated his life so much and wanted so badly to get away that even the state prison was a good alternative. As I watched him standing there, I wished I’d had the opportunity to get to know him better. I think he was somehow much more than the simpleton I’d pegged him for.

  Randy was put on probation for his part in the accident. When I saw him in the courtroom, it was the first time I’d seen him since he dropped me off at home after the long trip back from Florida. It had been only a few weeks, but Randy looked completely changed. I still didn’t love him or care about him very much, but when I saw him, I had the urge to take him in my arms and just hold him. I wanted to comfort him, but of course that never happened. Whatever had existed between us was over. It was as if Willow had been the glue that held us together, making my bizarre incestuous thoughts not so strange after all.

  This will come out sounding all wrong, but if Willow had died, it would have made things easier. Somehow, death is easier to deal with than the thing Willow became. She’s still alive, but she’s not here. She was transported back to New Jersey and is at a private care facility, which is just a nice way of saying a nursing home. Nursing homes are sad and ugly places, but even uglier is to see a seventeen-year-old girl living in one. After the trial, I told myself that I would go visit her once a week.

  When I went, I would sit in one of the uncomfortable armchairs in her room while Willow sat in the bed or in one of the other chairs. She would fix her vacuous gaze on whatever happened to be in her line of sight. Sometimes she would stare for hours out a window whose blinds were closed. Sometimes she would just stare at the institutional-gray floor.

  “I’ve got Lerner for English this year,” I said, continuing to keep the one-sided conversation going for appearance’s sake. “I’ve always thought he was a real hardass, but I don’t know. You know, he doesn’t give out homework. Says it’s led to the disintegration of the American family. Well, shit, it’s too late for me, but … ” Awkward silence followed as I realized how completely Willow’s breakdown had forced the disintegration of her own family. Randy, on probation, was taking a year off from school and had his own apartment over somebody’s garage. He worked at a nearby bagel shop. Midge had not handled Willow’s situation well at all, blaming her husband for everything. She walked out and went to go live with her parents in Connecticut. Mr. Jenkins went on with his life as best he could, but he’d become somewhat eccentric. The last time I drove by their house, the yard was overgrown and there were dozens of bags of garbage lying in the driveway, as if he couldn’t even bear the thought of dragging them to the curb. I tried to imagine what they might contain, and pictured Mr. Jenkins tearing apart Willow’s bedroom and shoving everything into the plastic garbage bags. But for all I know they contained empty pizza boxes and orange juice cartons.

  “So, senior year, huh?” I went on. “Well, don’t worry, you’re not missing much. I mean, it still pretty much sucks. I miss you. The only person I’ve got to hang out with now is Andrea, and you know how she is. God, I’m not even interested in her anymore. She’s going out with some soccer player from Sparta this week. I think his name is Cole, and last week she was dating some sophomore geek who plays the flute or clarinet or something. Apparently he’s got excellent lips and some sort of super tongue. I’m not even jealous; okay, maybe a little.” Down the hall, an old woman screamed for someone named Charles.

  This is how it was every time I visited her. I rambled on and on about everything I thought she would want to know about, and she stared off into space. Did she hear a thing I said? It didn’t seem likely. Anyway, after a while I stopped going every week. I found excuses, other things I had to do. After a while, I just stopped going. It’s not that I didn’t feel bad, but it was hard to see Willow like that, and I was afraid that if I kept seeing that Willow, I would forget the old one.

  In the end, the only sentence I received was the requirement to complete an outpatient drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation program. I never really took the rehab program seriously because I knew I didn’t really have a problem. All I had was a shitty life and a penchant for escapism. Still, I thought it would be good, at least for the sake of my own psyche, to make amends. I started with Christian, because I figured I hadn’t been as nice to him as I should have when I knew he just wanted to help me.

  I got Andrea to drive me to his apartment one Saturday afternoon and knocked on the door. I could hear fighting inside, a man and a woman. Merry and Christian, I figured. I’d come at a bad time, and when the door didn’t open right away, I started to leave. But then I heard the clatter of the chain and the click of a deadbolt. I turned around. A woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a stained T-shirt and a pair of grubby sweatpants. Her hair was a complete mess and there was a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She was not Merry.

  “What do you want?” she asked. I assumed I’d gotten the apartment wrong. But then Christian appeared behind her, and when he saw me he started to pull her back from the door so he could talk to me alone. I didn’t stay. I turned and ran.

  I knew the woman was his new girlfriend, his latest rescue from the trash bin of humanity. I don’t know what happened to Merry—whether he threw her out or whether she left of her own accord. I guess sometimes first impressions should be trusted. I didn’t like Christian when I first met him, and now I felt sure that whatever his intentions, he was not really a good person.

  The other person I intended to see was Gary Ballaster, the man whose wife died in the boating accident (I’d decided to stop thinking of him as the man whose wife I had killed). I chickened out. Instead, I visited her grave and put flowers on it. I stood and stared at her headstone. Her name was Mary Keigh Ballaster, and she’d been thirty-six.

  I thought of Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate general who’d surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina. Years later, Johnston wound up being a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral. Supposedly it was a cold day and Johnston caught a chill while paying his respects, which worsened and eventually brought about his own demise, like Sherman was conquering the poor sap from beyond the grave.

  It wasn’t especially cold as I crouched in front of Mary Keigh Ballaster’s headstone. I was probably safe, but there was always the chance that a plane could plunge out of the sky and land right on this very spot, or maybe the earth would spontaneously open up and swallow me whole. My guess is, Mary hadn’t been expecting some stupid high school girl to crash right into the boat she was on and kill her. She probably thought she was safe.

  I wanted to feel contrite, but this is something that’s hard to do on demand. I felt worse about what had happened to Willow, because she’d been my best friend, and Mary Keigh Ballas
ter, even after everything, was still a complete stranger. Yet they were connected. The night that Mary died was the beginning of Willow’s own end. So, in this way, it felt all right to stare at Mary’s tombstone and cry for Willow.

  Ferocity turned out to be nothing but a fad. The drug’s popularity died down by the fall. In October, the bass player for Davies Pauliny was hospitalized for a Ferocity “overdose.” It was the first celebrity example of the drug’s effects. It spelled the end of the drug’s heyday, as well as Davies Pauliny’s fifteen minutes of fame. By the new year there wasn’t even a mention of Ferocity on the news and Davies Pauliny had been supplanted by an all-girl band from Naugatuck, Connecticut, who sang songs about tampons, Emily Dickinson, and dry humping.

  Bill and I stayed friends. He called me from time to time, either to tell me that I was the most genuinely good person he knew or to warn me about what the government was really spraying on my vegetables, and why. But he had gone soft. When he spent his winter break doing constructive things like painting the living room and putting shelves up in his garage, I knew that he’d grown out of his anarchistic phase.

  My English teacher, the one who doesn’t give homework, brought up the idea one day in class that there’s not one universe but an infinite number of universes, that each decision that’s made thrusts us into a specific future universe. Somewhere out there is a universe where Willow and I never go to Florida, where our summer progresses with little or no fanfare. Then there’s another one where we never even go out on Tigue’s boat. I like to think of the versions of Willow and me that live in this universe, blissfully unaware of our other selves, happy, carefree, with futures brighter than the sun.

  In my less optimistic moments, I’ll try to imagine a universe far worse than the one I am in—one where I go to jail for life or am crippled in the car accident, or worse yet, become a Ferocity victim. In a sense, these pessimistic musings are meant to bring me back to the realization that the universe I landed in isn’t so bad after all. But they also make me realize that there are a lot of decisions down the road, and that I have to be careful not to steer myself into a universe much worse than this one.