Absolute Brightness (8 page)

“Hello?” I croaked.

The sound, as it turned out, was Leonard; he sat huddled in a corner of his “room,” his knees drawn up to his chest, his arms tightly wrapped around himself. He was sobbing. Hard. I knocked on the side of one of the boxes to announce myself, and he looked up at me. His eyes were red rimmed and brimming with tears; his face looked hot and swollen. The shape of his mouth perfectly imitated that cheesy mask of tragedy that hung on the wall outside Ms. Deitmueller's Drama Club, except that in Leonard's case, a thin string of dribble was dangling from the gaping hole. As soon as he saw me, he sprang up from his position on the floor and threw himself facedown on his bed. It was a dramatic move, but one I recognized from my own dramatic childhood; it was the kind of move designed to signal that there was really no hope to be found in this cruel and heartless world, and the only solace was being able to block out everything in sight. He buried his head in a pillow, and even though his sobs were momentarily muffled, it was clear he wasn't going to stop any time soon.

“Leonard…?”

“Go away.”

“What's the matter?

“
Go. A. Way.
”

I stood there letting my presence convey what my words couldn't. I wanted him to know that he wasn't alone, and whatever it was that was causing him such grief (I suspected it was the Deirdre Debacle), it couldn't be
that
bad, not really, and even if it was that bad, the whole thing would probably blow over soon enough and be completely forgotten.

“Well,” I finally said, “
something
must be the matter.”

He popped up, swung around, and stared at me with real hatred.

“Well, let's see,” he began, infusing his voice with venom and mock curiosity. “Could it be maybe that my father never did much for me except be a jerk? Or wait, maybe it's that my mother's dead and I'm now forced to live in a stupid cellar surrounded by crappy cardboard boxes and people who secretly hate my guts?”

He fell back onto the bed and started up a whole new jag of crying. I wanted to say something, something like, “Hey, no one hates you here,” but it was such an obvious lie that I couldn't utter a single word of it.

“You don't know how hard it is,” he mumbled into the pillow. “You can't even imagine.” And then he let out a loud, mournful wail that made me actually take a step back in horror. I so wished he were a backed-up washing machine. Anything but this.

“If you're crying about Deirdre's hair…,” I began.

There was more wailing, followed by a noisy intake of breath. By this point, he had worked himself into a pitch of hysterical proportions. I knew the signs; I'd exhibited them myself often enough during my adolescence and childhood. Once you got going with a performance like that, there was no stopping until exhaustion set in. I decided to sit on the edge of the bed and wait it out with him. Seemed like the least I could do.

Finally I managed to offer this: “I thought you liked it here?”

“I
doooooooooo
!” he howled. He lifted his head to wipe his nose on the pillowcase. Gross. “It's not…” Another gasp for breath. “It's not…” For a moment I thought he was saying
it's snot.
“It's not”—he motioned all around him with a gesture that was theatrical to the extreme—“
here
that's the problem. It's
here
!” And to make his point, he began pounding his head with his two clenched fists. “It's my brain, my mind.
It's me!
”

Poor kid. It was hard not to feel sorry for him. He'd been through so much and he wasn't even fifteen. But then, when he started to literally pull his hair out, I knew I had to do more than pity him; I had to intervene. Grabbing hold of his spindly wrists, I pushed against his strength, which as it happened was something to be reckoned with for a kid so slight and swish.

“Don't. Okay?” I said. “You're scaring me.”

He looked up at me and tilted his head, and in that moment all his resistance fell away. He just sat there, staring at me, scanning my face and clothes and hair, assessing it all and calculating the cost of change. I felt for sure that he was a heartbeat away from making some pronouncement about my look or offering a suggestion about how to style my hair or rearrange my outfit. I could see that all his attention was suddenly focused on me and he had stopped crying. I figured, hey, if this was his way of coping, the least I could do was to hear what he had to say.

“Go on,” I said.

“What?”

“Go ahead. Say it. I know what you're thinking.”

“I'm not thinking anything. Honest. I'm just looking.”

Unable to stand the pressure of his gaze another moment, I glanced around the room looking for I-don't-know-what. I happened to notice that one of the boxes had been opened and there was a small stack of books on the floor. I walked right over to the pile and picked up one of the books.

My grandmother, Judy Hertle, had a collection of books written by people who had died and then come back to life, people who could see into other dimensions, people who spoke to spirit beings on the other side, people who wrote automatically. She was into that kind of thing back when she was still alive and living in Bradley Beach. I never actually read these books, but I had poked around in her boxes of stuff enough to know what they were about and to know they were not for me. I also knew them well enough to recognize them sitting beside Leonard's bed.

“You've been going through these boxes,” I said as I brandished a copy of Edgar Cayce's
Channeling Your Higher Self
in Leonard's face. “You know you're not supposed to. This is not your stuff.”

“I couldn't sleep.” He was suddenly done with the crying; all of his attention was focused outward—on me. “I wasn't snooping. Honest. I was just looking for something to read.”

I started furiously packing the books back into the open box.

“She must've been something. Your grandmother.”

Nothing from me. He wasn't getting a word.

“I don't remember what book it came from, but I read this thing all about how the whole world is actually a pulsing, glowing web of invisible fiber optics that connect one person to another.”

I turned and stared at him hard. “They don't belong to you.”

He was now up, kneeling on his bedspread, and even though his face was swollen and puffy from crying, he was lit with excitement.

“But still,” he went on, “it said that the stronger and truer the bond between two people, the brighter the strand between them becomes. The more strands there are, the brighter the overall glow. Not everyone can see this, of course, because not everyone is looking, but certain people—the guy who wrote the book, for example—could see it all the time. He said sometimes he was blinded by it.”

“Anything else?” I asked, giving my voice as much edge as I could without actually drawing blood.

“Actually, yeah. A lot,” he said, ignoring my tone. “Like sometimes the glow got so dim, he worried it would completely disappear. And I was thinking maybe that's why you shoplift. Maybe you steal stuff as a way of making more connection. What I mean is, maybe you
want
to get caught so that—”

“What're you talking about? I do
not
shoplift. Are you saying I
steal
things? What've I stolen? What? Name one thing.”

He just knelt there staring at me. He didn't need to name anything. I was busy doing a complete mental inventory, trying to recall every item I'd ever stolen, while forcing my face to adopt the most innocent expression I could manage under the circumstances.

The phone rang. It was Mom calling to find out what all the howling had been about. She said she'd heard it over the sound of the hair dryer, for God's sakes. When I told her what had happened, she immediately left her station to be by Leonard's side. Even though the crisis had passed, Mom cradled Leonard in her arms and talked softly to him while Mrs. Ferrante was kept waiting in the salon with a wet head and a fashion magazine. That kind of coddling never happened to me when I was Leonard's age and I happened to fall into a pit of despair about the sorry state of my life. I returned to my room to read the last of Fanny Price. She and her new husband “had removed to Mansfield Park,” and soon those people who had caused Fanny “some painful sensation of restraint and alarm” began to seem “thoroughly perfect in her eyes.” Lucky for her. Of my makeover nothing more was said.

*   *   *

A month later, as I sat perched on the edge of Electra's bed pretending to have trouble with the zipper of my sweatshirt, I couldn't help wondering why Leonard had never gotten around to at least suggesting some improvement to my person. Was I too far gone? Did he think I wasn't worth it? Had my personal glow completely disappeared? He had zeroed in on almost everyone in town. Either he had made substantial changes to each of them or he had had a plan. Even if they point-blank refused to change their hair color or have their faces peeled or their tummies tucked or any of the 1,001 things he had in mind for them to do, they seemed to blossom simply because someone had them in mind and was willing to think of them as more than what they were. In this way, my mother had become someone else, and my sister was now unrecognizable. Surely I
had
to be next. But when? After so many months of waiting for Leonard to propose a plan for my improvement, I was beginning to see that I might be mistaken. I just wasn't in the running. He had no interest in me. Whenever I saw him coming at me, I ducked into my room and prayed he wouldn't find me. He usually walked right by. If he came upon me while I was doing my hair or putting on makeup, he stared at me hard but never made a suggestion. And Lord knows I could have used some suggestions. You might think that I'm putting myself down when I tell you this, but I'm not; it's just something I've learned from experience. I'm just not the type of girl a guy like Travis Lembeck kisses twice.

“What's wrong with
me
?” I asked Leonard, blurting out the question that had been rolling around in my brain for the past several weeks.

Electra and Leonard stopped discussing the merits and failings of various modern movie stars and their respective current hairstyles and upcoming projects. They both turned their attention on me, a non–movie star.

“I mean, how come I never get a makeover?”

I was looking directly at Leonard, though I gave a sharp, quick look over to Electra. I wanted to let her know that this was not some sort of practical joke that I was playing on Leonard. I wasn't setting him up for a fall like we sometimes did just so we could watch his shoulders slump and his mouth turn down the moment when he discovered we were actually putting him on. No, this was serious. I wanted to know once and for all.

“Everybody else seems to get some kind of program, while I'm just left to sit on the bed and play with my zipper.”

“Pheebs,” said Electra with real hesitancy in her voice, “for real?”

“Yes, for real. But hey, it's not like I would do what he says, or anything. And I'm not going around thinking anything's wrong with me, like I
need
fixing. I'm fine. But after a while, when no one's paying attention to you … I dunno. It makes a person wonder is all.”

“I pay attention to you, Phoebe,” Leonard said in the most pathetic voice imaginable. Then he tried to take hold of my hand in a tragic attempt to comfort me. I swatted him away, smacking the back of his freckled wrist with surprising force.

“Get off me.”

Leonard just stood there, stung. He held his hit hand in his other hand and looked at me. Electra fell into an overstuffed chair and threw her legs over the arm. She gave her head a couple of quick shakes to indicate that she didn't know what the hell was going on. Who could blame her?

“I don't know,” said Leonard, looking up toward the ceiling and literally sticking his neck out to offer his opinion. “Maybe you'll hit me again for saying it, but as far as I'm concerned, you're the one person around here who doesn't need a makeover. I mean it. To me, you're like my total ideal. You're kinda perfect.”

Electra's face registered the shock first. She blinked and then nodded her head once real fast, as if she were trying to wake herself from a dream. Her mouth opened, but she didn't say anything. She started to laugh and then pointed at my face.

“What?” I said to her.

“You. Your face. Man, if you could see your face right now.”

I turned back to Leonard, and it was clear from his expression that he wasn't playing me. He meant every word.

 

six

I WAS SITTING
in the brightly lit auditorium of Neptune High School, surrounded by a hundred other girls. In my hand I held a pink piece of paper, a pledge I had just willingly signed. I, Phoebe Margaret Hertle, agreed to abstain from sexual intercourse until the day I became a married woman. There was other stuff, too, about how I planned to conduct myself as a woman of unlimited self-esteem. None of the girls who had signed along with me actually took the thing seriously, because it was invented and introduced to us by a young woman wearing a pink sweater with a scoop neck, pressed jeans, and a pair of Puma running shoes. She said that she was a former Miss New Jersey contestant. I instantly felt sorry for her, less on account of her pitiful claim to fame than because of her hair. It was all wrong—triple processed, crimped, and invented for softer lighting than a high school auditorium. She admitted that the computer-generated document would not be binding in any court of law, but she hoped that before any of us “compromised our virginity,” we would stop and think about the consequences, and consider how a simple act performed in the heat of passion could change the course of our whole entire lives.