Noggin (28 page)

“Man!” Rodrigo yelled. We all jumped a little in our seats.

“Yeah, Cate, let’s go,” I said.

“Travis,” she whispered. “I’m with Turner. I don’t know why you—”

“Man.” Maraca shake. “Man.” Maraca shake. “Man.”

“I’m gonna kill him,” Turner said.

“Turner, calm down.” Cate put her hand on top of his.

“No, not Travis. This moron hippie on the stage.”

“This is the worst moment of my life,” I said, setting my head down on the table.

“Which life?” Turner asked, laughing.

“That’s not funny,” Cate said.

“The one where I kick your ass in this coffee shop,” I said, sitting back up.

“MAN! MAN! MAN! MAN! MAN! MAN!”

“Okay, Travis. Chill out, dude.”

Then I stood up and punched him right in the face just as Rodrigo held up his maraca and started convulsing on the stage. Turner fell back in the booth and held his hands to his face. There may have been blood, but I didn’t get a good look. I thought about grabbing the ring from the table, but instead I just bent down into Cate’s ear and said, “You can sell that to pay for the honeymoon.” Then I walked out holding Jeremy Pratt’s aching fist.

I didn’t tell Hatton what had happened, and I ignored the five calls in a row from Cate on the drive home. Once we got to my house, I stormed over to the front door. I wasn’t crying. I was too upset to cry. I sat down on the doormat with my knees folded up to my chest. Hatton walked over and sat down beside me.

“What happened?”

“She didn’t say yes.”

“Shit.”

“But she didn’t say no, either.”

“Oh. Travis . . .”

“I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“This. Exist. Be here like this with everything so fucked up.”

“Hey, Travis? I don’t think it really matters if you know how to exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think any of us do.”

“Then what are we doing?”

“I don’t know. We’re just meandering.”

Let’s pretend the whole thing at the coffee shop never happened. Let’s pretend Turner never came back to the table and Cate said yes to my proposal and, miraculously, Rodrigo never showed up to perform. Let’s pretend it all worked out and everything was okay again. Everything was as close to normal as it ever could be.

It doesn’t work, does it? Pretending away something you can’t change doesn’t work. I thought I was so close, and then I was further away than ever. I was finally forced to face the truth: Cate Conroy was no longer mine. And Turner, who should’ve beaten me to death with that weirdo’s maraca, didn’t. And that probably made him the better man. The only man, really.

Two weeks went by after that, and they seemed much longer than all the weeks before. Maybe it was because I stayed pretty zoned out the whole time, at school,
at home, even when Kyle and Hatton would drag me out of the house to go see a movie or go eat or just ride around town aimlessly. They tried. I’ll give them that. They tried really hard to cheer me up.

I even spent a night at my dad’s place, and despite still being pretty disturbed by his secret Travis museum, it was nice being there with all my old stuff. After he’d gone to bed, I went through my clothes and searched all the pockets. And I smelled them, which I know is weird, but you’d have done it too. All these years they’d been in storage and then this apartment, and they still smelled like my house. They smelled like I could open the door and yell for my mom and she’d be just down the hall.

I found an old notebook from school on the shelf in the closet and flipped through it. Aside from algebra notes, each page was covered in sloppy doodles and black-and-white checkerboards of ink. It was something I still did sometimes in class when I was having a hard time listening. I’d draw six vertical lines and intersect them with six horizontal lines, and then I’d fill in every other little square with my pen.

Then I looked through all the books on the bookshelf. I’d read a handful of them, maybe, but Mom had let me sign up for one of those book-of-the-month club things at the book fair when I was in middle school, and I used to get copies of the Boxcar Children or Hardy Boys like clockwork and just add them to the overflowing shelf, promising to read them someday. In one book
I found a leaf pressed between two pages. It was almost falling apart when I lifted it up to look at it. I’d taken it from the park one day when I was a kid. I’d wanted to remember that day for some reason. And even though I was holding the leaf all those years later and I knew it was supposed to remind me of something, it had escaped me completely.

The drawers of my desk were filled with more notebooks and junk that I’d hoarded. There was a Frodo Baggins bobblehead figurine on the desktop that still shook every time I slid open a drawer. In the back of the third drawer down, I found a photograph of Cate and me that I’d stuck under a couple of old yearbooks. We were fourteen and sitting side by side in eighth-grade French class. I was smiling, but I wasn’t showing my teeth. I never liked showing my teeth in photos when I was younger. Cate had her hair in a ponytail, and her smile was wide and unattached to any sense of self-consciousness.

I ended up sleeping better that night than any other I could remember, with my old movie posters of
Vertigo
and
Jaws
and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
hanging on the walls around me and my too-long body making my feet stick out over the short wooden railing of the twin bed. On the far wall, just above the TV, there was an empty spot where Cate’s painting of the movie theater should’ve been hanging.

She kept trying to call. For two weeks she called at least twice a day and left messages apologizing and
saying she was worried about me. In some of them she was crying. I never thought I could be the kind of person who ignored someone like Cate. But it was too much. I needed more time. Talking to her would make it worse. Seeing her with Turner had changed everything.

Then one day she stopped calling and I found the ring box sitting on the front steps after school. I stood there looking at the tiny silver circle in my hand and wondering what the hell had happened to me.

My parents were worried too. I’d never been the quiet type. Not before and not when I’d come back to them. But now I just sat around listening to music or watching TV and felt like I didn’t really have anything to say. I didn’t want to talk about the divorce. I didn’t want to talk about Cate. And I surely didn’t want to talk about the future. The future was something I didn’t really care about anymore. It had pretty much been a bitch to me so far, so I think I was allowed to be a little wary of it.

One Saturday at Mom’s she came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. It was around noon, and I hadn’t gotten up yet. This would’ve been normal teenage behavior if I hadn’t been in that same spot since four o’clock the afternoon before.

“Travis, you know, you can’t stay like this forever.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. Now let’s get you up. It’s a nice day outside. It’s warm. The sun’s shining.”

“Pass. It’s a good thought, though. But still. I pass. I’m fine right here.”

“You’re making it hard to feel sorry for you.” She looked down at the half of my face that wasn’t smashed into a pillow.

“I’d think it would be pretty easy, actually.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“What’s that, Mom?”

“I think if the old you were here right now, hooked to IVs and doped up on all kinds of drugs, well, I think he’d probably kick your sorry ass.”

With that she put some clean socks she’d been holding into my top dresser drawer and walked out. She had a point, I guess. The old me probably would kick my sorry ass. He’d probably look at me and be embarrassed at what I’d so quickly become—someone healthy who pretends to be dying.

After she left, I rolled over enough to nearly fall out of bed and caught myself before my face hit the floor. When I looked up, I noticed my closet door had been left open just enough to see the bottom edge of the container full of letters from school. I dragged it to the center of my room and tossed the lid aside, then reached in with my eyes closed and grabbed an envelope. I tore it open at one end and started reading.

YOU ARE A SIGN OF THE END TIMES. REPENT!

I picked another letter.

Dear Travis,

You are my hero. Do you have any information on the Saranson Center? I have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and would love to undergo the same procedure as you. Does it hurt? How do you like your new body?

And then I stopped reading. I dropped the letter, put the lid on the box, and crawled back into bed. How was I supposed to respond to any of that? I didn’t have answers for these people. Not the crazy ones or the ones who thought I’d made the right choice. I was just some dumb kid with a hell of a lot of good luck. It was hard for me to imagine a day when I’d be ready for that—when I’d be able to sit down and listen to all the things these strangers expected of me.

•  •  •

Exactly three weeks after my failed marriage proposal to Cate, Kyle and Hatton showed up at my door holding a Ziploc bag full of cremated cat remains.

“Travis, say hello to Binky.” Hatton held the bag up to my face.

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes, Travis,” Kyle said. “Step aside, there’s work to be done.”

Once they were in the house, Kyle and Hatton started looking around. Keep in mind that Hatton was still holding a liter-size plastic bag full of Binky’s ashes. They were definitely Binky’s, by the way, because it was written in black Sharpie ink on the side.

“Your mom home?” Kyle asked.

“She’s at work. We really don’t need to do this now, guys.”

“But we do, Travis. We’ve got to bury the past. Or spread it or whatever,” Kyle said.

“Or it’s not too late to get those tattoos we discussed,” Hatton added.

“So where are they, then?” Kyle asked.

“I’ll go get them. Hang on.”

I found the green tin cookie jar right where I’d left it, in the back corner of the guest room closet, and I brought it out to them. Kyle grabbed it from me and headed toward the kitchen. He set it in the sink and took the lid off.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“We can’t risk spilling any on the floor. Hatton, bring me the cat.”

Hatton walked over with Binky’s remains and opened up the bag like it had potato chips inside. He handed it to Kyle, who immediately got this confused expression and looked up at us.

“We need like a . . . mixing bowl, maybe.”

“What?” I was going back and forth between frustrated and disgusted.

“Well, we need to get you out of the jar and Binky into the jar and then you into the bag. So we need an in-between container.” It scared me how serious Kyle was.

I opened the cabinet by the sink and handed him a shiny metal mixing bowl and then stepped back in horror. He slowly and carefully poured the contents of the cookie jar into the bowl, and then Hatton walked over and started pouring Binky into the empty jar. Then Hatton held the bag open as Kyle poured me into the now-empty bag. The whole thing took less than five minutes, but I would be scarred for life.

“There. Perfect. Hatton, this was a grand idea.” Kyle patted him on the back.

Hatton held up the bag, which now had all that was left of my body inside, and gave me this dead-serious stare.

“Travis, what do you feel?”

“Nothing. Well, a little nauseous.”

“No,” Hatton said. “Focus on Binky’s Plastic Bag of Raw Emotion and just let it happen, man. Let it all out.”

I returned the cookie jar to its hiding place, and when I walked back into the kitchen, Kyle was scrubbing the mixing bowl in the sink. He was whistling. And Hatton? Hatton was sitting at the counter eating a baby carrot.

“What now, weirdos?”

“Now, Travis, now we lay you to rest once and for all.”

“Oh boy.”

“When’s the last time you talked to Cate?” Hatton asked, still chewing a carrot.

“Are you serious right now?
That’s
what you want to talk about?”

“It’s important.”

“Three weeks ago. In the coffee shop.”

“She says she’s tried to call you a million times,” Kyle added. He was using a hand towel to dry the bowl.

“I can’t yet. Maybe eventually but not yet.”

“But can you see her?” Kyle asked.

“Why do you even ask that? If I can’t talk to her, then I don’t want to see her either.”

“Just hear us out,” Kyle began.

“What’d you do?”

“We invited her to go with us,” Hatton said.

“To go with us where? What the hell are you guys talking about? Where are we going?”

“Oh. Yeah. We should tell him. Should we tell him yet?” Hatton had a very excited, almost sinister look in his eyes.

“Travis,” Kyle said. “Maybe sit down for a second, okay?”

“Okay.” I sat down.

“Travis, we found Jeremy Pratt.”

Before he died, Jeremy Pratt and his parents signed a waiver stating that the Saranson Center for Life Preservation could transport his corpse from a hospital in Quincy, Illinois, to Denver, Colorado. This was done using an ambulance so a series of machines could keep his heart beating and his lungs pumping air. In Denver he was carefully decapitated and, after the fifty-six-hour surgery to attach his body to my neck was completed, Jeremy Pratt’s cremated remains were shipped home to his family and buried in the Pleasant Grove Cemetery on Locust Street.

Which brings us to an unseasonably warm day in February. I was sitting in the backseat of Kyle’s truck, and he and Hatton were trying to convince me that everything happens for a reason. They were having a hard time with this. Audrey Hagler was sitting beside me with an enthused expression on her face.
I still wasn’t sure why she was there with us, but I knew Hatton had something to do with it.

Then we pulled into a driveway I didn’t recognize, and as I leaned up to ask where we were, I saw her. Cate was walking toward us with hesitation, no doubt considering turning back and running away. But she opened the door and took a seat on the other side of Audrey. I looked over at her and she half waved, giving me that sad expression of hers. If you’re ever dying, which I hope you’re not, this is a look you’ll get used to. People will try to smile at you and talk to you without thinking about what’s happening, but there’s always this slight change in their lips and eyes. It’ll bother you the first few times, make you feel like no one will ever be sincere with you again, but it’s not like that, really. They aren’t doing it on purpose. When one of us is dying, they say a part of all of us is. I think that’s why it hurts. We go our whole lives losing little chunks until we can’t lose any more of them.