Stupid Fast (13 page)

I bought an iPod with my paper route money, and I started carrying my school backpack filled with fruit from Kwik Trip and protein shakes and water bottles, and I’d go up there—and being up there became the best home I ever had. When the weather was good, I’d stay forever. I’d run myself totally out of energy, and I’d sweat and sweat (thankfully, Jerri had purchased a giant jug of laundry detergent in May, so I could clean the pee-stinker clothes) and then drink water and eat and take naps and listen to rap Cody gave me. I’d just relax, breathing, growing my body hair, running like the Road Runner, getting largely muscled (weights helped too), thinking about life and whatnot, but mostly not thinking at all. All the while, I’d look over all three states, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois, far below me.

You’re an adult, and this is what you do. Meep meep.

Aleah did take some nights off practicing. She even drove around with me, Cody, and Karpinski a couple times. Karpinski thought she was really hot, which wasn’t surprising. What was surprising? Aleah liked Karpinski. That stunned me.

“Oh my God, he’s funny!” she said.

“Really?”

Oh my God. It’s 5 a.m. There’s every possibility that Grandma is going to wake up and find me awake and then give me the business about not going to sleep. Like I’m trying to stay awake. I’m not!

I’m very muscley.

Very bruised but very muscley.

I worked so freaking hard!

Because if I wasn’t running the big M, I ran pass patterns with Cody. If I wasn’t running pass patterns or running the big M, I lifted weights, getting closer and closer to the school record maxes that jerk Ken Johnson set for all backs and receivers. My shirts got super tight. My stomach muscles got ripply. Extremely muscley, like a barbarian.

Toward the end of the second week of July, Coach Johnson said, “Reinstein, you’re putting on weight. Not fat, son. Don’t worry about that. You’ve got no fat. You’re carrying a lot more muscle though. Let’s get you on the scale.”

Cody, Karpinski, and I all followed Coach down the stairs from the weight room to the locker room. Down there, I pulled off my shoes and T-shirt and got on the scale. Coach adjusted the measures, sliding the stuff around. When it all balanced, the little arrow pointed at 182.

“Yes, sir!” Coach said. “What that’s? Fifteen pounds in a month? Fourteen pounds? Big.”

“You’re going to be 185 by your birthday party,” Cody said.

Then Karpinski said, “Too bad your…”

“Not in my locker room, Karpinski,” Coach said.

“Is so tiny and useless,” Karpinski whispered.

“Shut up, FishButt,” I said like Arnold Schwarzenegger, “or I’ll break you in half.”

Barbarian!

Or a warrior, seriously. I lived with Andrew. I lived with Jerri. I tried, but I couldn’t just run away.

As the month wore on, Andrew worked to drag me into his Jerri battles. I had to fight him off. Once, he woke me up in the middle of the night, his little head hovering over me in the dark.

“She’s a liar, Felton. She’s a crazy old lady liar. You have to help me.”

“What?” I was scared, didn’t know what was happening.

“She won’t tell me why you freak her out, Felton.”

“Who?”

“You. You do. Help me. You have to ask her, Felton. You have to.”

I woke up enough to know what was going on.

“No. I won’t ask her anything.”

“Why won’t anybody help me?” Andrew whimpered.

Jerri didn’t leave her room. Andrew wanted to fight her. He wanted me to fight alongside him. I wanted nothing to do with it.

“Get out of here,” I told him.

Because Andrew wasn’t the only one I had to fight.

Ken Johnson.

He was just a couple of weeks from leaving for the University of Iowa, for the big time really. Why did he bother with me? Why was he such a pecker? He worked out half the time at the college and half the time with us at the high school.

When he was with us at weights, he’d do his best to make me look stupid. Usually, he’d just make bad jokes, which fewer and fewer of the honkies laughed at. He’d say crap like “Don’t pop your squirrel nut” when I was squatting. Sometimes, he’d get close to me while I stretched, separated from my classmates, and he’d say, “Team’s so screwed to be depending on a squirrel nut. There’s going to be a lot of disappointment around here come fall.”

“Guess we’ll see,” I’d say.

On one hand, I figured he was right. I didn’t really know how to play football. It’s possible I might fumble every time someone tackled me. At night, when I was half asleep and the barbarian wasn’t in control of my emotions, I’d actually hear Ken’s asshole voice in my head: “There’s going to be a lot of disappointment around here come fall.”

I could see the headlines in the sports page:
BLUFFTON BLOWS AS REINSTEIN’S FUMBLES/BUMBLES FUEL ANOTHER LOSS
.

This fact, the fact of my total lack of football experience, scared me. My heart pumped too hard. My mouth was dry. I had to fight.

REINSTEIN CATCHES FUMBLE-ITIS, BLUFFTON DISEASED AGAIN
!

Ken Johnson.

These weeks in July were the best ever, sort of. They were. Even with Ken Johnson, etc.

I had lots of friends. Not just Cody and Karpinski but Abby Sauter and Jess Withrow too. I’d get texts from them all day long, and I’d write funny things back, which made them call me hilarious. I also had a girlfriend who was separate from anything Ken knew. She was even more big league than him. She wasn’t one in like a million soon-to-be college athletes. She was
the
one in a million. She was
the
best. And she was fearless. And she loved me because I was gentle and weird. And I knew something else: I could tell from looking at him. Not only was I nearly as big as Ken, but I was faster. He’s squat and really explosive. I’m explosive but longer. I could stretch and beat his ass. I knew it. I could beat his ass.
Felton the Barbarian.

At night, when the barbarian was asleep, Ken scared me, Andrew scared me, Jerri scared me.

In the daytime? Felton the Barbarian did really well.

On the Tuesday of the third week of July, Andrew locked himself in the downstairs bathroom for like three hours, seriously, doing nothing at all (no bathroom-type noise). My running shorts were in there on the floor. To hit the Mound, I needed my shorts. I waited for a while, then knocked and asked him to throw my shorts out. In response, he sang (I wouldn’t call it singing) some kind of terrible song (literally, I do not kid, he sang, over and over,
soup is good food, makes a great meal
). I waited for him to stop. But he didn’t stop.

Then I went vaguely ape shit and pounded on the door. I shouted loud, “Let me the hell in there!”

Even though I knew she could hear me, Jerri was upstairs in bed with the TV on, so she could do nothing.

Andrew fell totally quiet and didn’t let me in. So I went to my bedroom and got on my computer and sent emails to Abby, Jess, Cody, Reese, Karpinski, even Gus (who I had sort of stopped communicating with because he really let me down or so I thought. He thought I let him down. A week before, he’d emailed a long letter about how I’d abandoned him, which seemed like bull since I’d tried to tell him about Jerri earlier in the summer and he hadn’t even given a crap at all). I tried to relax while emailing, tried to be funny (ha ha) about my brother (ha ha) who was locked in the bathroom.

Another hour passed, and he didn’t come out, an hour when I could’ve been biking out to the Mound or running up it. Released from this hellhole. So I pounded again. This time, Andrew said, “Go away, Felton. I’m busy.”

“You’re going to tear your butt sitting on the toilet, Andrew.”

“I’m not sitting on the toilet, jerkwad!”

“Then let me in.”

“Never. Go away.”

“Let me in!”

“No.”

“Then throw my shorts out.”

“Your shorts are not my responsibility.”

“Goddamn it, Andrew. Let me in!”

“I. Am. Busy.”

Blood pounded in my veins. Barbarian blood. This acid started burning up my throat.

“Let. Me. In. Now!”

“No.”

“Now, you ass. Now! Or I’m going to
kill you
,” I screamed.

Andrew shouted, “Shut the hell up, Felton. I’m working.”

I bent down, breathing hard, trying to get hold of myself.
Not now, Barbarian.
But I couldn’t hold it in. I stood up, leaned back, and kicked the door frame as hard as I could. The kick shook the house. The kick broke the door frame in two (luckily not the door because I might have gone in there and actually killed Andrew). The reverberations knocked a picture off the wall upstairs, and glass shattered on the wood floor. Andrew screamed, “You broke the light! You broke the light!”

I scared myself. I stood back and breathed, then leaned in toward the door.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered fast. “I’m sorry, Andrew.”

“It’s completely dark in here, you asshole,” he shouted.

“Please just let me in.”

“No,” he sobbed. “Go the fuck away.”

I didn’t know what to do. What was I supposed to do? Why wasn’t Jerri stopping this? I turned and ran up the stairs. In the kitchen, the goofy caricature of me, Andrew, and Jerri that was done at the Strawberry Festival last summer, right after we got back from camping at Wyalusing, was broken on the floor. There was glass everywhere. I stepped over it and walked down the hall to Jerri’s bedroom. Unlike Andrew, I didn’t want answers about Jerri’s zombie life. I just wanted a mother to help me not kill my brother.

But I didn’t go in. Why? I could hear Jerri in there crying. I couldn’t go in. She was totally sobbing.

This was another moment when maybe I should’ve called Grandma Berba, whether she hated us or not.

Instead, I turned and ran back through the kitchen and down the stairs and out the garage and to my Schwinn Varsity, and I biked to the Mound wearing the pajama bottoms I pulled on after the route. Once at the Mound, I stripped down to my boxers, and I ran and ran and ran, crying “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit,” and, thank God, no visitors showed up. Because I might have killed them or something because who knows about barbarians and what they’re capable of?

When I got back home, late in the day, Andrew was nowhere to be found. The light didn’t work in the bathroom. The trim or whatever from the door frame was lying on the floor. Upstairs, most of the glass had been kicked into the corner of the kitchen (but little pieces were scattered around, catching light from the window). The Strawberry Festival picture was stuffed in the trash. I could hear the TV mumbling in Jerri’s room.

What am I going to do, I wondered?
Run away. Run away.
I seriously considered running away, but I didn’t want to lose Aleah. I didn’t want to lose Cody. So I kept on fighting to keep my life.

I needed the Barbarian.

On the Wednesday of that third week of July, all us honky backs and receivers were out at the baseball field running routes when Ken showed up with a couple of even older guys who used to play for Bluffton and now play football at some of the small D-III colleges in Wisconsin. They wanted to coach us and tell us we were doing things all wrong.

A couple of times, I made catches and ran a little, and the older guys would say, “Jesus, that’s speed,” or whatever. Then Ken would make a squirrel nut joke, and they’d laugh as if he were funny. The more the other dudes acknowledged I was good, though, the more sort of red in the face and jerky he became.

Then he decided he would cover me.

I got a huge adrenaline kick when Ken lined up across from me. Finally, I’d get my chance. I would beat his jerk ass with my improved giant speed.

But more importantly, Ken was bigger than me. Not taller, just bigger. Even with me at 180-something, he outweighed me by twenty pounds. He used what he had.

Cody said go, and I took a step, and Ken leveled me. He exploded into me with both arms and knocked my feet right off the ground, and I landed on the back of my head.

I totally cried out like a little injured animal, like I would’ve in fourth grade or sixth grade or eighth grade even. It was an accident. The hit didn’t hurt that much, just surprised me, but I high-pitch monkey-squealed.

Ken stood over me and laughed. The older dudes fell all over themselves laughing.

“That’s how a squirrel sounds when it gets run over by a truck,” Ken said. Then because he’s a gentleman and because he succeeded in making me look like a donkey, he pulled me up by my shirt. “Going to have to get past d-backs, squirrel nut. Can’t pull that pussy stuff. Jay Landry is going to kill you next month if you pull that pussy stuff.”

I wanted to say “Thanks Coach,” but I didn’t.

Then he lined up again because he hadn’t gotten enough.

I looked at him, looked over at Cody, and Cody shrugged. I was completely enraged and trying to keep from just fighting him, especially because I figured he could still kill me. I didn’t want to run another pattern. But Cody picked up a ball.

My next thought was to punch Ken in the nuts when Cody said go. (What would I do then? Run away?) Then I thought I’d just fight him off the line, just go at him—maybe I can get a punch in by accident, I thought. What’s the worst that could happen? Ken might beat me dumb, I guess. So? Just fight.

But when Cody said go, something else happened. My body made a move to hit Ken. But then I sensed him coil so he could hit me. As he unwound, I slapped his right shoulder, pushed, then spun. In a flash, he was on the ground on his face, and I was ten yards downfield, the ball already delivered into my hands by Cody.

Everybody, including the older dudes, whooped.

I slowed, turned around, and jogged back toward them. As I did, Ken pushed himself off the ground, turned, and held up his hands like he wanted me to throw him the ball.

Because I’m a trusting soul or an idiot, I tossed it to him underhanded.

Before I’d taken another step, he reared back and threw the ball at my head as hard as he could. My right hand, without me even knowing it, reached up barbarian-style and caught the ball in front of my face. I held it up above me for a second, squeezing it, staring at Ken, and then I smashed it into the ground. The ball bounced away about twenty yards. Ken and I glared at each other. Everybody stood there totally silent for like two months; I guess waiting for us to fight (which I was ready to do at that point).

Cody wouldn’t let it happen though. Cody said, “That’s enough for today.”

Ken looked over at the older guys.

I exhaled, turned, walked up to Karpinski, Dern, and Reese, quietly said “See you later,” and then went over to my bike and left without another word. I rode directly to the Mound to do my running. Little bolts of lightning kept firing all over my body as I rode.