Stupid Fast (7 page)

Yeah, what a huge day.

From the bathroom where I’d just applied deodorant to my entire body, I heard Aleah and her father enter my house. I’d had no intention of “visiting” with them. Before. But wasn’t I large? Wasn’t I a Division I football prospect? I dunked a basketball. Holy Christ, I dunked a freaking basketball! I liked what Cody said too. I had to carry myself like an athlete. Jesus.

Before doing anything, I went into my bedroom to check email. Surely Gus would have written something hilarious by now. I opened it up. Nothing. Where the hell was Gus?

I wrote:
beautiful piano girl from your bedroom is upstairs in my house.

From downstairs in my bedroom, I could hear Jerri play cheery, although I knew she was not.

“Oh, wonderful! Oh, lovely! What a beautiful dress!” She actually sounded kind of psycho (not surprising). I couldn’t hear Andrew at all, which made me think he was acting strange, probably just staring unblinkingly at Aleah from behind his plastic nerd frames and thinking about how jealous he was of her.

If I let Andrew and Jerri represent the family, there was no way I could face Aleah Jennings, super genius, at her house for the rest of the summer.

Om shanti shanti shanti
, I mumbled. Then I slapped myself in the face.
No, no, no! Not freaky om shanti! I am big. I am huge. I am an athlete.

I stood straight. I broadened my shoulders. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror that hung on my bedroom door. I said, “I am really big.” What was weird was this: I looked really big. For real. I looked like a young man you might believe is fast. I clenched my jaw and glared and looked sort of mean and ugly and, potentially, sort of smelly, which was accurate.

***

You know, I’ve never had any particular dislike for people who play sports. When I was little, I even watched football on TV. Green Bay Packers. I asked for a Brett Favre jersey once for my birthday (a request Jerri totally ignored—I believe she got me a Shel Silverstein poetry book that year). I’ve watched basketball too. I like big dunks. Sure, jocks smell funny. But animals don’t smell good, and I never blamed them for that fact. It’s nature. I never would’ve even cared that Ken Johnson played sports if he didn’t knock me off my damn bike when he was the one who parked half sideways in the swimming pool parking lot. Yes, it pissed me off that jocks called Gus names and me names and that Karpinski broke Sam Peterson’s finger in seventh grade (I’m sure on purpose, but he never got in trouble for it). None of that has to do with sports. I don’t mind sports. I like sports. I can be good at sports.

In the mirror, I expanded my chest, stood straight, and said, “I am huge.”

***

Two minutes later, I’d thrown on sweats (not to look like a jock but because all my pants were too short and they made me feel dumb) and I was upstairs, ready to face Aleah and her dad, to show that Reinsteins aren’t just a bunch of freaks.

I walked into the living room. Jerri and Aleah’s dad were sitting in the leather chairs talking about the college or something. Not a terrible scene. Aleah, who was wearing an orange sort of airy kind of sundress and looked completely, utterly awesome, sat across the coffee table from Andrew. They weren’t saying anything.

“Hello,” I said and smiled while I walked in.

“It’s the paperboy,” Aleah’s dad said. “You look bigger in the daytime.”

“I’m growing,” I told him.

“You do look tall,” Jerri said, then stared at me and cocked her head a little. She breathed out really hard. “Umm, I guess you’ve met Aleah?”

“Yeah,” I smiled.

Aleah’s mouth was open. Her eyes were watery. She looked sort of stunned.

“Uh, hi…you…”

“Hi. It’s Felton,” I said.

“Hi, Felton,” she said.

And then I blushed. I couldn’t take my eyes off her eyes. We were in this tractor beam of eyeball heat.

“I could be a zookeeper,” Andrew blurted. “That wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I could pick up animal poop all day. I’d be happy working at the zoo.”

“Oh,” Aleah sort of whispered, still looking at me.

“I could be a veterinarian or an astronaut or a…” Andrew nodded.

“Andrew. Have you played anything for Aleah?” I asked without looking at him.

“That’d be great, Andrew. Play something for me,” Aleah said without taking her eyes off mine.

“I wouldn’t want to be a medical doctor. I don’t like people,” Andrew said. Then, he got up and played piano.

Andrew is really good. People hear him and they can’t believe he’s thirteen. He’s small, like I’d always been before the fur growth, but with big hands (I also have really big hands), and he puts his face close to the keys and looks up at the music and then back at the keys, which is sort of intriguing because it is so odd, and it seems impossible a tiny guy, so frail, can get so much sound out of a giant piano.

Neither Aleah nor I heard a single note he played. He must’ve played for ten minutes while Aleah and I stared at each other.

Then Jerri applauded and Aleah’s dad said, “Boy’s got chops.” Then there were crackers and cheese, which I didn’t eat. Andrew talked and Aleah nodded. I made a joke and Aleah laughed. Her dad laughed. Jerri laughed, not in a psycho way but in the sort of sweet, singy way she used to laugh. Aleah and I looked at each other.

“I don’t miss Chicago so much today,” she said.

“I don’t miss my old friend Gus that much,” I told her.

Aleah and I looked at each other. Andrew talked. Jerri and Aleah’s dad laughed. Jerri smiled huge. Andrew stopped talking. Andrew left the room. Jerri talked. Andrew came back dressed in his white orchestra jacket, wearing a bow tie. I laughed. Andrew played piano some more. Andrew bowed. Aleah and I looked at each other. Aleah’s dad said it was about that time. Aleah gave me her cell number and told me she’d be playing piano for me in the morning. I walked her to the door, and I guess her dad was with her, and I guess Jerri and Andrew were probably at the door too. But I honestly don’t remember. All I remember is Aleah walking to the car, backward walking so she could look at me and smile at me, and then she was gone. And I stared up the road, where dust from the Jenningses’ car hung in the summer air.

“Felton?” Jerri asked.

“Ass brain,” Andrew said.

“Hello,” I nodded at them both.

I just turned my light off.

I’m achy and would like to fall asleep thinking about Aleah at my house that first day because that was good. But I can’t sleep. I can’t. I can’t!

In the past, after Andrew had a piano recital, which I would go to very grudgingly because I can be a jerk, he’d stay up until all hours of the night replaying the songs to try to burn it all into his memory or something. Jerri used to stay up with him, and she’d applaud after every replay and shout “Bravo!” They’d talk, and he’d play, and she’d clap and shout. I’d lie in the basement buried in pillows, going crazy, trying to get some sleep (even with my door shut, I’d very easily hear the piano vibrating through the floor like it was right next to my ear). He’d play and play and play. Crazy.

I understand.

I turned my light back on.

3 a. freaking m.!

Go. Go. Go.

After the Jenningses left that day, I sat stunned in my room for a while. I wanted to tell someone about Aleah. Gus was the obvious choice, but I didn’t want to send him email after email without him ever replying because I’d feel like a dork. I checked email again, hoping for Gus. No Gus.

I did have email though.

Cody sent me a link to a YouTube video of a dude named Jay Landry who is on St. Mary’s Springs, the team Bluffton was to play in its first game of the season. Cody wrote:
check it. he’s a safety. big time. going to notre dame after next year. we’ll beat him.

The video was set to some kind of screamy speed metal and was just a bunch of clips of this Jay Landry hitting people on the football field, totally killing them, knocking the ball out of their hands, hitting receivers trying to make catches, standing over kids he’s knocked totally stupid, shouting, and flexing.

Oh my Jesus God, I thought. Is this really what’s going to happen to me? Does Cody think I’m going to like football after watching this? I do not want to have my whole curly Jew-fro head knocked off my shoulders by Jay Landry. Jesus.

I closed the YouTube window and looked back at email.

No, no, no. Nothing from Gus. Man!

So I decided to be a dork. I wrote:
what if i said i love beautiful piano girl who lives in your bedroom and also that i am on football team and i am d-i football prospect and i jammed a basketball and i am smelly and in love?

His response came back in two minutes:
what in hell you talking about? mom annoying as crap and i cant be on computer and grandmas apartment smells like poop and everybody hates me. i hate…

Before I finished reading Gus’s message, I received another email and went back to my inbox. Three messages in one day that weren’t all from Gus (only one was from Gus)? I was on record pace!

It was from Cody again:
me and karpinski going to grill and watch longest yard (bad football movie) sometime next week. you wanna hit that?

I responded right away:
sounds good, man. thanks for video. jay landry is an animal. scary!!!

Cody messaged back right away:
landry is good, but you’ll be better.

I jumped out of my chair and then sat back down. I shook my head. I’m going to be better than that animal? Then this occurred to me: I might suddenly have friends and a girlfriend.
Are you kidding?
That sounded really good, even if I’d have to grill out with Karpinski, one of the worst honkies on record (sorry).

What a day!

***

I mean, this is really the thing: I’d never had a girlfriend. The closest I ever came was in fifth grade when Abby Sauter lived in a house on the golf course, and we walked home from school together every day for about six weeks. One day, she said, “You’re my boyfriend. I wrote it in my diary.” After that, I almost passed out every time she was within twenty feet of me. I stopped walking home with her, running out the door after school to avoid her but tried to smile when I saw her in the hall.

By the next year, she was sticking pencils down the back of my pants and calling me Rein Stone in Mr. Ross’s independent study hour, which I totally didn’t get. Why is Rein Stone funny? It’s just my name with a vowel changed. When I cried, Jerri told me that kids have funny ways of showing they like each other. Oh, right, Jerri. She liked me
because
she stuck pencils in my pants. Great! I harbored the totally ridiculous notion that Abby was my girlfriend for another year.

Then in seventh grade, Abby, who had just gotten really tall and gotten boobs, shoved me against a locker so hard my head bounced off the metal. She pinned me there and breathed on my face because she’d just eaten a bag of Doritos. Jess Withrow shouted “Gross!” I figured at that point, Abby had broken up with me. My stomach hurt for a month.

But not long after, me, Gus, and Peter realized that honkies were honkies and were different than us and that we hated them.

In eighth grade, I got called Gay Boy Rein Stone so much that I began to figure I was gay, even though I was attracted to girls, especially Abby Sauter, who I believed to be a terrible person, but I couldn’t help it. I thought about how I’d like to smell her Doritos breath again.

Then, in high school, the upper classes changed my name to Squirrel Nuts or Squirrel Nut and didn’t invoke Rein Stone as much, and I felt like Squirrel Nuts—jumpy and flinching, staring out across the lunch room, nibbling my food fast. My shiny, secret rocks and crystals were squirreled away in my leather pouch in my pocket, and I was so wary of the dangers present—ready to hop and hightail it.

Romance, gay or otherwise, didn’t occur to me, not even when I searched for Ladies in Swimsuits on the Internet (which I did a lot all sophomore year).

Then I grew tall and strong and hairy and fast and a famous African American pianist, the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my entire life, told me she’d be playing music for me when I showed up at her house in the morning to drop off the paper.

As I lay in bed that night, I thought, “Aleah Jennings, you are my girlfriend.” Yes, that was a little…What’s that word? Presumative? Presumptive? Let me look it up.

Presumptuous!

Then, because I’d lifted weights and changed into another human being completely in one day (evolved from squirrel nut donkey boy to big) and was thus completely exhausted, I slept like a freaking rock.

I can’t say that any real alarm bells had gone off before then. Yes, Jerri had called me an f-bomber, and yes, I’d made a pledge not to speak to her or Andrew ever again. But as I’ve said, Jerri had always been a little strange, and I’d just figured out that normal for me was not normal at all, not remotely, and I suppose I figured we’d just keep rolling along and we’d all figure it out or whatever, and I didn’t follow through on not speaking to my family, and Jerri had seemed warm and happy while the Jenningses were over.

But the next morning was the first morning of the rest of my life.

My alarm went off, and I turned to stop its music but could almost not turn at all. “Whoa. Ouch.” I struggled and had to basically fling my hand at the alarm clock because I could not control my shoulder muscles. “Owwww.” I moved to leave bed, but everything burned. All my muscles were on fire. “Ahhhh!” I cried out. Had I caught polio or multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis or cirrhosis of the liver? Every little piece of me just totally killed. “Ahhhhh!” I had to lift my legs with my aching arms to get them out of bed. “What the hell is going on?”

I lumbered into shorts and a shirt and a windbreaker. I stumbled up the stairs, using my aching arms to steady me so I wouldn’t fall over. I stumbled down the hall into Jerri’s room, convinced she’d have to drive me on the route or I wouldn’t make it because I’d caught multiple sclerosis.

But Jerri’s room was empty.

The light was off. I pressed on the bed, but she wasn’t in there. I moved to the door and leaned out into the hall. “Jerri?” I whispered, trying not to wake Andrew.

No one answered.

I lumbered back down the hall, holding myself against the wall.

“Jerri?” I said louder.

No one answered.

The light was out in Andrew’s room, but the door was open a crack. I pressed my lips into the crack and whispered, “Andrew?”

No one answered. No one made a noise.

Andrew didn’t seem to be breathing in there. I reached through the door and turned on the light in his bedroom. I poked my head in. His bed was made. He was gone.

“What the hell is going on?” I shouted. No one responded.

As fast as I could on my broken limbs, I rumbled through the house shouting, begging for a response. The house was totally empty. I began to panic. Had aliens attacked us overnight? Had they taken Jerri and Andrew and poisoned me so my body would not work, so I could not pursue them (I pictured poor Andrew and Jerri undergoing total butt probes and screaming in pain)? Had kidnappers released gas into the house, knocked us all out, robbed us blind, taken my little brother and mother? I flipped on light switch after light switch, shedding light in every room. Nothing was out of place. If robbers had robbed us, I couldn’t see what they’d taken.

I tripped back downstairs calling for my family, nearly in tears from the pain and the loss of my potentially butt-probed family.

I do have experience with the world turning inside out. This was all so weird, like the day when I was five when my dad died. I was five. Five. But everything felt out of whack, was out of whack. Bizarro world.

While I stumbled around the house, everything felt out of whack.

Should I call the police, I wondered? I couldn’t do it. Not yet. Maybe Jerri was outside. Maybe she was gardening at dawn. Maybe Andrew was helping her. Andrew never helped her, but maybe, because he knew he wasn’t the best piano player in town, he was looking for a new career. As a gardener. Or a butt-probe victim.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” I mumbled, stumbling down the hall to the garage door.

I kicked open the garage door, terrified of what I might see on the other side (as I saw something terrible in the garage once before). This is what I saw: The light was on. Jerri’s Hyundai was gone. Andrew was standing in there next to his bike, looking out the open garage. He turned to me and said, “Good morning, Felton. Ready to deliver some papers?”

“Where’s Jerri?” I shouted.

“What’s wrong with your head?” he asked. “It looks crooked.”

“Where the hell is Jerri?”

“You look like Quasimodo. He’s the hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“Andrew. Where. Is. Jerri?”

“I heard her leave around midnight.”

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t know. It’s really none of my business. She’s an adult, you know.”

“God dang it!” I shouted. I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea what was going on. I stumbled over to my Schwinn Varsity. I had to do my paper route.

“Why are you dragging your leg like that?” Andrew asked.

“It’s really none of your business!” I shouted. I grabbed my paper bag, hunched my head, and let the bag drop painfully over my shoulder. Then I grabbed my bike and leaned it way down, using my left arm to pull my left leg over the seat.

“Okay,” Andrew said. “Let’s deliver some papers!”

Before I pedaled away, I turned to Andrew and said, “You wait right here. You wait for Jerri. If she shows up, call my cell.”

“Can’t do that,” Andrew told me. “I’m going for a bike ride.”

“Stay here!” I shouted. I biked away down the driveway, my aching legs straining against the pedals. At the main road, I stiffly looked back over my shoulder. Andrew was pedaling down the hill, about a football field behind me.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, shaking my painful Quasimodo head.

***

At each stop on the paper route, I’d look up the street and find Andrew ghost-like about a block away, riding his bike in circles, waiting for me to move on. He never got any closer because he knew I’d go off on him. I sort of knew what he was up to. He either: A) wanted to see Aleah play the piano, or B) wanted to make sure I didn’t spend time with her alone. I believed the correct answer was “B” because he could’ve ridden directly to her house, skipping all the Felton tailing, if he just wanted to see her in action. In either case, I was terribly irritated and freaked (Jerri).

If my muscles weren’t killing me, I’d charge you like a drunk elephant. I’d go gorilla all over your little monkey ass.

Fortunately for Andrew, I didn’t have the strength to charge, and I was preoccupied with Jerri’s absence, which I found really scary.

Jerri had never been gone when I woke up in the morning. Up until that moment, she’d been there every single morning of my life. Before she turned weirder recently, she wouldn’t let me start a day without hugging me. After she turned weirder but before I got the paper route, she’d have breakfast for me in the morning, and she’d stare at me and try to say something nice, even if incomprehensible. Since the paper route, at least I knew where she was because her car was in the garage when I’d go out there, and it didn’t seem remotely possible that she’d ever leave me. But now gone? Left at midnight? Jesus Christ! Where the hell did she go?

Her absence didn’t faze Andrew one bit.

After hitting the first half of the route, I noticed that my muscles were loosening. By the time we got to Aleah’s block (or the block next to Aleah’s block, in Andrew’s case), the kinks in my neck and shoulders were pretty much gone. My chest and biceps and thighs still hurt, but I felt looser. It occurred to me, coming around the corner, that my muscle disease could have something to do with the weight lifting the day before. The looseness might have meant two things: 1) That I could make my gorilla charge on Andrew, and 2) I could enjoy Aleah’s playing, etc., in relative comfort—if my brain wasn’t torturing me about Jerri’s absence, of course.

But speaking of Jerri, as I rounded the corner, something stunned me so hard I stopped thinking at all and nearly crashed. Jerri’s Hyundai was parked on the street in front of Gus’s house. That is, Jerri’s car was parked in front of the Jenningses’.

I squeezed the front brake on the Varsity so hard that the back wheel came off the ground, threatening to flip me completely over. I jumped off the pedals and steadied myself, staring at this most horrifying sight. Behind me, Andrew had come to a halt. I waved him toward me, my breathing getting thinner and thinner. Andrew kept riding in circles until I hissed, “Get over here, Andrew!” Then he slowly, nervously biked toward me.

When Andrew got to me, he whispered, “I don’t know why Aleah would even like you, you athlete.”

I pointed down the street at Jerri’s car. “Look.”

“Jerri? What the ass?” Andrew’s mouth hung open.

“Come on,” I said.

There was no piano sound floating as we biked slowly forward. The whole neighborhood was still, totally silent. I actually feared noise. I imagined Jerri sitting in that living room, babbling on to Aleah or Mr. Jennings, showing off what a freak show she actually is, talking about
Tayrays
a
and turnips and “engagement” and Tito.

But it was worse than that.

As I approached the car, I saw Jerri’s body folded over the steering wheel. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Andrew.” As Andrew pulled up next to me, he began to scream.

Immediately, Mr. Jennings came bounding out of the screen door.

“Quiet,” he shouted, trying to whisper at the same time. “Steady kids. Steady,” he said. “Your mother’s okay.”

“Jerri’s dead!” Andrew shouted, both of us staring at Aleah’s dad.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the car. Jerri looked up at us and rolled down the window. “I’m not dead,” she said so quiet. “I’m stupid.”

“Um, Felton. You have a paper for us?” Mr. Jennings asked.

I was so confused, but I reached in my bag and handed Mr. Jennings a paper.

“Andrew,” Jerri said, popping open the trunk from inside, “put your bike in the car. Let’s go.”

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive, Ms. Reinstein?” Mr. Jennings asked.

“I’m Mrs. Berba,” Jerri said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jennings. I’m so sorry,” Jerri said. “I’ll take Andrew home now. Finish your route, Felton.”

“Okay,” I said. But I didn’t move. Mr. Jennings stared at me holding his newspaper in both hands in front of him. Andrew stared at me. Jerri slumped in the front seat. I thought of her hugging me back when I was little. I thought of her singing John Denver songs by the campfire at Wyalusing.

“Jerri,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Andrew,” she said, “get in the dang car.”

Andrew’s eyes were huge. He looked at me and shook his head. I looked over at Mr. Jennings, who was stuck in place.

“Go, Andrew,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“Okay,” he said, then put his bike in the back of Jerri’s Hyundai.

“Have a good morning, Mr. Jennings,” I said to Mr. Jennings.

And then I biked off, totally shaking.

When the mail comes to our house, it’s addressed to Jerri Berba because my mother never took my dad’s last name. They were married though. Andrew established that fact later in the summer.

At the nursing home, that sort of young lady inmate screamed when I walked through the door. I didn’t even pay attention to her.

I rode my bike home slowly because I wasn’t exactly looking forward to getting home. My stomach hurt more than my achy muscles. I’d already thought Aleah and I were together, which was, yes,
presumptuous
because she didn’t know me. I was sick over our breakup, even though we’d never been together for real. I was also sincerely, completely, totally terrified of what I’d find at home. What Jerri would tell me about what she did. What the consequences would be if she was even at home—
she might be gone. What if she left?

As I got to the top of the hill on the main road heading down to our place, there was a buzz in my pocket. I stopped my bike.

I was wrong about Aleah. It was a text from Aleah. We’d exchanged cell numbers the day before. I couldn’t believe it.

We sent several texts as the sun came up, me standing over my Schwinn Varsity, facing the east bluffs.

It went like this:

That was weird.

Sorry. Don’t know what happened. What happened?

LONG STORY. Stop by tonight. 8pm?

What about your dad? Sure OK?

Understands domestic drama. Too much. Worried about you. Andrew too.

OK. Definitely. 8pm.

See you then…

The voice in my head simply said
I’ll be damned.
Yes,
unbelievable
, I responded to my own voice. Aleah Jennings, Aleah Jennings, Aleah Jennings. My heart swelled!

Dang, yeah, how freaking selfish. My own mother was suffering some unknown breakdown, and I was up on the hill by our house all swollen in love. I don’t know what to say about that, so I’ll just move right along.

If I hadn’t been facing a serious domestic drama back home, I might have exploded all squirrel nut crazy and biked a million miles an hour down the hill. But the terror…the terror…Home was at the bottom of that hill. So after my swelling, I stared down at the house, swallowed, and then rolled down the hill slowly.

I was totally right to be terrified.

***

I rolled my bike up into the garage and found Andrew sitting on a lawn chair in there, his face totally red and his eyeballs red from crying. I know this because he was still sort of crying. Andrew cried out as I flipped down the kickstand on the Varsity.

“Jerri’s an abusive alcoholic!”

I stopped in my tracks. Paused. I couldn’t believe that.

“Did she hit you?”

“No.”

“What do you mean alcoholic?”

“We drove home, then she barfed, then she drank wine.”

Jerri was no drinker. Not at all.

“Where’d she get wine?”

“She bought like ten bottles for Aleah’s dad for their visit yesterday.”

Jerri hadn’t served wine when the Jenningses were over the day before. This was completely out of character. Jerri could barely stand the smell of alcohol. Her own dad was an alcoholic, and she hated it. We could never go out for pizza because she thinks Steve’s Pizza smells like beer.

“Okay. Okay. How is she abusive, Andrew?”

“I went to…I began to…” Andrew could barely get this out. “I played piano because I thought it would make her happy because it always makes her happy, and she told me to go make my crappy noise someplace else.”