100 Sideways Miles (4 page)

“I don't think flounders fuck,” I said.

“If I was a flounder, I would fuck,” Cade said. “And it would look exactly like that.”

“Uh. Of course it would, Win-Win,” I said.

• • •

Cade Hernandez had seen me blank out on several occasions. One time, it happened in the boys' locker room at Burnt Mill Creek High School after a baseball game.

Being tired always elevated my chance of having a seizure.

It was the most embarrassing thing, in retrospect. It happened after our game against a team from a place called Moreno Valley.

It goes like this: I am just standing there, and first I smell something sweet—like flowers or maple syrup. Then I realize that I don't know the names for anything I am looking at. A showerhead can become a pulsating chrome anemone-thing, eating its way through the universe.
Chomp, chomp, chomp.
Sounds, colors, textures, all mash together in an enormous symphonic assault on my senses as I shrink down, smaller and smaller. I am not hot, cold, dizzy, or uncomfortable—because all of those things are
words
, which by that point in the seizure have floated away—
pfft!
—into space.

It is so beautiful.

I believe my atoms begin to drift apart—stop holding hands—in those wordless moments too.

But I see, hear, feel, taste, and smell it all.

So, after our game against Moreno Valley, I blanked out while standing under a flow of steaming water in the boys' locker-room showers.

Ridiculous.

They told me I was out for over half an hour, more than forty-five thousand miles.

That was as far as Magellan's voyage around the world.

When the words started to come back into my head and I realized what I was looking at, there were about a dozen guys around me, staring down. It looked like I was lying inside a clearing in a forest of pale, hairy legs with white Burnt Mill Creek High School locker-room towels flocking their upper branches. I saw fluorescent lights and mottled chrome showerheads above the shoulders of my teammates. I lay on my back, completely naked, on the tiles of the shower floor in a half inch of dirty water while three ambulance attendants with latex-gloved hands strategized methods for lifting me onto a perfectly white rolling gurney stretcher.

One of the paramedics was a woman. She kneeled right there beside my hip and poked an intravenous needle that was attached to a plastic bag of sugar water into my hairless arm as I lay naked on the floor of the shower.

I watched her. She stared at my penis. The atoms that built the highway of nerves in my arms were still disconnected from my brain, so I could not even move my hands to cover myself.

What a ridiculous moment it was!

When the words come back, usually the first thing I feel is anger.

The goddamned words could stay gone. It was always so pleasant, chaotic, emotionless, nameless—everything vibrating so beautifully in the universe without words.

Nobody at all knows this except for me: It is how things
really
are.

We beat Moreno Valley that day 7–2, by the way.

They were terrible!

My father is a writer.

He is very good at what he does, but he hates the attention it brings.

For a man who wrote novels, sacrificed the hours of his days to the invisible god of word upon word, Dad was never much of a talker. I saw how his shoulders would predictably tense and curl inward like the hood on a cobra whenever anyone got to that point of having talked too much.

Cade Hernandez, who loves to talk, could make my father turn into a cobra.

About seven years, or four billion miles, ago, my father swore he would never let anyone read another word of his writing.

Just like that, he quit.

He had written a science fiction novel called
The Lazarus Door
, which was wildly popular. The book was about, among other things, a massive religious movement—a reawakening of sorts—that occurred simultaneously with the opening of all
these microscopic doors that allowed visitors from space to overrun the earth.

The visitors in his book were called incomers.

When you think about it, that would be the smartest way for creatures from way out there to get here: Blast all these mechanical doors that are no bigger than atomic dust particles out into the universe and hope they hit pay dirt. Then you open them up and send yourselves through.

In the story, most of the doors landed on shitholes, but some of them made it here.

Poof!

Pay dirt.

I liked the novel, but some people went crazy over it. I didn't find this out until after I started high school, that Dad had actually received death threats for making fun of characters from the Bible.

Imagine that.

Some people are overly sensitive about Bible stories.

When the incomers came through the little doors, they popped open—usually right in the middle of peoples' skulls and stuff, since the doors were small enough to go in your ear, or wind up under your eyelid. It was a very violent story. But the aliens looked exactly like angels—so beautiful, and completely naked with gleaming silvery-white wings.

Well, the incomers weren't angels. In fact, they liked to rape people and then eat them. Planet Earth was an endless party for the angel-aliens.

In Dad's novel, a lot of starry-eyed Christians got raped and eaten.

You'd think they'd have caught on a bit sooner!

So Dad stopped writing for publication. Everyone kept asking him when the next part of the story was going to be published.

Dad's answer, through his agent, was always this: never.

His novel sold all over the world, and they even made a movie from it too, which my father had never been able to bring himself to watch.

It's just as well. I saw it when I was thirteen. The movie was pure horseshit.

My father, whose name is Mike, wrote under the name Easton Michaels.

Easton Michaels, who wrote six novels, was an inordinately private person as a general rule.

Nobody around here knew much about us—Mike Easton and his son, Finn.

Of course, my best friend knew all about what my father did for a living, but Cade Hernandez didn't care and was generally unimpressed by all the things that most people tended to make into such monumentally big deals.

• • •

Two years after my mother was killed by a dead horse, when I was just beginning to walk again, my father married a pediatric nurse named Tracy Snow.

Tracy took care of me every day after the knackery horse turned me and my real mother into something else. I thought Nurse Snow was actually Snow White. I still call her that sometimes.

I fell in love with her.

Dad fell in love with her.

What else can you do? It all just keeps going. Twenty miles per second. Twenty miles per second.

I have a six-year-old half sister named Nadia, and we all live in a big house in San Francisquito Canyon, which is the location of one of the greatest disasters in the history of the state of California.

Not our family—a dam broke there in 1928.

Fifty billion miles ago.

Imagine that.

• • •

I met Julia Bishop the morning after Kommissar Nossik threw Cade Hernandez out of our class for asking about the punctuality of his boner.

I suppose the things that transform your life don't appear as you fancifully imagine they will. They appear as knackery trucks that carry dead horses, as collapsing dams, and maybe as beautiful girls with long dancer legs who drift silently through the dust of a California desert morning.

I had never seen anyone like her before at Burnt Mill Creek.

Anywhere, actually.

I found myself wondering how many atoms from the same calamities out there in the universe our bodies shared. I imagined that parts of my insides and parts of her insides may have come from the same exploding star, billions of years ago. Maybe my right hand and her left hand both came from the same supernova.

The atoms inside me sparked and jangled nervously as soon as I saw her.

This was new.

I rubbed my eyes.

I was ahead in credits, and a good student. And everyone in the office knew about my epilepsy, so they were always so careful around me. During third period, I worked as “Office Concierge” for Burnt Mill Creek High School. It was among my responsibilities to show visitors and new students around our campus.

I had very polite atoms.

Usually, getting a new student in May meant something bad—like the kid had been expelled from another school because of drugs or fighting.

Nobody moves in May.

The head counselor, Mrs. Hinman, tried to snap me out of my daze. She said, “Finn, this is Julia Bishop. She's starting classes today.”

“Uh. Uh.” I was completely dumb.

Mrs. Hinman handed me Julia Bishop's class schedule. She had an extra-concerned look on her face when she said, “Finn? Are you all right, sweetie?”

She thought I was blanking out. I knew that look. Nobody calls a sixteen-year-old guy “sweetie” unless he's pissed his pants or something.

“Oh. Sorry. Um. Hi. Here, let me show you where your classes are,” I said.

Then I snatched Julia Bishop's papers and escorted her out of the office.

• • •

“Is that your name?” Julia asked.

On the south side of the office building, the stairsteps of a tiered grass field led down to an outside amphitheater and the cluster of classroom buildings that made up the campus.

I was sweating. It was hot. And something else was going on too.

“Uh. Finn. Yes,” I answered.

The girl paused, studied me.

She said, “There are fish on your socks.”

This is what I wore that day: red and black Burnt Mill Creek High School basketball shorts and a white sweatshirt from UCLA with the hood pulled up over the mess of my straw hair. I had gray and black skater shoes and dark blue socks with sharks swimming and swimming up around my ankles. Somehow, I felt as though I were standing there naked in front of that beautiful girl.

“Uh. Sharks.” I was slack jawed, immobile and helpless, frozen in the grass. Cade had given me those socks on my sixteenth birthday, the summer before. I didn't know what else to say.

What can you say to someone like that—someone who so obviously had been paying attention to your socks?

“Well, they're cute. I like them. How tall are you?”

I went completely dumb.

Then she leaned forward and looked directly at my eyes.

“Huh! You have two different colored eyes. That's beautiful.”

I couldn't help but look back at her eyes. They were brown. Julia Bishop's eyes were wondrous.

“Uh.”

I squinted, trying to focus on the papers I held, the ones that would contain the mysteries of Julia Bishop.

I wondered why she'd come here—if she had parents who were monsters, or if I could find anything that might say,
This is why I ended up here on this grass staircase walking beside you, Finn
.

I smelled flowers. I prayed that it might only be her perfume.
I repeated in my head, over and over, a command for my atoms to stay here, to not blank out.

Julia Bishop.

Grade eleven.

She lived in San Francisquito Canyon.

Remember that address, Finn.

Don't walk so fast.

“Hey. I live in San Francisquito Canyon too,” I said.

“Well, nice to meet you, neighbor,” Julia answered.

I smell something sweet.

I struggled to come up with anything clever that would make her need to keep talking to me, looking at me and my socks, so we wouldn't have to hurry to her class. And my dumbfounded seconds ticked by.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

Before I could unstick my throat, she stopped in front of me and pulled open the door to the art building.

Click!

“Well, nice socks, anyway, Finn. And eyes. You have a cool name.”

“It's from Mark Twain.”

Julia Bishop took her schedule from my hand.

“Why are you wearing a hood? Aren't you hot?”

I was definitely hot.

Without thinking, I put my hand on my head to see if it was true. I was, in fact, wearing a hood. I was also unaware of just about anything in the universe that wasn't named Julia Bishop.

I pulled the hood down. My hair was a mess. Some of it fell across my eye. I refused to blink.

I only stared at her. I realized, relieved, that what I smelled on the air must have been atoms from the perfume on her neck floating across the gap between us, because Finn Easton would have been on his back and staring out at the wordless universe by now if he were having a seizure.

And Julia Bishop said, “I'm not flirting with you, you know.”

“I didn't think you were,” I said.

“I'm not,” she said.

The door shut.

She disappeared inside.

Six foot one,
I mouthed. No sounds came out.

Eventually, staring at the shut door, I got my lower jaw to rejoin the upper.

My dog enjoys rolling around in dead things. Her name is Laika.

Laika was named for the dog who died in space.

I have always been somewhat obsessed with that unfortunate animal.

When she slept outside, which is what we made her do whenever she rolled in dead things and then returned home stinking with a guilty canine grin on her snout, Laika was exiled to a small plastic cube with a barred chrome door that made it look like an old jail cell.

I penned “
Sputnik 2
” and drew the ringed planet Saturn, stars, and comets on the outside of Laika's crate.

Almost nobody gets the joke.

There is more room for my little dog inside her plastic crate than there was inside
Sputnik 2
for the original Laika.