Crazy (24 page)

Gomez tilts her head. "What do you mean?"

CRAZY GLUE
:
Don't tell her about us.

FBG WITH A MUSTACHE
:
Or Dear Mouse.

"Oh, well, like I've always tried to just be invisible in school, partly 'cause of my dad and then because of what happened with the swirlie. I figured who needs friends if all they're going to do is turn against you. I thought it was safer and easier to be on my own. But I don't think I want to be invisible anymore because—because it's lonely, and I don't want to be lonely. I don't want to be alone."

CRAZY GLUE
:
You mean you're scared shitless of being alone.

SEXY LADY
:
That's why you have us. You're never alone with us, Jase.

I scrub real hard at this spot on the rug so I don't
have to look at her. "Like writing the wrong dates on my papers and not punctuating my sentences and stupid stuff like that. I think I just wanted to get attention, get noticed, just to kind of see if I could." I laugh again. "I think I was starting to really believe I was invisible—practically."

"And what do you believe now?"

I look at her. She's leaning against the desk, waiting, her arms crossed. "That my teachers think I'm a pain in the ass, but I think I can be funny, too."

Gomez stirs. She picks up some pencils and puts them back in her pencil holder. "Just what this school needs, another class clown."

"Yeah, okay, maybe not like that, exactly."

Dr. Gomez smiles at me and pushes up the sleeves of her puffy shirt. "I'm proud of you. I think you've made an important discovery about yourself."

I've finished cleaning the mess, so I set the wastebasket back over by the side of her desk. I feel better about stuff, I guess, but something nags at me. I don't know what it is and I don't feel like digging around in my head anymore to figure it out.

Dr. Gomez hands me a pass for my next class and then, just as I'm leaving, she says to me, "Forgive yourself, Jason."

I stop. "Huh?"

"Think about it," she says, then smiles this Mona Lisa—type smile that I can't read at all. She lets the
door close on me, and after just standing in the hall for a minute or so, stunned, 'cause what the hell did she mean by that, I make my way to class.

For the rest of the school day, I keep going over and over my explosion in Dr. Gomez's office and our conversation afterward. These thoughts make me restless all over again. I can't sit still. I need to do something, get up, run, pace, something. During the last period of the day, I get so restless, I can't stand it anymore. I walk out of the classroom, leaving behind my books. I wait for my teacher to stop me, but she doesn't. She lets me go because my mom's dead or she knows my dad's crazy, or she thinks I'm crazy, I don't know, but she doesn't stop me. I hurry through the hall, past the lockers and classrooms. "Forgive yourself," she said. I start to jog, and two students standing by the lockers look up at me. I feel their eyes on my back as I jog past them, and then I go into a full-out run and hit the exit doors, bursting through to the outside.

The first few gulps of cold air sting my still-sore throat, but it feels good, too. The sky is real gray and the wind is high, its sound competing with the noise of the highway traffic. I keep running, feeling the chill of the air passing through my jacket and shirt and jeans, and it feels like freedom to me—the wind and the sound of the rushing traffic. I race across the playing fields to a tunnel that runs under the highway where students who walk to and from school pass to get
to the quieter, safer streets. Shelby must use this path. I remember that she walks to school. I remember she told me once that she lived nearby, on Vinton. I run through the tunnel and think about Shelby walking to school in winter, in shorts and no socks. I take a set of stairs on the other side of the tunnel, climbing up to a wide road with a good sidewalk. I keep running away from the highway and the school. I don't know where I'm going—I'm just going—but then I find myself near Shelby's house, and I realize I was headed here all along. It's a crazy thing to do. Her mother's just died, but I need to see her. I need to be in her presence. I don't know why, but as I run down the street I feel desperate to get there, to see Shelby, to see her face, to touch her, to just be with her.

By the time I reach Vinton, I'm out of breath. I lean against a stop sign on the corner and bend over, resting my right hand on my knee, and watch puff after puff of cold vapor escape through my mouth. For the first time I feel just how cold it is outside. I stand up, still breathing hard. A gust of wind hits me full in the face and chest, and I feel its bite on my nose and ears. I shiver and look down the street at the row of houses on either side, all of them white and stark-looking against the gloom. I know right away which house is Shelby's by the line of cars pulled up outside the house. I start jogging again, and then when I get there, when I find myself standing on the short walkway
leading up to the front door, I can't move. How can I just barge into her house? Maybe this isn't even her place after all. I check the mailbox and see the name Majors—it's hers. I rub my bad arm, feeling the cold, and pace up and down the walkway, trying to decide what to do.

CRAZY GLUE
:
Go on, goob. Go see your girlfriend.

She's not my girlfriend. I don't even know why I'm here.

AUNT BEE
:
Go on, Jason. Ring the bell. Take a chance.

SEXY LADY
:
Why do you want to see that big mouth? Come on, Jase. I'm the one who thinks you're hot. What does she think of you?

Good question. What does anybody think of me?

LAUGH TRACK
:
Forgive yourself.

Yeah, and what does that mean? For what?

FBG WITH A MUSTACHE
:
You know.

AUNT BEE
:
He was only six years old. He was going to be buried alive.

"Jason? What are you doing here?"

I jump, I'm so surprised to hear Shelby's voice. I can't answer her question because I don't know. I look at her blotchy-red face, with her eyes, her cheeks, even her mouth, looking swollen, and I know it's a mistake for me to be here.

I back away from her. "Sorry, I—I don't know what I'm..." I turn to run but get no farther than the mailbox when she calls to me.

"Jason, what are you doing? Come on inside—it's freezing out here. Come on."

I turn around and she waves me toward her. I head back down the walk, climb the two brick steps to her house, and follow her inside.

I'm hit with the warmth of the house as soon as I enter, and I feel my fingers and toes, cheeks, nose, and ears start to tingle, then itch as they thaw. I'm in the living room, a large room with green walls and a deeper green carpet. The room seems dark, and then I notice that all the curtains are drawn. I wonder if Shelby's family drew them because of death or do they always live this way, in the dark.

I follow Shelby to her kitchen and notice the house smells funny, like cough syrup, or maybe it's embalming fluid.

CRAZY GLUE
:
This place feels creepy.

Everything in the house seems to speak of death, the dark rooms, the smell, the people in the kitchen talking in somber tones, their heavy, dark clothes. What am I doing here?

I wait in the doorway of the kitchen while Shelby enters the circle of people. "Dad," she says, "that's Ja-son. We're going to go up to my room, okay?"

Her father, a heavyset man with the thickest eyebrows I've ever seen, nods. "Just leave your bedroom door open, sweetheart."

Shelby makes no reply to this and as soon as we enter her room, she closes the door behind us and I'm suddenly in a jungle. She's painted the walls of her room in
a wild jungle theme with all kinds of trees and ferns and grasses everywhere. There are animals, too—monkeys, zebras, lions, tigers, and elephants—all peering at me from various places on the walls. There's even a snake wound around the trunk of a tree, giving me the eye, and a couple of colorful parrots staring out at me as if they're considering attacking my head. The whole effect of the dark jungle scene is disorienting, and I'm still lost in the mural when Shelby bursts into tears and dives onto her bed. I wonder again why I'm here.

I watch the way she folds into herself and cries in a way I've never seen anyone cry before. It's so loud, so close to screaming, and her whole body shakes, even the bed shakes. As I stand watching her, it finally occurs to me why I've come. I need to see this. Shelby is acting out everything I've felt inside about the loss of my own mother. I can see her pain. I can hear it. I walk over to the bed and reach out for her hand, and it's hot. It's her pain. For the second time today I'm flooded with my own grief over my mom's death and my dad's illness. I grab Shelby. I pull her off the bed and draw her to me and I hold her tight.

We stand for several minutes, or maybe it's hours, just like this, holding on to each other and crying—both of us crying. I feel out of control with my grief, first in Dr. Gomez's office and now here, with Shelby, and I don't like it. I can't stop myself and I don't know what I might do next, and this scares me.

I
HAVE THIS
sudden urge to kiss Shelby. One second I feel all out of control with my emotions and then this. I want to kiss her. We stand holding on to each other, crying into each other's shoulders, and I don't even know whose sound is whose; we just meld into each other. With my thoughts already so wild, feeling Shelby's hot body up against me, her hair smelling like perfumed peaches tickling my nose, her arms holding me as tightly as I'm holding her, I feel I just have to kiss her.

CRAZY GLUE
:
Goob, you've never kissed a girl in your life. You'll do it all wrong.

No. I don't care. I don't care about anything except kissing her. That's all. That's all there is in the world right now—Shelby, with her sweet, freckled, tear-stained face.

She notices how still I've become, how silent. She looks into my eyes and I lean in to kiss her, but she draws back and says, "How 'bout a haircut, Jason?"

I stare at her, uncomprehending. "What?"

"A haircut. I want to cut your hair. It's too long. You really need a haircut."

"What?" Why is she talking about a haircut? Weren't we about to kiss? Haven't we both just been crying our heads off? Where is this coming from?

Shelby pulls away from me. She moves over to the mirror hanging from her closet door and looks back at me. "Come on—look at yourself. What do you see?"

I don't know what to do, so I do as she asks and join her in front of the mirror and stare at myself. What do I see?

CRAZY GLUE
:
Yup! Bad idea. It's that broken mirror. The one you smashed. You don't like mirrors, goob. You'd better close your eyes or you might see crazy.

I squint at the mirror. At first all I see are these jungle animals, tigers and elephants and zebras, peering at me from behind my back. It takes me a second to even find myself, but when I do, I see a squinty-eyed, red-nosed, blushing skinny guy with hair down to his shoulders. I look away.

"You've got really nice hair, all wavy and soft," Shelby says. She grabs some of it in her hands, runs it through her fingers, and drops it. "You could donate it to Locks of Love. You know, the people who make hairpieces for people with cancer?"

I look at Shelby. "What are you talking about? Locks of Love?"

"Yeah, you know them." Shelby doesn't look at me.
She moves over to her desk, reaches into a drawer, and pulls out a pair of scissors, a comb, and a plastic squirt bottle as if she's been waiting for me to drop by just so she can cut my hair. She turns around and holds up the implements. "So let me cut your hair." She drags the chair out from her desk and pats it and, stupidly, I go sit down.

She pulls my hair back from my face and peers around to look at me. "That's better. You've got that Mediterranean kind of nose, you know, with the high bridge and kind of longish—in a nice way, I mean, but it's too big to wear long hair. There's all this hair and then this nose poking out from it."

Shelby combs my hair while she talks, and I sit staring at the two of us in the mirror.

"Gee, thanks."

"My mother once told me the nose and feet grow first, so that's why teens look awkward for a while. So your nose has grown. Eventually the rest of your face will match, but right now..."

CRAZY GLUE
:
Goob, what's her problem? Why is she blathering on about your nose?

SEXY LADY
:
Long noses are hot, anyway.

"Hey, enough about my nose, already. Okay?" I jump up and pull my hair away from her with my good hand. "I know my hair's too long. I've been cutting it myself for a while, but okay, things have been a little crazy lately and I haven't, but jeez, what the hell? Why do you
suddenly want to cut my hair? I mean, we were just—just..." I can't finish my sentence. I don't know what we were just doing, but it had nothing to do with hair and my freakin' long nose.

Shelby blushes and sets the comb and scissors on her desk. Her eyes fill with tears again. "I don't know why I want to cut it. I used to cut my mom's hair all the time." A tear rolls down her face. "It always made us feel better, so I just—I just thought that maybe you'd feel better, too, and there's the Locks of Love, so..." She shrugs again, looking totally helpless. I can't stand to see her like this, so I plop myself in the chair.

"You're right—cut it off!"

"Really?"

I hear the hope in her voice and I nod. "Sure, cut it all off." I wave my hand and look at her through the mirror, and she smiles. Then I correct myself and say, "I mean, not like Pete's. No bald head for me, okay. I want
some
hair. I have a big nose, after all."

Shelby nudges me. "It's not
that
big. And anyway, I like it. Its distinguished-looking.

I feel my nose. It feels like it grew overnight. I hadn't even noticed, but it's bigger, and the high bridge is more noticeable. I look at it in the mirror.