Forever Changes (5 page)

When Brianna got home, Dad was sitting on the front steps talking to Cindy.  Brianna closed her eyes briefly and tried to conjure up a stronger version of herself for Ashley’s benefit. Because if Cindy was here, that meant that Ashley would be here too.

She forced a welcoming smile onto her face.  “Hi, Cindy!  Where’s Ashley?”

“Oh, I have to go pick her up from auditions.  I was just passing through town on some errands and I saw your dad out here, so I stopped to say hi.”

Brianna thought about that.  They’d known Ashley and her family for five years, since they’d moved to town.  They used to see them at CF picnics and stuff, back when Brianna would still let Dad do those things.  And in those five years, they’d started to see Ashley’s dad less and less.  Maybe he was getting ready to bail.  Or maybe Cindy had a thing for Dad. That “I just happened to be driving by” was one of Stephanie’s signature stalking moves.

“Well, it’s nice to see you,” Brianna said, and started heading inside.

“Yes, I did get a lot done on my day off,  and yes, I did mow the lawn.  Thanks so much for asking!” Dad said.  Ugh.  Brianna thought she might escape the dreaded three questions since Dad was busy flirting with Cindy, but apparently not.

“I’m sorry, Dad.  I just had a kind of bad day.”

“So tell me three things about it,” Dad said. He’d been doing this since middle school, after he’d gotten tired of her saying “good” whenever he asked how her day was.

“Okay, one, my math teacher almost just died on the beach, two, you gave me an apple that was all bruise in my lunch, and three, Mr. Thompson is a dick.”

“Brianna.  Watch your mouth out on the street, please.”

“Okay, if you watch yours when you’re working on your bike and the garage door’s open.  What was it … something about the intake valve.… I think the exact quote was ‘Son of a motherf’—”

“Okay, okay. What happened to your math teacher?”

“I don’t know.  I went to the beach after school, and he was there all huffing and puffing and I thought he was going to pass out.  I gave him some Gatorade. He’s a big fat guy.”

“And why’s Mr. Thompson a … why don’t you like him?”

“Agh, Dad, can we talk about it later?”

“When exactly?” Dad asked, smiling.  “In the two seconds between when you hang up with Stephanie and Melissa calls?”

This comment was totally for Cindy’s benefit.  She was smiling the “it’s so true” smile that pretty much everybody with a teenage kid did whenever somebody else made a joke like that.  Brianna smiled in spite of herself.  She decided she could talk about the CF part now in front of Cindy, who knew all about CF, and save the college part for later.  Like never.

“Well, we had this senior assembly, and Mr. Thompson was talking about how they’re all gonna help us climb every mountain or whatever, but he totally singled me out.  He was like, whether you are battling a tough home life, or CF, or MD, we’re here to help.… I mean, I mostly felt bad for Keith, ’cause everybody was staring at him.”

“That seems insensitive,” Cindy said.

Dad got an “I need to protect my little girl” look in his eye.  “He said ‘battle’?,” he said.

“Dad, please don’t.  It’s just … people are dumb, and lots of people—I mean even Leila at the hospital told me to keep fighting.”

“I know, Bri, but listen, I’m not going to yell at him or anything, but I think we should have a little conversation so I can educate him a little bit.”

“Dad, you would too yell at him.  You’re not calling him.”

“Dammit Bri, yes I am!” Dad was standing up now, and Cindy looked uncomfortable.

“No Dad, you’re not!  I’m a legal adult, and I don’t need you to protect me from every stupid thing, okay?  You asked me how my day was, I told you the college counselor is a dick!  You tell me all the time about how Mr. McCluskey at the store is a dick, but I don’t call him up!”

She slammed the door behind her as she went into the house.  She got some Oreos and a glass of milk and sat down at the kitchen table to start doing her homework. After twenty minutes of homework, she called Melissa back and told her she was okay, she was just pissed off.  Melissa said that she and Stephanie went up to Mr. Thompson after and told him about how much Brianna hated the battle thing, and he was really nice about it and said he felt terrible and he owed her an apology. That made Brianna feel better.

She reached into the fridge for a Gatorade and saw her note to herself about calling MIT.  Reluctantly, she dug in her bag for the brochure with the number and called it.  She gave her info to the lady in the admissions office, who said, “Great!  We look forward to seeing you there.”

“Thanks a lot!” Brianna replied in her best fake-enthusiastic voice.  She wondered if she could go into Cambridge by herself that day and tell Dad she’d been to MIT, and nobody would ever be the wiser.  Except then she would have lied to him.

But wasn’t it a lie to get his hopes up about her going to college when she knew it wasn’t going to happen?

Dad finally came in and was rattling around the kitchen, obviously wanting to talk to her. He rooted in the cabinet and pulled out two boxes of Hamburger Helper.  “You want the cheeseburger mac or the stroganoff?” he asked.

“Cheeseburger mac,” Brianna said. “I called MIT.”

“Great!” Dad said, grinning.

He reached into the fridge for the ground beef.  Head in the fridge, he said, quietly, “I’m sorry. I’m not gonna call Mr. Thompson.”

“Thanks.  It looks like Melissa and Stephanie talked to him anyway.”

Dad looked mad for a second.  “So Melissa and Stephanie are allowed–forget it.”

Brianna bit her tongue even though she was annoyed.  Another minute passed while Dad started browning the meat, and she started to feel bad.

“Hey Dad,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I think Cindy wants you.”

“Shut up, Bri.”

“She does! What kind of errands does she have to do in West Blackpool? There’s nothing here!”

“I dunno, Bri.  You’re too suspicious.”

“Did she tell you about some problems she’s having with Bill?  That’s what Stephanie does whenever she wants to break up with somebody.  She goes to the new guy and is all, ‘you understand me, I don’t know who else to talk to …’” Dad looked uncomfortable, and Brianna was really enjoying herself.

“She didn’t … well, I mean, she said …” he trailed off and focused on stirring ground beef.

“I knew it!  She’s after you, Dad, I’m telling you, this is exactly how Stephanie operates!”

“I thought Stephanie got drunk and asked guys if they wanted to make out.”

Brianna didn’t know Dad knew that, but she wasn’t ready to concede the advantage just yet.  “Oh my God, did she ask you to hook up?  I’m going to kill her.”

Dad turned purple.  “Jesus Christ, Bri, of course she didn’t, that’s gross …”

He looked over at Brianna, who was smiling.  “Gotcha,” she said.  “But seriously, how do you know that?”

“It’s a small house, Bri, and you don’t exactly whisper.”

Oh.  That opened up a whole bunch of stuff that Dad might have overheard that he really wasn’t supposed to know.  Well, the best thing for that was just not to think about it and just assume that the only thing he’d ever heard was her talking to Melissa about how Stephanie got was when she was drunk.

After dinner, Ashley called.  And Briana had to admit to herself that she was pleased. Ashley was the only person besides Keith Who Is In a Wheelchair who could understand why she was upset about the assembly.  And Keith Who Is In a Wheelchair was a big stoner, so conversations with him tended not to be that interesting.

She thought about telling Ashley about seeing Mr. Eccles on the beach and pondering the infinite, but Ashley was so young and so positive that  Brianna didn’t want to drag Ashley into her own mess of fear and sadness.

Instead Brianna asked, “So how was the audition?”

“Whoa?  How did you know I auditioned for the play today?”

“Your mom told me.”

“That’s weird.  She didn’t mention seeing you.  But anyway, yeah, it was cool, I think my reading was really good, and I—I don’t know– I coughed a little bit. I hope they don’t hold that against me.”

“I don’t think they will.”

“I mean, you’d hate to have your Juliet hack up a lung on stage.  Not very romantic.”

Brianna laughed.  “Hey,” she said, “do you want to like, I don’t know, go to the mall or something on Saturday?”

“Yeah!” Ashley sounded like she’d just won the lottery.

“Cool.  I’ll pick you up at ten-thirty?”

“Great!”

Ashley thanked Brianna, and Brianna said she had a lot of homework to do, so she had to go.

She was halfway through the most boring History chapter ever in  the history of boring history textbooks when Dad came in.  He looked embarrassed.

“Hey, sweetie, I’m sorry to interrupt you while you’re working.”

“It’s okay,” Brianna said, but she didn’t lift her head up, just so he would know to keep it quick.

“Well, you’re busy, we can do this later.”

Brianna felt guilty almost immediately, and she wondered if that had been Dad’s intention.

“I’m sorry, Dad, I just had to finish a paragraph.  What is it?”

Dad had a notebook and a pencil in his hand, which was not something he usually carried. He also looked really uncomfortable.  For a second she really thought he was going to say something about how he and Cindy had been having a hot and heavy affair, and Cindy was leaving Bill.

“So this guy came into the store today …” Dad paused, and Brianna wondered if he he’d promised the guy a date with his beautiful stick figure of a daughter.

“And … he asked about my bike, and who had customized it, and when  I told him I did, he asked if I would do one for him.”

“Whoa, Dad, that’s great!  Congratulations!” Brianna was surprised he didn’t look happier.

“Well, I kind of need some help figuring out what I should charge.”

“Oh!  Okay,” Brianna said.  She closed her history book, relieved to have some math to do, even if it was pretty easy stuff. She made all the numbers really simple to  make it easy for Dad to do the math himself if she didn’t make it until he finished the bike.

Not that she had any real reason to think that she wouldn’t make it that long.  It was just that Ashley was just so much like Brianna had been in the ninth grade, and that felt like another lifetime, like that person she was in the ninth grade was dead already.

She didn’t know if regular people ever felt like that or not. But she figured that if she did feel like that already, like something that happened three years ago was like the whole other end of her life, maybe she was steadily approaching her limit.

They kept telling her that people were living longer and longer, but she remembered lying in that hospital bed with Dad sitting there next to her and just feeling like her lungs, and all the cells in her whole body were telling  her, “one more like this and you’re on your own, kid, don’t expect us to come along for the ride anymore.”

She managed to push these thoughts away long enough to get her homework done and talk briefly to Stephanie.  Stephanie was having some boyfriend drama, which distracted Brianna for a long time while she told Stephanie it was going to be okay, and yeah, maybe if he makes you this unhappy, you should dump him.

Finally she went to bed.  She tried not to think about anything, but it came back—that cold, hard fear in her stomach when she thought about being dead forever.  She could joke about it most of the time, but when she really thought about doing it, it really terrified her.  She couldn’t help thinking of being dead as just being all alone in the dark, and she wouldn’t even be able to look forward to having it stop, and she would just spend forever like that, feeling sad and alone and scared.   She felt like crying, and she wondered if she should wake up Dad.  But he wouldn’t have anything to tell her except whatever happens you won’t be sick, which was okay, except it was better to be sick and have your dad and your friends around than to be unsick and dead and alone always without ever ending.

She had to think about something else.  She got up and popped the
Forever Changes
CD into her CD player.  And for forty-two minutes, she felt better. She lay in the dark with the headphones on and the music playing, and she didn’t have to think about being Brianna. She wasn’t encased in a body that was lying on the bed; she was in the music. The CD ended, and, lying in the dark and the quiet, Brianna thought maybe being dead was like getting lost in music—maybe she’d just be lost in the music of the world, and she’d have no time to miss people or feel alone because she’d be part of everything.   If you thought about it that way, it wasn’t so very scary. She knew the terror would be back,  but it was gone for tonight.  She turned off the light and worked on her vampire fantasy, and pretty soon she was asleep.

Brianna woke up and immediately felt the terror rising up again, but with Dad’s weights clanking in the garage and the sky looking like it might contain sunlight sometime soon, she managed to focus on the day ahead and push her fear away.

When Dad was finished percussing, Brianna decided to tell him about  that night.  “So I’m sleeping at Melissa’s tonight, okay?”

“Where’s the party?”

“Dad, there’s no party.”

“Yes there is.  Where is it?”

“It’s at Bryan McMahon’s house, okay?”

“Who’s driving?”

“We’re walking.”

Dad looked at her for a minute.  “Really,” he said in this flat voice.

“I swear!  Bryan lives like two blocks from Melissa’s house.”

“And you’ll remember all your meds?”

“Yes!”

“What about tomorrow morning?  You gonna be home by 5:30 in the morning?”

“Dad, why did we even bother to train Melissa if you’re going to ask me that every single time I spend the night over there?”

Dad looked at her again.  “I want a call if there’s any trouble or anybody needs a ride.”

Brianna rolled her eyes. “There’s not going to be any trouble, and we’re not even driving.”

“Okay.  Just for God’s sake be careful.”

“Dad, I’m always careful.”

“And don’t sleep with anybody who doesn’t deserve you.”

“Aaagh!  You don’t have to say that every time I go out!” Like anybody was even going to even notice her, much less want to sleep with her if she was standing next to Melissa and Stephanie anyway.  They hadn’t invented beer goggles powerful enough to make that happen.

“I know, I know, I just–”

“I know, you got drunk and did something dumb and you’ve been stuck with me ever since.”

Dad’s face turned red.  “You know what?  I tell you this stuff because I love you and I care about you. It’s a really shitty thing to do to use that against me.  Goodbye.”

Dad stormed out of the house, started up his bike, and left.  Well, the hell with him.  Wasn’t that why he was always telling her this stuff?  “I got drunk and slept with somebody who didn’t deserve me and got stuck with this CF kid and if you do the same, I might get stuck raising a CF grandkid too, and I want to have a life when you finally croak.”

I mean, right? It was pretty hard to hear about how those actions could have unintended consequences when she was the unintended consequence.

Brianna arrived at school feeling a mixture of barely suppressed fear, annoyance with Dad, and dread of the awkward apology Mr. Thompson would offer if he saw her.  She couldn’t wait to see Melissa and Stephanie, but she didn’t want to talk about anything.

Melissa and Stephanie had their own problems.  Melissa had a quiz that day and was panicking.  It took Brianna ten solid minutes before she was confident that Melissa understood the concepts enough to get through the quiz on her own.

As soon as Melissa’s pre-calc problems were squared away, it was back to Stephanie and how she and Kevin had a fight and then he went to the mall with some girl from Gloucester named Kandy.  With a K.  And she was actually asking
whether
she should dump him.

“Steph, that’s one strike and you’re out,” Melissa said.

“I know, but then he called me like an hour later and told me he was sorry and he loved me—he
loves
me!  He never said that before!  And he just sounded so cute, I mean he was really really sorry.  And it’s not like I haven’t gotten mad at him and called somebody else.”

“Yeah, but …” was all that Brianna got out.

At that point, the bell rang, and Melissa and Brianna just looked at each other.  “What are we going to do with her?” Brianna thought at Melissa, and Melissa’s look said exactly the same thing.

Adam had earbuds in his ears and yanked them out when he saw Brianna walk into homeroom.  “Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“I am completely obsessed with
Forever Changes
.  I have no idea what most of these songs are about, but … it’s just so cool.”

“Yeah.  I like it too.  Even if I can’t really understand it,” Brianna agreed.

“You know what I get from it?  Well, I mean, I couldn’t really tell you what any single song is actually about, but I think the album is about how life is really beautiful and horribly ugly at the same time.”

Well, Brianna thought, that  about sums it up.  She was silent for a second as she let Adam’s words sink in.  She’d been wondering what it was about the music that spoke to her, and that was it.  It felt good to have somebody finally put into words what she’d been trying to figure out.

“Yeah.  That’s exactly what it’s like,” she said.

“Well, let’s hope Mrs. Marrs buys it.  I’m writing about it for English.”

Brianna smiled.  Here was another difference between her and Adam.   There was no way she would ever write about Love for English class, or even tell anybody else but Adam about the CD.   It felt too private somehow.  Or maybe, she thought, she just didn’t have the guts to admit in public that she liked something so weird. “You gonna like interview Eccles about it or something?” she aksed.

“Maybe after my paper is done.  I think it’ll wreck my thesis if he tells me something about how they were all just stoned out of their minds and wrote words on pieces of paper and assembled them randomly or something.”

Brianna laughed.   “So I got an interview at MIT on the same day as you,” she said.

“Cool!  I’m glad … I mean, it’ll be good to know somebody there.”

In calc, Eccles was fine, totally his normal self.  You’d never guess that he looked like he was going to croak on the beach the day before.  He gave the homework, and while everybody was packing up, and he called out, “Ms. Pelletier!  May I speak to you for a moment please?”

Brianna felt nervous, like maybe she’d screwed something up in her homework, or, worse yet, that Eccles was going to bring up what happened  on the beach.

“Yes?” she said, standing at the desk, books in hand.

“Ms. Pelletier, I believe I owe you one of these,” Eccles said, reaching into his desk drawer and pulling out a Gatorade.  Original flavor.  Well, it was the thought that counted. “I do appreciate your kindness, and I would hate to see you wanting for a revivifying beverage.”

Brianna took the bottle. “Thanks,” she said.  She turned to walk out of the classroom, but then, on her way out, she said, “Hey, Adam made me a copy of your CD—
Forever Changes
.  It’s kind of cool.”

Eccles smiled.  “Well, I certainly can’t take credit for any but the most miniscule contribution to that album. I was merely a foot soldier executing the orders of a general who was a brilliant, if troubled, artist. Still, I’m always happy when that particular underrated masterpiece finds a new audience.”

She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to get out of talking to Eccles about the album.  Maybe she thought somebody who made music about the beauty and horror of life would understand her more than somebody who didn’t. Her curiosity about the album fought with her embarrassment about seeming like a dorky fan.  Brianna turned to leave, but stopped at the door. “Uh, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, though if it concerns the lyrics of that album, I must warn you that the only times I’ve felt I fully understood it, my thinking was somewhat … occluded.”

“No, it’s not that, I just wondered.  When you go to the beach to think about infinity, what do you think about?”

“Well, Ms. Pelletier, there are times when I watch the waves roll in, and I think about all the waves that have crashed on this beach for hundreds of thousands of years.  I consider the waves that will continue to crash against this shore for years and years and years to come. Sometimes just having this visual aid helps me to get my brain to deal with the concept of infinity.”

“You mean like every wave is an integer or something?”

“Or something.  Or perhaps every wave is a point between zero and one.”

Suddenly Brianna felt awkward and wanted to go to lunch.  “Okay, well, thanks.”

She got about two steps, but Eccles kept talking like he hadn’t even heard her say anything.

“And sometimes I sit there late at night or early in the morning, and I think about the vastness of the ocean, of the sky, of the spaces between us and the nearest stars, about the incredible, unfathomable bigness of it all.”

Brianna could feel the terror curling around in her brain, and it never usually did that in the daytime.  Why had she even brought this up? She really needed to get out of here, but Eccles wouldn’t stop talking.

“And yes, it strikes me that in comparison to all of the humans on earth, to all the stars, to all the atoms in the universe, I am infinitesimally small.  If we were to assign a number to all the atoms on earth—let’s use the number one–my personal collection of atoms is so close to zero as to be nearly indistinguishable from zero.  I mean, I am really not sure I’d want to divide by me.”

Brianna’s  stomach was sour and panicky.  Why wouldn’t he shut up?

“But here, Ms. Pelletier, is the thing.  Without infitinesimals, the calculus as we know and love it simply doesn’t exist.  It is these nearly-zero, sort-of-zero, sometimes-zero quantities that allow us to understand the world through mathematics.  Something which seems to be nearly nothing turns out to be crucial to everything.  So though I, or you for that matter, or any of us, may be, as a collection of atoms, nearly indistinguishable from zero, this does not necessarily mean we are insignificant.  Indeed, it may be that, like the infinitesimals in our discipline here, we are actually crucially important.”

Brianna found herself cracking a smile.  “I like that.”

“So do I, Ms. Pelletier.  Enjoy your lunch.”

At lunch,  Melissa and Stephanie were talking about something, but Brianna had a hard time paying attention.  She kept thinking about being an important infinitesimal.  It was a really good way to look at things, but the only problem was that she couldn’t just wait for somebody to plug her into an equation and try to divide by her.  She’d have to figure out for herself what this particular infinitesimal was good for.