Forever Changes (7 page)

Monday morning, Brianna saw Stephanie talking to Melissa and looking very happy and animated.  Melissa shot Brianna a “Here she goes again,” look, and Brianna prepared to bite her tongue.

Which she did as Stephanie described how Tom, one of the guys who had beaten up Kevin at the party, called her on Sunday night.  “He was really sweet!” she said.  “He said he just wanted to check and see if I was okay.  Isn’t that nice?”

“It is,” Brianna said.  She had to tread carefully so she neither pissed Stephanie off nor betrayed herself.

“So we talked for over an hour, and I think we’re going to go out next weekend.  I mean, I just … it was really nice the way he stuck up for me, you know?”

I know he was hammered and probably happy to have an excuse to pound somebody, Brianna thought.  “It is nice when people stick up for you,” Brianna said.  Well, that was true.  Even if they were meatheads trying to beat the snot out of somebody.

In homeroom, she started a conversation with Adam instead of letting him do it.  “So I listened to the other Love CD,” she said.

“And?”

“Well, I have to say—I mean, it was okay, but it didn’t grab me the way the other one did.”

“I know.  I really like ‘7 and 7 is,’ though.  Hey, can I show you something?”

“Uh, sure.”  Adam dug into his bookbag and pulled out a paper.  “Blood and Snot: images of ruin and decay in Love’s
Forever Changes
,” it said on the cover page.

“It’s my paper for English.  Since you’re the only other person I know who’s ever even heard of this album, do you think you could just read this and tell me if I’m completely insane?”

“Well, okay, but I’m more of a math person, you know.”

“Yeah, me too.  That’s why I’m freaking out about this.”  Brianna looked at Adam for a second.  If he was in AP English, he had to be good at it.

“Well, there’s only a couple of minutes left in homeroom, so I can’t read it now” Brianna said.

“It’s not due till Friday;  you can keep that copy.”

“Okay then,” Brianna said, and tucked the paper into her bag.  “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Aren’t you like … I don’t know.  I mean, I haven’t told anybody about being into that record, ’cause it’s so weird, you know, and I just … Aren’t you worried about kids in your class making fun of you?”

Adam looked at her like she had three heads.  “They make fun of me anyway.  I might as well get made fun of for being myself.  I tried fitting in for a while—it didn’t take.  And then I just felt stupid for trying to be something I’m not and failing.  No, I’m afraid this”—he pointed to his chest—“is the Pennington package, and people pretty much have to take it or leave it as is.”

Brianna stared at him, and his face turned red.

“There’s a really dirty package joke in there, isn’t there?” Adam asked, grinning.

Brianna giggled.  “I guess so.”

“Well, I’m gonna just refrain from making any jokes about my package.  Not that it’s inherently humorous or anything …”

“Okay, okay, that’s more than enough,” Brianna said, laughing.  Fortunately, the bell rang at that point.

The rest of the week was strange.  Dad was working all the time.  The guy who had hired Dad to customize his bike had sent a couple of other customers his way after stopping by to check on Dad’s progress, and now Dad’s cell phone was ringing constantly and there was barely room in the garage for Dad’s weights with tools and motorcycle parts scattered everywhere.

Brianna liked seeing Dad happy, and she was glad that he had something to occupy his mind besides hassling her about MIT.  But seeing him this happy made her think she was holding him back.  If it weren’t for the cost of the meds and hospitalizations, he might be able to customize bikes for a living and tell Bargain Zone to take their assistant manager job and the health insurance that went with it and stick it someplace dark and tight.

School was completely normal.  Mostly. History was boring, Calc and physics were interesting, and English was somewhere in the middle. Melissa was stressing about math and BU.  Stephanie was talking to Tom every night and giving them all the details.   Brianna told Adam which parts of his paper were confusing, and he kept producing new drafts for her to look at.

And everybody, not just Melissa, seemed to be talking about college.  Adam was always going on about MIT, and every teacher seemed to be talking about how you’ll need this or that to get into college.

Ashley was caught up in the whirlwind of ninth grade and seemed to be having a good time, though she had called Brianna a couple of times at night close to tears because her parents were fighting again.

Despite the CF and her many absences, Brianna had always felt like she was part of everything at school. This week, however, she was starting to feel like school was a river flowing to the sea that was college, and she was on the banks, watching.

On Friday, Brianna was spaced when Calculus class ended, so she was the last one leaving the classroom.  As she walked past Eccles’ desk, he said, “Ms. Pelletier?”

She looked up, surprised.

“Well, forgive me for the intrusion, but you haven’t seemed yourself the last few days.”

Well, she thought, I’m certainly not the self I was last year.  I seem to be becoming a new self. She hadn’t thought it was noticeable.  Nobody else had said anything, but Steph and Melissa had their own problems.  And so, for that matter, did Adam, who she guessed was her friend, too.

“I’m sorry,” she said,  I just …”

“Oh, Ms. Pelletier, I’m not scolding you.  I’m merely expressing concern.”

“Well, thanks.”

Eccles smiled.  “Any time.”  And Brianna noticed, approvingly, that he didn’t offer to be somebody she could talk to about what was bothering her, nor  did he suggest that she needed to see somebody to talk about her problems.

Brianna moved toward the door, then stopped and turned around.  Well, he seemed cool.  After all, he’d helped make the album that seemed to be the only thing that helped her feel better right now, and he was also the only person who’d ever said anything about infinity (and death, which was the same thing) that didn’t terrify her.   Maybe she could tell him the truth.  “It’s just … well, forget it.”

“Yes, Ms. Pelletier?  Is something amiss?”

Brianna looked down at the desk as she said, quietly, “I guess I’d like it if you didn’t talk about college all the time.”

“Ah.   Is the application process bringing stress and heartache?”

“No. It’s not that.  I know you can get college credit for this class, but that’s not why I’m taking it.  You know?  I just like math.  And I’m probably not going to college because … well, not to be too dramatic, but I guess I just … I don’t feel like it really makes sense for me to make any long-term plans.”

Eccles nodded.  “Well, Ms. Pelletier, as you may have guessed from our encounter on the beach, long-term thinking doesn’t make much sense for me either.  And yet, if I could, I would most certainly spend my remaining time in college.”  She tried hard not to roll her eyes. She could feel Dad’s favorite lecture coming:  all about using the gift of her great mind, blah blah.  But then, strangely, that wasn’t what he said at all.  “For if today’s popular culture is to be believed, college life consists of a perpetual bacchanalia, a hedonistic dance of decadence not seen since the fall of Rome.  In what other environment can young people constantly celebrate the fact that they possess adult bodies but no adult responsibilities?  Indeed, it would seem, if my colleagues are typical adults, that this celebration of the seven deadly sins is the whole point of college for many people, that they go to college and engage in Dionysian revels so that they will have something to talk about when they become insufferably dull adults.  Having settled into the unthinking somnambulism that passes for life for too many people, they look back fondly on their college years as a way of reminding themselves that once, if only for a few short years, they were actually alive.”

Brianna looked at him, and, for the first time that week,  she started to laugh.  “That’s certainly an argument my dad hasn’t used.  I guess I’ll have to think about that one.”

“Ponder it well, Ms. Pelletier.  My advice to you is:  get thee to a dormitory.”

“Okay.  Thanks … Is that true what you said about not thinking long-term?”

“I have some cardiac issues.  There was a minor incident over the summer. According to my doctors, I need to make some significant lifestyle changes if I wish to avoid a major and possibly fatal incident.  I’ve done some research, and, well, for a man of my age with heart problems, it seems time will be relatively short even if I do muster the willpower to make some lifestyle changes.”

She looked at him.   He’d said that with the same kind of tired resignation that Dad would use if he said he had to work a double shift.  Could he really be that calm about it?  “Are you scared?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute, and Brianna immediately felt embarrassed.  She shouldn’t have asked that.  But who else could she ask?  Everybody she knew was probably scared of dying, but none of them were as close to it as she was.  Or Eccles was.

“Yes.  I’m scared.  And yet, having devoted my life to a discipline which is all about imagining the unimaginable, I like to think about becoming one of those unimaginable mysteries. Sometimes when I’m telling a class about the infinite number of points on the number line between zero and one, I think  this:  One—not just the number one, but one of anything, the distance between any two integers on the number line, or a single orange, or a single human being, contains infinity.  Do you see?  Though I am but one, I contain the infinite.   While you couldn’t, of course, do this in practice, in theory it is possible to divide me an infinite number of times.  I mean, if you could divide me by the infinite number of points I occupy, rather than by the finite, but ever-increasing”–he patted his gut–“number of atoms that make up my body.   Thus, my hope is that, in death, I shall not cease to be, I shall just become more fully what I already am:  one, and infinite.”

Brianna found it comforting to think that maybe what was coming wasn’t as different and strange as she’d been thinking.  She said, “I like that.  Maybe I’ll understand how the sets of integers and primes can both be infinite.”

“Maybe, Ms. Pelletier, you will dance in eternity with the primes.  You know, there has been a historical debate in mathematics as to whether mathematical concepts are created or simply discovered.  In a discipline that exists only in the mind, how can anything be discovered?  And yet it is the very usefulness of the calculus in measuring, describing, and predicting the world around us that makes me think it was discovered, rather than created.  It’s pretty thin gruel when you really have to think about your life ending, but I do try to cling to the idea that even as some of these concepts describe our physical world very neatly, they may well provide some clues about what awaits us both, and, indeed, awaits us all.”

They were both silent for a moment.  Brianna smiled.  “Kinda hard to think about lunch after something like that.”

“Strangely, Ms. Pelletier, I disagree.  For whatever joys the afterlife holds, I am fairly certain that the fluffernutter is not among them.  Thus, pondering the infitine reminds me of this fleeting, ephemeral joy that I should savor while I can.”  He dipped into his desk drawer.

“Well, I will then go savor the joy of the Tater Tot,” Brianna said.  “Thanks.”

“Any time, Ms. Pelletier, any time.  I will make an effort not to stress college so much in the future.”

“Thanks.”

“The least I can do.  Enjoy your Tater Tots.”

“Savor your fluffernutter while you can.”

“I plan to, Ms. Pelletier, I plan to.”

Brianna walked down to the cafeteria feeling lighter than she had in a long time.

After dinner a couple of weeks later, Dad asked, “Can I get your help with this?” He pulled a computer box and a printer from the closet.

“Whoa, Dad!  How’d you afford that?”

Dad smiled.  “Well, I got a big advance from another bike customer, and with my employee discount, this was only four hundred bucks, so it’s not that bad.  But I’m gonna need to keep some records—you know, what I buy from who, who owes me money, this kind of stuff.  So far I just have this”– he pulled out a cheap spiral notebook— “And I’m starting to get confused, and I’d like to be able to give somebody an invoice that looks professional.”

Brianna looked at Dad, standing there in a sleeveless T-shirt with some splatters on it from the sauce he’d heated up for their spaghetti dinner, and his bike tinkering jeans, which had grease and dirt all over them, and smiled.  A month ago, the idea of Dad saying he was concerned about professionalism would have been bizarre, and even now it didn’t seem to fit with the person standing in front of her.

“Okay.  Let’s get started.”  They managed to get the computer turned on, and Brianna got Minesweeper running, but once they got into trying to set up a spreadsheet for Dad’s new business, they hit a wall.  Brianna knew that Dad was expecting her to be some computer whiz just because she was younger than him, but she had only ever typed her papers on Stephanie’s or Melissa’s computer.  She knew somebody who did know computers, though. They turned the computer off and Dad washed the dishes while Brianna dried.  Maybe because Brianna’s mind was wandering back to infinity, or maybe just because she was afraid that one of Dad’s “so”s was coming, she said, “Hey, can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Dad said, squirting Bargain Zone-brand dishwashing liquid onto a sponge.

“Do you ever like wonder what you’re here for, or why your life matters, or anything like that?”

Dad handed her a wet plate and looked at her for a minute.

“What?” Brianna said, wiping the plate.

“Well,” Dad said as he pulled the saucepan out of the sudsy water that filled the sink, “I guess that’s not a problem I ever have.  I’ve known for eighteen years what my purpose in life is.  I have to say that’s one thing I haven’t worried about since you were born.”

Brianna paused, stunned.  She certainly knew that Dad made  a lot of sacrifices for her, but she’d never really thought that he might think she was his whole reason for being alive.  That felt heavy.  And also, what would that mean for him when she died?  What would his purpose be then?

“But if you’re thinking about this stuff, I really don’t want you to go the having a kid route.  Not until you’re older, anyway.”

“Jesus, Dad, I’m not going to go get knocked up just so I can feel like I have a purpose in life!” Not like I could even if I wanted to, she thought.  Her extra-thick mucous made her fertility unlikely, though Dr. Patel was always careful to tell her that this didn’t mean she should have unprotected sex.

Dad smiled.  “I know, honey.  But a lot of people do.  A
lot
of people.”

Brianna dried and chewed on that for a minute.  “I guess that explains cousin Brittany, huh?” she said, laughing.

Dad laughed, too.  “You know, I love my sisters, but  yeah. I think that explains pretty much all of your cousins.”  He paused.  “On both sides, actually.”

“I was thinking something more along the lines of a Nobel prize or something,” Brianna said.

“Do they give those out for dish drying?  Because if they do, I think you’re taking yourself out of the running.  There’s a freakin’
puddle
in the cabinet there,” Dad said, pointing to where she’d put away the improperly dried plates.

Brianna smiled and blotted the puddle.  She thought about trying to steer the conversation back to the deep question of what her life was going to mean, but it felt good to laugh, and she decided to leave it alone.