Forever Freaky (21 page)

When my mom came home, she discovered me
lying in bed in my room when I should be in school. I told her that
I was sick, and for a full hour she grilled me as to the nature of
my illness.

“Well, sick how?” she asked.

“You know, just sick.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’m not a
doctor.”

“Well, what exactly is bothering you? Is it
your stomach?”

“Yeah, my stomach.”

“You have a headache?”

“Yeah, that too.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Why does it always come back to that? Can’t
I just be sick?”

“There has to be a cause. Does it have to do
with the tree burning?”

“Why would it have anything to do with
that?”

“You tell me,” she said. “Do you feel
upset?”

“A little.”

“You feel irritable?”

“Yeah.”

“When did that start?”

“When you started asking me twenty million
questions. Mom, I’m sick and you’re interrogating me. Please! You
think that’ll make me feel better.”

“I just want to make sure it’s nothing
serious,” she said.

“It’s not.”

But she kept asking if I had this symptom or
that symptom. That was the problem with having a nurse as a mother:
she knew a lot of medical conditions and had a vast imagination. I
grew weary from answering questions. I actually started to feel
sick for real. I started agreeing with whatever she said. Yeah, I
felt feverish. Yeah, I had a pain in my lower back. Yeah, my throat
was sore. By the time she left my room, she was probably convinced
that I had malaria or Rocky Mountain spotted fever or
something.

Saturday afternoon I drove over to Jack’s
house. I had never been there before. He lived in a large brick
bungalow, and when I pulled up to the curb, he was sitting on the
cement front stairs. He looked tired, as though he hadn’t slept.
There were tiny pouches beneath his eyes, and his hair was messier
than usual. He got up slowly from the stairs and led me through the
gangway to the back yard, where an old woman sat in a wheelchair on
the patio. Her face was as wrinkled as an rotting peach, and she
didn’t seem to be enjoying the sunny afternoon. She just stared
straight ahead at some fixed point that only she could see.

“That’s Gramms,” Jack said, paused at the
back stairs. “It’s a bitch getting her up the stairs from the
basement apartment, but she likes sitting outside when the weather
is nice.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said. Really, I
didn’t think the woman even realized she was outside.

“Do me a favor. If it starts raining, remind
me she’s out here. Last summer I forgot, and my mom had a hissy
fit.”

“Sure thing.”

The old woman stirred. She craned her neck as
though she heard faraway voices. Her beady eyes drifted toward
where Jack and I stood.

“Hey, Gramms,” Jack called out loudly, waving
at her although she was only about ten feet away. She looked
vaguely puzzled, as if she didn’t quite recognize Jack.

“Sometimes, she doesn’t know what’s going
on,” Jack whispered to me, and then shouted toward the old woman,
“Gramms, this is Jules. Say hello.”

The beady eyes shifted toward me, locked onto
me, and after a couple seconds became as hard and dark as tiny
hunks of coal. She raised her hand and pointed a crooked finger at
me.

“Witch!” she cried in a surprisingly strong
voice. “Witch!”

“Do I need this?” I asked Jack.

“Sorry.”

“Witch!…Witch!…Witch!” the old woman
screeched.

“There’s definitely a quality-of-life issue
here,” I commented.

Jack quickly led me up the back stairs and
into the house, as his grandmother continued to cry witch after
us.

We entered a family room that had recently
been built onto the back of the house. It had a cathedral ceiling,
from which hung a huge fan. A large bay window overlooked the small
backyard. A plasma television screen was mounted on one wall. There
was a sofa but no other furniture, just a lot of floor space
covered with tan carpeting. A doorway to the left opened on the
kitchen.

I walked around, checking out the place.

“Love what your parents did with this room,”
I said. “It’s nice and…cold.”

“They had it built on a few years ago.
They’re still trying to catch up on furnishings,” he added, vaguely
embarrassed.

I stood at the window and looked down at the
patio. The old woman had calmed down. Again she was staring off
into space, as though seeing her prize-winning azaleas, which
probably died about fifty years ago.

“So, what were you planning?” Jack asked.

“Well, you don’t have a swimming pool. I
doubt the basement stairs would be enough of a fall.”

“What?” Then he realized I was talking about
his grandmother. “Jules,” he said in a chiding tone.

“Really, that woman is a poster child for
euthanasia,” I said.

“She’s old. She can’t help that.”

“My point exactly.” I turned to look at him.
He looked nervous. “I was just kidding,” I said. “I do that
sometimes. I know it doesn’t sound like I’m kidding, but, really,
I’m laughing inside. I’m sure your grandmother is a wonderful
person. It’s not her fault she sees the real me, although
technically I’m not a witch. You know what they say: old people,
children, pets—they see things everybody else misses.”

“I was asking about Amy,” he said, obviously
wanting to change the subject. “What are you going to do?”

I shrugged. I wandered to the sofa, and
flopped down on the soft cushions. I hooked a leg over the arm,
which at home drove my mom nuts. It was quite comfortable.

“Really, Jack, what do you want from me?” I
asked, looking up at him, feeling exposed but not in a bad way.
“You want me to save the world? I can’t do that. Nobody can. The
world is doomed. So, aside from that, what do you want from
me?”

“I just like you,” he said.

“That doesn’t answer my question. I know you
like me, but what do you want from me?”

“The usual things, I guess.”

“You want me to like you back?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“All right, I confess, I like you back. Half
the time I’m mad as hell at you, but I still do like you. I have to
hand it to it; you stuck in there, you followed me around like a
lost puppy, you never gave up. Somewhere along the way, I got used
to you. And now I like you. So now what? You want to hang out
together? You want us to go places? You want us to hold hands and
get kissy-faced? Jack, I don’t think I have a lot to offer in this
area. Still, if that’s what you want, I might be willing to try.
But you have to understand something. I can’t have you dragging me
into this weird shit all the time. I just can’t deal with it—I
don’t want to deal with it. If I could, I’d run away from myself.
So if you really want to be my boyfriend, try starting by being my
friend.”

He sat down next to me.

“I never meant to--” he started
awkwardly.

“I know,” I said.

“Sometimes I just get carried away with
things.”

“Sometimes?”

“All right, most of the time. I just don’t
think.”

“Well, start,” I told him. “Now, I think I’ve
said too much about all that—I’m starting to feel stupid. So back
to the Amy problem,” I said, and then added with emphasis, “which
is going to be the last problem you drag me into, right?”

He chuckled. “I promise.”

“Okay, now what to do with Amy.”

“You think of anything?”

“I figure there are two ways to deal with
her: the easy way and the hard way.”

“What’s the easy way?” he wondered.

“You won’t like the easy way.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“It’s pretty obvious, really. We know that
she’s fireproof and waterproof, but she’s not bulletproof. So I
find a gun and blow her brains out. End of story, right?”

Jack was horrified. “You’re not serious.”

“Sure, I’m serious. It’s the quickest way to
solve the problem. It wouldn’t bother me. Remember, I don’t have
much of a conscience.”

“But I do.”

“Which is why I said you wouldn’t like the
simple way.”

“Well, what’s the hard way?” he asked, eyeing
me suspiciously.

“That’s where I try to stop her by other
means,” I said.

“How would that work, exactly?”

“Exactly? I don’t know. I can cause things to
happen, but I never practiced. That would be the big problem: I
don’t know what I’m doing, and she does.”

Jack frowned. “You could get hurt.”

“Possibly.”

“You could die.”

“No, I won’t. I already know how I’m going to
die; I’m not going to burn up.”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Something’s going to kill me,” I
offered.

“Something?”

“Some kind of animal.”

He leaned back on the sofa, and released a
slow weary breath.

“Do you know when?” he asked.

“No, just that it will happen. It’s actually
kind of comforting, knowing. At least I won’t wither away in some
hospital bed.”

“But this could be years from now,” he
said.

“Sure, it can—it probably will be. My point
is that I’m absolutely certain Amy won’t kill me. And that’s a good
thing to know. I figure I go to the forest preserve before the
party starts. I lurk around in the woods and wait for her to show
up. I’m sure she’ll be hiding in the woods, because, well, that’s
what I would do. I’d want to be close enough to witness the pain
and suffering I’m causing, otherwise, what the point?”

“And when she shows up…?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I guess I play it by ear. Maybe
something will occur to me.”

“That’s your plan?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not much of a plan.”

“You could always go out and find me a gun,”
I reminded him.

“Isn’t there a third option?” he asked.
“Something where you don’t risk getting hurt or becoming a
murderer.”

“Hey, you tell me what that is. I’m all ears.
Amy is just a nightmare. There’s not a lot to work with—you can’t
reason with her, and stopping her is going to be hard. I’m telling
you, it’s easiest just to shoot the bitch. But you don’t what me to
do that. I understand why. You’re worried about my soul, and I
appreciate that. You always seem to be worrying about things I’m
not sure I actually have.”

“Well, what about practicing?” he asked. He
just didn’t know when to quit.

“Practicing? Really? Practicing what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s something you
can do to protect yourself. Maybe your can create some kind—I don’t
know—shield.”

“A shield?”

“Yeah, sure, why not?”

“Jack, I’m a lot of things, but I’m not the
U.S.S. Enterprise,” I said. “As for practicing, it took me two
weeks to learn how to twirl a pencil on my fingertip, and the only
reason I learned that was to drive my mom crazy. There just isn’t
enough time to learn to control what I have.”

He sat there and thought about things. From
his expression it was clear he didn’t like any of it. Who
would?

“And what do I do?” he asked.

“You do nothing.”

“You can’t expect me—”

“Yeah, I can,” I said, raising my voice. “I
expect you to listen to me. You made me like you, when I didn’t
want to like you. You make me care, when I didn’t want to care
about anybody or anything. A couple months ago, I couldn’t imagine
ever talking to somebody the way I’m talking to you now. You even
got me thinking stupid things, like maybe—ah, just forget it.
That’s not important. But you are not to do anything. You’re not to
be anywhere near to that place, you understand?”

“Sure, I understand,” he said meekly. He
looked at me. He didn’t seem to know what to say. I could see
something welling up in him, begging to come out.

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, go ahead,” I
said.

He reached over and gave my shoulder an
affectionate squeeze and then rested his hand there. It didn’t feel
bad. I couldn’t read his mind, and that still mystified me. He was
like a cipher, but at this point in my life ciphers were good
things. After the moment passed, I said, “Okay, okay, enough of
that. No point in getting sappy.”

He removed his hand.

“So we have an agreement on this?” I asked
him.

“Yeah.”

“Say it.”

“I won’t go near the picnic.”

“And?”

“And I won’t ever involve you in weird stuff
again.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “Now that that is
settled, I should go home.”

“Already?” He looked disappointed.

“Well, yeah. What?—you want me to hang out
for a while?”

“It would be nice,” he said.

“Jack, if you haven’t noticed, I’m not very
sociable. I don’t play video games. I don’t like watching movies.
Honestly, I don’t I think I know how to hang out. It would be
something I’d have to work at.”

“Well, what did you do when you were at Amy’s
house?”

“Nothing you’d be interested in, I’m sure,” I
said.

“We could just talk,” he said.

“Talk about what? The weather?” I asked. “You
know it’s all going to come back to the weird, the bizarre and the
insane. It always does. There’s no escaping that. Sometimes I think
that’s all I’ll ever be about, and if you take that away, there
wouldn’t be much left over. See what I mean about not having
anything to offer?” It felt as though the walls of the room were
closing in on me. I stood up from the sofa, and looked down at him.
He seemed so glum. I managed to reach out and run a finger through
his nightmare hair. “You really ought to do something about that.
Maybe a buzzcut, huh? I really have to go,” I added, finding it
hard to breathe.

Jack stood and led me outside, where a chorus
of one old woman cried witch after me as I left.

***************

The following week at school was uneventful.
Mostly I sat in hushed classrooms and took finals, listening to
soft groans, muted coughs, and the scratching of number two pencils
on test sheets as classmates struggled to remember answers. I
always did fairly well on tests, despite, and maybe because of, the
fact that I didn’t care how I did.