Life After Genius (36 page)

His mother looks stunned. “I’m sorry, Teddy. I didn’t know. How could I have known? You never told me.”

But Mead is on a roll. He can’t stop, every slight he ever felt bubbling to the surface. “And then he poisoned Mr. Cheese. Not that you gave a damn about that either. You hated that mouse from day one. And now . . .” Mead turns away from his mother. He has said enough. He has said too much.

She grabs his arm. “What, Teddy? What happened up at college? Has someone threatened to harm you? Is that why you came home?”

“It isn’t your concern, Mother. I took care of that problem and I’ll take care of this one too. On my own.”

“But you didn’t take care of it, Teddy, you got a C. I’m the one who spoke to your teacher. I’m the one who fixed it. And you want to know why? Because I do care about you. I care about you more than I care about myself. So please, let me help.”

Mead yanks his arm out of her hand. “No, it’s too late. I’m a grown man now. I don’t want or need my mommy’s help anymore.”

“So what’re you going to do, walk away from a college degree? After all the years of hard work you’ve put into earning it? You’re proud of your accomplishments, Teddy. You put your heart and soul into your studies. I know it. I know you. And I know how much it means to you to graduate. To get credit where credit is due. If someone is threatening you, Teddy, you have to tell me. Because you don’t belong here in High Grove, you belong at that university. You owe it to yourself to tell me, Teddy. Please. Tell me so I can fix it.”

“You don’t get it, Mother, do you? I don’t want your help. I don’t want you to fix my life, I just want you to leave me alone.” And he gets up off the bed and storms out of his room.

I
T’S LEANING AGAINST THE BACK WALL
behind a cardboard box. Mead’s old banana bike. Sky blue with tassels hanging off the ends of the handlebars. He moves a ladder out of the way and rolls the bike into the middle of the garage. The tires are flat but hold air when he pumps them up. He raises the seat as high as it’ll go and gets on, but his legs are still too long. It takes him a minute or two to find his balance but then he’s off and pedaling through the streets of High Grove. He bikes past the cemetery and out of town toward Snell’s Quarry. There isn’t much of a shoulder on the two-way road, just gravel, so the speed limit is posted at forty. But no one pays attention to it. Most of the cars swing wide around Mead’s bike but a few come close to sideswiping him, sending him headlong into the brush. Mead doesn’t care. Even when his legs begin to cramp up, he keeps pedaling. Eager to clear his head, to get away, to escape the voices of his mother and his uncle and his father, not to mention Bernhard Riemann and Grampa Henry. Too many voices. Mead has too many voices in his head telling him what to do and not a single one of them does he trust. Only when he gets to the parking lot does he stop.

She’s here. Just as he had hoped. Mead rests his bicycle against her blue Dodge coupe and reaches inside the passenger side window —which has been rolled down a few inches to let the hot air escape —to unlock the door, then crawls inside and pops open the glove box. He takes out a bottle of suntan lotion and slathers the stuff over his arms and face even though the sun is low on the horizon and the shadows long. Even though the day is almost over. Then he puts the bottle back and gets out.

He spots her right off, swimming across the quarry. Her blond hair trailing behind her like a veil. When she reaches the far side, she turns around and looks straight at Mead. As if she were expecting him. But she doesn’t wave and neither does he. She rests a moment and then starts back. When her hands next touch rock, Mead is standing over her. She squints up at him, breathing hard from the exertion, and says, “Theodore, you really shouldn’t be out here, not with that sunburn of yours.”

“Those swimming trunks don’t belong to your brother.”

“Excuse me?”

“The ones you loaned me, the ones that were drying on the shower rod in my parents’ bathroom when my aunt came over for supper the other night. She claims they belong to Percy and I believe her.”

Hayley gives Mead a noncommittal look. It is a look he knows well. A way to buy time. To give your accuser an opportunity to fill in the blank with the answer he most wants to hear. So Mead chooses his words carefully because he is tired of always giving the other guy the upper hand. He’s tired of always supplying the wrong answer, the one that allows him to hold on to the false notion that he is dealing with a friend when perhaps he needs to own up to the fact that he may be dealing with just the opposite.

“You dated him, didn’t you, Hayley? He was your boyfriend.”

“Yes,” she says. “He was.”

“So why didn’t you just tell me? What’s the big deal?”

Hayley pulls herself up out of the lake, water pouring off her body. Wrings out her hair. “Sit next to me, Theodore,” she says and pats the rock.

“No, I prefer to stand.”

She squints at him, sizing him up. So Mead makes himself a little taller.

“You remind me of him.”

“Of Percy? You’re crazy. We aren’t the slightest bit alike.”

“Not on the surface, no, but scratch just below it and you’re exactly the same. Same dogged determination, same intelligence, same stubbornness. And neither of you takes disappointment very well either. It’s not personal, you know, it’s just life.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Mead says. “Why the big secret?”

Hayley stares out across the lake. “I thought he’d come back. I thought he’d get homesick and come back and I didn’t want him to be mad at me when he did, so I kept my word and didn’t tell anyone where he’d gone. But he didn’t come back. He traveled around the country and sent me postcards from Florida and Kentucky and Ohio.” She shakes her head, remembering. “When I realized that he wasn’t going to come home, I went after him. But Percy had changed. I mean, he was nice and all when he saw me, said all the right things, but he was distant. I think . . .” She takes a deep breath and exhales as if fighting back more tears. “I think I reminded him of his past. And he didn’t want to be reminded. It was almost as if he feared being sucked back in. As if I were a vacuum and he was a piece of lint hiding under the bed.” She stares down at her feet, which are moving in circles under water, slowly stirring the lake. “And then, of course, he did come back. But he still had about him that sense of distance. You know, like he was here but at the same time he wasn’t here.” She looks up at Mead. “You have that same look about you, Theodore. You say you’ve come back to stay, but your eyes say different.”

“He sent them to me too,” Mead says. “Postcards.” He looks out over the lake then back at Hayley. “Do you know, by any chance, why he drove up to Chicago?”

She nods.

“Why?”

She looks down at her feet. “I loved Percy. Still do. He’s stubborn and proud and I would’ve married him in an instant if he’d asked.” She shakes her head again. “He had so much life in him. But he had other plans. He’d decided to become a sportswriter. That’s why he drove up to Chicago, Theodore. He had an interview with this guy at the
Tribune
, someone he met while he was playing in the minors. He called me afterwards. He said —” She chokes up as if she’s going to start crying, takes a deep breath, and exhales, starts again. “He said it had gone really well. He called me from a bar. He’d been celebrating and sounded kind of drunk and so I told him not to drive home, to stay up there overnight and sleep it off.” She looks up at Mead, tears rolling down her face. “That’s when he mentioned you. He told me he was going to crash with you for the night. At the dorm.”

“So it was my fault.”

“No,” she says and swipes her hand across her wet cheek. “It was his fault, his choice to get back behind that wheel. Not yours, Theodore, his.” But it doesn’t sound like something that even she herself believes, it sounds like something she is trying to talk herself into believing.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, Hayley?”

“I don’t know. Because he told me not to tell anyone. And because talking about it makes it real and I’m not ready for real yet. I keep telling myself that he’s still up there. In Chicago. That he got the job. That he’s living in some cockroach-infested apartment that looks out onto an airshaft and that he’ll be coming back to get me any day now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next month. When he’s making enough money to get us a nice place.” She looks at Mead. “It sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”

A bloodcurdling scream pierces the air as a boy jumps off Dead Man’s Leap, his body plunging into the lake like a rock. Like dead weight.

“It’s not stupid,” Mead says.

“Yes, it is. He’s not coming back. I’m stuck is what it is. I’m stuck and I don’t know how to get unstuck.”

Mead kneels down and takes hold of Hayley’s hand. Squeezes it. “Percy isn’t coming back, but I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

Hayley squeezes his hand back. “Your eyes say different.”

“Would you stop with the eyes already? The sun’s in them. I’m squinting. All my eyes are saying is will someone please make the goddamned sun set already.”

“If you really believe that, Theodore, then you’re in more denial than I am.”

Mead pulls his hand away. Why is she being like this? Why is she being so mean when he’s sitting here trying to be nice? She’s really starting to piss him off. “Stop calling me Theodore,” he says. “My name is Mead now. Not Theodore, not Teddy. Mead.”

“My point exactly.”

“Point? What point? No, don’t tell me. I’ve heard enough. More than enough.” Mead’s chest feels tight, as if it’s going to explode. How dare she act as if she knows him better than he knows himself. The girl doesn’t know a goddamned thing about him. Or about Herman. Especially not about Herman. If she did know about Herman, then she would know that Mead had no other choice but to do what he did. Namely, leave.

Another scream pierces the air, echoing off the walls of the quarry.

“So do it,” Hayley says.

“Do what?”

“Prove to me that you can change: Jump off the cliff.”

“Oh, changing my name doesn’t prove a thing, but jumping off a cliff will?”

“Yes, I can see it in your eyes.” And she says it real serious-like.

“No,” Mead says, stands up, and stomps back to his bike. He’s had enough.

“Theodore, come back. I’m sorry. You don’t have to jump off the cliff, okay?”

But Mead is too mad to go back. Instead he hops on his bike and pedals out of the parking lot, spraying gravel in his wake. And as he pedals furiously back into town, he wonders why it is that the people who claim to care the most about you are the ones who always inflict the most pain.

12

BREAK A LEG

Chicago
Two Weeks Before Graduation

M
EAD TAKES SHIRLEY TANAPAT TO THE COVE
, an eatery in the student center where your meal ticket buys you a hamburger and a Coke. Or, in this instance, two cups of coffee and a slice of carrot cake. It is their fourth such date in as many weeks. “I love carrot cake,” Shirley says when she sees it listed on the mimeographed menu, so Mead orders it for her. The girl working the counter places two forks on the tray along with the slice of cake and Mead carries the whole thing to an empty table near the back. The rest of the tables are occupied by other students boycotting the college cafeteria although Mead suspects that both eateries get their food from the same wholesale distributor.

“Why aren’t you having any cake?” Shirley asks. “It’s delicious.”

“I don’t like carrot cake,” Mead says. “Too sweet.”

Shirley frowns. It’s not a real frown, it’s the fake kind people put on to let you know they feel bad about what just happened or what was just said, but not that bad. “You should’ve said something. We could’ve ordered something else.”

“It’s all right. I’m not hungry. I had a big lunch today. In Baylor Hall.”

“Baylor Hall? Where the elite meet to eat? I’m impressed.”

“I didn’t bring it up to impress you, just to explain why I’m not hungry.”

Shirley looks at Mead’s hands, which causes him to look at them too. The left one is wrapped around his mug of coffee, the right one stirring a spoon round and round inside of it, betraying his nervousness. Mead lets go of the spoon and the mug and tucks both hands under his legs and out of sight.

“You don’t like coffee either, do you?”

“No. Too bitter.”

Shirley crosses her legs and her right foot bumps into Mead’s suitcase. His lunch with the dean ran late. A review of his outline turning into a dress rehearsal of his presentation. It wasn’t supposed to, it’s just that once Mead gets started talking about the Riemann Hypothesis, he can’t stop. Mead moves his suitcase over a few inches to give Shirley more room. “I’ve never met anyone quite like you before,” she says. “You must have very interesting parents.”

“Not really,” Mead says, “I’m much more interesting than my parents.”

Shirley smiles. But whether she is reacting to the piece of cake she just put in her mouth or Mead, it is impossible for him to know.

T
HE BIKE RACK IN FRONT OF EPPS HALL IS EMPTY
. Mead checks his watch, thinking that he is early, but he is right on time. He shakes out his umbrella in the vestibule and heads up to Dr. Alexander’s office to wait. But the door is cracked open so he must be here. Mead peeks his head inside. The professor’s chair is empty. And on his desk is a rough draft of Mead’s presentation, the one he dropped off a couple days ago for the professor to read over.

“Dr. Alexander? Hello? It’s me, Mead.”

He waits for the professor’s gray crown to rise up over the edge of the desk, like a moon over the horizon, but it doesn’t. Mead glances at the blackboard. Several 4x4 matrices have been drawn on it, along with their characteristic polynomials and traces, and then the whole thing partially erased. As if the person doing the erasing was interrupted by a ringing phone or some other urgent matter. “Dr. Alexander?”

Mead steps into the office and around the desk, expecting to find the professor stretched out on the floor, eyes closed, a pair of headphones clamped over his ears. But no one is there.