Mr. Fahrenheit (4 page)

“Sure.” After a moment, he added, “Want me to grab Zeeko, too? I think CR's having too much fun with the crowd to want to leave.”

Ellie was already down the embankment to the shore of the lake when she replied, “Yeah, whoever.” He thought (but couldn't be sure) he detected a note of terseness in her voice.
And it only occurred to him then that maybe she hadn't wanted anyone else to come.

He and Zeeko met Ellie on the trash-strewn shore of the quarry's brightly iced-over, acres-large lake. There were a few rusted beach chairs on the shore. The moment Zeeko spotted them, he picked one up, stomped the ice to make sure it was solid, then broke into a jog across the lake. Still running, he slammed the chair onto the ice and sat down: an improvised chair-sled. “That,” Ellie said, “is a pretty damn fabulous idea.”

She and Benji followed Zeeko's lead, gliding out there across the lake-frost. Benji made a snowball and threw it at Zeeko, the loose dust trailing behind it like the tail of a meteor. He missed by several miles, and Zeeko shouted, “A for effort!” They all sledded for a while, snow-battling and ice-capading, and Benji had the weird sensation of being nostalgic for the present, because he knew he'd remember this moment for a long time. The quarry was beautiful if you could ignore the trash and focus on the fun of riding the frozen world.

But Benji
couldn't
quite do that. He was too distracted. He hadn't realized it until talking with Spinney, but what had happened at the field tonight—those asshats from Bedford Falls's rival, Newporte High in Indianapolis, telling the stadium how his illusions worked—had broken his heart a little.

It reminded him of this birthday party he'd done a couple of months ago. After his performance, the eight-year-old birthday girl had come up and asked him where he learned his tricks. He told her he'd gotten them from Santa, and the girl got this unspeakably sad look on her face and said, “Santa isn't real.” When Benji tried to insist otherwise, the girl interrupted with solemn finality: “I googled it.”

Magicians are in the business of wonder, but the truth is,
most illusions depend on unextraordinary items. Thread. A rubber band. Smoke and mirrors. People always talk about “misdirection,” but in Benji's opinion, a more accurate way of describing what a magician does was just “direction.” He directs your gaze toward the apparently impossible so he can steal your heart, and give it back to you, enlarged. And by doing that for you, he can do it to himself, too.

But only if you let him.

“What happened to him?” Benji asked as he and Ellie stopped in their chairs but Zeeko continued to sled.

“Who?” she replied.

“Spinney.”

“I would say he just ran the hell out of
maybes
,” Ellie said. “Like, when you're a kid, you're just this adorable mass of—”

“I'm still adorable,” Zeeko called, chair-zooming by.

“Don't I know it. Date me, stud.”

“Sorry, dahling, my parents are strict: They don't want me to date until I'm married,” Zeeko said as he glided away.

“Anyway,” she said, “kids are adorable little
maybes
: Maybe they'll be president, or walk on Mars, or maybe they'll cure cancer or write the great American novel or run a three-minute mile. But the older you get, honey, the fewer
maybes
you got. So you wake up one day, and hot damn, you've used all yours up, and you're not ‘a potential.' You're not what you might be. You're just what you are.” She shrugged. She might have been explaining gravity.

“What I like about you is, you're always so positive,” Benji said.

Ellie smiled, playfully punching his shoulder, which didn't hurt at all. “Just a realist, my friend.” After a moment, the smile faded, replaced with an un-Ellie-like fear. “I shouldn't be so bitchy about him. I'm probably worried I'll end up like him,
honestly. I'm still working on that short film for my application to the film program at Northwestern. I've got some okay footage around town, but I can't get the narration written. The movie's message leaves something to be desired. Specifically, a message, ha-ha.”

“I'm sure it's awesome.”

“That's sweet. That's very sweet. But no, it's emphatically unawesome. I just have this feeling, like this emotion crushing my windpipe sometimes, that the things I want to do with my life are not going to happen for me, that I'm going to be a cautionary tale instead of a success story. What if the people at Northwestern hate my stuff, you know? People say you should make what you love, but when you do and people reject it, they're saying that what you love is stupid, that your love
itself
is stupid. Just, ugh. Life is not supposed to be this complicated, Benji Lightman!”

Benji laughed. “I don't think it
is
that complicated, though,” he said. “I don't accept that Spinney did anything except give up. At some point, there had to be a moment when things could have gone either way for him, when he could have made whatever life he wanted. Like, your life might look like this huge, roving landscape, but only a handful of pinpoints actually
matter
. I've believed that since I was a kid. Spinney had to become the kind of person who deserved that life, though. Maybe the moment was that he could have chosen to work harder or just drop out. I don't know. It sucks for him that he didn't live up to that moment, but that's his own fault.”

Ellie thought about it a little. “Do you think everyone has one? A moment that changes everything?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Even you, Benji Lightman?”

For a moment, an image of the front door of the House flashed
through his mind. As always, he shook it out of his head, refusing to think about it. And then he noticed something.

Without Benji quite realizing it, his and Ellie's voices had softened to whispers, white breath lacing together and upward between them. His heartbeat was suddenly very
insistent
, drumming in his fingertips. The shouts of the party dimmed like a song ending, and was he imagining it or did Ellie lean a subtle millimeter toward him just now, some other question in her bonfire-lit eyes?

“GUESS WHO'S BAAAACK?” CR sang directly into Benji's right eardrum. Having somehow made his way from the shore without them seeing, CR now answered his own question by slipping and dropping on his ass directly between Benji and Ellie. It looked painful. CR just chuckled. “Oh man, I love you guys. Are you having FUN?”

“What the actual hell?” Benji said, ear ringing like a school bell.

CR looked up at him. “You wanna go to Dairy Queen?”

“They're closed, big guy,” Zeeko said, gliding to a stop beside them.

“And also it's a little cold for ice cream, Christopher Robin,” Ellie said, sounding unamused.

“Why do restaurants gotta close?” CR said philosophically. “Like,
hello
, my stomach is open twenty-four seven. This is America! Let's go to Wendy's.” Several slipping/skating seconds later, he got to his feet.

“CR, keys,” Benji said, following him to the shore and up the embankment.

“I'm okay to drive.”

As Ellie caught up with them, an idea came to Benji. “Wait, didn't you give me your keys earlier?” he said.

“'Course I didn't,” CR replied, and displayed a gloved palm
with a half-dozen keys on a metallic ring. Benji, with a wink Ellie's way, quickly glided his own palm above CR's. A satisfying
tink
as the keys hovered into Benji's handheld magnet, then the keys were gone, zipping up Benji's sleeve on a retractable string in the blink of an eye.

CR didn't notice the trick. “I swore I had 'em!” he said. “Do you have 'em?”

Ellie tried not to laugh as Benji turned out his pants pockets.

“Aw, shit and no,” CR said. “We have to find 'em. Banjo, we
haaave
to. My dad'll be so pissed. . . .” His face crumpled, like a little kid who's lost something important and knows full well how much trouble he's going to be in.

Aww, dude, it's okay
, Benji thought, feeling sort of bad. “Hey, why don't we clear the party out, look for the keys, lock up the quarry, then go get some food? It's getting late anyway.”

CR brightened and, on the second try, successfully gave Benji a thank-you high five.

Ellie suggested CR go look around his truck. As he walked away, she said to Benji, “That boy's a
charmer
when he's inebriated. I wonder why he and I ever broke up.” She scratched her head like a confused cartoon character, though Benji had a notion: When she and CR had dated a couple of years ago, they'd fought more or less constantly. “Speaking of breakups, let's end this shindig, Benji Lightman.”

He and Ellie recruited Zeeko to help relay the bad news to the partiers (it was impossible to get angry at that guy), then the three of them split up to clear the crowd faster. It took them a while to get the party to break up, the nucleus near the bonfire splintering into subgroups of people loudly looking for their rides and debating where to go next.

The whole time, Benji kept thinking about when Ellie had asked him if everyone had a moment that changes everything.
Did
she want me to lean toward her—like, maybe, kiss her or something?
For a split second he had thought so. . . . But he doubted it now. Anyway, the truth was, he'd been completely wrong about his “moment” before. During that summer a billion years ago, he'd gone into the House electrified by hope and a kid's sense of destiny that were soon shattered (with assistance from Spinney), because he'd been so sure it was his great life-changing moment. Now the memory just always made him wince.

You don't really believe that things can change like that, do you, Benjamin? Or hey, maybe it was your moment, and you didn't live up to it?
said Papaw's voice in his head.
You need to just accept that you're going to Bedford Falls Community College. You know the difference between a dream and a bucket of bullshit? The bucket.

That's not true
, Benji said back.

Then why did he feel pressure in his solar plexus, why hadn't he told anyone that he still hadn't applied for the Magic Lantern apprenticeship even though the deadline was coming up? Chicago was a magic city, it was where David Copperfield got his start, and Copperfield and other famed magicians came to the Magic Lantern all the time. Benji always assumed that sometime in the future, like when he became an adult, he'd be worthy of being part of that amazing place. But he was running out of future. He was terrified that he wasn't good enough, that if they said no, his hopes of “moments” would vanish, and he'd wind up staying in Bedford Falls forever.

It'll work out
, Benji told himself.

The quarry was now deserted, the roaring bonfire reduced to a diminutive crimson pyramid, logs popping with final, feeble light. He headed back toward CR's truck to announce that he'd “found” the keys.

CR wasn't at the truck, though. Benji looked around and
spotted Zeeko and Ellie about thirty feet away. They sat on the hood of Ellie's ancient Subaru station wagon, aka the Rust-Rocket, which was held together with duct tape and prayer. Ellie was drawing Zeeko in her sketchbook. He'd taken off his thick glasses (they were on top of Ellie's head) and was posing in an awkward-family-photo pose: toothy smile, eyes closed, chin propped on fist.

Benji heard someone muttering down on the lakeshore. It was CR, who was struggling to open a long, thin duffel bag.

“Hey, CR, guess what I found?” Benji said, walking to him.

CR shrugged, unzipped the oblong duffel bag, and pulled out a hunting rifle.

“Do you know what he told me?” CR fumed, then caught on to Benji's nervous expression and said, “Relax, it's just twenty-two caliber. Buck season starts this week, hellooo?

“After the game, you know what my dad says?” CR went on, pivoting toward the lake, flicking the lens cap off the rifle's scope. “Dick looks me right in the eye, goes, ‘Very smart move with that showboating at the coin toss, Chrissy. Say there were college recruiters there tonight—do you truly believe that it would improve your scholarship prospects? Jesus. If brains were TNT, you couldn't blow your nose.'”

BANG
—CR fired. Ellie and Zeeko yelled in surprise as the bullet flew across the lake, slamming into the sheered face of the granite wall on the far edge of the quarry.

Benji stepped forward. “Heyyy, maybe not so much shooting guns while drunk?”

CR said, “Yeah,” but fired off two more thunderclapping shots. “We should prank the Newporte guys back, man. That's the tradition, pranking each other. I know it's against the rules now and we could get suspended and blah blah.”

“If you get suspended, you're not eligible for scholarships.”

“Only if we get caught, Banjo. I just want to
do
it. The quarterback is
supposed
to do it. It's what I always thought I'd do. And my dad makes me feel like garbage because I'm going after the only future I ever wanted.”

CR dropped the rifle to the ground. Shoulders sunken, eyes listless, he looked like all the most helpless parts of a small kid and an old man. For all his vaunted athletic power, CR could be brought to his knees by his dad so easily.

It really wasn't fair. After the fateful day at the House, CR had transformed from the awkward, homeschooled new kid in town into that rarest of middle school creatures: a very kind, popular guy. It would have been easy for him to stop saving Benji and Zeeko seats every lunch period at the Cool Kids' Table, but he never did, not even after enough time had passed for him to learn about the social food chain. Eventually, a couple of guys insisted Benji and Zeeko sit elsewhere. “Yeah, that's hilarious, 'cause I think so, too,” CR had said. He picked up his tray and led Benji and Zeeko to the only available seats, which were at a small table where kids with special needs sat with their aides. CR ate lunch there with Benji and Zeeko that day and every day for the rest of middle school. Occasionally, some of the nicer cool kids visited there, too. Almost unconsciously, CR had issued the edict that being an asshat was not synonymous with being awesome. He was like a hyperactive superhero who used his powers for good—for mischief, sometimes, but mostly for good. And it always broke Benji's heart a little when his best friend got a dose of Kryptonite.