The Big Crunch (3 page)

“Okay.” Wes knew he wouldn’t. Paula was still mad at him for breaking up with Izzy, who she worshipped. He paid for his cookie and stood awkwardly as she counted out his change and handed it to him. She smiled, a real smile this time. Wes felt a smile begin to form on his own face, then realized she was looking over his shoulder. A woman stood behind him, waiting to place her order. Wes stepped aside and carried his cookie to a table, sat down, watched Izzy ring up a coffee and a muffin, stood up, took his cookie outside, and ate it as he walked home.

He didn’t even really like cookies.

S
HE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO CALL
S
CHAUMBURG,
or any of the other places they’d lived before. Her parents were fanatical about that.

“Move on, Junie,” her mom had said. “The past is the past.”

“ ‘There Is No Reverse Gear in Time Machine,’ ” her father said, quoting the title of a book he’d once read.

“But isn’t the whole point of a time machine so you can go back?” June said.

“Not
this
time machine. This time machine only goes forward, into the future.
Next!
” Like a counterman in a deli, he loved to yell,
Next!

Her mother said, “Junie, you’ll probably never see any of those kids again. Best to make a clean break.”

“Why?” June asked.

“Junie, I know it’s hard moving from one school to another. But hanging on to the past is not the way to deal with it.”

“Why?” she asked again.

“Please don’t be difficult,” her mother said.

June scrolled through the numbers on her cell, remembering faces to go with the names. Brent. Gerry. Felicity. Heather. Katie. Kevin. Krista D. Krista K. So many
K
names. LeBron. Octavia. Prathi …

June knew her mother was right. The past was gone forever. Nobody in Schaumburg probably even thought about her anymore. Or if they did, it was like,
Remember that girl? The one with blond hair?

You mean Teresa?

No. The one that moved a few weeks ago, you know. The one who was going out with Brent?

Oh yeah, um, I’m pretty sure her name started with a “J.”

Jennie? Jenna?

Something like that.

“June.”

June looked up. Her mother, carrying two bags of groceries, was standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing?”

“Sitting at the kitchen table.”

“Well, put down your phone and help me with these groceries.”

Later that night, June picked up her phone and once again looked at her contact list. It was blank. All the numbers had disappeared, erased, gone forever.

Wes’s mom and his little sister were in the kitchen having one of their arguments when Wes got home. Neither of them noticed him. Paula was being a brat, as usual, and Mom was falling all over herself trying to please her.

“Honey pie, I am not going to buy you a new pair of shoes just because Lynette Stiles told you your shoes were stupid. She’s only being mean.”

“Nobody wears Skechers anymore.”

“Honey, that’s not true. Lots of kids your age
love
Skechers.”

“Yeah, the dweebs and morons.”

“You liked them fine when we bought them. Does that make you a dweeb?”

“If you make me
wear
them, yeah.”

“Don’t you think that Lynette was just trying to make you feel bad?”

“The
shoes
are bad.”

“And suppose you wear new shoes to school tomorrow, will that make Lynette think you’re cool?”

“I don’t care what she thinks.”

“I’ll tell you what she’ll think — she’ll think she has power over you. She might say your jeans are dorky. What then?”

“My jeans aren’t dorky. These shoes are.”

“Honey, don’t you think …”

Wes grabbed a bottle of juice from the fridge and took it out to the garage, where he wouldn’t have to listen. He knew how it would end. Paula would be in tears and locked in her bedroom, and his mom would come looking for him and saddle him with some heinous task — mowing the yard, or sorting his dirty laundry — just to remind herself that she could still control her children. She wouldn’t cave to Paula’s demand for new shoes, but she would probably take her to the mall and buy her a new belt or something.

The garage was a refuge of sorts. It contained several half-finished repair projects: his dad’s prehistoric ten-speed with the bent wheel, an outboard engine with a broken prop and no boat, a rocking chair that needed a new armrest, and so forth. One corner
was filled with Wes’s skateboard collection and other sports gear. There was a table saw, a drill press, and assorted other tools, and several lawn care items: weed whacker, leaf blower, push mower, trimmer, edger, spreader. There was no room for their two cars. That was one of his mom’s pet peeves. About once a year she would throw a fit, and Wes and his dad would rearrange and clean and get rid of a few things — just enough to fit Mom’s car inside. And then they would start accumulating again, buying things like the infamous and enormous commercial sod cutter, which his dad had picked up dirt cheap at an auction. The sod cutter had sat in the garage for two years, never used, until one day Wes’s mom wheeled it out to the curb — she must have been really mad, that thing was
heavy
— and put a
FREE
sign on it. An hour later, it was gone.

Wes’s dad couldn’t believe she’d given away his sod cutter.

“When were you ever going to cut sod?” his mom had said.

“It was worth a lot of money, Rita.”

“So why didn’t you sell it?”

“I was going to get around to it.”

“Well, I’ve saved you the trouble.”

Wes turned on the light over the cluttered eight-foot-long workbench and sat on one of the three ancient leather-covered bar stools from the Hotel LaGrange, which had been torn down before Wes was born.

“Why do you need three stools?” his mother had once asked. “There are never more than two of you out here.”

“The stools are cool,” Wes had said. His dad had backed him up. That was one argument they’d won. Something Wes had figured out — learned from Izzy and her artist parents,
actually — was that purely aesthetic judgments were unassailable. If you said you liked something, or loved it — like when Iz declared that vintage blue jeans were the most beautiful garment ever created — people could disagree all they wanted but never be able to prove you wrong. Of course, to make it work, you had to not care what anybody else thought, and you had to believe.

Wes believed in the stools.

Wes looked around the garage, hoping he might be inspired to do something. The workbench alone made him want to curl up and scream. He couldn’t even see the top of it. What
was
all this? Scraps of used sandpaper. Bent nails. Worn-out drill bits and Allen wrenches and pieces of electrical cord and a busted desk lamp and a pile of rusty upholstery tacks and a squeeze bottle of Elmer’s glue, open on its side and permanently cemented to a box of dry-wall screws. The bench was both an archaeological wonder and testament to the utter and undeniable incapacity of father and son to clean up after themselves.

Overcome with a wave of revulsion and shame, Wes got up, kicked the stools aside, and tipped the workbench onto the floor.

Two hours later, Wes’s father got home from work and looked into the garage to find his son sitting on the floor sorting screws and nails and upholstery tacks into small piles.

“Wes, what the hell?” he said.

“Hi, Dad.”

Mr. Andrews noticed that the top of the workbench was completely empty, and that it had been painted green.

“You painted the workbench green?” he said.

“I like green,” said Wes. “Green is cool.”

“Oh. What color was it?”

“White, I think.”

“What got into you?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain,” said Wes.

B
Y THE END OF HER FIRST WEEK AT
W
ELLSTONE,
June had made three new friends — Jess, Britt, and Phoebe. Jessica Weitz was a tall, thin girl with flawless-but-quirky fashion instincts, Britt Spinoza had her own car, and Phoebe Keller’s brother worked at First Avenue, the famous Minneapolis nightclub. June was accepted into their circle by virtue of her cosmopolitan background — she told them she’d lived in Chicago, Kansas City, Phoenix, Dallas, and a few other places all bigger and more exciting than here. June did not mention that most of her homes had not technically been in the cities she cited, but in the stunningly boring suburbs preferred by her parents.

Naomi Liddell attempted to use June to inveigle herself into the group, but was met with the sort of icy politeness that even she was unable to overlook. June felt bad about shrugging off Naomi, but her relief outweighed her guilt.

Jess, Britt, and Phoebe had several male friends they occasionally dated, though as near as June could tell, none of the girls had a boyfriend in the usual sense.

“Our job is to have fun,” Phoebe declared one afternoon as they were drinking iced coffees at the Bun & Brew. “I need a boyfriend like I need a third boob.”

Jess gave Phoebe a look and jerked her head toward the counter behind them, where a girl with short dark hair was taking
an order from a sour-faced old man wearing a leather cap with earflaps.

“Just coffee,” the man said. “No capu-whatever, no flavors, no milk, no nothing. Just a cup of coffee.”

“Dark roast, breakfast blend, or decaf?” the girl asked.

“Surprise me,” the man snapped.

“Decaf it is,” said the girl.

Jess leaned over the table and lowered her voice. “You heard Izzy and Wes broke up?”

Who’s Izzy?
June wondered.
Who’s Wes?

“So?” said Phoebe.

“So it seems kind of, I don’t know, rude. To be talking about boyfriends with her standing right over there.”

“She can’t hear us. Besides, I wasn’t talking about her.”

“Wes and Izzy were practically married,” Britt said.

“That’s Izzy behind the counter?” June asked.

Britt nodded.

“Who’s Wes?”

“You’ve seen him, I’m sure.”

“He’s in our English class,” said Phoebe.

“You mean language arts?”

“Yeah, English. Floppy hair? Kind of cute?”

June knew right away who she meant.

Wes had almost gotten used to seeing Izzy at school. It helped that she had shorter hair now, and some clothes he hadn’t seen, almost as if she had become a different person. He was also getting used to not having one special person to talk to about everything all the time. The closest thing he had was Jerry Preuss. Not that they had
much in common anymore. Jerry had decided to become Emperor of the Universe or something, and he was kicking off his political career by running for class president. Wes cared less about who was class president than he did about, well, anything. He didn’t even know who the current class president was, so it was awkward when, during a study period at the library, Jerry asked him to work on his campaign.

“The main thing is to create buzz,” Jerry told him.

“Bzzzzz,” said Wes.

Jerry didn’t laugh. “Seriously. I need you to talk me up.”

“To who?”

“Everybody.”

“You want me to go around saying nice things about you all day?”

“Not
all
day. Just whenever you get a chance. Remind people about the election, and mention my qualifications.”

“What qualifications?”

“I’d be proactive. I’d get things done. I’d —”

“Get what things done?”

“Whatever the student body wants.”

“Free pizza? Optional homework?”

“Anything within reason.”

“Do you know you’ve suddenly gotten incredibly boring?”

“Thanks a lot!”

“If you’re going to run for office, you’d better learn to handle criticism.” Wes could hear his father’s voice coming out of his own mouth.

“Not from my friends.”

“Especially
from your friends.”

Jerry looked so stricken that Wes took pity on him and promised to create buzz. Tons of buzz. He would turn Wellstone into a giant beehive of pro-Jerry buzz.

“Thank you,” said Jerry.

Later that day, Wes ran into Izzy — almost literally ran into her as he came rushing around a corner.

“Hey, Wes,” she said, giving him the same cautious smile she’d given him at the Bun & Brew.

“Uh. Hi.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Chemistry. You?”

“English. So what’s new?”

“Uh … Jerry Preuss for class president?”

Izzy laughed. “You’re such a goof!” She walked around him and headed for her class.

Wes stared after her. It was almost like old times, her calling him a goof, and it made him think that maybe some of the good feelings he and Izzy had shared were still there. So breaking up wasn’t that bad.

After school, once again waiting until the last second to board the bus, Wes told Jerry that he had been creating big-time buzz.

“How?” Jerry asked.

“I am inserting your name into every conversation. I even brought it up in science.”

“How did you do that?”

“We were doing acids and bases and using litmus paper to tell the difference. I asked Reinhardt what politicians mean when they talk about litmus tests, and —”

“When do politicians talk about litmus paper?”

“Litmus
tests.
Like when the president says, ‘I will not use a litmus test for selecting the next Supreme Court judge!’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Wes admitted. “But they say it all the time.” He was beginning to think he knew more about politics than Jerry.

“What did Reinhardt say?”

“He said to ask my American history teacher. I said, ‘Maybe I’ll ask Jerry Preuss. He knows a lot about government.’ ”

Jerry thought for a moment. “Did anybody laugh?”

“Nope.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“Bzzzzz.”

“We’d better get on.”

Wes looked at the bus. “I think I’m gonna walk,” he said.