The Local News (5 page)

“You want?” he said, waving a half-eaten carton of fries in front
of David Nelson and me. They had the pallid shine of being cold already, the cardboard carton spotted with grease along the bottom.

“No, thank you,” David Nelson said in a staccato,
fuck you very much
tone.

“Sure,” I said, grabbing them. “Thanks.”

Tip then pulled ketchup packets from his pocket and held them out to me, which seemed a little laughable. Tip kept ketchup packets in his pocket, probably warm and slightly gross from the friction of his jeans and his massive thighs. Still, I reached my arm out, as if it weren’t even my body that it was attached to. “Thanks,” I heard myself repeating. Tip had what Cindy and Min did, that inexplicable gravitational pull that made it hard to say no.

“Later,” Tip said, holding up two fingers in a peace sign. Greg ory Baron mumbled an apology as they left. The fries tasted pretty good. David Nelson sat next to me quietly, telling me no one time, then again, when I offered him some.

Chuck wanted to talk about my dreams. I told him I didn’t remember my dreams, which was a lie. I often found myself lying to Chuck, which was not a habit of mine in general. Back in August, I’d been excited when my parents, at the urging of the huddle of cops who’d been camped out at our house for weeks, told me about the arrangements they’d made for me to talk to a counselor. I imagined a pillowy room filled with deep couches and soft light where I would reveal my every everything and be rewarded with warm embraces or at least the same sort of suckers my pediatrician used to give out after shots. I imagined my new therapist saying things to me like “That was a great insight” or “I’ve been waiting anxiously through my other patients to get to my time with you.”

But there were no pillows in Chuck’s office, no deep couches. He sat in a swiveling desk chair, sometimes spinning himself just
slightly back and forth as if staving off boredom, and I sat in a wooden-armed, tightly upholstered chair that reminded me of a waiting room. There was only one window, and its venetian blinds were always down, open just slightly, so I could make out only thin stripes of pale sky. Chuck rarely smiled, talked in a low monotone, stared directly at my face, and habitually slid his thin, wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. I wanted to like Chuck—or, more accurately, I wanted Chuck to like me—but it was slow going.

Even with his early speeches about this being a safe space and no one else being privy to these conversations, not even my parents, and this whole process being free of judgment, I had the sense of being on the precipice of unwittingly implicating myself in some terrible thing. With his methodical questioning, his expressionless reactions, and his irregular and distracting habit of jotting something down on his pad while I spoke, I had free-floating guilt, as if all I had ever done wrong was soon to be revealed (yes, I cheated off Lisa Barney’s social studies exam when I fell asleep the night before without getting to the Geneva Protocol; yes, I was the one who made both of Oliver’s paws bleed after trimming his toenails too closely). A single poster hung in the office, behind Chuck’s desk. It was a reproduction of a Hockney-like painting, a front door of a house opening onto a sudden, serene ocean instead of a front lawn. I’m sure it was meant to be soothing—an ocean of opportunities awaits you just outside your front door—but it struck me more as a warning: take one wrong step and you’re sunk.

“I don’t sleep enough to dream,” I said. I could remember part of one from the night before where I was getting married in a glittery purple dress and I had to clutch the dress to my chest because it was strapless and the elastic was old, so the whole thing felt like it was going to slip off.

“Dreams can be just minutes long. Do you remember even part of one?”

“Sorry,” I said.

Chuck sat quietly looking at me. He was particularly skilled at this. Sometimes I looked away. Sometimes I catalogued his face: the brown soul patch, the unusually full lips that made him look slightly feminine and pouty. Sometimes I thought things like
Does he have a girlfriend?
or
How often does he have sex?

“Okay,” he finally said. “How’s school?”

“Fine.”

“Are you still getting a lot of new attention?”

The question embarrassed me, making me wish I’d never revealed the fact to begin with, as I had grown quickly to act as if it were unremarkable. I shrugged and briefly considered telling him about Tip at lunch, but I wasn’t sure what I’d say about it.

“We can just sit here,” Chuck said. He said that a lot. “I’m not here to do the work for you.”

“What work?”

“What work do you think we have to do?” He nudged his glasses up his nose.

It was disconcerting, really, the way he had of looking at my face. It made me want to blow my nose or check for sleep in the corners of my eyes.

“I have something,” I said after a while, reaching into my pocket, figuring he’d like this. “I have a note from Danny. Well, from a friend of Danny’s, originally written by Danny. She gave it to me today.”

“What’s it say?”

“Haven’t read it yet.”

Chuck looked surprised—only for a second, but I saw it, his face
flexing, then relaxing back to neutral. He leaned slightly forward. “Maybe you want to talk about why you haven’t read it yet.”

I sighed. “Can I just read it?” I said. “I thought you’d be excited.”

“Are
you
excited?”

I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “No,” I said, the word drawn out and plaintive. Chuck’s questions brought out an achy weariness that, once elicited, felt ever-present, as if it’d been trailing me all along.

“Okay, why don’t you just read it?” he said, sounding a little resigned. I was, I knew, a source of ongoing or at least regular disappointment to Chuck.

I unfolded the paper, already regretting this, trying to tamp down a nervous feeling that rose in me. “ ‘Min,’ ” I began, and then stopped to clear my throat. “ ‘This is so boring. Madame Guignan looks like a penguin. What are you doing this weekend? We’re going to Haber’s after the game. You should come with us. Bring Penny. Chemanski thinks she’s hot. Write me back. I’m bored as shit.’ ”

That was it.

Chuck watched me, waiting for a reaction. I watched him, doing the same.

“There you go,” I said, “my deep and introspective brother.” But that wasn’t what I was really thinking. I didn’t tell Chuck that
Mme.
was abbreviated incorrectly to
Mdm.
and
penguin
was spelled
pain
.
g
‘
-wim
and that Danny had dropped the apostrophes
from Haber’s
and
I’m,
and that he’d used a homonym for
write me back
so it came out
right me back.
And that there was barely a period in the whole thing, most of the words running one right into the next. I didn’t tell Chuck that all of that gave me a bad feeling, the way Danny came across as little and stupid.

Chuck didn’t know anything about Abernathy, about how before we moved to Fairfield, Danny had been scrawnier than David Nelson.
He used to get teased all the time, and not just because of his size, but because he was dumb. All through middle school he’d been terrible at reading out loud, his words coming in a slow, unintelligible sputter. He brought home papers scrawled in red, with notes from teachers about needing to talk to my parents. He had to go get a bunch of tests and was given a constellation of diagnoses from dyslexia to dysgraphia to ADD. By ninth grade he spent parts of his days in what they called a resource room, which was basically special ed. He came home one time with a crusty shine at the back of his head, leftovers from an egg someone had thrown at him.

Throughout, he had a joking sort of vulnerability, a self-deprecating humor that made him the magnet of our household. At the dinner table he would go on long riffs about how they made kids do math with colored felt squares in the resource room
(like they’re going to hurt themselves with a regular multiplication table),
or about how Jerry who sat next to him had a hole in the back of his skull that he would let people stick a finger into for a quarter, or how it wasn’t Danny’s fault that he got confused about prepositions when he was writing
(If those words are so important, why are they so little and annoying?).
“Mississippi,” he’d say, “that’s an important word.” He’d sing: “M-I-S-S, I-S-S, I-P-P-I.” My parents were quick to laugh at his silliness, even when it wasn’t particularly witty or clever, which it often wasn’t.

He shared an easy rapport with them that I could never quite muster. My parents, I knew, were mostly befuddled by my studied seriousness. How, I wanted to know, did anyone ever come up with the big bang theory to begin with? Where exactly was East Timor, and why were people there so angry? “Was the milkman a Nobel laureate?” my father often joked to my mother. My mother tried to turn every conversation back to things like why didn’t I grow my hair out or get my ears pierced. “Madame Librarian,” Danny often
said when I tried to start dinner table conversation, making my parents chuckle. And I would chuckle too. There was something soft in such jibes, as if he were poking me only as hard as he poked himself.

But then the summer after his ninth grade we moved to Fairfield and he grew three inches and his voice dropped and he spent every day in his room lifting weights and panting through a series of ever-increasing sets of sit-ups and push-ups. The boxes weren’t even unpacked, and an unending stench of warm sweat wafted from his room. He drank powdery energy shakes for breakfast. He had three servings of whatever we ate for dinner. Dad was proud, talking to him about what to bench safely, when to use the help of a spotter. Mom was nervous but relieved; you could see it in her face, the searching way she would stare at him across the table, trying to figure out who this man-boy was. I would catch her smiling at him when he wasn’t looking. Danny started running a mile, then two, then three a day. He swam laps at the community pool.

Mom and Dad set him up with a tutor, who came over three nights a week and Saturdays too, sitting at our kitchen table and trying to make Danny’s tongue wrap around words like
intriguing
and
thoroughfare
and
physiology.
Danny would press his fist to his temples and stomp his feet against the floor. Afterward he would stand in the doorway of my bedroom and tell me how lucky I was not to need a tutor. “The dude’s mouth smells like dog crap,” he’d say, “and he sits like one inch from me.” He would come up to me then, imitating his tutor, sticking his face right in my face and breathing heavily onto my nose, and I would laugh. “You so
smaht,”
he’d say in a fake Chinese accent, pulling the corners of his eyes back. “You so
rucky
cuz you so
smaht,
Rydia.” I would laugh and laugh, more than the comments merited. Those were long, lonely months. I was twelve and scared, in a new town, friendless. My parents were even
further away and fuzzier than usual, preoccupied by the wallpaper that had to come down from the bathroom and the ivy to be pulled from the yard. Danny was what I had.

By the end of summer, he’d made a deal with my parents: he’d do ninth grade over if they’d take him out of special ed. My parents agreed. So by the time he started Franklin, he was big and new and full of the pent-up, vengeful charisma of someone who’d had to fight his way to it. The football coach took him as a late walk-on even though he’d missed summer practices, and his first girlfriend, the catlike and breathy Hindy Newman, followed shortly after. His dumbness hardly mattered anymore; it was muted by his repetition of ninth grade and, more important, almost expected of a standout athlete, which he quickly became, attacking opponents with praise-worthy viciousness.

My entrance into the seventh grade made barely a blip, save for the girl in science who complained to the teacher that she wanted to be lab partners with one of her friends instead of “that new girl” and the three boys in PE who took to imitating the way I ran, their legs splaying out at their sides as if in need of stabilizing braces. Each night Danny would come home late after practice, sweeping past me up into his sweaty, dank room as if I were a museum piece, a relic of a forgotten era. One night after a particularly bruising day—no one would sit with me at lunch, my haggish new English teacher said I had “misapprehended” the themes of
The Old Man and the Sea
in my first assignment—I went into his room as I had many nights before, slumped against the wall, and waited to begin one of our lazy, aimless conversations. I wanted to be distracted. Danny was good for distraction, but this night he lay on his bed, perched on his elbows, flipping through a notebook. I couldn’t see what he was looking at. I knew he knew I was standing there.

“What are you studying?” I finally asked.

“None of your business,” he said.

“No, seriously,” I said, and flopped on the end of his bed.

“Go the fuck away, Lydia,” he said, scowling at me. His face was so wide and squarish now, barely even his face anymore. I stared at the strange blue veins of his biceps. It was a stunning moment, one that lingered in my mind for years, not because it was particularly dramatic. Likely it was a moment he soon forgot. But it marked for me the first stinging rebuke, the first appearance of the casual cruelty that had come from apparently nowhere but would stick, would become simply who Danny was, or at least who he was to me.