The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B (4 page)

“St. Mary’s?” she asked.

She was so crazy beautiful, so heart-hurtingly, breath-stoppingly beautiful. This was nuts. She was beyond him.

Didn’t matter. She was everything.

“St. Mary’s is a Catholic school, right?”

“You bet!” he said with supremo dorklike enthusiasm. What if she hated Catholics?

“So you’re Catholic?”

He gulped and nodded.

“I’m kind of nothing, but I’m fascinated by Catholicism,” she said. “I want to learn all about it.”

“Me too.” What was
that
? He’d just said he was one, for God’s sake!

Miraculously, Robyn Plummer smiled again. That was the fourth and a half time she had smiled at him since they’d met. His ears got hot.

“I mean, I’ll tell you anything you want to know, whenever you want to know it.”

“Promise?” Her cheeks reddened just enough to connect all her freckles.

“Promise,” he said.

He would slay a dragon for her.

“That was nice what you did back there.” Robyn crooked her head in the direction of the clinic.

“What? Iron Man and the meds? Naw, I just guessed—”

“No.” She turned but did not step toward him. “I mean, that was good too, but I was talking about Wonder Woman, the elevator. Nice catch.” Robyn smiled and looked sad at the same time.

He would slay a
million
dragons for her.

Adam had never felt more alive than in that cemetery at that very moment. His world shifted.
She
and
he
were talking.
She
and
he
were possible. Maybe. If he didn’t blow it.
Don’t blow it, don’t blow it, don’t
 …

And then he almost did.

So
now
what? It was one thing to have a life-shifting moment in a graveyard but quite another to humiliate yourself in midshift. The problem was that Robyn was so close and so …

Intense urges helicoptered inside him. Things were happening to his body.
That
thing. Adam was going to humiliate himself any second. What to do? Before any of his rituals came galloping to the rescue and hijacked everything, he remembered what he’d heard the guys at school say:
Cross your legs and think of Sister Mary-Margaret
—
man, she’s better than a cold shower
. Adam couldn’t very well cross his legs, but thinking about St. Mary’s assistant head did the trick.

Eventually.

Adam tried arranging his face into its best neutral, nonthreatening, absolutely unsexual expression.

Robyn looked perplexed. Okay, so he might need more bathroom-mirror time refining that one.

“Uh.” She raised an index finger. “I just need a minute, okay?” She turned back to the black granite stone.

Robyn touched it tenderly, although that could have been his imagination, since he really couldn’t see. He shifted to the right, gaining a critical sight advantage in doing so. She bowed her head. Eyes closed. Adam couldn’t really see that part either, but he figured it was a good guess. She made the sign of the cross, sort of, and genuflected, mostly.
That
he could see. The sign of the cross missed a gesture, and the knee did not touch the ground. Everything was just a little off. Adam had plenty of opportunity to observe this, since Robyn continued with the ritual crossing and almost-kneeling another three times. She got it wrong each time.

There it was. Adam could be a value-added kind of guy. Robyn didn’t know what she was doing. She
needed
him.

As soon as she began to turn back, Adam snapped his head straight up to avoid being caught ogling her. He was going for a contemplation of the heavens through the willow’s gnarled old branches.

“Wow,” said Robyn, craning her neck as well. “Wow, wow, would ya look at that! Amazing.” They both leveled their gaze. “It’s so beautiful. How did you know? There’s more to you than meets the eye, Pretty Boy.”

Did she wink?

Did he blush?

Lazy shafts of light snuck in between the branches and backlit Robyn. It looked like she was posing for a movie trailer.

He needed to kiss her.

“Yes, there is,” he agreed. “
A lot more
than meets the eye.” Okay, that was scary. Where did it come from? Adam didn’t even know he could say stuff like that. He was a stranger to himself. The biggest brand-new item was this whole need-of-her thing. The need was so big and raw and … 
big
. He’d never felt
this
, whatever
this
was, before. And now he was feeling it way too many times, like right this second,
again
. He decided to sit with it for a bit, like he did with some of the other urges, the OCD ones. Adam exhaled and waited for it to pass.

It didn’t.

What would she taste like? His mom usually tasted like Starbucks bold coffee, while his stepmother, Brenda, left an unmistakable imprint of Crest Cinnamon Rush toothpaste. Sweetie—Brenda and his dad’s kid—tended to smell and taste like a Labrador puppy. And his father … well, his father was more into stiff hugs than kisses, so who knew.

He should say something. Was it his turn? But he couldn’t. He was still grappling with the visibility of his urge. Adam had to use all of his concentration to think about Sister Mary-Margaret.

They both waited for him to say something.

He
should
flirt.

If only he knew how.

If
Adam had still had access to a computer, he’d have been up all night Googling and therefore counting through “how to flirt” or “pick up chicks” sites, which was precisely why he
didn’t
have access to a computer. He winced remembering sixteen-hour searches, counting, tabulating and
reordering plague paraphernalia sites: smallpox, the Spanish flu, the Black Death, bird flu, SARS, swine flu and West Nile, and then counting, always counting. He’d stopped eating and sleeping. The computers at both homes had been removed, and they’d watched him at school. Okay, so it was a dark time, but that was then.

Right now he’d settle for saying
something
. Maybe he could ask about the gravestone? But at that moment, Robyn tugged at her skirt, which was definitely not regulation, and the ability to form words deserted him. There wasn’t a single girl in any school who could match her grade-A, never-ending legs. Somehow the black oxfords and sloppy, dark green knee socks made her naked knees and thighs even more fabulous. God.

“Uh, Batman?”

“You’re doing it wrong,” he blurted.

“Oh?” She blushed and then recovered nicely. “Really? What exactly? The whole meta-life thing? Or my legs, which you can’t seem to stop staring at?”

Adam’s face caught fire. “No, no, your ritual there, with the sign of the cross. Uh, it’s incorrect.” Adam knew just enough to guess that this wouldn’t pass for flirting, but he lumbered on nonetheless.

Robyn looked at him all expectant-like, her eyes a calm gray-blue shade. “Oh yeah? Which part?”

“If you’re going for Catholic, you’re not quite there.” Adam walked over and sat on top of Marnie Wetherall, 1935–1939. “Assume the position.”

Robyn glanced at the gravestone.

“What? Do you think Marnie would mind?”

“No.” She shook her head. “She was just a kid. I bet she’s glad for the company.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “Assume the position. Uh, I mean the prayer position.”

They were both at eye level now.

“Follow me. We’ll say it together.”

She nodded.

“Index finger and thumb touch. Bring that gesture to your forehead.”

She did, and with a solemnity that made him tumble ever deeper into the deepest kind of hopeless love.

“In the name of the Father,” they both said.

“Now to the center of your chest,” he instructed.

“And the son,” they said.

“To the left shoulder.”

“The holy …”

Robyn looked surprised. This was the gesture she had been missing.

“And back to the right shoulder.”

“Ghost,” they said.

“Hands together for …”

“Amen.” They smiled.

“Okay.” She nodded. “That felt right, good. So the genuflect?”

“Knee’s gotta hit the ground, or Sister Katherine will appear out of nowhere and nail you in the back of the head. It’s all the way, all the time, unless you’re in a wheelchair.”

“Got it,” she said. “Thanks. I know I’ve got a lot to learn. I’ve just started with the Catholic thing because it feels right, you know? It’s been really, incredibly …”

“Soothing?”

“Yeah, but in a good clean way,
not
in an OCD kind of way. I mean it.”

Adam nodded, pretending to believe her.

They headed for the Main Street gates. “Are all your friends Catholic?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “The guys at school are kinda Catholic because you have to be, and most of them are harmless, but I don’t have, like, a ton of friends. Let’s face it, I take a lot of work, and there’s a lot to hide.”
Way too much info, dred dork!
Adam regrouped. “My best friend is Ben Stone, but he’s kinda Jewish. We have this fierce brother-type bond over Warhammer Fantasy Battle games. I find
that
soothing. But
not
in an OCD kind of way, of course.”

She hit him in the arm, but she smiled as she did it, so it was a clearly superior moment. When they finally reached the elaborate iron gates, they both hesitated.

Now what?

Adam lived at the opposite end of the cemetery and three blocks north. He
should
come clean right now, confess, start fresh. One shouldn’t lie to one’s beloved before she officially becomes one’s beloved.

Robyn finally broke the silence. “Well, Batman-Adam, I head left on Main and then onto Palmerston. Halfway down Palmerston and I’m home. How about you?”

“Uh … I turn right,” he said. It was the God’s honest truth, or was going to be. Adam would have to turn right and walk all the way around the cemetery back to where he’d started and go home that way. It would take him an extra forty minutes. He would be late.

“So, uh, see you next Monday, Batman.”

“You betcha.”
You betcha? Really? Again with the SpongeBob routine
.

Adam watched her walk away, rooted to the cement. Robyn walked great. When she hit the street she turned around and waved. “And thanks for the tips, Batman!”

“Anytime!” he yelled.

He would measure, of course, as soon as he got home, but it wasn’t necessary. He had grown at least an inch.

He paused at the door. Nothing prevented Adam from entering 97 Chatsworth—nothing physical or emotional, obsessive or otherwise. He now knew that it was the power of wanting the
in
to be different that held him captive on the
out
.

Chuck had given him a stack of photocopied articles about this phenomenon and Adam had read them all. This surreal wanting happened to all kinds of people, especially war veterans, especially the young ones who got their legs blown off. There’s like this time of twilight when you’re awake but not. You’re in the right-before-you’re-awake part. In this part, you know you’ve got to throw off the warm covers, go to the bathroom, pee and brush the fur off your teeth. And then you’re in the completely-awake part, and you remember you can’t. You remember you’re
never getting up and peeing again. But the next night you go through the same thing again, and the next night and the next. That story killed him. Adam would have cried if he could have. He hadn’t cried since his dad left seven years ago, but for sure he would have if he could have.

For weeks now—maybe since the letters started coming—Adam would unlock the door, willing a different
in
, but it was not like he was incapable of entering. As of this moment, approximately 21 percent of all thresholds presented problems of varying intensity for him. Actually, it was 22 percent, but that was an unacceptably even number given the 2
and
the 2.

The problem ranged from minor, almost negligible issues with the large biology lab and English class doors at St. Mary’s, to doors that needed small hand movements to clear him in, like the entrance to the Phipps’ Family Pharmacy, to a few entrances that now involved fairly extensive ritual clearing, and finally to some no-gos, where entry was simply not possible. For this last type of threshold there was no relief in rituals, no matter how elaborate or repeated. Crossing such a barrier would cause his disintegration or, worse, would make him responsible for the mortal endangerment of his mother, or Sweetie, or his father, or Brenda, or Chuck … and the list spiraled ever outwards to include bus drivers and 7-Eleven checkout clerks.

Of course he knew that this was not true.

But it didn’t stop him from believing it.

So far, only the south entrance of the Hudson Street subway was a no-go.

But
it
was gathering.

He finally opened the door. And there it was, that twilight thing where he believed that his hallway looked like it had when he was a kid, when his dad lived here. But like the war vets, he was fully awake by the time he entered and shut the door behind him.

Semi-neat piles of junk lined both walls, but there was still a visible pathway. Not so bad, right? Once he was in and faced with reality, his house became almost the inverse of the twilight-dream thing. In many ways, the stairs and the hallway—hell, the rest of the house—looked the same as they always had. Today looked like yesterday, which looked like last week, last month and last year. It was one of those tricks-of-the-eye things … no wait, that was a trompe l’oeil. It was a trick of the mind, that’s what it was.

He had a lot of those.

The exact same thing happened when his best friend Ben Stone gained a whack of weight. Ben came from a
big
family, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise. When Adam used to see him every day, Ben always looked exactly the same. But now that they could hang out only every couple of weeks or so, and couldn’t even Skype, Adam was stunned to realize that he had a fat friend. Overnight, Ben had gone from a Cornish hen to a Butterball turkey. Adam’s mom’s junk was like that too, morphing from neat little piles into … well, what it was now. It was as if Adam could conjure up his house when it was normalish or as it was on that day, and nothing in between. But there had to be an in-between. There had to have been a time when only the dining room was unusable. Then the chairs, the credenza and so on. Next went the garage, slowly filling to the
ceiling with plastic see-through boxes of Christmas lights, impressive-looking power tools, brooms, shovels and exercise equipment. Then some of that
stuff
marched into the basement and procreated and its offspring marched right back up to the second floor. Now his mom’s bedroom and en suite were infiltrated. The sweet little two-bedroom on 97 Chatsworth Avenue just got incrementally crazier.