Charmed Thirds (25 page)

My crotch blushed.

I opted for the couch. When Mrs. Flutie returned, she was holding a glass of pink lemonade. Mr. Flutie followed her in a wheelchair.

“Hey, kiddo!” Mr. Flutie bellowed as he rolled toward me. “I was about to shoot over to the park for some basketball but when the wife told me you were here, I thought, Hell, I can shoot on over there later.”

“My god!” I gasped. “What happened?”

“What? This?” he asks, pointing to the steel cage contraption keeping his knee together. “Ahhhh, it’s nothing. Let’s talk about you and my son. That’s why you’re here, right?”

Mrs. Flutie gently tapped him on the shoulder. “Kid gloves,” Mrs. Flutie urged him. “Treat her with kid gloves.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s just. Uh . . .”

Whenever I see Marcus’s parents together, I get momentarily distracted. I can’t help but look at them and think, Wow. So you’re the ones responsible for bringing Marcus into the world.

“Go on,” Mrs. Flutie said. She has a truly comforting manner. I bet she talks many a toddler out of tantrums at the day-care center.

I took a deep breath, bracing myself for my second parental face-off in as many days. The house smelled like burnt cedar. Like Marcus.

“I haven’t seen or talked to Marcus since Christmas and I know he hasn’t talked to anyone because of the silent meditation thing but then again maybe he’s not even doing that anymore I have no idea maybe he is talking again and just not talking to me I don’t know and I thought well even if he isn’t
here
exactly you would know where he is because I sent him a letter to his school address because that’s where the last postcard came from, oh, he’s been sending me these cryptic one-word postcards postmarked from California, so I mailed my letter there but it got returned so now I don’t know where he is and I guess I would just really like to see him and talk to him because I miss him even if he isn’t my boyfriend anymore I just want him in my life and I’m so embarrassed to be telling you all this.”

Mr. and Mrs. Flutie exchanged pained looks. About which part of my confession, I wasn’t sure.

“So. Uh. That’s why I’m here.”

“You mean he didn’t write you about Pure Springs?” Mr. Flutie asked.

“Pure—what?”

Mr. Flutie whistled through his teeth.

“Pure Springs,” Mrs. Flutie said. “Where Marcus will be for the next two years.”

“He’s not at Gakkai?”

“Nope,” Mr. Flutie said. “He’s near Death Valley, on the California-Nevada border.”

“Death Valley,” I repeated, just to make sure I had heard correctly.

“Yup!” Mr. Flutie beamed with pride.

So maybe Sara was onto something after all.

“Okay,” I said calmly. “What exactly do they study there in the middle of the desert?”

“That is a more difficult question,” Mrs. Flutie said, tugging at the drawstring on her sweatpants.

And so, for the next few minutes, Mrs. Flutie told me everything Marcus couldn’t. Or, rather, could but chose not to.

Pure Springs College was founded in 1915 by an oddball named Thaddeus Fox, a Harvard-educated steel magnate who thought that the traditional model for education bred “slow-witted, morally questionable dullards.” So he set up the Pure Springs College campus smack dab in the middle of one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. Each year, a new class of fifteen young men (and only men) “with keen minds and unsullied hearts” who have grown disillusioned with traditional schools and “wish to pursue wisdom in its purest form” are admitted to the college after subjecting themselves to a rigorous application process that includes writing no fewer than ten separate essays answering questions on topics as varied as gravitational lensing and the semiotics of the Teletubbies. What makes this school like none other is that it is run completely by the student body. The Pure Springers are in charge of all the school’s administrative duties, including admissions and the hiring and firing of faculty. Tuition is free, and the students support themselves by working on a cattle ranch.

“So there’s no one in charge,” I said.

“They’re
all
in charge,” Mr. Flutie said.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Each kid has a job that keeps the place up and running,” Mr. Flutie said. “Rancher, butcher, mechanic, cook, and so on.”

“So what is Marcus’s role?” I asked.

“He has two,” Mrs. Flutie said. “He’s junior farmer and librarian.”

I imagined Marcus in overalls and a straw hat. Pitchfork in one hand,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in the other.

“I know what you’re thinking: that it’s a cult, or worse, one of those boot camps for troubled kids where some poor child winds up dead from dehydration,” Mrs. Flutie said. “We thought the same thing.”

“You
thought the same thing,” Mr. Flutie interrupted. “I thought it sounded like the greatest place on earth.”

Mrs. Flutie put her hand on his unmangled knee. “As crazy as it sounds, this place has molded the minds of some of the best and the brightest. Nobel Prize winners, politicians—”

“That newscaster’s son, whatzisname . . . ,” Mr. Flutie interrupted.

“Billionaire businessmen, novelists—”

“You know, that guy on that show . . .”

“Once we found out more about it, we knew it was the kind of place that could unlock Marcus’s potential.”

I was still skeptical. “I still don’t see how with all that freedom and testosterone it doesn’t turn into
Lord of the Flies.
And add a keg . . .”

“Well, we don’t worry about that because there are only two strictly enforced rules, and the first is no drugs or alcohol,” Mrs. Flutie said. “You can understand why we found that one appealing.”

“And the second?”

A pause. And in the silence, I could hear every clock-tick of time passing me by. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

“Total isolation,” Mrs. Flutie said finally. She folded her hands in her lap, a gesture of acceptance.

“Meaning?”

“If he leaves, he can’t come back,” Mr. Flutie said. “And no one can visit.”

“I know this must be very upsetting to you, Jessica. We felt the same way.”

“You
felt the same way,” Mr. Flutie said. “I thought it was just the thing to get his head screwed on right.”

“I wish . . . ,” I began, not knowing exactly how I wanted to finish that sentence. I didn’t realize that I had started crying until I felt the warm rivulets coursing down my cheeks.

Mrs. Flutie therapeutically squeezed my shoulder. Her voice got deeper, more serious.

“Jessica, words cannot express just how much we loved seeing Marcus develop such a positive relationship with you.”

“You were the best of the lot,” Mr. Flutie said, obviously unaware of how being referred to in that manner might be a tad upsetting to me.

“Marcus was a troubled spirit long before you entered the picture.”

“‘Troubled spirit,’” Mr. Flutie grumbled. “Pain in the ass is more like it.”

“Surely you can understand why Marcus might need to put Pineville behind him,” Mrs. Flutie said. “There are a lot of bad influences around here. People from his past who don’t understand that he’s trying to live a life of sobriety. People who don’t understand that he isn’t interested in reliving his youthful foibles.”

I thought about that girl Sierra, the one we bumped into at the park last summer, and how Marcus practically crawled out of his own skin trying to escape. I had been too upset to care about his discomfort.

She continued. “There were only two reasons why he ever returned to Pineville. His love for us, and his love for you.”

“And we told him to get the hell outta Dodge!” Mr. Flutie shouted.

I stared at the chair on which we had once made love.

“And I . . . wasn’t enough,” I said softly.

Mrs. Flutie let go of my shoulder and lifted my chin with her hand so we could see eye to eye.

“I’m telling you this because I like you so much, Jessica,” she said with a sad smile. “I’m telling you this as a parent who loves her sons more than life itself.”

Mr. Flutie stayed strangely still and quiet.

“You need to let Marcus go and move on,” she said. “You are not the source of his problems. And he shouldn’t be the source of yours.”

She said some more stuff after that, but it was all just different versions of the same message. One that I needed to hear, I guess. One that I would have heard months ago, if I had bothered to listen.

the thirtieth

When I called to tell him that I’d be returning to the city today, he insisted on meeting me at the bus station. My heart swelled when I saw him waiting for me under the neon blue Hudson News sign, and nearly burst when he pressed his lips to one of my cheeks, then the other, as is customary in his country. His hair hung loose, and it seductively caressed my neck when he leaned in, and again as he pulled back.

“Is it safe, kissing you?” Bastian asked.

“Uh . . .” I hadn’t expected us to pick up our adulterous banter right where we had left off.

“It is the kissing disease, the mononucleosis, correct?”

“Oh, right,” I said, suddenly remembering my lie. “Yes, it is. But I’m not contagious anymore.” I wondered if my face would give me away.

“That is good,” he said with his bruised eyes as much as his succulent mouth.

Bastian threw my duffel bag over his shoulder and carried it all the way through the winding subterranean tunnels until we reached the stale-aired platform for the 1/9 line. As the train pounded through the tunnel like a drum corps one thousand strong, he turned to me and said,
“Bella,
tell me your story.”

And from 42nd to 116th, we crowded together, side by side in corner seats of the icy, nearly empty train, shoulders and knees occasionally crashing into one another for no reason at all other than that we wanted them to. Over the furious roar of the air conditioner, I obliged his request. As Bastian listened, and afterward, he was every bit the gentleman. Which I know he knows is exactly what he needs to be if he wants to sleep with me. My story proves that when it comes to Marcus, there is no simple beginning, middle, or end.

My Story

The first time I was ever aware of Marcus Flutie was in eighth grade at my best friend Hope’s house. Hope had a brother, Heath, who was four years older than we were and who hung out with a bunch of unsavory characters, including Marcus. Marcus was a year older than Hope and me but in our grade because he was held back early on for mysterious reasons, reasons I could have probably asked him about later but didn’t. Just like I could have asked him to translate the Chinese character tattoo wrapped around his bicep, but never bothered to because there was always something else to talk about. Though with respect to the latter, I suspect that another reason I didn’t ask was because I was afraid to hear the answer, to discover that it was the name of one of the many girls he’d had before me. Or even worse, that it was a bit of nothing branded on his arm, an in-joke that seemed like a good idea at the time, that is, under the influence of mind-bending chemicals, but made less sense in sobriety. But what I really mean to say here is that Marcus and I didn’t talk about certain things because we were too busy having long, rambling, restless conversations about other things, like microbes on Mars or
American Idol.

Marcus was the kid in their delinquent crew. They called him Krispy Kreme because he was always blunted, or in other words “burnt to a crisp.” And also because in our school, having sex with girls was called “getting donuts,” the donut being a crude reference to the female genitalia, of course. Even at the tender age of fifteen, Marcus had already honed his stonah lovah man persona, as my friend Bridget puts it. He’s never had a problem getting girls to fall for him.

I remember seeing Marcus hanging around Heath and his drug buddies, and he made me nervous because he was in our grade and yet seemed so much more experienced, which he was in every way. He never so much as blinked at Hope and me, and yet I found out from him later that he was paying more attention than I could have ever imagined, eavesdropping on our conversations through the thin wall that separated the siblings’ bedrooms.

Then Heath died of a heroin overdose and everything changed. Hope’s parents decided that she needed a change of scenery, and moved a thousand miles away to her grandmother’s huge farmhouse in a tiny town in Tennessee. I was bereft. She was the only person who made Pineville tolerable, and I was left to stagger through the rest of my high school years stunned and alone. That is, until Marcus made his move.

The first time he spoke to me was outside our school counselor’s office, where we’d been sent for separate juvenile infractions. I used to think that Marcus approached me in his sexy, serpentine way because he was bored and needed a challenge. Like, “Hey, can I use what I know to get in the goody-goody’s pants?” He confessed as much to me one New Year’s Eve when I had finally decided to indeed give up my virginity to him. But we didn’t sleep together that night, and it was another year and a half before we did.

As the years have gone by, I’ve been startled by a revelation that a younger, callow Jessica wasn’t capable of making: Marcus had lost someone, too. Heath was a friend to him as much as Hope was to me, after all. And Heath was gone forever. Perhaps, unbeknownst even to himself, Marcus wanted to get close to me as a way of remembering someone he cared about. Marcus was just another wandering soul, like me, missing his friend and trying to find solace in another.

And I hope he found it for a while.

But this isn’t the story I meant to tell. The one I was thinking of is this:

The first time I became aware of Marcus Flutie, he was showing off in Hope’s kitchen, trying to juggle a raw egg, a bowling pin, and a squeaky toy in the shape of a T-bone steak that belonged to the family dog, Dalí. I don’t know if he was high or uncoordinated or both, but after one or two successful hand-to-hand tosses, the egg was sent flying through the air and landed with a smash on the floor. I remember watching this heavy-lidded, wild-haired boy stand there with his guilty hands thrust deep in his pockets. He didn’t move as Hope knelt on the linoleum with a paper towel and cleaned up his mess.